Slawomir Mrozek
Mrozek is the most famous Polish avant-garde playwright. His first play, The Police, which premiered on June 27, 1958 in Warsaw, is a typically Kafkaesque parabola. The action takes place in a certain country in which the secret police are so powerful that there is no opposition to the ruling tyrannical regime. There is only one leftist under suspicion, who has been achieving his goal for years, stubbornly not deviating from his chosen path. When he, wanting to lead the police on a false trail, declares that he agrees with the ruling ideology, the secret police loses raison d'être. Not wanting to deprive so many loyal people of their livelihood, the chief of police charges one of them with committing a political crime.
“On the High Seas” (1961) three people, fat, thin and of average fatness, find themselves on a raft after a shipwreck. In order not to die of hunger, they decide to eat one person. In determining the victim, they resort to all types of political methods - elections, debate, scientific reasoning - to establish which of them lived better and therefore should die first. But no matter what method they use, the potential victim is always the thin one. He doesn't want to be eaten. But when the fat one convinces him that such a death is a heroic, artistic act, the thin one agrees. At this moment, a character of average fatness, in search of salt, finds a can of beans with sausages. The need to kill the bad disappears. But the fat man orders his henchman to hide the can. “I don’t want beans,” he mutters. “Anyway... Don’t you understand? He will be happy to die!
In "Striptease" (1961), two people are locked in an empty room. They are deeply outraged by their situation. A huge hand appears and gradually removes their clothes. They come to the decision that the best thing to do in their situation is to ask the hand for forgiveness. They humbly ask the hand to forgive them and kiss it. A second hand appears “... in a red glove. The hand forces them to come closer and puts jester's caps on them, plunging them into complete darkness." They are ready to follow where the red hand points. “If they call you, you have to go,” says one of them...
These two plays and the one-act plays “The Torment of Peter Ohey”, “Charlie”, “The Witching Night” are poignant political allegories. "Fun" (1963) aspires to more. Three men are invited to a party, or so they think. They come to an empty place looking for entertainment. There is no party in sight. Wanting to have fun, they persuade one of them to hang himself so that something will happen. They are already close to carrying out their fun when the sounds of music are heard in the distance. The party probably took place after all. The play ends with one of the characters asking a question to the public:“Ladies and gentlemen! Where is the party anyway? There are clear echoes of Waiting for Godot, but the atmosphere is rich in Polish folklore and folk culture with a village orchestra and strange dancing masks.
Most famous play Mrozek remains “Tango” to this day. The premiere took place in January 1965 in Belgrade, in Poland - in June 1965 in Budgoszcz; July 7, 1965 with triumphant success - in Warsaw, at the Erwin Axer Theater Wspolczesny, and this performance became the most outstanding event in the history of Polish theater in the mid-century.
"Tango" is a complex play, a parody or paraphrase of "Hamlet". The hero is a young man who horrifies his parents with his behavior. He feels deep shame for his mother, who cheats on his father, and for his smug father. The bitter attacks are understandable young man for a generation that allowed war, occupation and devastation of the country. Arthur grew up in a world devoid of values. His father, a careless man who pretends to be an artist, wastes his time on useless avant-garde experiments. The mother sleeps with the boorish proletarian Eddie, who hangs around the unkempt apartment the family calls home. Someone accidentally ordered my grandmother to be put in a coffin. last husband, and she lies in a coffin that was never taken out. An uncle with aristocratic manners and a crooked brain also lives here. Arthur is thirsty normal life in compliance with order and decency. He tries to convince his cousin Alya to marry him, as was customary before. Alya doesn't understand what the ceremony is for. If he wants to sleep with her, she agrees without any ceremony. But Arthur insists on observing them. He grabs his father's gun and starts a revolution, forcing the family to dress decently, tidy up their cluttered, dirty apartment and prepare for his wedding. But he is not able to cope with all this. Realizing that the old order cannot be restored by force, he gets drunk. Old values are destroyed and cannot be restored by force. What's left? Naked power. “I ask you, when there is nothing left, and even rebellion is no longer possible, what can we take into life from nothing?.. One force! Only strength can be created from nothing. It is always there, even if there is nothing. ...Only one thing remains - to be strong and decisive. I'm strong. ...In the end, force is also a protest. Protest in the form of order..."
To prove his point, Arthur is ready to kill his old uncle. Alya tries to divert Arthur's attention and shouts that she, his bride, slept with Eddie on the eve of the wedding. Arthur is shocked. He is too humane to put into practice the doctrine of absolute power. Eddie has a different point of view. With wild force he attacks Arthur. Power has triumphed. The family obeys Eddie. The play ends with Eddie and the old aristocratic uncle dancing a tango around Arthur's dead body.
Tango is a symbol of the impetus for rebellion. When tango was a challenging innovation, Arthur's parents' generation fought for the right to dance it. When the rebellion against traditional values destroyed all values, there was nothing left but naked power - Eddie's power, the power of the mindless masses, dancing tango on the ruins of civilization.
The meaning of this exercise in revolutionary dialectics is quite clear: the cultural revolution leads to the destruction of all values and, as a consequence, to an attempt by idealistic intellectuals to restore them; however, following these values, once destroyed, is impossible and therefore only naked force remains. As a result, due to the fact that intellectuals cannot be cruel to the required extent and show strength, it is shown by Eddies, of whom there are plenty in the world. “Tango” is relevant not only for communist countries. The destruction of values and the rise to power of the vulgar man of the masses is also familiar to the West. "Tango" is a play with broad meanings. It's brilliantly constructed, has a lot of inventiveness, and is very funny.
