Tymon Terlecki writes that Akropolis is, “perhaps, the strangest and most baffling of Wyspiański’s dramatic works.”281 At the crossroads between the Romantic and avant-garde traditions, in many ways Wyspiański was ahead of his time, anticipating the twentieth century’s crisis of representation. Łempicka notes that Akropolis is a literary hybrid both structurally and thematically: part drama, part opera and part poem, with themes that stretch across cultures and epochs.It was partially this conglomeration of themes, motives, and genres that prompted Solski to reject the idea of staging it.282 A few literary critics of the time agreed with Solski, suggesting that the play is proof of Wyspiański’s weakening mental condition, of the “disintegration of the great talent’s creative elements,” claiming that “such chaos and disorder was never before seen in poetry.” Critics contended that the play reflects Wyspiański’s “sick imagination,”
that “the entire first act is an aberration,” and that the play “is maddening and sick.”283 More generous, Antoni Mazanowski stressed the stylistic inconsistency of the playwriting:
each act of Akropolis could stand on its own. Like tapestries and sculptures which ended up in the cathedral accidentally and can be moved somewhere else without losing their meaning, so the acts of Akropolis share the same arbitrariness. They are not connected either by their common time and place, common theme, or common feeling.284
“In Akropolis, there is not an ounce of reality; everything is a vision and a symbol,”285 Mazanowski continued reproachfully, but he eventually acknowledged that “[i]t is a beautifully written work.”286 The play breaks with prevalent, late nineteenth-century realist conventions while drawing on newly emerging avant-garde trends. elżbieta Kalemba-Kasprzak pointed out that “Wyspiański questions in his drama the rule of
‘repraesentatio’ that dominated the nineteenth-century theatrical space […] His reality is multi-perspective, multi-dimensional, and symbolic.”287 In 1904, Jan Stena’s review of the play contained similar observations:
For me, Akropolis does not have a plot; I don’t understand why these particular images are assembled here together in this particular order […] But, it is the style that is important – the soul of the poet […] Whoever is mystified by life’s enigmas won’t be able to pass by this work in indifference. Whoever wants to listen to the soul of the poet will find him here more accessible, more familiar than in his other more mature works.288
Responding to all the criticism, in 1932 Karol Homolacs, a Polish painter, wrote a passionate editorial reminding the critics that Wyspiański was foremost a painter, and then a poet: “Wyspiański […] begins writing his dramatic work by drawing the sketch of a scene on a piece of paper.”289 But, in 1969, contradicting Homolacs, Wojciech natanson commented: “It is often said that Wyspiański was a great poet, but a bad writer.”290
Indeed, critics’ ambivalence towards Akropolis stems from the fact that the play borders the threshold of two trajectories: lingering nineteenth-century Romantic tradition steeped in nationalistic and revolutionary longings, and european modernist tradition framed by post-national avant-garde aesthetics. Konstanty Puzyna considered Wyspiański a Romantic, though Puzyna also noted that Wyspiański’s fascination with modernist designs, especially those influenced by Gordon Craig’s ideas, places him on the border between Romanticism and Modernism.291 Terlecki suggested that Akropolis “is governed by the laws or the logic of dream, not the laws or the logic of waking life. […] we are dreaming a dream in the form of a drama.”292 The objects that come to live belong to the liminal space between the waking and oneiric states. For that very reason, Terlecki argued, “Akropolis presents itself as an anticipation of surrealist poetics.”293 nina Taylor classified it as a symbolist drama in the “Maeterlinckian vein of mood and metaphysical suggestion.”294 drawing on Mickiewicz’s call for grand, dramatic works that unite all of the arts into one monumental stage production, Wyspiański’s work brings together a number of art forms into one autonomous vision. Wyspiański was fascinated by Wagner’s concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, particularly his inclination towards ancient stories, themes and characters. Wyspiański advanced Wagner’s ideas by becoming the harbinger of the Great Theatrical Reform, particularly of the theories of edward Gordon Craid and his concept of an autonomous “art of theatre.”295 Gordon Craig himself repeatedly acknowledged Wyspiański as the front runner of the movement and even devoted an issue of his journal, Mask, to Wyspiański following the poet’s death in 1907.
