1793 (1791?) - 1876

POLSKI

            The greatest Polish comedy writer, also a poet and a diarist. He was born and also spent his childhood in a Galician provincial town near Lwów. He was brought up and educated solely at home and never attended any public schools. From his early youth (16 years of age) he was involved in military service - first in the army of the Duchy of Warsaw, later in Napoleon's army. After many years he would recall his youthful memories and describe his wartime experiences in his diary Trzy po trzy ["Three by three"], which does not fall far behind his best comedies in artistry. In 1812 he took part in the Moscow campaign where he was awarded the Golden Virtuti Militari Cross. Then, as an orderly officer on the Emperor's staff, he went through the entire 1813 - 1814 campaign, beginning with the battles of Dresden and Leipzig and ending in Paris. In 1814 he was awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honour. After Napoleon's abdication Fredro resigned his commission and in 1815 returned home and settled on the estate of Beńkowa Wisznia and in Lwów. He joined the freemasons' lodge in Lublin. The rest of his long life, both public and private (a happy marriage which crowned a ten-year-long fight for his beloved to divorce her first husband, his parliamentary activities in the Estates Parliament and his membership of the Academy of Learning in Kraków), was connected with Galicia and the Austrian protectorate. In the years 1850 - 1855 (with brief breaks) he lived in France (where after the Hungarian Uprising his son, also a comedy writer though of lower artistry, found shelter). He was a man of internal contradictions: on the one hand active and involved in public matters, on the other he sought seclusion and revealed misanthropic tendencies. The last years of his life, heavily marked by illness, were spent isolated from the world accompanied only by his family.

Fredro's literary output had a visibly realistic character and developed independently of contemporary literary trends. It was not only his observation of life that had a great impact on the shape of his creations, but also the contact he had with Parisian theatres during both his stays in France. On the stages of Lwów, apart from the plays of Moliere and Marivaux, he saw also the dramas of Shakespeare and Schiller, and at the beginning of the thirties, post-Enlightenment comedies, operas and vaudevilles.

Through the theatre Fredro drew on the European literary heritage both in its classical and plebeian (commedia dell'arte) forms. Hence in the theatrical intrigue of his multi-genre plays - comedies, musical vaudevilles, farces - there appear: disguises, role-changing, putting on masks and many and varied misunderstandings. Because of some features of the composition of his creations - especially the early ones (Pan Geldhab ["Mr Geldhab"] 1818, staged in 1821; Cudzoziemszczyzna ["Foreignness"] 1822, staged in 1824), but also to a certain extent his later works (Zemsta ["Revenge"] 1832-1833,

staged in 1834; Dożywocie ["Life Sentence"] 1835, staged in 1835) - these may be referred to as the comedies of the Polish Enlightenment which were continuing the traditions of Moliere's theatre. In the centre of these comedies there are character-types defined by meaningful names: Raptusiewicz [Hot-headed], Milczek [Taciturn], Birbancki [Reveller], just as in Moliere, for example, Harpagon [Miser] or Tartuffe [Bigot]. In Fredro's plays (he was not a Romantic but rather, with his interest in an individual's depths, a comedy writer of the Romantic period) the unambiguity of human characters disappears, man and the world are more complicated than in the Classicist-Enlightenment or plebeian tradition. Understatement is very often introduced to express the complexity of human character.

In Fredro's literary activity two periods can be differentiated. In the first one, lasting till 1835, he created his best comedies: Pan Jowialski ["Mr Jovial"] (1832, staged in 1832); Śluby panieńskie ["Maiden Vows"] (1832, staged in 1833); Zemsta ["Revenge"]; Mąż i żona ["Husband and Wife"] (1821, staged in 1822); Dożywocie ["Life Sentence"]. Each of them deals with different matters. What they have in common are the games which people play among themselves in everyday life: in love, in social life, in business. The author showed life with reference to the characters from the epoch of the nobles (the so-called "robed nobles"), placing the action not only in manor-houses and in salons but also in inns - where it was possible to observe inter-human relations in natural circumstances.
A theme favoured by Fredro was happy love and family relations, as opposed to the contemporary, Romantic vision of love: tragic and impossible to be fulfilled. In Polish Romanticism love was impossible not only because of metaphysical reasons but also because of patriotic ones (Konrad Wallenrod "found no happiness at home for it did not exist in his homeland" - wrote Mickiewicz, expressing the opinion of the whole of his generation). Fredro, being remote from Messianic views, was accused by some contemporary critics of a lack of patriotism and civic attitude. The bitterness he felt made him stop writing in about 1835. Only after fifteen years did he renew his comedy writing (but only for private consumption). His plays always were, and still are, popular with the public. They appeared on the stage very quickly. Between the Uprisings (1831 - 1863) - when Europe took special interest in Poland - they were translated, adapted and played abroad. The first translations appeared as early as in 1824, when "Husband and Wife" was translated into French and German.

In the second period of his literary activity he was influenced by the French stage of The Second Empire and the new moral art (the adaptation of "La Dame aux Camelias" by Alexander Dumas, fils, and the staging of "Le Gendre deMonsieur Poirier" Emile Augier). Hence the introduction into Fredro's plays of the bourgeois type. These are new people in the changing society for whom the most important value is money. The best comedies of this period are: Wychowanka ["The Ward"], Rewolwer ["A Pistol"] (the method of organising the intrigue resembles that of Scribe's "Un Verre d'eau") or Wielki człowiek do małych interesów ["A Great Man for Small Business"]. These compositions, published and staged after the author's death, anticipate the anti-bourgeois comedies of The Young Poland Movement (Zapolska, Perzyński).

Fredro was also a fairy-tale writer. He continued the traditions of Krasicki, Trembecki and La Fontaine. He was also an aphorist. His aphorisms were published after his death in Zapiski starucha ["Notes of an Old Man"].

Anna Kubale
Wirtualna Biblioteka Literatury Polskiej
14 lipca 2001

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