The Romantic Poles!
SIMON, JOHN
On Stage THOSE ROMANTIC POLES! BY JOHN SIMON One of the abiding riddles of literary criticism is why the Romantics could not write drama. Just about all of them, in every country, wanted to; and...
...just as Boris Godunov lives through Moussorgsky's music rather than Pushkin's dramaturgy...
...in fact, it lampoons in part an unsuccessful love affair of Krasinski's, and though it has an occasional glimmer of actable wit, its mainstay is neither plot nor character, but its travesty of Romantic diction...
...Most fascinating is Krasinski's cosmic irony, sparing not even God...
...answers vary somewhat from country to country...
...Aside from the already mentioned Shelley, every English Romantic worth his salt wrote, or thought of writing, for the stage...
...I am not much happier with "Her son still breathes, though crushed and stuporish" or "Then heed me, God and nature, for my song/ Is worthy you...
...This increased the guilt of the poet, whose sympathies were naturally with a free Poland...
...Another problem was lack of experience in the actual theater...
...for Mickiewicz, six months in prison and four-and-a-half years of lionization in the literary circles of St...
...If not a spurt, then still, most likely, a long poem...
...Krasinski was the only one of this trio of poets who could freely enter Poland, because his father was a general in the Russian Army...
...a couple of Victor Hugo's are still performed...
...the fact that a great many Romantics had difficult and very short lives may also have militated against their acquiring the dramatist's slow-ripening skills...
...To church the crowds are passing in" may perhaps be acceptable Pennsylvania Dutch...
...Or an angel...
...I don't think of the Austrian Grillparzer as a Romantic, rather as some curious compound of Neoclassicism and Biedermeier...
...Unlike Romantics of other nations, these writers lacked not only a theater but even a country: Poland had been partitioned off and ceased to exist as a sovereign nation...
...Two major uprisings took place: The November Insurrection of 1830, and the January Insurrection of 1863...
...Here, too, we are dealing with poets whose work culminated in lyrics or, in the case of Mickiewicz, also epics {Pan Tadeusz), whose attraction to the theater was nevertheless intense...
...Yet, as a fore-sightful aristocrat, he also had a sense of the declining elitist values and of the coming people's revolution, whose outcome he foresaw as dire for all...
...As a result, he becomes painfully fair to both sides, showing their strengths and weaknesses, and creates a play that, despite a discontinuous narrative and insufficient characterization (not to mention spirit maidens and other supernatural supernumeraries) has a dialectical balance making for dramatic validity...
...Some of Musset's plays, especially the shorter ones, maintain a foothold in the world repertory...
...These thoughts are prompted by the publication of Polish Romantic Drama, (Cornell, 320 pp., $17.50), plays by Poland's three major Romantic poets, Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855), Juliusz Slowacki (1809-49) and Zygmunt Krasihski (1812-59...
...The Romantic imagination fed unprecedentedly on the ego, but in fiction and drama other people matter as much as the creator's self...
...In The Undivine Comedy (Segel's "Un-Divine" strikes me as clumsy), the author is trying to justify his "traitorous" father and his aristocratic-militaristic-Christian code, but cannot help feeling as well for the rebellious, atheistic rabble...
...Eichendorff's The Suitors depends on its use of the German language, and does not travel...
...Essays and books have been written on the subject...
...both were unsuccessful...
...For the Romantic mode par excellence was the spurt: the gushing forth of something repressed or confined by tradition and regulations...
...Petersburg as the leading poet of Poland...
...A few of Ludwig Tieck's fairytale plays could still have a little life breathed into them by an expert production, though Genoveva is better (but still not well) known as an opera by Schumann...
...Whether making fun of revolutionist butchers ("For the masters we shall slay oxen and for the people masters") or himself as the protagonist's sickly, poetic son ("Thought has utterly destroyed himcatalepsy is a real danger"), Krasinski lets his sarcasm soar freely, without turning topheavy like Slowacki's...
...Yet well-nigh all these poets wanted to be dramatists too, rather as 20th-century novelists have been lured by the cinema, where most of them came to egregious grief...
...One must be God or nothing...
...But God himself is only "an eternally burning sun...
...Spain's only surviving Romantic drama is Zorrilla's Don Juan Tenorio, with its feebly sentimental, pietistic ending...
...One unfortunate sidelight is the play's embarrassing anti-Semitism...
...Generally speaking, one can safely assert that the key genre of the Romantics was poetry, usually lyrical...
...The latter does, however, suffice for works as different as, say, The Prelude and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Hugo's Dieu and La Fin de Satan, Lenau's Don Juan, to name a few long poems at random...
...Even art is...