Physically, in person, Slawomir Mrozhek was in Russia twice: in 1956 - as an ordinary Polish tourist traveling around the Soviet Union, and almost half a century later, in 2002, - already as an honored guest, a venerable writer, a luminary of the theater of the absurd, a living legend . His creative presence in Russian culture is much more noticeable: hundreds of performances, dozens of translations, several book publications. The Russian theme also occupies an important place in Mrozhek’s work: these are the tragic intricacies of Polish and Russian history, which could not always be discussed openly (in one of the feuilletons Mrozhek admitted: “When I wrote a satire about a hole in the bridge, I felt like this , as if this is a satire on something global, maybe even on the entire Soviet Union"); and Chekhov's subtexts, scenery and rehashes of many of his plays, and, finally, an incredible cocktail called “Love in Crimea” , which the master of the absurd mixed at the end of his creative path from Russian history, literature and reality, seasoning this explosive mixture with Shakespeare.
Mrozhek's relationship with the Russian theater was not easy. Under the guise of “Soviet-Polish friendship,” several of his stories were translated and published, they tried to stage something in the theater, but when in 1968 Mrozhek allowed himself the luxury of expressing his own, very impartial opinion on the topic of “fraternal assistance to Czechoslovakia,” his career The Soviet Union ended before it really began. When glasnost and perestroika shook the foundations Soviet world, the banned Mrozhek triumphantly returned to the Russian stage, and when the situation stabilized, he quietly moved into the “classic” category. Thus, in the history of the appearance of Mrozhek’s dramas on the Russian stage, four periods can be distinguished.
The first, the stage of acquaintance, occurred during the Khrushchev Thaw and was associated with the attempts of the Soviet theater to start a dialogue with Western culture. As new plays by a young but already famous writer in his homeland appear, they are translated, published and staged in theaters. This period was short, but the acquaintance took place, and Mrozhek’s name was imprinted in the memory of Russian intellectuals, who later began to be called the sixties. It is to this generation, which preserved what was removed from libraries and removed from the repertoire, that Mrozhek owes the explosion of popularity that came in the late 80s.
In Poland, several generations of spectators grew up listening to Mrozhek's dramaturgy: his plays were staged by leading directors, almost everything he wrote regularly appeared in print (the ban on his works in his homeland lasted only a few years, in Russia - several decades), and the best literary critics were sensitive to followed his work. In the minds of the average Pole, it was thanks to Mrozek that the theater of the absurd and the absurdity of everyday life were intertwined into a single, inextricable whole, as the author himself humbly admits: “The concept of the absurd went to the people and, accordingly, having become vulgar, remained there.” His name has found its way into the colloquial language: Poles immediately comment on everyday, and especially bureaucratic absurd situations, “Like from Mrozhek!” or “Well, Mrozek wouldn’t have come up with that!” In Russia the situation was different. If the term “theater of the absurd” appeared in the press, it was invariably accompanied by the definitions “bourgeois, rotten, degenerate.” When his drama “On the High Seas” was published in the anthology “Modern Polish Plays” in 1967 , it was assumed that the reader would interpret the illogicality of what was depicted as a parody (!) of the fashionable theater of the absurd. About some phenomena modern culture in the Soviet Union you could write either badly or nothing. Only occasionally did valuable critical articles appear in print, but it is difficult to judge the true intentions of their authors today. For example, after the key phrase: “The decay of the rotting bourgeois world even penetrated the stage,” it was possible, not without irony, but to retell in detail the content of Beckett’s main plays. “The theater of the absurd, rooted in the decaying bourgeois culture, is direct evidence of its degeneration, its progressive spiritual squalor” - this is how another critic motivates his “righteous anger”, after which with a clear conscience he sets out the main postulates of the fundamental work of Martin Esslin, tells the history of the theater of the absurd , indicates its philosophical foundations, existential roots, basic artistic techniques and sets out a brief summary of two dozen plays that are unknown to the Soviet reader and have no hope of translation or publication.
The second - the longest - period of Mrozhek's interaction with official Russian culture can be described as his complete absence from it. In 1968 Mrozhek was blacklisted and was no longer published in the Soviet Union. Paradoxically, the censorship ban concerned, first of all, the name; the very work of the rebellious Polish writer did not cause sharp rejection by the authorities, so it was possible to stage and show Mrozhek’s play under the name of a certain mythical NN. State theaters Such conspiracy was feared, but the students did not deny themselves the pleasure of touching the unknown theater of the absurd.
The third stage - the real fashion for Mrozhek - was prepared by the previous two; the Polish author was already known - at least in the theatrical environment, they remembered his early plays, caricatures and stories, followed - as far as possible - the development of his work and dreamed that someday... maybe... it would be possible to -put it. Perestroika, glasnost, etc. provided such an opportunity. You don’t have to publish the author, you don’t have to mention him, but you can’t forbid him to be remembered. And people remembered. Without this memory, there would not have been a whole series of Mrozhekov’s productions at the Chelovek Studio Theater, including “Striptease” (directed by Lyudmila Roshkovan) - the most “long-lasting” of all his performances, and the underground “Emigrants” (directed by Mikhail Mokeev), would not have played for 17 years in a row at the St. Petersburg theater on the Fontanka “Tango” (directed by Semyon Spivak).
The peak of Mrozhek's popularity in Russia came in the 1988/89 season, when more of his pieces were staged than either before or since. The outbreak of interest was not accidental. Mrozhek appeared on the Russian stage at the most opportune moment: freed from censorship, the theater - aware of its backwardness in the field of stage technology, tired of the journalistic squabbles about the historical past that filled Russian drama - rushed in search of new dramatic material that would allow not only refresh the acting skills, but would also be in keeping with the spirit of the times. “Unexpectedly” - thirty years late - the theater of the absurd that appeared on the horizon was received with enthusiasm. Mrozhek triumphantly enters the Russian stage. And it is very indicative in what “company”: Beckett, Ionesco, Genet. Moreover, it was Mrozhek who turned out to be most understandable to the simple viewer, who was not prepared to perceive this type of drama, which has become classic in the West, but is practically unknown in Russia. It is also important that the gaps in the education of the Russian viewer were not limited to this - in the late 80s it turned out that there were many blank spots on the cultural map (the philosophy of Berdyaev and Solovyov, the work of Nabokov, Gumilyov, Brodsky, Tsvetaeva, Remizov...); all this was printed, studied, commented on and mastered at an incredible pace. The fact that Mrozhek’s work was not lost in the avalanche of new names and trends is a merit, first of all, of the directors. Moreover, in a narrow circle of intellectuals, the dramaturgy of the absurd “went from hand to hand” in printouts, and stage performances significantly outpaced the publication of translations.
