‘I know that you have suffered a great deal because of me,’ the Polish writer Stanisław Przybyszewski wrote in a letter to Aniela Pająk, painter and mother of their illegitimate child Stanisława.
Stanisław Przybyszewski was a famous Polish dramatist, poet and essayist. He played a major role in Polish cultural life as a thinker and taboo-breaking provocateur at the beginning of the 20th century. While his career seemed a lot more important to him than his children, he had no idea that one of his daughters was going to follow in his footsteps, both intellectually and artistically.
Stanisława Przybyszewska grew up without her father. The first time she saw him was at the age of five and was not bequeathed his last name until she turned 13 after her mother Aniela’s death. He refused to acknowledge her before that, fearing how his wife, Jadwiga Kasprowicz, would react to it. Przybyszewski sent letters to Aniela often, making her believe that they were always attached to each other.
Aniela, on the other hand, was proud to have a child with him and wanted his daughter to be his as well. However, she only really ever served as a confidante and money-lender to whom Stanisław would always turn if he was in need of help. Aniela taught Stanisława to respect and admire her father and never spoke about him not contributing to the household nor about his absence. Przybyszewska learned from her mother that women had to be self-sufficient.
Born in Kraków in 1901, Stanisława was just one of the many children he had with different women. However – and perhaps because of this lack – she did everything to become a recognised dramatist just like him. Unfortunately, she also shared an addiction with his father, which later also became not only her cause of death cause but that of her father and her husband: morphine.
Przybyszewska also admired her mother, a painter who was only able to continue her career and raise her, thanks to the support of a wealthy family which sponsored her. They moved many times all around EuropeL first to Lviv, later to Berlin and Paris.
After her mother’s death, Stanisława was left all alone at the age of 11. She moved to Switzerland to live with a family Aniela had chosen to take care of her once her mother knew she was dying of pneumonia.
The family that supported her mother also took care of her studies until she turned nineteen years old. From a very young age, she showed interest in the sciences, music, languages and literature. Sometimes she even slipped technical terms into her writing. She was very competitive and disciplined and always strived to be better than other students.
In 1914, the family she was living with left Switzerland. The situation forced her to move in with her mother’s younger sister, Helena Barlińska. She lived with her husband and children in Vienna. There she spent most of her time on her own, writing essays, poetry and stories or reading. Two years later, in the middle of World War I, the family moved back to Kraków.
Przybyszewska spoke and wrote in four languages: German, English, Polish and French. Multilingualism was key to her success – not only because she could read more writers’ work, but she could also reach more a wider audience with her own work. She knew that she had a message that she want to share with the people. She studied teaching in Kraków and did her teaching apprenticeship in Nowy Sącz, at a school run by the Order of the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception.
It was not until the age of 18, in 1919, that Stanisława’s interactions with her father intensified. He had been resettled to Poland after spending10 years in Munich. She attended a lecture he gave in Cracow on The Enigmas of Life and Death. Przybyszewski was then ready to be an influence in life and career and they began a correspondence. Stanisława was not only getting her father back, she was also gaining a fatherland – it was a year after Poland regained independence. Some say, that their relationship became somewhat too close: that there was a sort of incestuous attraction between them. She was beautiful and admired him greatly.
Two years later, Przybyszewski got a job in Poznań at the post office and was in charge in supervising of the preparation of a new Polish-German dictionary. He got the job thanks to one of his admirers Wacław Dziabaszewski, who was assistant director.
Dziabaszewski also found a job for Przybyszewska, something that she could stand only for a few weeks, she thought she was not meant for any routine job. The best thing she could do was to think and write. Stanisława then resumed her teaching and continued to study languages and music.
Her father was one of the founders of the famous bimonthly Zdrój. At the magazine, she had the opportunity to meet intellectuals, artists and painters that gathered there. At one of those meetings, she met her future husband: Jan Panieńśki, a painter and student of sciences.
Later on, due to the ongoing jealousy of Przybyszewski’s wife Jadwiga, she severed ties with her father and was not willing to see him again. The initial enchantment had faded. She moved back to her aunt’s house in Warsaw and found a job at a library that was linked with the Communist Party, which also functioned as a meeting place. She ended up being imprisoned and interrogated under the suspicion of being the organiser of clandestine activities but was freed after just one week due to lack of evidence.
The last city where she lived was Gdańsk. She moved back there after her husband got a job as a teacher at a Polish secondary school. By that time, Poles were only a minority in Gdańsk. It was a city that she never liked, but that she would never leave.
In 1925, her husband died of a morphine overdose in Paris, where he had was on a scholarship. As a widow of one of the teachers, she received help from the wife of the secondary school’s principal. However, she had to move into a tiny room in the barracks that were used for summer camps. She was living in very primitive conditions. Her room was humid and lacked heating, something unimaginable during winters at the time. She managed to get some coal from the parents of one of her pupils.
