A Life of Solitude: Stanislawa Przybyszewska : A Biographical Study With Selected Letters - Hardcover

Kosicka, Jadwiga; Gerould, Daniel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0810108070 ISBN 13: 9780810108073

Publisher: Northwestern Univ Pr, 1989

Synopsis

A Life of Solitude is a biography of Polish playwright Stanislawa Przybyszewska (1901-35). One of the finest plays about the French Revolution, The Danton Case, was written by this unknown Polish woman living in obscurity in the free city of Danzig. The illegitimate daughter of writer Stanislaw Przybyszewski, she became a writer against long odds and at the cost of her health, her sanity, and eventually her life. A Life of Solitude shows how she chose her vocation, examine her ideas about writing, and reveal her struggle with material existence. Tragically, she came to substitute creativity for life and clung to her sense of calling with a stubbornness that dulled the instinct for self-preservation and led to her death from morphine and malnutrition at age thirty-four.

About this title

About the Author:

Jadwiga Kosicka is a Polish writer and translator. She has also translated some of Jan Kott's work on theater for Northwestern University Press.

Daniel Gerould (1928-2012) was a  Lucille Lortel Distinguished Professor of Theatre and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center.

From Publishers Weekly:

It is difficult to imagine an audience for these cranky letters, so obsessive that their recipients probably threw them away without a second thought. According to Kosicka, a translator, and Gerould, Kosicka's husband and a professor of theater at City University of New York, Przybyszewska (1901-1935), an illegitimate daughter of an acclaimed Polish writer, merits attention for the genius she evinces in her play about the French Revolution, The Danton Case. But because that work awaits publication and staging in English, the trials and tribulations of the Polish Przybyszewska's literary career--the chief subject of her epistles--elude appreciation. Determined to be "100% a writer," she isolated herself at age 24, moving into a tiny, poorly heated apartment which she rarely left, writing for eight to nine hours each night and sleeping during the day, and maintaining contact with others almost exclusively through correspondence (of which she kept copies). An addiction to morphine only deepened her peculiarities and her immoderate sense of self-importance. Illustrations not seen by PW.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Northwestern Univ Pr
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0810108070
• ISBN 13: 9780810108073
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 5
• Number of pages: 16