The “Theater of the Absurd” turned out to be the key that opened the door for the Polish playwright that not a single one of his compatriots was allowed to enter. There was nothing similar in the history of cultural contacts between Russia and Poland. Polish drama was represented on the Russian stage very modestly, and Mrozek's almost obligatory presence on the posters of the late 1980s and early 1990s was a real event, his plays were staged in capitals and provinces, from Vilnius and Minsk to Yerevan and Komsomolsk-on-Amur - throughout the Soviet Union.
The “quantitative” success of the 1988–1990s did not immediately translate into “qualitative” success. The short, condensed form of one-act plays interested the young Russian avant-garde, which overfed Stanislavsky's system and rushed in search of a new stage language. The theme of Mrozhek’s parable plays also turned out to be close to the Russian audience: the state shamelessly invading personal living space, manipulating people with the help of ideological clichés and slogans, fear of power leading to the loss of one’s own self. Perhaps the performances of that period were not distinguished by the novelty of their interpretation, but they introduced the author’s name into wide theatrical use, and most importantly, translations that had been gathering dust in library departments began to appear in print.
A characteristic feature of the fourth period was the elimination of the backlog: starting with “Portrait” , Mrozek's plays appear on Russian stages no later than a year after their Polish premieres, and Widows », staged in Moscow in January 1994 under the title “Banana”, turned out to be the first foreign premiere of the play. At the same time, in the 90s, some doubts appeared about the longevity of interest in the work of the Polish author. Mrozhek occupies Russian theaters together with the absurdists and, together with them, begins to gradually disappear from the posters to give way to the fledgling modern national drama. The repertoire changes observed in the Russian theater in the 1980-1990s could be schematically expressed as follows: from journalistic drama through the theater of the absurd to the so-called drama new wave" The mechanism of this process seems to be quite transparent. In the mid-1980s - when political and aesthetic freedom seemed to be concepts of the same order - social drama was especially popular, and the stage was filled with “chernukha” - plays that demonstrated disgusting reality, degradation of values, lack of prospects, but also theater, and, more importantly, the viewer quickly got tired of all this. Separated from the world theatrical process and its own past, the Russian theater began to fill gaps that were no longer of a historical, but of an aesthetic nature. Studying with Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, and Mrozhek allowed directors to take a different look at the work of Russian playwrights. For the Russian stage, Mrozhek’s dramaturgy turned out to be a valuable experience - it played the role of a kind of catalyst, which not only “provoked” the emergence of new acting techniques and means of expression, but also mercilessly exposed the helplessness of those who turned to Mrozhek’s work in pursuit of fashion. Directorial and acting failures exposed the irrelevance and inadequacy of old theatrical forms and showed that it is impossible to change without changing, it is impossible to take on a new type of drama without taking into account the new stage requirements.
The fashion for absurdity has gone, but interest in Mrozhek’s work has remained and “stabilized” at the level of 2-3 premieres per season, and the geography of productions is still expanding. Mrozhek is now rarely staged, but aptly: almost everyone new performance becomes an event in theatrical life, and productions are distinguished by their novelty of approach. Mrozek's plays remain attractive to Russian stage, and perhaps this stability is more indicative than the theatrical boom of the late 80s: if today a director takes on Mrozhek’s production, then this is no longer a tribute to fashion, but an internal need.
Russian productions of Mrozhek's plays differ significantly, if not dramatically, from Polish ones. Two mutually exclusive trends can be distinguished: on the one hand, Mrozhek, who was perceived as an absurdist author, served as a reason for theatrical experimentation; on the other hand, the Russian stage tradition and acting school forced actors to seek and, more surprisingly, find deep psychological truth in his sketchy characters. And although main feature The perception of Mrozhek in Russia was still a look “through the glasses” of the absurd; it would, however, be a great simplification to reduce Mrozhek’s entire “career” in Russia only to the fashion for the absurd. The end of the 1980s was not only a turning point, but also a crisis: disappointment, collapse of ideals, revaluation of values - these are characteristic features this period. Interest in plays of Mrozhekov's type is explained by the similarity of sentiments prevailing in post-war Europe and post-communist Russia, especially since the freshness of dramatic material opened up new opportunities for the theater. Mrozhek's plays enriched the theatrical language, forced directors to go beyond the boundaries of the known, actors to look for a manner of performance appropriate for vague dialogues and schematic characters; in a word, for many they became a real school of conceptual directing and conventional theater, an exciting adventure and a kind of master class.
Unlike the Polish theater, in the Russian theater - despite the thirty-year censorship ban (or perhaps precisely because of it) - Mrozhek did not acquire the status of an acutely social author. The political slogan of his work: “the fight against communism” - exploited so actively in Poland that when this slogan lost relevance, Mrozhek’s plays fell from posters like overripe apples - was practically not heard on the Russian stage. Where the Polish viewer saw sharp political satire, the Russian viewer looked for and found psychological drama. The socio-political orientation, in a sense, is generally alien to Russian culture, so the theater stubbornly looked for something hidden deep inside Mrozhek, ignoring what was visible to the naked eye, preferring the universal to the concrete political, exploiting psychological and everyday motives. Mrozhek might seem too dry and critical to Russian viewers. Overly intellectual. His “cold cruelty” towards his own heroes came into conflict with the established Russian tradition, according to which the author must, if not sympathize with everyone “humiliated and insulted,” then at least treat him with understanding. Although Mrozek revealed the operation of socio-psychological mechanisms, he refused to sympathize with them. This conflict between established tradition and Mrozek's approach sometimes made viewers suspect the Polish author of misanthropy. Even the most loyal fans of the master, which, without a doubt, include director and actor Roman Kozak, reproached him for emotional coldness and indifference to the characters. Kozak, working on the play “Love in Crimea,” which, however, did not arouse much interest among the Russian public and quickly disappeared from the Moscow Art Theater repertoire, admitted: “For him, our country is of thematic interest because of its exceptional sincerity, which Mrozhek himself probably lacks a little.” enough." This idea sounded even sharper among theater critics, who constantly reproached actors and directors for the fact that, when playing Mrozhek, they focused not on the guilt of the characters, as the author intended, but on their misfortune, which supposedly contradicted his idea.