Wyspiański’s Akropolis is an autonomous work of art, functioning according to its own internal logic of a dream. It exists in an alternative universe that parallels the world only on the symbolic and metaphorical level. It operates completely independently from the historical moment, while simultaneously condensing multiple epochs and geographic locations into one psycho-visual landscape.296
At the time of its publication in 1904, Akropolis, full of symbols, allegories, and modern conventions, was considered “the most fantastical” 297 of all Wyspiański’s dramas. But it was also a nationalist drama in the same sense that Wesele and Wyzwolenie were considered nationalist dramas.298 Kazimierz Kosiński suggests that, following the 1863 January uprising against the Russians, which ended in an overwhelming Polish defeat and brought on further persecutions from the partitioners, the Poles’ outlook grew increasingly gloomy. Collaboration with the partitioners became more predominant, and hopes for resurrection slowly faded, giving way to passivity and acceptance of the status quo, and thus reawaking the urgency in some quarters to revive the national passion for independence.299 drawing on the liberatory Romantic tradition established by Mickiewicz and
Słowacki, Wyspiański saw the role of playwright-poet as that of both clairvoyant and leader, and that of the conscience of the nation. In this sense, Akropolis “is both a religious and a political statement to a then nonexistent Polish nation.”300 Indeed, in writing Akropolis, Wyspiański attempted to capture Poland’s ambivalence towards its history, its present and its future, and sought to recreate the ephemeral effect, the sense of loss and hope that Wawel embodied. Wawel was the place where the death struggle over the Polish national soul was going to happen.301 But first and foremost, the play was an attempt to represent through allegories and metaphors a sense of Polish national consciousness, with all of its conscious and subconscious elements, both sacred and profane.
The play consists of four acts, which at first glance appear to have nothing to do with each other. They take place in four different places around Wawel: “In what has been likened to the four mansions of a Chichester mystery play, the four separate frames in which four separate actions take place, this setting provides the only unity.”302 Act 1 takes place in the national corpus of the cathedral; it focuses on national themes and draws on Zygmunt Krasiński’s 1840 play Trzy Mysli Henryka Ligenzy [Three Thoughts of Henryk Ligenza]. The four stone angels from the tomb of St. Stanisław Szczepanowski (the medieval patron saint of Poland) come to life, and they carry his coffin, beckoning other figures to rise up. In addition to the angels, Wyspiański resurrects the Lady figure and the Cupid figure from the monument to Andrzej Ankwicz, a Roman Catholic archbishop of Prague (1833–1838) who was born and ordained in Cracow; the Lady figure from the memorial to Stanisław Skotnicki (1894–1939), the general of the émigré brigade in Switzerland; and the Cleo figure from the memorial to Roman Sołtyk (1790–1843), the Polish general of napoleon’s Russian campaign. The tone of act 1 is dark and ominous. It opens with a prologue that narrates what has just happened: “They have left and are leaving,/ they left the heavy cloud of smoke circling above the church/ […] They have left,/ and smoke and darkness grows heavier.”303 The angels grow weary under the heavy weight of the coffin, asking God if he hears their pleadings: “does He hear us talking,/ or does he only hear our wailing?” – to which the second Angel replies:
Can you smell it? – the incense smoke weaves the fog
like a spider web – ?
Ah, the candles! I thought they would smoke out the flame.
I was burning in this fiery halo weak under the weight of the coffin my eyes blinded by the light.304
The death and love themes intertwine, in a melancholic danse macabre of love, loss and desire. As nina Taylor notes, “The latent eroticism and theatricality of Baroque aesthetics take flesh, and the sacred love of paschal worship turns swiftly to profane love as figures from other sepulchral monuments wake up, and give vent to their erotic urges in scenes of mutual seduction.”305 The love theme quickly gives way to the sense
of desperate sadness and muted mourning which overwhelms the play. The Angels struggle to hold back the tears for something, or someone, they have lost:
Angel: don’t cry and don’t curse.
MAiden: don’t cry? don’t complain?
Angel: don’t wail – don’t weep.
MAiden: don’t remember – nothing?306
The hopeless melancholy of the first act, with its somber and dark undertones, the images of Angels suffering under the weight of the coffin, the smoke rising above the church, and those who unjustly perished and who must be mourned in silence, all quickly bring to mind Auschwitz. The sensory imagery is strikingly similar, and the association is inevitable for a modern reader (as it was for Grotowski); though of course, it is not inscribed in Wyspiański.