...From the late 18th century, then, until after World War I, there was no real Poland, and the natural subject of poetry and the drama of the emigre poets, mostly living in France, was the dream of a resurrected fatherland...
...Man gets his, as do the angels: "It's not worth it to be a, man...
...guilty of lies: "Poetry will some day gild all of this...
...Similar Romantic failures can be chronicled in each European country, and notably in England, obviously most relevant to us...
...Shelley's The Cenci gets revived now and then, with scant success...
...To this end, the drama could function very well as a political tool, yet of the three plays Segel has given us, only one is overtly propagandists, Mickiewicz's Forefathers' Eve, Part III (the first and second parts being considerably less spectacular and essentially unrelated...
...The play records Konrad's (Mickiewicz's) private sentiments along with real or imaginary events surrounding Konrad, and a metaphysical drama with devils, angels and more ambiguous spirits, challenged by or fighting over him...
...A remarkable talent like Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-49) might have profited enormously from such an association, but the author of the eccentric and macabre Death's Jest Book was unlikely to form a practical, working friendship with some down-to-earth man of the theater...
...as one figure says, "Can't we get along without that porridge of stars and diamonds and flowers...
...If only we had a good translation at least, rather than one that is part doggerel, part gibberish...
...Even when there are characters in them, they can very well be the alter egos of the poets, carried along by the idiosyncratic intensity of a highly personal voice...
...Most writers who have succeeded on the boards have done so because of a healthy association with a theatrical manager or company...
...For some, this meant Siberia or death...
...Although Krasinski's The Un-Divine Comedy (1833) is equally undisciplined and basically unstage-worthy, it is, to a non-Pole anyway, a more interesting work...
...To someone who cannot read Polish, and who must depend on this translation by various hands reworked by Segel, the poetry is very poor stuff...
...It is intended as a take-off on Romanticism...
...Yet only Byron's efforts can even be considered which, unfortunately, does not mean produced...
...With typical Romantic arrogance, Mickiewicz sees his alter ego as the spiritual and political savior of his country...
...Italian Romanticism produced only one partly viable play, Silvio Pellico's Francesco da Rimini...
...Why, the hero himself disappears far more often than he appears...
...so is Vigny's Chatterton...
...Perhaps with God confer...
...After a few ages, the first archangel, as we did after a few years, felt weariness in his heart, and longed for greater strength...
...but there is also guilt feeling herecompensation for not having actively participated in the first Insurrection...
...Why this almost global failure of the Romantic drama, except perhaps in France...
...illuminating nothing," and the soul in heaven may be "happy and holy and yet, at the same time, mad...
...Still, this is a good example of Romanticism turning on itself...
...The play itself is closet drama of the most flagrant sort, even though it has been produced repeatedly in Poland where, Jan Kott reports, it moved audiences 125 years later (in a 1955 production at Teatr Polski) as "no other drama in the whole of world literature...
...Here, again, the Romantic temperament stood in the way...
...The great, the only absolute, Romantic playwright is Heinrich von Kleist, but he died prematurely, aged 34, soon after completing his first truly ripe play, The Prince of Homburg...
...Indeed...
...A movement whose principal aim was to liberate art from Classical conventions and the individual from the conventional bourgeois values, found its greatest vehicle in the lyric, through which the ego could assert itself most freely and, above all, in spurts...
...As for Slowacki's Fantazy (1843, published posthumously), it is, as the very title suggests, indebted to Musset's Fantasio, and inferior to it...
...They are represented by one play each, translated or revised from previous translations by Harold B. Segel, professor of Slavic Literatures at Columbia University, who supplies an ample Introduction as well...
...Alas, what are we to do with this structureless work that keeps shuttling between tones and realms, that goes from the pettily personal to the grandiosely cosmic, from the lyrical to the satiric, and contains soliloquies that bluster on for pages but no continuous stage action...
...Forefathers' Eve HI (1832) is personal history projected onto an epic and metaphysical canvas...
...For such a purpose, Segel's translation will not do, even when it is dealing with a prose work: "Not kneeling as before a lovely Raphael's Madonna of the steppes, didn't you want, Count, to cause her face to blush and with coarse behavior bring off the holy miracle of her eyes filling with tears...
...where the infinitive "confer" is totally illiterate...
...The need to rhyme, of course, accounts for many of these atrocities, e.g.: "Tell me, dear priest, are you a conjurer?/ How did you know...
...and just about all of them, everywhere, failed at it...
...It deals, quite openly autobiographically, with the imprisonment of the poet and many of his student friends from the University of Wilno for supposed revolutionary activities, and their subsequent exile to Russia...
Vol. 60 • September 1977 • No. 18