The lack of keen interest among Russian directors in politics, especially in the “fight against communism” that Mrozhek tirelessly led, changes the meaning of his plays. The political motives that dominate in Polish stage interpretations and seem to be close to our experience were not heard in the Russian theater, which resolutely preferred to deal with universal human problems, extracting from Mrozek’s drama the absurdity of the cosmic structure of the world, rather than the illogicalities of a specific political system. Why? The answer is largely due to the difference in understanding the tasks of the theater and its place in the culture and society of Poland and Russia. The Russian theater - after several attempts and subsequent failures (both artistic and commercial) - prefers not to particularly sort out its relationship with the communist past. After a period of intensive research into “blank spots”, historical and political themes do not even fade into the background, but from the theater altogether, giving way to ethical and aesthetic issues. An in-depth analysis of the mechanisms of human enslavement and manipulation, state and government intervention in privacy ceases to interest the audience, since it does not correspond to its needs and desires, as a result of which the stage interpretation of Mrozek requires a much broader context than that used in the Polish theater, for which one of the most significant issues is the exposure of the socialist system. In Poland, Mrozhek’s work has always been perceived through the prism of politics, where the art of reading between the lines sometimes reached such heights that the public saw political hints even where the author did not have them. And in general typical feature Polish theater has always been committed to politics. There, the theater more than once went underground, actively becoming involved in the political struggle, which was understood as the struggle for independence, for the preservation of national identity. In Russia, the theater, with the exception of a short period of agitprop, did not engage in pure politics and from those imposed on it in Soviet era the functions of an ideological tribune fled into psychologism. Its characteristic feature was metaphysical and literary character. This alone was enough for Mrozhek's plays in Russia to cease to be political commentaries. Moreover, in the Soviet Union the grotesque turned out to be too weak a camouflage for unsafe ideas, and after perestroika the need for Aesopian language completely disappeared. However, it turned out that an apolitical interpretation of Mrozek’s plays is not only possible, but also interesting, since thanks to the polysemy of the text, the characters move into the context personal experience, and the universality of the method of reduction to absurdity and the humor of the dialogues make it possible to pose questions of a universal human nature. Considering the experience of Russian theatrical productions, Polish interpreters of Mrozhek can even be reproached for narrowing Mrozhek, reducing the content of his plays to political satire. But the Russian theater, which bypassed Mrozhek the politician, impoverished Mrozhek to some extent. There were, however, positive aspects: Russian theater managed to solve the problem of “talking heads”, which Polish directors could not cope with. Polish criticism, for its part, more than once scolded Mrozhek’s plays for being static, unstageable, and excessive intellectualism, but Russian actors were not bothered by Mrozhek’s static “talking heads”; thanks to their technical capabilities, they easily “filled” such a “head” with inner life.
An attempt made at the end of perestroika Russian theater abandoning the Stanislavsky system (until then officially accepted and the only one recognized in the country) failed miserably. Stage theory and the directing and acting method developed by Stanislavsky are still cultivated in Russia and form the basis of practical training, constituting the pride of the Russian theater. In the Polish theater, relations with the Stanislavsky system did not work out for a number of political reasons, and the development acting went the other way. According to eyewitnesses, after watching the Russian “Emigrants” and “Striptease,” which were shown at the 1990 Krakow festival dedicated to Mrozhek, the author was touched by the respect with which Russian theaters treated his texts. The detailed and subtle psychological elaboration, typical of most Russian productions, is the original contribution of the Russian theater to Mrozhek's reading. Does such psychological deepening distort Mrozhek’s schematic images? big picture his dramaturgy? The malicious Mrozhek with a “human face” - why not? His cold, dispassionately intellectual dramaturgy seemed to provoke internal resistance among the performers. The actors persistently searched for psychological motivations for the characters’ behavior - this is how a strange hybrid of conceptual directing and psychologized acting, sincerity and intelligence appeared, which is characteristic feature Russian Mrozhekov's performances recent years. With such a psychologically realistic manner of execution, Mrozhek’s grotesquely absurdist text receives an unexpectedly strong comic charge, because the author’s humor sounds especially clear, and the dialogue acquires unexpected expressiveness. The Russian history of Mrozhek's stage life opened up a new field of interpretive possibilities, which the Polish theater had passed by indifferently. A deep rethinking of the playwright’s works by the Russian theater made it possible to escape from traditional Polish readings, to see a different face of Mrozhek and to expand the boundaries of understanding beyond which the writer himself may not have intended to go.
The book by the remarkable Polish writer and playwright Slawomir Mrozhek includes satirical stories and plays. His writing style is characterized by irony and grotesque, revealing the absurd aspects of life, often parable-like and farcical features. Mrozhek rebels against the primitivization of life and thinking, the spiritual impoverishment of the individual, and against vulgar didacticism in art. Mrozhek's works - from "full-length" plays to miniatures, both verbal and graphic - are distinguished by genuine originality, sharpness of thought and inexhaustible imagination.
Slawomir Mrozek
Somersault morale by Slawomir Mrozek
“I describe only what is possible to describe. And so, for purely technical reasons, I keep silent about the most important things,” Slavomir Mrozek once said about himself.
He leaves it to the reader to speculate and guess about the most important things. But at the same time it gives him very significant and original “information for thought.”
