Stanisława Przybyszewska is recognized as a major twentieth-century playwright on the basis of her trilogy about the French Revolution. Very difficult to understand for people with little background, absolutely mind-blowing for those who have studied the era.

Stanisława Przybyszewska, The Danton Case; Thermidor: Two Plays, Trans. by Bolesław Taborski, Northwestern University Press, 1989. 

read it at Google Books

Stanislawa Przybyszewski is recognized as a major twentieth-century playwright on the basis of her trilogy about the French Revolution, of which The Danton Case and Thermidor are the principal parts. The Danton Case depicts the battle for power between two exceptional individuals: the corrupt sentimental idealist, Danton, and the incorruptible genius of the Revolution, Robespierre. Thermidor shows the final playing out of this drama, as Robespierre, left alone with the heroic absolutist Saint-Just, foresees the ruin of himself and his cause, and in his despair predicts that hatred, war, and capitalism will steal the Revolution and corrupt nineteenth-century man.

Brilliant, obsessive and painfully overlooked as a playwright, Stanislawa Przybyszewska was able to turn her life time fascination with the Revolution into a compelling if highly idiosyncratic recounting of 1794. Very difficult to understand for people with little background, absolutely mind-blowing for those who have studied the era. She writes as if she were talking to Committee of Public Safety. Although both plays leave a bit to be desired in the way of historical accuracy and her Robespierrism gets on your nerves, few authors are able to so successfully live in the lives and times of their characters and so keenly convey the historical ambiance and psychological nuances. Nervy, haunting and brilliant, Stanislawa's highly personal telling sheds light on our own troubled century as much as Robespierre's. A must read for anyone interested in the failure of radical social change. - vause@pacbell.net

amazon.com

Stanislawa Przbyzewska (1901-1935) was the daughter of a well-known polish writer. Her father left her and her mother soon after she was born and for much of her life he had no contact with her. As he grew older, they became more close and she also started to write. She went to university in Cracow and stayed on there in some junior teaching position.

In her late twenties she saw a few of her works (plays and essays) published, not to much acclaim however, and by then she had begun to lose her grip on her life and on her sanity. Whether it was mental illness of instability, one or more unhappy love affairs or her progressively worsening morphine addiction (and probably all of the aforementioned together) she got weirder and weirder. The last years of her life she lived as a recluse in a small wooden shack on a courtyard within the maze of 18th-century universtiy buildings. She read and she wrote. Feverishly so. Mostly about the French Revolution, and why it had gone so spectacularly wrong: it began in 1789 with the hope for a better world, and it ended in 1799 in Napoleon's authoritarean government, passing throug the bloody terror and an appalling civil war.

As a pole Przbysewska had seen a revolution gone bad in her own country: Pilsudski made a new and free Poland after the first world war, but soon made himself the head of state and of the governement.

In Russia, next to Poland, it had gone even worse: the Bolshevik experiment had degenerated in Lenin's terror and Stalin's terror was getting up steam by the 1930s.

Przbysewska, living like an ascetic, strange, hallucinating hermit wrote and rewrote her plays. Her views on the French Revolution and particularly on the chief protagonists (Robespierre, St-Just, Danton, Desmoulins, Fabre) of its most exciting period (1793-1794) are still valid, fresh and refreshingly different. So what if she is way too far into Robespierre. Robespierre was as ascetic and uninterersted in material things as she was herself and that must have appealed to her: like him she only lived for her work. She is never dogmatic and never makes the characters into caricatures, as so many writers do: Danton the lust-for-life and larger-than-life big old brute with the golden heart and Robespierre the sneaky, utterly humourless, friendless fanatic.

Przbysewska's Robespierre is a complex charachter, who loses sight of humanity, even if he is a very humane and caring human being: he likes animals, children and "the People".

Robespierre loses sight of the fact, or deliberately shuts out the fact that the enemies of the people are people too, even if they are royalists, criminals, cooked stockbrokers, defeatists or dantonists. And so Robespierre, who by most accounts was an odd but fundamentally decent, shy and kind person becomes the personification of the Terror and of it's excesses.

