{"id":21066,"date":"2026-06-18T18:18:47","date_gmt":"2026-06-18T16:18:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/?p=21066"},"modified":"2026-06-18T20:10:52","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T18:10:52","slug":"playwrights-1-fredro-wyspianski-and-przybyszewski-encounters-with-polish-and-ukrainian-literature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/2026\/06\/18\/playwrights-1-fredro-wyspianski-and-przybyszewski-encounters-with-polish-and-ukrainian-literature\/","title":{"rendered":"Playwrights 1 \u2014 Fredro, Wyspia\u0144ski, and Przybyszewski \u2013 Encounters with Polish and Ukrainian Literature"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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S6E7<\/a>\u00a0and all video recordings are available on\u00a0our\u00a0YouTube<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Encounters with Polish and Ukrainian Literature<\/strong> is a video series for anyone interested in literature and the culture of books and reading. Each month, host David A. Goldfarb<\/strong> will present a new topic in conversation with an expert on that author or book or movement in Polish literature. More about the Encounters with Polish and Ukrainian Literature series<\/a><\/strong> and the timeline.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This episode marks the beginning of a new mini-series within \u201cEncounters with Polish and Ukrainian Literature\u201d focusing on drama and playwrights. As a way into this topic, we are going to look at three plays structured around the marriage plot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Aleksander Fredro (1793-1876) is often associated with the Romantics, because he lived and wrote comedies for the stage during the era of Romanticism, but he was really an anti-Romantic closer to Enlightenment or even Baroque playwrights like Moli\u00e8re, Goldoni, or Beaumarchais than to his contemporaries, Mickiewicz and S\u0142owacki. He was a member of the szlachta or Polish gentry, who fought under Napoleon and traveled extensively, but did not emigrate like the more well-known Polish writers of his era. His travels exposed him to the European theater and commedia dell\u2019arte, but he had resources and no reason to leave his home country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stanis\u0142aw Wyspia\u0144ski (1869-1907), the son of a sculptor, was a dramatist, writer, and painter and one of the co-founders of the modernist movement known as \u201cM\u0142oda Polska\u201d or \u201cYoung Poland\u201d at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a multimedia artist, he was a theatrical maximalist conceiving of monumental works in the mode of the Polish Romantics and Wagner\u2019s Gesamtkunstwerk, the \u201ctotal work of art\u201d encompassing the language and action of drama along with music; the visual aspects of set design, costumes, and lighting; reality, myth, and folklore; and blurring the line between the theater and the outside world. Wyspia\u0144ski is often regarded as the founder of the modern Polish theater.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stanis\u0142aw Przybyszewski (1868-1927) was an expressionist novelist, essayist, poet, and dramatist, very popular in his day, publishing in Russian and German as well as Polish, and translated into English in his own time. His idea of the \u201cnaked soul\u201d\u2014the essential kernel of personal identity\u2014would figure in important ways into the thought of many thinkers and avantgarde prose writers of the 1930s, and he brought eroticism to the surface in ways that would also become important during the interwar period of free Poland. He was close to painter, Edward Munch and even claimed to have proposed the title for Munch\u2019s most famous painting, \u201cThe Scream\u201d and was involved in a love triangle with Munch and poet and translator Dagny Juel, whom he married.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this episode we look at Fredro\u2019s Maidens\u2019 Vows: Or the Magnetism of the Heart as the classical wedding play, in which all the right people get married, and the marriage solves the problems of the work, which reflect the problems of society. Wyspia\u0144ski\u2019s The Wedding is a work that combines fantastical elements from folklore with an actual wedding attended by the author, and embodies central themes in Polish culture such as the division between the peasants and the nobles or alternately the country and the city, which must be resolved in order to resurrect the nation in the time of the partitions. Przybyszewski\u2019s Snow mirrors the structure of Fredro\u2019s work at first but takes some bizarre turns with the formation of unexpected love triangles and ends in tragedy rather than resolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Fredro, Wyspia\u0144ski, and Przybyszewski, selected dramas in English translation:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alexander Fredro. The Major Comedies of Alexander Fredro<\/a>. Tr. with intro. and commentary by Harold B. Segel. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stanis\u0142aw Przybyszewski. Snow<\/a>. Tr. O.F. Theis. New York: Nicholas L. Brown, 1920. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stanis\u0142aw Wyspia\u0144ski. Meleager: A Tragedy. Tr. Florence and George Rapall Noyes. Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press, 1933. (Check your local research or university library or try interlibrary loan)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stanis\u0142aw Wyspia\u0144ski. The Wedding<\/a>. Tr. Noel Clark. Intro. by Jerzy Peterkiewicz. London: Oberon Books, 1998. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Benjamin Paloff<\/strong> chairs the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan, where he is also Professor of Comparative Literature and a faculty affiliate of the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies and the Copernicus Center for Polish Studies. His most recent books are Worlds Apart: Genre and the Ethics of Representing Camps, Ghettos, and Besieged Cities (Columbia University Press, 2025) and Bakhtin’s Adventure: An Essay on Life without Meaning (Northwestern University Press, 2025); vs Computer, his third collection of poems, is forthcoming in 2026. He has translated about a dozen books and many shorter literary and theoretical texts from Polish, Czech, Russian, and Yiddish, notably works by Dorota Mas\u0142owska, Marek Bie\u0144czyk, Richard Weiner, and Yuri Lotman, and he has received grants and fellowships from the Michigan Society of Fellows, Stanford Humanities Center, and National Endowment for the Arts, among others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

David A. Goldfarb, Host & Producer
Bartek Remisko, Curator and Executive Producer
Natalia Iyudin, Produce<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
\n
\n

Image:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fredro and Wyspia\u0144ski from \u00a9 Wikimedia Commons. Przybyszewski by \u00a9 Edward Munch, 1895, Munchmuseet.
