Sławomir Mrożek, playwright, author of many short stories, satiric writer, columnist and essayist, born in 1930.

On this page we present two articles on Sławomir Mrożek - his biographical note originally published on www.polska2000.pl, and his portrait as the writer written by Krystyna Dąbrowska.


His dramas show the simplest situations, human behaviours matching the scheme. He uncovers them in their comicality and their absurd. The most important plays he created before emigrating in 1963 to France and then to Mexico, are: "The Police", "The Turkey", "Karol" and "The Game". His most famous play "The Tango", a biological and psychological observation of creation of totalitarian mechanisms, the play, which made him internationally famous, was staged for the first time in 1965.

"The Emigrants", Mrożek's second most staged play, was written abroad. This play is a study of two different forms of exclusion, juxtaposing idealistic patterns of thinking of a political emigrant with the sane sense of a simple emigrant, who left his country for money. In the 1980, in texts like "The Ambassador" or "The Portrait", Mrożek continued his laboratory research on characters, concentrating more and more on their psychology and using them to present historical and political mechanisms.

In the 1990's Mrożek mainly wrote three plays: "Love in Crimea" about the fall of the Russian empire, "The Beautiful Sight", the image of the Balkan War from the perspective of two Europeans carelessly spending their holiday at the seaside in one of the countries of the former Yugoslavia, and "The Reverends", a humorous analysis of religious hypocrisy. All three plays provide an image of the last decade of the 20th century, of war, disintegration of values, of a system based on genocide. Even though these are very important subjects, Mrożek does not present them directly but he twists them. The war becomes an annoyance to the tourists, the chaos of the last days of the totalitarianism is irresistibly funny, and the reverends become a sitcom in a twisted mirror. All this, because Mrozek recognises the contemporary reality through laughter.

Selected stagings of Mrożek's plays:

• 1965 - "The Tango" in the Old Theatre in Krakow, directed by Jerzy Jarocki
• 1975 - "The Butchery" in the Dramatic Theatre in Warsaw, directed by Jerzy Jarocki
• 1994 - "Love in Crimea" in the Contemporary Theatre in Warsaw, directed by Erwin Axer
• 1997 - "The Tango" in the Contemporary Theatre in Warsaw, directed by Maciej Englert
• 1998 - "Mrożek's History of People's Republic of Poland" in the Polish Theatre in Wrocław, directed by Jerzy Jarocki

To see the selected bibliography of Sławomir Mrożek go to pages of Instytut Książki in Krakow

See also Michał Bujanowicz's essay: "Sławomir Mrożek - Playwright".






Sławomir Mrożek, one of the Polish writers best known around the world, is an uncommonly versatile artist, freely moving around various forms of expression. Tadeusz Nyczek wrote:

"What has been emphasised many times is the scale of his creative possibilities, unheard of, almost inconceivable and hard to encompass. Because we have his drawings, to which he has remained faithful for perhaps the longest time: his grotesque-philosophical prose, one of the totally singular summits of post-war literature, not just tales but also two short but funny novels; and the plays, the most famous part of his achievements; and film screenplays, of which he has directed two himself; and journalism - essays and feature articles of the highest class; and even various trivia, literary games, like 'Donosy' ['Denunciations'], well known in the martial law period [1981-1983] and later published in London in 1983. The year of 2004 saw the revealing of Mrożek the letter writer. The letters to Jan Błoński and the correspondence with Wojciech Skalmowski, published several years later, are 'postal literature' of inestimable intellectual and artistic value. (...) All of this together makes for a truly uncommon literary portrait. It is not at all even about the fact that Mrożek can with equal facility write an excellent analytical essay about 'Popiół i diament' ['Ashes and diamonds'] or a philosophical comedy about three starvelings on a raft. It is about a certain internal act of courage, the masterly gesture of a free artist: look, I can do even this: to sign with my own name things that rate among the most serious and those which are the most trivial." (Tadeusz Nyczek, "Tango z Mrożkiem" ["Tango with Mrożek"] in the anthology of Mrożek's texts "Tango z samym sobą" ["Tango with himself"], 2009)

Mrożek began his artistic career as a draughtsman and a journalist. He was born in 1930 in Borzęcino but soon the Mrożek family moved to Kraków, where his father, Stanisław, a post office official, received a post. After the war, which he spent in the provinces, the future playwright went to grammar school in Kraków and enrolled at the university. He could not, however, come to terms with any of the three subjects that he studied (Architecture, Oriental Studies, History of Art). He did, however, find popularity for his satirical drawings for "Przekrój" and "Szpilki" (he made his debut as a draughtsman in 1950). He also wrote reports supporting the "building of Socialism". In 1950-1954 he worked in the editorial office of "Dziennik Polski" - his texts at that time zealously fulfilled the demands of ideologically correct journalism. And although the youthful fascination with Communism passed quite quickly and radically, Mrożek never denied his past:

"Being twenty years old, I was ready to accept every kind of ideological proposition without checking it too carefully - as long as it was revolutionary. (...) It was from among people like me that they once recruited for the Hitlerjugend or the Komsomol (...). Frustrated, unneeded and rebellious youths are present in every generation but what they do with their rebelliousness depends only on circumstance." ("Baltazar. Autobiografia" ["Balthazar. An autobiography"], 2006)

The road taken by the young writer, however, from belief in the Communist system through scepticism to negation, allowed him to experience personally the actions of social mechanisms:

"Stalinism often broke or at least derailed artists," wrote Jan Błoński. "Mrożek, paradoxically was strengthened by it, because it showed him de visu what the power of the stereotype, the imposed code, the interpersonal form was, which by intensifying and swelling, destroys itself in the end... and, however, often litters the social scene with bodies." ("Wszystkie sztuki Sławomira Mrożka" ["All the plays by Sławomir Mrożek"], 1995)

According to Tadeusz Nyczek,

"The four-fold salto mortale - the pre-war petit bourgeois-rural stabilisation, the destructive war, the later inspiration of revolutionary Communism and finally the escape from the hell of naivety - had a decisive influence on the nature of Mrożek's creativity. Himself shattered, he decided to become a broken mirror for the carved-up Polish reality of the times of real socialism. This broken mirror began to reflect Polish life in dozens of fragmented variants: in absurd language, topsy-turvy behaviour, the whole absurdity of living in a dustbin, defined in the propaganda as happiness at the building of a socialist homeland." ("Tango z Mrożkiem")

The stereotypes and nonsenses of daily life in the Polish People's Republic were mocked by Mrożek in "Postępowiec" ["The progressive"], his famous column with texts and drawings which he produced for various periodicals from 1956 to 1960. The wit of "Postępowiec", as Jan Błoński wrote in "Wszystkie sztuki Sławomira Mrożka", is based on the unmasking of journalistic genres, for example the informative telegram:

"From the scientific activities of the UNO. The spokesperson for research into the effects of work in agriculture and forestry has declared that - as heretofore - the use of professors to cut down forests does not have any influence on the quality of timber."

Another kind of satire is the parody of introductions to programmes:

"Towards a prophetic vision. In the whole country there will take place a collection of empty vodka bottles. These bottles will be used for the construction of glass houses, which had already been foreseen by Żeromski."

The sense of humour, surreal imagination and sense of the absurd which, in "Postępowiec", serve above all to amuse the reader will gradually take on in Mrożek's writing a deeper and darker sense. In his mature prose and plays, they will become the tools of a perceptive and often cruel analysis of social and existential issues. The kind-hearted mockery will over time be replaced by bitter and ambiguous irony.

The year 1953 saw the debut of Mrożek the prose writer. It was then that two collections of his satirical tales appeared: "Opowiadania z Trzmielowej Góry" ["Tales from Bumblebee Mountain"], published by Czytelnik in Warsaw, and "Półpancerze praktyczne" ["Practical half-armour"], published by Wydawnictwo Literackie in Kraków. The writer was still seeking his own voice.

"If it were not for the age of the author," assessed Jan Błoński, "I would say that the tales with which Mrożek filled his debut books rebuked social defects and vices in a fatherly way, with a sensible excuse and a smile, which rarely humiliates and generally does not frighten. To today's reader they would seem quite simply... infantile! (...) Mrożek still had to tear his way through to reality... through the grotesque and the absurd. (...) And only then, when there appeared nonsense and death could Mrożek shine for a while with his talent (for example in the tales 'Półpancerze praktyczne' or 'Sztabskapitan Hipolit' ['Staff Captain Hippolytus'])."