However, not even the cold could stop her. She worked long hours into the night and went to bed at 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning. She claimed that during the day she was completely unable to bear her anxiety. Due to the cold, from time to time, she had to put her hands in a basin of hot water to be able to continue writing.
The main motif of Przybyszewska’s work was the French Revolution. She insisted that all the revolutions of the 19th century ended in failure because they did not have a genius at the helm. Maximilien Robespierre was a different story due to his ‘inner harmony and equilibrium that are the marks of a true genius.’ She was convinced that only with a genius-leader, a movement could have a direction and drive. ‘The thought, the will, the energy of a single human brain has to penetrate an entire society and decide its every movement,’ she wrote.
Stanisława was very strict and disciplined. According to her life philosophy, artists needed to make sacrifices and even work against their own will in order to succeed. She gave up on working all together to become a writer. Even four-hour shifts took up too much of her precious time. She preferred to starve and live in very precarious conditions, just to have the time to write.
She was living like a hermit. Since she had no one to talk to, she began to have speech problems. The only way she could exchange ideas and have a dialogue with others was through letters. She wrote very long letters and corresponded with exceptional figures such as Thomas Mann, Leon Schiller, Jean Cocteau and Georges Bernanos.
I am frightfully alone, my encounters with the Gymnasium directors have practically come to a stop. Their son, whom I taught languages – has been sent to Poland.
Although she criticised capitalism and preferred to study and write, money always was a big issue for her. She was conscious that money was an important part of life. ‘Money is a life ingredient just like blood, air and water,’ she wrote in a letter to Iwi Bennet, one of her half-sisters. However, the path she chose led her to debts, illness and solitude. Whenever she had money she would buy morphine and suffered terribly each time she ran out.
In the period that followed the French Revolution – the Napoleonic period – resulted in a powerful and long stimulation of nationalism. She was convinced that the gains of the French revolution will all be lost with the rise of nationalism and capitalism that was sweeping over Europe in the first half of the 20th century.
‘I have been loyal to anybody as long as I was to Robespierre,’ she wrote. The revolution and Robespierre were the central figures in both of her surviving plays. She even used the months of the revolutionary calendar as descriptions in her letters.
She studied the revolution and was inspired by it since her visit as a child to Parisian museums with her mother. She also was inspired after reading Danton’s Death by the German dramatist Georg Büchner. She adopted the so-called Neue Sachlichkeit or ‘new objectivity’ that was a reaction to expressionism in German literature at the beginning of the 20th century.
Her most important work is The Danton Case. The book shows the conflict between Maximilien Robespierre and Georges Danton. She literally brought the past into the present by using analogies from revolutionary France to write about the political and social situation in Europe at the time.
Her other play, written in German, was named after one of the periods of the revolutionary calendar: Thermidor. It shows the downfall of her hero. Robespierre ‘predicts that national hatreds and wars along with the growth of capital, will seat the Revolution and corrupt 19th-century man”, wrote Gerould.
During her lifetime her work remained mostly unknown. Only The Danton Case was staged by Edmund Wierciński in 1931, at the insistence of Leon Schiller. It was revived 40 years later by Jan Krasowski in the Polish Theatre in 1967. In 1983, the story was moved onto the big screen by Andrzej Wajda. Her literary work can be found in the archives of the Polish Academia of Science in Poznań.
Stanisława paradoxically never got used to solitude. In a letter to Thomas Mann, she emphasised that she was tired of it. Belonging to the proletariat, one could say that she had great difficulty integrating into society. On the one hand, she was self-educated, on the other, she always belonged to the lower class. Two months after Hitler came to power in 1934, she wrote to Mann.
Master: obtain death for me! Have mercy on me: do not let me be given over those people!
No, I can’t any longer. I’ve run out of bread and I can’t go on without it. The cold is torturing me. Every object in my room is heavy with pain; in each ‘bent’ muscle lurks more pain. Unimaginable spiritual and physical pain. And nothing and no one can provide any answers. And no love to be found (…) Had I known that such suffering is possible – I simply would have refused to come into this world.
Only three people attended her funeral, a very modest funeral compared to her father’s, whose funeral procession three-quarters of a mile long and included state and Church dignitaries, chancellors of colleges and universities, writers and journalists.
Sources: Kosicka J. and Gerould D.: A life of Solitude, a Biographical Study with Selected Letters. London 1986; Graczyk E.: Ćma: o Stanisławie Przybyszewskiej. Warsaw 1994; Przybyszewska S.: The Danton Case + Thermidor, two plays. Translated by Taborski B. 1990; the title alludes to Hilary Mantel’s article in the London Review of Books, published in March 2000.