Wyspiański drew on other scenes from the tapestry for the themes of the play’s remaining three acts. Act 2 focuses on the Greek story of Hector and Andromache, and act 3 on the Hebrew story of Jacob and esau. Act 4 revolves around david, the king of Israel, who in this version becomes a Polish prophet. In Akropolis, Greco-Roman mythology intertwines with Judeo-Catholic sacrum, all of which intermingle with references to Polish national literature and military culture. As Kalemba-Kasprzak notes, “The integration of Wawel with Akropolis, Troy, Mount Sinai, and Jerusalem allows one to define european tradition as a space of common mythical identity.”307 In 1927, in response to its first full production, at the Słowacki Theatre in 1926, an anonymous critic confidently wrote: “It is not difficult to see in this oratory mysterium of easter revival, the ideas of polygenesis, the Helleno-nietzschean idea of eternal recurrence, Hectorian sacrifice and biblical references to Christ whose benevolence unites all of the quarreling nations.”308 The rediscovered Baroque and Gothic frescoes and the Greek mythological figures of royal ghosts come to life to tell their dramas and become allegorical representations of Polish national tragedy as framed within the larger european context. Terlecki argues that “Acropolis is a drama of civilization, of culture in an inner sense. It embraces the widest prospects of the cultural entity which in the course of time has been called european, Western Mediterranean, Atlantic, Judeo-Greco-Latin-Christian.”309 As Terlecki rightly notes, “there is not a single real, living person in the play.”310 It operates entirely on the level of symbols, myths and metaphors. Or, as nina Taylor observes, Akropolis “provides a condensed evocation of consecutive cultures and centuries, and a portrayal of the metaphysics underlying the Greek, Judaic and Christian heritage, in which works of art are considered as the main residue of civilization, and cultural layers are superimposed and fused into the entity which we call Western culture.”311 It is important to note that, architecturally, Wawel is a syncretic building, which architecturally combines Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque and neoclassical elements.312 Likewise, bringing them all together, Akropolis attempts to condense the essence of Western culture and identity as framed by the tragic struggle between conflicting values and paradigms. It is this aspect of Wyspiański’s Akropolis that Flaszen had in mind when he argued that, in
Grotowski’s adaptation, “the century-old values of european culture are put to a severe test.”313
drawing on Krasiński’s plays Three Thoughts, as well as on Homer’s Iliad, and Jewish Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible), Wyspiański attempted to recover and restructure the historical moment of his era. Like Krasiński, Poland’s renowned Romantic poet, Wyspiański merges together in his Akropolis the location, the cathedral, the time, the night, and the idea of angels coming to life. The Trojan myth from Homer’s Iliad is about the “conscious acceptance of one’s death, apathy, and the fatality of faith.
The biblical Hebrew story of Jacob is all about action, dynamism, struggle with one’s destiny.”314 The dichotomy between apathy and action, fatality and self-determination, reflects a particular Polish schizophrenia. Thus, along with the dreams of greatness and images of resurrection, Akropolis also contains resigned undertones:
The dead won’t rise.
The fatalism of the first act of Akropolis is a theme that Wyspiański, like many Poles, had been pondering for almost a decade. In 1896, he began work on illustrations for a new publication of The Iliad. That same year, he visited Paris, where he saw an adaptation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, another thematic source for Akropolis. He also read Aeschylus’ dramas around this time.316 The Greek heroes, living and dying on the gods’ playgrounds, became models for the Polish sense of national fatalism, framed by centuries of oppression and uprisings, and forever etched in the national memory. Juliusz Kleiner (1938) defined fatalism as the “tragedy of the dual nature of one’s acts.”317 It is the Oedipal tragedy of a man whose motives, actions and outcomes misfire terribly, confirming rather than averting his fate. In 1907 in his study Life and Death in the Works of Wyspiański, Stanisław Brzozowski wrote that
“Wyspiański once more relives the historical legacy of Poland to prove that one cannot live on memory alone. Memories do not exist. But Wyspiański doesn’t know the world of the living. He simply defends himself from the madness of memory.”318 In this context, Wawel, at once a cemetery and a repository of Poland’s national legacy, becomes fatalistically entangled in the myths of national martyrology and revival. One of the most prominent images of the first act is an eagle, Poland’s national coat of arms, in the half-opened coffin. There are many interpretations of this image; everyone agrees that an eagle represents the partitioned Poland, but there are disagreements about whether the half-opened coffin suggests that the eagle should not be awakened as it is too early for the uprising, or whether it implies that it will never be the right time.