The writer emphasizes: “Information is our contact with reality. From the simplest: “fly agarics are poisonous, saffron milk caps are edible” - and right up to art, which is essentially the same information, only more confusing. We act in accordance with the information. Inaccurate information leads to rash actions, as anyone who has eaten a fly agaric knows, having been informed that it is a saffron milk cap. bad poetry They don’t die, but they are also poison, only in a unique way.”
The stories and plays of Slavomir Mrozhek, for all their seeming unreality and “intricacy,” provide accurate information about the fly agarics and toadstools of the surrounding reality, about everything that poisons our lives.
Slawomir Mrozek is a famous Polish satirist. He was born in 1930, studied architecture and fine arts in Krakow. He made his debut almost simultaneously as a prose writer and a caricaturist, and since the second half of the 50s he has also been acting as a playwright (he also wrote several film scripts). In all three “guises,” Mrozek appears as a keen-sighted and insightful artist, focusing his attention on the sad (and sometimes gloomy) sides of modern life and striving not just to highlight, but to burn them out with the healing ray of satire. The cycles brought him great popularity humorous stories and drawings, published in Polish periodicals and later published in separate editions. The stories were collected in the collections “Practical semi-armored cars” (1953), “Elephant” (1957), “Wedding in Atomice” (1959), “Rain” (1962), “Two letters” (1974); drawings - albums "Poland in Pictures" (1957), "Through the Glasses of Slawomir Mrozhek" (1968). In addition, the writer's literary baggage includes stories " Little Summer" (1956) and "Flight to the South" (1961), a volume of selected essays and articles "Short Letters" (1982), and a dozen plays, among which "Police" (1958), "Turkey" (1960) can be highlighted. , a triptych of one-act farces "On the High Seas", "Karol", "Striptease" (1961), "Death of a Lieutenant" (1963), "Tango" (1964), "The Tailor" (1964), "Happy Accident" (1973) , "Slaughterhouse" (1973), "Emigrants" (1974).
Since 1963, Slawomir Mrozek lived in Italy, and in 1968 he moved to Paris. But he remains a citizen of Poland and a very Polish writer who does not break ties with his homeland and the national literary and theatrical tradition. At the same time, his artistic and philosophical generalizations go beyond the scope of national experience and acquire universal significance, which explains the wide international recognition of his work and the production of plays on all continents.
Through the glasses of Slawomir Mrozhek (to use the name of the column that he constantly wrote for fifteen years in the Krakow magazine Przekruj), the world is not seen in a rosy light. Therefore, his manner is characterized by irony and grotesqueness, identification of the absurd features of existence, a penchant for parable-likeness and farce. His satire often smacks of bitterness, but not lack of faith in man.
The artist rebels against the primitivization of life and thinking, the spiritual impoverishment of the individual, and against vulgar didacticism in art. Although sometimes he suddenly catches himself on the fact that he, too, is not free from a preachy tone and wonders - where is he from? “Sometimes I notice it even in the manuscript and take action. And sometimes I notice it only in print, when it’s already too late. Am I really a born preacher? But in that case, I wouldn’t feel the hostility towards preaching that I nevertheless feel. the style is vulgar and suspicious. There is probably something in the inheritance that I received... Since I cannot master the style, the style masters me. different styles, on which I was brought up. Here it’s preaching, there I suddenly burst into laughter, and here and there a foreign feather flickers,” Mrozek reflects on the origins of his own creativity in the essay “The Heir” from the book “Short Letters.”
Critics have detected in Mrozhek's works the influence of Wyspianski and Gombrowicz, Witkaca and Galczynski, Swift and Hoffmann, Gogol and Saltykov-Shchedrin, Beckett and Ionesco, Kafka and other illustrious predecessors and contemporaries, who acutely felt the imperfection of man and the world in which he lives. But after a victory, there are always more heroes than there actually were. And the abundance of Mrozhek’s supposed literary “godfathers” only convinces of the originality and originality of his talent.
This originality is manifested, in particular, in the amazing laconicism, the parsimony of those strokes that delineate the multidimensional space of the narrative, which only makes the flight of thought freer. Circumstances and figures devoid of specifics acquire a painfully recognizable reality. Mrozek is disgusted by idle talk: “I dream of some new law of nature, according to which everyone would have a daily quota of words. So many words per day, and as soon as he speaks or writes them, he becomes illiterate and dumb until the next morning. By noon There would be complete silence, and only occasionally would it be broken by the meager phrases of those who are able to think what they are saying, or who treasure their words for some other reason. Since they were spoken in silence, they would finally be heard.”
The Polish writer fully feels the weight of the word and the sharpness of the thought, sharpened on the touchstone of pain for a person and polished with wit - a thought like a sensitive surgeon’s knife that is able to easily penetrate under the cover of living reality, diagnosing and treating it, and not just dispassionately anatomizing a corpse of cold abstractions. Mrozhekov's works - from "full-length" plays to miniatures (both verbal and graphic) are distinguished by genuine originality and inexhaustible imagination, growing in the field of woeful notes of the mind and heart.
At times his paradoxes are reminiscent of Wilde’s (for example, when he asserts that “Art is more life than life itself"). The author of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” stated: “The truth of life is revealed to us precisely in the form of paradoxes. To comprehend Reality, one must see how it balances on a tightrope. And only by looking at all those acrobatic things that the Truth does, we can correctly judge it." Slawomir Mrozek also more than once resorts to paradox as a means of comprehending the Truth and verifying or refuting worn-out "truths." Perhaps, more than anything in the world, he is afraid banality, which, in his words, kills the most immutable truths. That is why the writer is not averse to making a banality stand on its head or perform a stunning “moral somersault.”