Przbysewska puts them all on stage and lets them speak. She does so skillfully, believably and, in my view honestly. One may not always agree with her opinions or with her slant on the events or the charachters but it is clear her views were passionately held and very very sincere.

Not yet 35 she died, in 1935, alone in her shed. After her death it was found she had died of illness and hunger, in short, form neglect. Lots of people had offered to help her and to take her in, but she had stubbornly refused. The neglect of which she died was self-imposed.

She had starved herself to death, again, like some exalted medieval mystic. She deserved better, of course, and made life unnecessarily hard for herself. But maybe because of her weirdness, she had an uncanny feeling for her subjects and wrote about them magnificently. Highly recommended, especially for Fr. Rev. buffs and for those who enjoy reading good plays. - S. A. Kuipers amazon.com

There is something about the French Revolution that captures one with a sweet taste of disturbance.

My knowledge on the French Revolution was limited, untill I had the chance to read Przybyszewska's The Danton Case. Alienated and confined in the caverns of her mind, the playwright provides an insight into the unresolved tensions between Georges Danton and Maximilien Robespierre. The former a liberal, sentimental animal, the latter an incorruptible, cold mountain. Both, led to their deaths 5 years after the Fall of Bastille.

What strikes me about The Danton Case, is the boldness with which she enters the mentality of both the oppressor and the oppressed, revealing the animal and foolish nature of the mob and the cannibalistic logic of the dictator. Are we capable of wielding freedom, or are we debasing ourselves to voluntary servitude? Are we oppressed by the dictator or by ourselves?

Stanislawa Przybyszewska might not resolve the problems between Danton and Robespierre, but she definitely raises our social consciousness. It seems that we are all concerned with the wrong question: instead of asking ourselves how do we stop the dictator, we should be rather asking how do we allow the rise of the dictator in the first place.

I recommend this book to anyone who is eager to expand his or her knowledge on the French Revolution. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is capable of seeing the multiple facets of truth- the rise of Hitler after all, was not exactly condemned at first. - Maria Nicolaou goodreads.com

Stanisława Przybyszewska: The Maddest of All Female Robespierrists

The dimensions of the room are small: seven-and-a-half feet by fifteen. On the left wall is a single window, half the size of a normal window, which sheds a meagre light on the furniture: a wooden table and stool, a love seat, an ugly grey cabinet where the books are stored, a basin, a stove, and a narrow bed. Because the room is on the ground floor, it gets very cold in winter — and the winters in Danzig are merciless, the temperatures sometimes dropping to thirty below. So close to the earth, it is also damp. Sepulchral drafts drift up from beneath the floorboards. The typewriter rusts in its case. On one occasion, the orgy of dampness leads to the begetting of animal life in the form of mysterious, white wet worms so minuscule they are scarcely visible. Only after the stove is lit and the room heated dry do the worms perish, crackling into withered corpses, tiny crumpled membranes littering the once damp sheets of paper that had served as their ‘great metropolis’.

From the age of twenty-six until she died eight years later (of tuberculosis and malnutrition brought on by her addiction to morphine), the Polish writer Stanisława Przybyszewska lived in this room. Following her husband’s death from an overdose at the age of twenty-five, she had moved there from another, more spacious apartment on an upper floor of the same building. Her husband, Jan Panienski, had been a teacher at Danzig’s Polish Gymnasium, and the building where they had lived together — and where she would live and die alone — belonged to the school, which provided the ground-floor dwelling-space free of charge to the widowed Przybyszewska, less out of respect for her husband than out of respect for her father, Stanisław Przybyszewski, who had helped found the institution.

Stanisław Przybyszewski, though wholly unknown in English, was one of the most celebrated Polish writers of his day. A fin-de-siècle libertine and all-round poète maudit, Przybyszewski dabbled in Satanism, hobnobbed with Strindberg and Munch, and fathered at least half a dozen children by at least three different women, none of whom was his wife. Stanisława was the last of these children. Her mother, Aniela Pajak, was by all accounts a nurturing soul (her daughter would later call her a ‘genius at motherhood’) and a passably good painter in the impressionist style. She worshipped Przybyszewski and asked nothing of him, except that he legitimize their daughter. Which he refused to do.