Akropolis is set in the castle during the night of the Resurrection, a holiday just before easter that, according to folk legend, is a night of miracles. The setting also alludes to Christ’s resurrection. (In Polish, easter – Wielkanoc – literally means “the Great night.”) The exact time is from midnight to four o’clock in the morning, the liminal hours. Bałus argues that “the religious liminality, the condition between sacred and profane, can never be sustained for too long. There will always be ‘something’
separate created in the space/time of ‘in-between.’ Between the cemetery and the village, there is a wall. This is the place to bury suicides. Two fields are always separated by the balk. This is the place where the ghosts appear.” (In Polish, the word for “balk,”
miedza, comes from the word między, which literally means “in between.”)319 The in-betweenness of time is important in Akropolis because it denotes the “something”
that is created in the space between the sacred and the profane, and that parallels what is created between the West and the east. This is the space of Polish national identity:
a space in constant geo-psychological struggle with itself and its surroundings. The play is a meeting place between the living and the dead, who resurrect themselves in order to brandish their sacrifice and pass judgment on the living. It is a confrontation between history, the present and the vision of the future, which depend on the dialogue between the living and the dead.
Acts 2 and 3 take place outside of Wawel, on the steps to the cathedral. Before the restoration of Wawel, the tapestries depicting the mythical figures that Wyspiański brings to life had hung inside the cathedral. Although when he was writing the play the tapestries were no longer in place and he instead used the illustrations of Ignacy Polkowski, Wyspiański considered the tapestries an integral element of the cathedral.
The mythical setting of act 2 also changes; the Vistula River, which passes through Cracow, changes into the ancient Scamander River, which passes near ancient Troy.
drawing on The Iliad, Wyspiański retells the Greek story of Priam, Hector, Paris and Helena. To allow Paris and Helena their happiness, Hector follows his fate and goes to war, knowing well that he will die. He believes he will return in spirit, wrapped in everlasting glory. In the meantime, Paris and Helena romance each other, unaware of their tragic destiny. Wyspiański’s Priam, the King of Troy, and father of both Hector and Paris, in vain chastises Paris: “do you know that your folly means our unhappiness?”
To which Paris replies: “And isn’t it your virtue/ that we can be as foolish as we want to/ under the majesty of your will/ and your strength?” 320 The exchange is a bitter allusion to Poland’s political situation; Poles who accept the protectorate of their occupants are foolish, Wyspiański seems to suggest. The act ends with a battle between Hector and Ajax. Standing ominously among the scavenging ravens, Cassandra tries to calm Andromache, Hector’s desperate wife, who wanders aimlessly through the battlefield, sensing the looming tragedy.
This act is structured around the opposition between Hector and Paris, and between Hector and Apollo. Tymon Terlecki points out that Paris and Hector represent “two opposite tensions in culture. The one embodied by Hector is exaltingly altruistic, self-denying and sacrificial, and can be called the heroic ideal. It is opposed to the attitude of Paris – egotistical and given to pleasure and joy of life.”321 Wyspiański’s Hector is more aware of the inevitability of his death than he is in The Iliad. In this sense, Hector
symbolizes the Polish soldier who is aware of the futility of his fight and the inevitability of his death, yet is unable to resist the battle because he is driven by the heroic myth of immortal glory. Paris symbolizes those Poles who prefer to focus on their private lives rather than devote themselves to the national struggle. In 1905, Antoni Mazowski noted the parallels between Troy and Poland: “everything is in the scene: knightly honor, idyllic love, youthful love, marital love, love that’s changed into friendship over
symbolizes the Polish soldier who is aware of the futility of his fight and the inevitability of his death, yet is unable to resist the battle because he is driven by the heroic myth of immortal glory. Paris symbolizes those Poles who prefer to focus on their private lives rather than devote themselves to the national struggle. In 1905, Antoni Mazowski noted the parallels between Troy and Poland: “everything is in the scene: knightly honor, idyllic love, youthful love, marital love, love that’s changed into friendship over