Benjamin Paloff at Iwaszkiewicz’s Desk at Tw\u00f3rczo\u015b, photo credit \u00a9 Darek Foks, 2025
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\"\"<\/figure><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

S6E7\u00a0and all video recordings are available on\u00a0our\u00a0YouTube. Encounters with Polish and Ukrainian Literature is a video series for anyone interested in literature and the culture of books and reading. Each month, host David A. Goldfarb will present a new topic in conversation with an expert on that author or book or movement in Polish literature. More about the Encounters […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":202,"featured_media":21076,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-events","category-literature"],"yoast_head":"\nPlaywrights 1 \u2014 Fredro, Wyspia\u0144ski, and Przybyszewski \u2013 Encounters with Polish and Ukrainian Literature - Instytut Polski w Nowym Jorku<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/2026\/06\/18\/playwrights-1-fredro-wyspianski-and-przybyszewski-encounters-with-polish-and-ukrainian-literature\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"pl_PL\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Playwrights 1 \u2014 Fredro, Wyspia\u0144ski, and Przybyszewski \u2013 Encounters with Polish and Ukrainian Literature - Instytut Polski w Nowym Jorku\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"S6E7\u00a0and all video recordings are available on\u00a0our\u00a0YouTube. 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Each month, host David A. Goldfarb will present a new topic in conversation with an expert on that author or book or movement in Polish literature. More about the Encounters with Polish and Ukrainian Literature series and the timeline.\\nThis episode marks the beginning of a new mini-series within \u201cEncounters with Polish and Ukrainian Literature\u201d focusing on drama and playwrights. As a way into this topic, we are going to look at three plays structured around the marriage plot.\\nAleksander Fredro (1793-1876) is often associated with the Romantics, because he lived and wrote comedies for the stage during the era of Romanticism, but he was really an anti-Romantic closer to Enlightenment or even Baroque playwrights like Moli\u00e8re, Goldoni, or Beaumarchais than to his contemporaries, Mickiewicz and S\u0142owacki. 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As a multimedia artist, he was a theatrical maximalist conceiving of monumental works in the mode of the Polish Romantics and Wagner\u2019s Gesamtkunstwerk, the \u201ctotal work of art\u201d encompassing the language and action of drama along with music; the visual aspects of set design, costumes, and lighting; reality, myth, and folklore; and blurring the line between the theater and the outside world. Wyspia\u0144ski is often regarded as the founder of the modern Polish theater.\\nStanis\u0142aw Przybyszewski (1868-1927) was an expressionist novelist, essayist, poet, and dramatist, very popular in his day, publishing in Russian and German as well as Polish, and translated into English in his own time. His idea of the \u201cnaked soul\u201d\u2014the essential kernel of personal identity\u2014would figure in important ways into the thought of many thinkers and avantgarde prose writers of the 1930s, and he brought eroticism to the surface in ways that would also become important during the interwar period of free Poland. He was close to painter, Edward Munch and even claimed to have proposed the title for Munch\u2019s most famous painting, \u201cThe Scream\u201d and was involved in a love triangle with Munch and poet and translator Dagny Juel, whom he married.\\nIn this episode we look at Fredro\u2019s Maidens\u2019 Vows: Or the Magnetism of the Heart as the classical wedding play, in which all the right people get married, and the marriage solves the problems of the work, which reflect the problems of society. Wyspia\u0144ski\u2019s The Wedding is a work that combines fantastical elements from folklore with an actual wedding attended by the author, and embodies central themes in Polish culture such as the division between the peasants and the nobles or alternately the country and the city, which must be resolved in order to resurrect the nation in the time of the partitions. Przybyszewski\u2019s Snow mirrors the structure of Fredro\u2019s work at first but takes some bizarre turns with the formation of unexpected love triangles and ends in tragedy rather than resolution.\\nFredro, Wyspia\u0144ski, and Przybyszewski, selected dramas in English translation:\\nAlexander Fredro. The Major Comedies of Alexander Fredro. Tr. with intro. and commentary by Harold B. Segel. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969. \\nStanis\u0142aw Przybyszewski. Snow. Tr. O.F. Theis. New York: Nicholas L. Brown, 1920. \\nStanis\u0142aw Wyspia\u0144ski. Meleager: A Tragedy. Tr. Florence and George Rapall Noyes. Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press, 1933. (Check your local research or university library or try interlibrary loan)\\nStanis\u0142aw Wyspia\u0144ski. The Wedding. Tr. Noel Clark. Intro. by Jerzy Peterkiewicz. London: Oberon Books, 1998. \\nBenjamin Paloff chairs the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan, where he is also Professor of Comparative Literature and a faculty affiliate of the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies and the Copernicus Center for Polish Studies. His most recent books are Worlds Apart: Genre and the Ethics of Representing Camps, Ghettos, and Besieged Cities (Columbia University Press, 2025) and Bakhtin's Adventure: An Essay on Life without Meaning (Northwestern University Press, 2025); vs Computer, his third collection of poems, is forthcoming in 2026. He has translated about a dozen books and many shorter literary and theoretical texts from Polish, Czech, Russian, and Yiddish, notably works by Dorota Mas\u0142owska, Marek Bie\u0144czyk, Richard Weiner, and Yuri Lotman, and he has received grants and fellowships from the Michigan Society of Fellows, Stanford Humanities Center, and National Endowment for the Arts, among others.\\nDavid A. Goldfarb, Host & ProducerBartek Remisko, Curator and Executive ProducerNatalia Iyudin, Produce\\nImage:\\nFredro and Wyspia\u0144ski from \u00a9 Wikimedia Commons. 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Encounters with Polish and Ukrainian Literature is a video series for anyone interested in literature and the culture of books and reading. Each month, host David A. Goldfarb will present a new topic in conversation with an expert on that author or book or movement in Polish literature. More about the Encounters […]","og_url":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/2026\/06\/18\/playwrights-1-fredro-wyspianski-and-przybyszewski-encounters-with-polish-and-ukrainian-literature\/","og_site_name":"Instytut Polski w Nowym Jorku","article_published_time":"2026-06-18T16:18:47+00:00","article_modified_time":"2026-06-18T18:10:52+00:00","og_image":[{"width":949,"height":499,"url":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2026\/06\/Screenshot-2026-06-18-122429.jpg","type":"image\/jpeg"}],"author":"stypulkowskaa","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_misc":{"Napisane przez":"stypulkowskaa","Szacowany czas czytania":"6 minut"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"event","@id":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/2026\/06\/18\/playwrights-1-fredro-wyspianski-and-przybyszewski-encounters-with-polish-and-ukrainian-literature\/","url":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/2026\/06\/18\/playwrights-1-fredro-wyspianski-and-przybyszewski-encounters-with-polish-and-ukrainian-literature\/","name":"Playwrights 1 \u2014 Fredro, Wyspia\u0144ski, and Przybyszewski \u2013 Encounters with Polish and Ukrainian Literature","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/#website"},"primaryImageOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/2026\/06\/18\/playwrights-1-fredro-wyspianski-and-przybyszewski-encounters-with-polish-and-ukrainian-literature\/#primaryimage"},"image":["https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2026\/06\/Screenshot-2026-06-18-122429.jpg","https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2026\/06\/Screenshot-2026-06-18-122429-300x158.jpg","https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2026\/06\/Screenshot-2026-06-18-122429.jpg","https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2026\/06\/Screenshot-2026-06-18-122429.jpg"],"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2026\/06\/Screenshot-2026-06-18-122429.jpg","datePublished":"2026-06-18T16:18:47+02:00","dateModified":"2026-06-18T18:10:52+02:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/#\/schema\/person\/c732b2695ee92026d080eec35471c7f1"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/2026\/06\/18\/playwrights-1-fredro-wyspianski-and-przybyszewski-encounters-with-polish-and-ukrainian-literature\/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"pl-PL","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/2026\/06\/18\/playwrights-1-fredro-wyspianski-and-przybyszewski-encounters-with-polish-and-ukrainian-literature\/"]}],"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","startDate":"2026-07-01","endDate":"2026-08-31","eventStatus":"EventScheduled","eventAttendanceMode":"OfflineEventAttendanceMode","location":{"@type":"place","name":"","address":"","geo":{"@type":"GeoCoordinates","latitude":"","longitude":""}},"description":"S6E7\u00a0and all video recordings are available on\u00a0our\u00a0YouTube.\nEncounters with Polish and Ukrainian Literature is a video series for anyone interested in literature and the culture of books and reading. Each month, host David A. Goldfarb will present a new topic in conversation with an expert on that author or book or movement in Polish literature. More about the Encounters with Polish and Ukrainian Literature series and the timeline.