Is Mrozhek a moralist? Undoubtedly! (Hence the unobtrusive taste of preaching that he himself feels). Quite often in his works, behind the grotesqueness of situations, the parody of the text and the amusingness of the dialogue, it is easy to discern a philosophical, ethical or socio-political subtext. And the parabolas he draws are very instructive. For example, this: “...We are like an old ship - it is still sailing, because the elements from which it is built are composed in such a way that they form a ship. But all its boards and bolts, all its parts, sub-parts and under-under-under (etc.) - the parts yearn for disintegration. Some parts think that they will do without the whole and, after disintegration, will no longer enter into any structure. Illusion - because the choice exists only between disappearance and any structure. , confident that when the ship falls apart, it will cease to be a ship plank and will lead the free and proud life of a plank as such, a plank “by itself” - it will disappear and disappear, or someone will build a stable out of it.
But for now we’re cracking.”
Slawomir Mrozek
Born June 29, 1930 in the village of Bozhenczyn, Brzesko County, Krakow Voivodeship. Date 26 June, given in all official biographies and encyclopedic articles, arose due to an incorrect entry in the church book, on the basis of which documents were subsequently issued.
Father - Antoni Mrozhek, the son of a poor peasant, had only primary education and miraculously received the position of a postal official, his mother was Zofia Mrozhek (nee Kendzier).
Having entered the Faculty of Architecture of the Krakow Polytechnic Institute, Mrozhek left home (later he recalled that during this period« slept in friends' attics, ate soup for the homeless at the nuns' shelter»), also visited the Krakow Academy of Arts.
Literary activity started at a Krakow newspaper"Dziennik Polish" where he was at first« as an editorial errand boy», was engaged in current newspaper work, wrote on different topics. The first feuilletons and humoresques were published in 1950. Works published in periodicals formed a collectionPractical half-shells (1953), the story was published Little Summer (1956). In 1956 Mrozhek was abroad for the first time; he visited the USSR and was in Odessa.
The rapid recognition of readers was not, however, evidence of high literary merits early prose Mrozek. By his own admission, the communist ideals absorbed in his youth (which was facilitated by his special character and temperament) were long and difficult to overcome. The book, which he considers his first serious work, is a collection Elephant (1957). It was a great success. Mrozek notes:« It was a collection of short, very short, but in every way poignant stories.<…>Some phrases from the book turned into proverbs and sayings, which proves how close and understandable my thoughts were then to my compatriots». Then came the collectionsWedding in Atomice(1959), The Progressive (1960), Rain (1962), the story Flight to the South (1961).
It has been repeatedly noted in the literature that Mrozhek’s work is associated with his predecessors, in particular V. Gombrowicz and S.I. Witkevich. This is true, but the connection of his prose with the traditions of Polish humor is much more obvious - foppish, slightly sad and invariably subtle. However, Polish wit has such peak achievements as the aphorisms of S.E. Lec, the satirical poems of Y. Tuvim, the comic phantasmagoria of K.I. Galchinsky. Mrozhek’s stories and humoresques are, as it were, life situations projected into infinity. Yes, in the story Swan An old watchman guarding a lonely bird in the park decides to go to a pub to warm up and takes the bird with him - it can’t sit unprotected, especially in the cold. The watchman warms up with a glass of vodka and sausages, and orders the swan a delicacy in the form of a white roll soaked in heated beer with sugar. The next day everything repeats, and on the third day the swan invitingly pulls the old man by the hem of his clothes - it’s time to go warm up. The story ends with the fact that both the watchman and the bird, which, sitting on the water, swayed, terrified the walking mothers and children, were kicked out of the park. The plot of the story contains a peculiar algorithm of Mrozhek's prose.
Became important in his life 1959, – he married a woman for whom he felt strong feeling, in the same year, at the invitation of Harvard University, he visited the United States, where he took part in a summer international seminar, headed by political science professor Henry Kissinger. Two months spent overseas radically affected Mrozek's consciousness.
At the beginning of 1960- x he left Krakow and moved to Warsaw, where he was greeted as a literary celebrity. He publishes a lot in periodicals, including in the newspaper« Przeglyad cultural center", weekly " The old-timer", magazines "Dialogue", "Pshekruj", "Culture", "Tvorzchozs", conducts regular columns, acts not only as a prose writer, but also as a kind of cartoonist. Although Mrozek himself notes that« This is the art of graphics, to characterize a character with a couple of strokes», its graphics are tightly linked to the word. This is either a funny drawing, accompanied by a short caption or dialogue, or a small series of pictures, somewhat similar to a comic book. Neither a drawing without text, nor text without a drawing can exist separately. For example, words« A phenomenal football team will soon arrive in Poland» are accompanied by a drawing depicting members of this team, and each of them has three legs. A message about a new model of Eskimo sleigh, which has a reverse gear, is adjacent to the image: sled dogs are tied to the sled at both ends, and part of the dog team is tied so that it can only run in one direction, and the other part can only run in the other. It is clear that this is impossible. This light absurdity in its visual design is directly related to the tradition of Polish posters 1960–1970- X. Mrozhek's works as an artist are collected in publicationsPoland in pictures (1957), Through the glasses of Slawomir Mrozhek(1968), Drawings (1982).
Greatest glory Mrozhek gained fame as a playwright. His dramatic works are usually considered to be formed in 1950–1960s “theater of the absurd”, quite conventionally named direction, or rather, a certain ethical-aesthetic space in which such different masters as the French Eugene Ionesco worked ( 1912–1994), Jean Genet (1910–1986), Irishman Samuel Beckett ( 1906–1989), Spaniard Fernando Arrabal (b. 1932), Englishman Harold Pinter (b. 1930). E. Ionesco himself called his dramatic experiments« theater of paradox». This definition also fits well with Mrozek’s plays, where what happens is not so much that« can't happen», how much through theatrical grotesque, with the help of forcing artistic means life situations become extremely aggravated, satirically enlarged. Life, as revealed by artistic experience XX c., in itself, is both extremely absurd and monstrously paradoxical. Mrozhek's plays, both multi-act and one-act, were successfully performed on the stage of Polish theaters, and then theaters all over the world. Among the early plays - Cops (1958), The sufferings of Peter O'Hay(1959), Turkey (1960), On the High Seas (1961), Karol (1961), Striptease (1961), Death of a Lieutenant (1963).
