Nienapisane i napisane
Unwritten and Written

On Some Adam Asnyk’s Contemporary Dramas

Summary/Abstract: The main foci of interest in the paper are three Adam Asnyk’s dramatic fragments preserved as handwriting on three separate pages and revealing some affinity to his two completed dramas. The first fragment derives from some early editing of „Gałązka heliotropu” („Heliotrope Brunch”) which, before it began one-act romantic play compared to Alfred de Musset’s, Jules Janin’s, or Aleksander Fredro’s creations, most probably was planned as a full several-act play. The verse form links it with the tradition of romantic comedy, while its content moves it towards the modern realistic drama. The two remaining fragments, of which both seem to be remote scenes of the same prose drama, reveal in their figures and conflicts some resemblance to the drama „Żyd” („Jew”) the poetics of which situates somewhere between Émile Zola’s naturalism and Henrik Ibsen’s analytic technique of drama. It can be argued that the idea of the drama developed from post-Romantic and Biedermeier picture showing the process of an aristocrat’s degradation with an addition of a love story moving to a painting that presents the fall of morality in the world of brutal capitalism.

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