Theatre
The Undivine Comedy
Nie-Boska komedia
Zygmunt Krasiński · 1835
Opening lines
Gwiazdy wokoło twojej głowy — pod twoimi nogi fale morza — na falach morza tęcza przed tobą pędzi i rozdziela mgły — co ujrzysz, jest twoim — brzegi, miasta i ludzie tobie się przynależą — niebo jest twoim — chwale twojej niby nic nie zrówna.
Stars around your head, beneath your feet the waves of the sea, on the waves of the sea a rainbow races before you and parts the mists; what you see is yours: shores, cities and people belong to you, the sky is yours, nothing, it seems, can equal your glory.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from wolnelektury.pl
Synopsis
Count Henri, a poet, marries a woman he does not love and soon neglects her for the mirages of poetry, embodied by a Virgin who comes to seduce him; his wife loses her reason, and their son grows up sickly. Years later, a revolution rises up the masses against the Christian aristocracy: Henri takes command of the nobles entrenched in the castle of the Holy Trinity, facing the leader of the insurgents, Pankracy, whom he meets before crossing the revolutionary camp by night.
Context
Begun in Vienna in June 1833 and completed in Venice in the autumn of 1834, the play, first titled The Husband, appeared anonymously in Paris in 1835, probably to protect a family subject to the Russian empire. Long judged unperformable, it was not staged until 1902, in Kraków, by Józef Kotarbiński; Leon Schiller, Konrad Swinarski and Adam Hanuszkiewicz have revived it since. Translated into more than a dozen languages, it appeared in French in 1869 under the title La Comédie infernale. Its portrayal of conspiring Jews draws criticism today.
Who it is for
A drama in four parts and thirty-two scenes, long judged better suited to reading than to the stage. Old French translation, from 1869.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as its author's masterpiece and one of the peaks of Polish Romantic drama; Mickiewicz saw in it the highest achievement of Slavic theatre.
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