In 1907, when Stanisława was five, her mother moved them away from their native Kraków to the Austrian Alps and then on to Paris, where Aniela integrated herself into the city’s large Polish émigré community, enrolled her daughter in a French-language school, and resumed her interrupted artistic career, exhibiting her paintings at the Salon des Indépendants. Then, quite suddenly, in 1911, Aniela grew ill and died of pneumonia, though not before making arrangements for her daughter to be looked after by family friends in Zürich. Stanisława remained with these friends until 1914, when she moved in with her aunt Helena Barlinska’s family in Vienna and, two years later, with the Great War raging, followed them back to Kraków.

Although Stanisława had had two brief encounters with her father in the course of her childhood, it was not until 1919, when she approached him after a lecture he gave in a Kraków concert hall, that she spoke with him at any length. The man who had refused to legitimize her and ignored her from the moment of her birth took a belated interest in his progeny — now a bright, beautiful, dark-eyed young woman who had read everything and who spoke Polish, German, French, and English with facility. To his new wife’s great displeasure (the free-loving Satanist had since become a staid Catholic), Przybyszewski began corresponding with Przybyszewska, assisted her financially, helped her husband secure his post at the Gymnasium in Danzig, and introduced her to the ‘mind-sharpening’ powers of morphine. For the next few years, until she grew disillusioned with his genius, Przybyszewska worshipped her father almost as ardently as her mother before her. Even after their falling out, he continued to cast a long shadow over her life. His abandonment of her as a child, his disappointment of her as an adult — together with the sudden early deaths of her mother and her husband — fortified Przybyszewska’s distrust of human relations and paved the way for the idiosyncrasy, the isolation, and the aversion to daily life about which she would become fanatical in the years to come. - Alex Andriesse

read more: The Incorruptible: Stanisława Przybyszewska

Daniel Gerould, A Life of Solitude: Stanislawa 

Przybyszewska, a Biographical Study with 

Selected Letters, Northwestern University 

Press, 1989.

A Life of Solitude is a biography of Polish playwright Stanislawa Przybyszewska (1901-35). One of the finest plays about the French Revolution, The Danton Case, was written by this unknown Polish woman living in obscurity in the free city of Danzig. The illegitimate daughter of writer Stanislaw Przybyszewski, she became a writer against long odds and at the cost of her health, her sanity, and eventually her life. A Life of Solitude shows how she chose her vocation, examine her ideas about writing, and reveal her struggle with material existence. Tragically, she came to substitute creativity for life and clung to her sense of calling with a stubbornness that dulled the instinct for self-preservation and led to her death from morphine and malnutrition at

It is difficult to imagine an audience for these cranky letters, so obsessive that their recipients probably threw them away without a second thought. According to Kosicka, a translator, and Gerould, Kosicka's husband and a professor of theater at City University of New York, Przybyszewska (1901-1935), an illegitimate daughter of an acclaimed Polish writer, merits attention for the genius she evinces in her play about the French Revolution, The Danton Case. But because that work awaits publication and staging in English, the trials and tribulations of the Polish Przybyszewska's literary career--the chief subject of her epistles--elude appreciation. Determined to be "100% a writer," she isolated herself at age 24, moving into a tiny, poorly heated apartment which she rarely left, writing for eight to nine hours each night and sleeping during the day, and maintaining contact with others almost exclusively through correspondence (of which she kept copies). An addiction to morphine only deepened her peculiarities and her immoderate sense of self-importance. - Publishers Weekly

Stanislawa Przybyszewski (1901-35), the illegitimate daughter of the modernist writer Stanislaw

Przybyszewski, became famous in her own right only after her death. Today she is recognized as a major twentieth-century playwright on the basis of her trilogy about the French Revolution, of which The Danton Case and Thermidor are the principal parts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanisława_Przybyszewska