Tomasz Kaczmarek

Karolina Czerska’s book offers a comparative study in which the theater of Maurice Maeterlinck is confronted with the theatrical work of Tadeusz Kantor. The author has set herself two major objectives: on the one hand, she wants to popularize Maeterlinck’s dramaturgy with the Polish public, and on the other, she evokes the works of the Belgian writer in the context of Kantor’s stage productions, which agrees to revisit and reconsider the work of the Polish theater director from a new perspective. By comparing the work of these two theater men, Czerska examines four themes where their artistic concepts seem similar: the conceptions of the “tragique quotidien” (tragedy in everyday life) and the “invisible”, the construction and status of the character as well as the function of the actor.

Charles Malato has gone down in posterity as the author of novels, memoirs and especially plays in which he castigates the excesses of power. Two events are at the origin of the birth of Malato’s vocation as an anarchist writer: the condemnation of his parents to banishment in New Caledonia and the meeting of the young Charles with Louise Michel. It is in this context that this article proposes to study the autobiographical text of the French author From the Commune to Anarchy which allows us to understand the inner evolution of the somewhat carefree adolescent towards destiny of a revolutionary able to use his pen as a formidable weapon. From then on, the analysis of the text accounts for Malato’s political awareness and his subsequent involvement in social issues, as well as highlighting the style of his language, as cruel as it is grotesque, which will upset the fragile minds of the bourgeois. In short, the exploration of the work constitutes a kind of propaedeutic to the subversive work of Malato whose universality attests to its undeniable topicality.

It is commonly said that expressionism was a purely German movement, however, it is difficult not to notice similar tendencies, albeit with a lesser intensity, also in France. Expressionism was not only an artistic movement. It could be seen above all as a certain spiritual attitude towards the dehumanized industrialization. Expressionism was born of existential anxiety of many German writers leading to a rebellion against the bourgeois society. This rebellion was also expressed by some French writers. In this article, the author compares the theaters of Jean-Victor Pellerin and Georg Kaiser from the perspective of expressionistic aesthetics. Both writers describe the alienation of a modern man in the mechanized civilization. They both put attention on the internal crisis of the main character who in the end decides to fight against the hostile reality. Hence, in their works typically for the expressionist drama, the protagonist embarks on a journey during which his internal change takes place. While Georg Kaiser expresses his pessimism by describing apocalyptic scenes, Jean-Victor Pellerin still believes in the power of love which alone can change the fate of mankind.

The author of the article studies Curel’s play, which testifies to the crisis of traditional drama, announced at the turn of the 20th century. Curel seems to destroy the canonical form of “drama-in-life”, based on a dramatic progression of the action and on the character as an active agent ensuring this same progression, by proposing a new paradigm of “drama-of-life”. The latter moves away from classic prerogatives to focus on the inner life of the protagonist. Instead of focusing on episodes that inevitably lead to disaster, the French writer attempts to embrace the evolution of the characters’ souls. This is how he passes from “agonistic drama” to an “ontological” one.