A Gnostic Tragedy

Stanislawa Przybyszewska is known above all for her plays on the French Revolution, among which The Danton Case has become classic. Thus far her works have been interpreted almost exclusively in political terms. The present study, however, argues that in fact she lakes a Gnostic view of history as an eternal opposition between matter and spirit, and that this dualism saturates the utopian project she undertook both in her art and in her life. Przybyszewska does not belong to the Polish cultural tradition. Her aesthetics and works are rooted instead in the Western European philosophical and literary context and developed out of a continual dialogue with figures such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, August Strindberg, Georges Bernanos, H.G. Wells and G.B. Shaw. The analysis of her views presented here is based to a considerable extent on her unpublished aesthetic studies and prose texts.