While still living in his homeland, he gained wide popularity abroad, his books were translated and his plays were staged, which, in turn, increased his fame in Poland. But the desire to change his fate, to become a European writer, forced him to decide to leave his native country. 3 or (according to other sources) June 6, 1963 Mrozhek and his wife flew to Rome on a tourist visa. He later recalled:« My plans included creating a precedent - acquiring a special status for a Polish writer living abroad at his own expense and outside the jurisdiction of the Polish state». Discussions with the state continued for five years, in the end the state offered to obtain a long-term foreign passport, while Mrozhek was supposed to become a kind of illustration of the creative freedom of the Polish writer, without at all criticizing political situation in Poland, but, on the contrary, assuring the West that everything is fine. His plays continued to be staged in his homeland, his books were regularly published, because the authorities considered it inappropriate to impose a ban on works that were so popular among readers and viewers. Many had no idea that the author lived abroad. In February 1968 Mrozek and his wife moved to France and settled in Paris.
This state could last as long as desired, but the Prague events 1968 and the entry of Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia changed everything. Mrozhek spoke with open letter, where he condemned this act of aggression, which was published by the world's largest newspapers. The consequences were not long in coming. When attempting to renew his expired foreign passports, Mrozhek, who had visited the Polish embassy, was ordered to return to Poland within two weeks. A refusal followed, after which his plays in his homeland were removed from the repertoire, his books were withdrawn from sale, and the few copies remaining in private libraries began to circulate from hand to hand and sold well at"black market".
In 1969 Mrozhek’s wife died from a sudden outbreak of illness, and years of restlessness and lonely wanderings began for him, he visited, in particular, Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, lived in the USA, taught for some time at the University of Pennsylvania, lived in West Berlin for a year . To sum it up, he says:«… I have traveled almost the whole world. And in the professional sphere, the adventure was a success (including attempts to act as a screenwriter and director in cinema)».
The ban on his works in Poland was lifted just a few years later, and thanks to the changed situation in the country and the entry into the political arena of the unification"Solidarity" Mrozhek was able to return to his homeland after a decade and a half of voluntary exile. By that time, he already had French citizenship, which he could apply for as a political emigrant.
After the defeat of Solidarity delivered a series of harsh and topical essays directed against the Polish authorities and imbued with anti-communist sentiments. The essays were published in the West, and in Poland they were distributed in samizdat. In this regard, his entry into his homeland was again closed.
In 1987 Mrozek married a second time, settled in Mexico with his Mexican wife, where he lived secludedly on a ranch"La Epifania" He did housework and wrote. According to his admission, he never got to know the country properly, but he realized that there are other, non-European ways of development, a different rhythm of life, and other values. In Mexico he createdMy autobiography (1988), here, after the decision was made to return to Poland, he April 13, 1996 began broadcasting Return Diary.
Prose written after leaving for emigration, which divided the writer’s life into two parts, is collected in books Two Letters (1973), Stories (1981), Short Letters (1982), Denunciations (1983), Stories (1994), Stories and denunciations (1995). After leaving, plays were also written Tango (1964), Tailor (1964), lucky chance(1973), Carnage (1973), The Emigrants (1974), Beautiful View (1998) and others.
Plays and stories have been filmed several times. Among the films where he acted as a screenwriter are television and feature films Cops (filmed - 1960, 1970, 1971), Striptease (1963), The sufferings of Peter O'Hay(1964), Emigrants (1977), Love (1978), Tango (filmed - 1970, 1972, 1973, 1980), Last cocktail(1993), Cooperative 1 (1996), Revolution (2002).
In 1998 Mrozhek returned to Poland.
To sum it up, he doesn't consider his experience special:« I just lived in this world. Survived the Second world war, the German occupation of Poland, Stalinist communism and its continuation, but there is nothing to boast about, millions of people managed the same thing. There is nothing exceptional about my emigration either...».
Someone who deliberately avoids interviews or tries to get rid of newspapermen does nothing meaningful phrases, he does not like to make far-reaching statements in both prose and plays. Noticing a moral teaching that has unexpectedly slipped onto the page, he crosses it out. Moreover, much of it own life has changed - after a serious heart disease, which knocked him out of the working rhythm for a long time, he wants to return to work again, and for this he needs to think and rethink something:« In that long life... I didn’t think about the absurd for a long time. And when I finally thought about it, I found out that I was precisely in the absurd. And I even began to write something about the absurd, but then I got tired of it. There is a thesis that a person lives absurdly and does not think about it constantly, but from time to time he is aware of it. And I decided to live more or less absurdly in order to correspond to this thesis. And then I realized that I didn’t want it anymore. And now I already live without absurdity».
In 2002 Mrozhek visited Russia again as an honorary guest of an international theater festival"Baltic House" visited St. Petersburg, where he was received as an undoubted classic, one of the popular playwrights 20th century
Berenice Vesnina
Slawomir Mrozek
Somersault morale by Slawomir Mrozek
“I describe only what is possible to describe. And so, for purely technical reasons, I keep silent about the most important things,” Slawomir Mrozhek once said about himself.
He leaves it to the reader to speculate and guess about the most important things. But at the same time it gives him very significant and original “information for thought.”
The writer emphasizes: “Information is our contact with reality. From the simplest: “fly agarics are poisonous, saffron milk caps are edible” - and right up to art, which is essentially the same information, only more confusing. We act on information. Inaccurate information leads to rash actions, as anyone who has eaten a fly agaric knows, having been informed that it is a saffron milk cap. People don’t die from bad poetry, but they are also poison, only in their own way.”
The stories and plays of Slavomir Mrozhek, for all their seeming unreality and “intricacy,” provide accurate information about the fly agarics and toadstools of the surrounding reality, about everything that poisons our lives.