\nThis episode marks the beginning of a new mini-series within \u201cEncounters with Polish and Ukrainian Literature\u201d focusing on drama and playwrights. As a way into this topic, we are going to look at three plays structured around the marriage plot.\nAleksander Fredro (1793-1876) is often associated with the Romantics, because he lived and wrote comedies for the stage during the era of Romanticism, but he was really an anti-Romantic closer to Enlightenment or even Baroque playwrights like Moli\u00e8re, Goldoni, or Beaumarchais than to his contemporaries, Mickiewicz and S\u0142owacki. He was a member of the szlachta or Polish gentry, who fought under Napoleon and traveled extensively, but did not emigrate like the more well-known Polish writers of his era. His travels exposed him to the European theater and commedia dell\u2019arte, but he had resources and no reason to leave his home country.\nStanis\u0142aw Wyspia\u0144ski (1869-1907), the son of a sculptor, was a dramatist, writer, and painter and one of the co-founders of the modernist movement known as \u201cM\u0142oda Polska\u201d or \u201cYoung Poland\u201d at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a multimedia artist, he was a theatrical maximalist conceiving of monumental works in the mode of the Polish Romantics and Wagner\u2019s Gesamtkunstwerk, the \u201ctotal work of art\u201d encompassing the language and action of drama along with music; the visual aspects of set design, costumes, and lighting; reality, myth, and folklore; and blurring the line between the theater and the outside world. Wyspia\u0144ski is often regarded as the founder of the modern Polish theater.\nStanis\u0142aw Przybyszewski (1868-1927) was an expressionist novelist, essayist, poet, and dramatist, very popular in his day, publishing in Russian and German as well as Polish, and translated into English in his own time. His idea of the \u201cnaked soul\u201d\u2014the essential kernel of personal identity\u2014would figure in important ways into the thought of many thinkers and avantgarde prose writers of the 1930s, and he brought eroticism to the surface in ways that would also become important during the interwar period of free Poland. He was close to painter, Edward Munch and even claimed to have proposed the title for Munch\u2019s most famous painting, \u201cThe Scream\u201d and was involved in a love triangle with Munch and poet and translator Dagny Juel, whom he married.\nIn this episode we look at Fredro\u2019s Maidens\u2019 Vows: Or the Magnetism of the Heart as the classical wedding play, in which all the right people get married, and the marriage solves the problems of the work, which reflect the problems of society. Wyspia\u0144ski\u2019s The Wedding is a work that combines fantastical elements from folklore with an actual wedding attended by the author, and embodies central themes in Polish culture such as the division between the peasants and the nobles or alternately the country and the city, which must be resolved in order to resurrect the nation in the time of the partitions. Przybyszewski\u2019s Snow mirrors the structure of Fredro\u2019s work at first but takes some bizarre turns with the formation of unexpected love triangles and ends in tragedy rather than resolution.\nFredro, Wyspia\u0144ski, and Przybyszewski, selected dramas in English translation:\nAlexander Fredro. The Major Comedies of Alexander Fredro. Tr. with intro. and commentary by Harold B. Segel. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969. \nStanis\u0142aw Przybyszewski. Snow. Tr. O.F. Theis. New York: Nicholas L. Brown, 1920. \nStanis\u0142aw Wyspia\u0144ski. Meleager: A Tragedy. Tr. Florence and George Rapall Noyes. Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press, 1933. (Check your local research or university library or try interlibrary loan)\nStanis\u0142aw Wyspia\u0144ski. The Wedding. Tr. Noel Clark. Intro. by Jerzy Peterkiewicz. London: Oberon Books, 1998. \nBenjamin Paloff chairs the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan, where he is also Professor of Comparative Literature and a faculty affiliate of the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies and the Copernicus Center for Polish Studies. His most recent books are Worlds Apart: Genre and the Ethics of Representing Camps, Ghettos, and Besieged Cities (Columbia University Press, 2025) and Bakhtin's Adventure: An Essay on Life without Meaning (Northwestern University Press, 2025); vs Computer, his third collection of poems, is forthcoming in 2026. He has translated about a dozen books and many shorter literary and theoretical texts from Polish, Czech, Russian, and Yiddish, notably works by Dorota Mas\u0142owska, Marek Bie\u0144czyk, Richard Weiner, and Yuri Lotman, and he has received grants and fellowships from the Michigan Society of Fellows, Stanford Humanities Center, and National Endowment for the Arts, among others.\nDavid A. Goldfarb, Host & ProducerBartek Remisko, Curator and Executive ProducerNatalia Iyudin, Produce\nImage:\nFredro and Wyspia\u0144ski from \u00a9 Wikimedia Commons. 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