Slawomir Mrozek is a famous Polish satirist. He was born in 1930 and studied architecture and fine arts in Krakow. He made his debut almost simultaneously as a prose writer and a caricaturist, and since the second half of the 50s he has also been acting as a playwright (he also wrote several film scripts). In all three “guises” Mrozhek appears as a keen and insightful artist, focusing his attention on the sad (and sometimes gloomy) sides of modern life and striving not just to highlight, but to burn them out with the healing ray of satire. Great popularity was brought to him by the cycles of humorous stories and drawings published in Polish periodicals and later published in separate editions. The stories were collected in the collections “Practical semi-armored cars” (1953), “Elephant” (1957), “Wedding in Atomice” (1959), “Rain” (1962), “Two letters” (1974); drawings - albums “Poland in Pictures” (1957), “Through the Glasses of Slawomir Mrozhek” (1968). In addition, the writer’s literary baggage includes the stories “Little Summer” (1956) and “Flight to the South” (1961), a volume of selected essays and articles “Short Letters” (1982), and a dozen plays, among which “ Police" (1958), "Turkey" (1960), triptych of one-act farces "On the High Seas", "Karol", "Striptease" (1961), "Death of a Lieutenant" (1963), "Tango" (1964), "Tailor" "(1964), "Happy Accident" (1973), "Slaughterhouse" (1973), "The Emigrants" (1974).
Since 1963, Slawomir Mrozek lived in Italy, and in 1968 he moved to Paris. But he remains a citizen of Poland and a very Polish writer who does not break ties with his homeland and the national literary and theatrical tradition. At the same time, his artistic and philosophical generalizations go beyond the scope of national experience and acquire universal significance, which explains the wide international recognition of his work and the production of plays on all continents.
Through the glasses of Slawomir Mrozhek (to use the name of the column that he constantly wrote for fifteen years in the Krakow magazine Przekruj), the world is not seen in a rosy light. Therefore, his manner is characterized by irony and grotesqueness, identification of the absurd features of existence, a penchant for parable-likeness and farce. His satire often smacks of bitterness, but not lack of faith in man.
The artist rebels against the primitivization of life and thinking, the spiritual impoverishment of the individual, and against vulgar didacticism in art. Although sometimes he suddenly catches himself on the fact that he, too, is not free from a preachy tone and wonders - where is he from? “Sometimes I notice it in the manuscript and take action. And sometimes I only notice it in print, when it’s already too late. Am I a born preacher? But in that case I would not have felt the hostility towards preaching that I nevertheless feel. I find the preaching style vulgar and suspicious. There is probably something in the inheritance that I received... Since I cannot master the style, the style takes possession of me. Or rather, different styles on which I was brought up. Here it’s preaching, there I suddenly burst into laughter, and here and there a foreign feather flickers,” Mrozek reflects on the origins of his own creativity in the essay “The Heir” from the book “Short Letters.”
Critics have detected in Mrozhek's works the influence of Wyspianski and Gombrowicz, Witkaca and Galczynski, Swift and Hoffmann, Gogol and Saltykov-Shchedrin, Beckett and Ionesco, Kafka and other illustrious predecessors and contemporaries, who acutely felt the imperfection of man and the world in which he lives. But after a victory, there are always more heroes than there actually were. And the abundance of Mrozhek’s supposed literary “godfathers” only convinces of the originality and originality of his talent.
This originality is manifested, in particular, in the amazing laconicism, the parsimony of those strokes that delineate the multidimensional space of the narrative, which only makes the flight of thought freer. Circumstances and figures devoid of specifics acquire a painfully recognizable reality. Mrozhek is disgusted by idle talk: “I dream of some new law of nature, according to which everyone would have a daily quota of words. So many words per day, and as soon as he speaks or writes them, he becomes illiterate and mute until the next morning. By noon, complete silence would reign, and only occasionally would it be broken by the terse phrases of those who are able to think what they are saying, or who treasure their words for some other reason. Since they would be spoken in silence, they would finally be heard.”
The Polish writer fully feels the weight of the word and the sharpness of the thought, sharpened on the touchstone of pain for a person and polished with wit - a thought like a sensitive surgeon’s knife that is able to easily penetrate under the cover of living reality, diagnosing and treating it, and not just dispassionately anatomizing a corpse of cold abstractions. Mrozhekov's works - from full-length plays to miniatures (both verbal and graphic) are distinguished by genuine originality and inexhaustible imagination, growing in the field of sad notes of the mind and heart.
At times his paradoxes are reminiscent of Wilde’s (for example, when he asserts that “Art is more life than life itself”). The author of The Picture of Dorian Gray stated: “The truth of life is revealed to us precisely in the form of paradoxes. To comprehend Reality, one must see how it balances on a tightrope. And only after looking at all the acrobatic things that Truth does, we can correctly judge it.” Slawomir Mrozek also more than once resorts to paradox as a means of comprehending the Truth and verifying or refuting worn-out “truths.” Perhaps, more than anything else, he fears banality, which, in his words, kills the most immutable truths. That's why a writer is not averse to making a banality stand on its head or performing a stunning moral somersault.
Is Mrozhek a moralist? Undoubtedly! (Hence the unobtrusive taste of preaching that he himself feels). Quite often in his works, behind the grotesqueness of situations, the parody of the text and the amusingness of the dialogue, it is easy to discern a philosophical, ethical or socio-political subtext. And the parabolas he draws are very instructive. For example, this: “...We are like an old ship - it is still sailing, because the elements from which it is built are composed in such a way that they form a ship. But all its boards and bolts, all its parts, sub-parts and sub-sub-sub (etc.) - parts yearn for disintegration. It seems to some parts that they will do without the whole and, after disintegration, will no longer be included in any structure. An illusion - because the choice exists only between disappearance and any structure. A board, confident that when the ship falls apart, it will cease to be a ship's board and will lead the free and proud life of a board as such, a board “by itself” - it will perish and disappear, or someone will build a stable out of it.