"Półpancerze praktyczne" is an amusing tale about shop assistants in a department store, wondering how to sell a singular item - "four hundred new examples of half-armour, 16th century model" - which had reached them by mistake, which did not change the fact that "goods are goods and must be sold". After many unsuccessful attempts to dispose of the half-armour, an old man turns up at the shop, ready to pretend great interest in the items. It is not hard to foresee what happens next: the negotiations between the old man and the salesperson attract other buyers and it soon turns out that everybody in the town wants to possess "elegant half-armour". Soon all of the stock is sold like hot cakes. In this simple story, kind-heartedly laughing at herd instincts, Mrożek juxtaposed old props (half-armour, 16th century model) and the harsh reality of People's Poland. This method, depending, as Błoński noted, on seeing the "old" in the "new" and vice versa, was used by Mrożek in later, literarily better tales from the volume "Słoń" ["Elephant"] (1957) and "Wesele w Atomicach" ["The Ugrupu bird"] (1959):

"Applied with rigid consistency, this device of the author's - in essence a simple one - builds a world which is perfectly schizophrenic, where the word and the thing (the intellect and the practice of life) have parted irreversibly,"

notes the critic and cites a fragment of the tale entitled "Wesele w Atomicach":

"It was precisely at that time that they started to transform nature. That which was forested became civilised but also ameliorated while the desert was afforested. The course of the river was altered so that it flowed in the opposite direction. In connection with this, the road to the church was to be found a little further away but in my yard there appeared a huge dam with a significant economic importance, so that the doors did not close entirely and it was only with difficulty that you could leave the house."

The opposition of the "old" and the "new' and at the same time their tragic-comic intertwining can be found in all of Mrożek's works - it is most strongly articulated in "Tango" (1964), in which the avant-garde world-view (represented, paradoxically, by the old generation) comes up against the conservatism of the young Artur.

The co-presence and the conflict of various historical realities already appear in the linguistic tissue of Mrożek's works. In the tale "Sjesta" ["Siesta"] from the "Słoń" volume, two men talk to each other: one is a priest and the other introduces himself as a "maître de danse"; both, although originating from a 19th-century world, are participating in the construction of a new socialist homeland. The reflection of this conflict is "Sjesta's" language, in which the olde-worlde conversation, full of courtesies and rhetorical ornaments, is intermingled with primitive party jargon. Expressions such as "please allow me", "if Father would be so kind" and "please forgive me my importunity" are mixed with ideological gibberish: "Hostile propaganda will once again have its prey and will go to the masses whereas we above all have to be oriented towards the masses."

Błoński wrote,

"In reading Mrożek, the moderns laughed at tradition while the reactionaries laughed at the progressives. Similarly, Gombrowicz once shuffled the cards for Pimko and the Młodziak family... Undoubtedly, however, Mrożek was more fascinated by the past - or perhaps more clearly? He noticed that you cannot mock it completely with impunity. From this oscillation between mockery and nostalgia there was born, apart from humour, also disquiet. (...) The traditional backwardness and the flaws of revolutions, Polish delay and bourgeois absurdities - the writer threw all of these into one bag. As if he were saying that we can see the outdatedness of our forms but we cannot create new ones. Our bodies live in the twentieth century but our souls in the nineteenth, the provincial one. Because, quite simply, we cannot see any other values than those from that period." ("Wszystkie sztuki Sławomira Mrożka")

So Mrożek, while mocking the hypocrisy and ossification of small-town customs, at the same time looked at the provinces with tenderness and nostalgia. Also because it was at the end of the day the world of his childhood, which had shaped him and which constituted an unending creative inspiration. It is in the provinces that his early tales are set and in his later work, for example in the tale entitled "Moniza Clavier" (1967) or in "Emigranci" ["The émigrés"] (1974), what will be of great significance is the collision between the provincial protagonist and the so-called Great World. Also, the language of Mrożek's prose and plays, rich in stylisation and allusions, full of references to both "high" and "low" culture, owes a great deal, which critics many times emphasised, to the writer's familiarity with local idioms, rural or petit bourgeois, with a Polish language that was homely and colloquial. It is worth mentioning here the feature article entitled "Prowincja" ["The provinces"] from the series "Małe listy" ["Small letters"] in which Mrożek, referring to Fellini's "Amarcord" and to his own roots, analyses the artistic and metaphorical dimension of "provincialism":

"The longing for the Great World, so characteristic of the provinces, is a model of longing for transcendence. The joy of anyone who has managed to tear himself out of the provinces into the Great World is a model of mystic joy, the joy of one who has crossed (or has the impression he has crossed) the enchanted and cursed circle of his particular existence. An artist works exclusively - because he cannot do otherwise - with the help of models. So anyone who comes from the provinces and is an artist has it easy. In the provinces, the limitation of places, people, details, their relative but nevertheless stability - because exchangeability and changeability are so slow as to give the impression of stability - enable observation, concentration, contemplation. Nay, they even compel them. In a Metropolis everything is random, casual and hurried and quantity is deafening. Quantity and hurry are not the friends of an artist. There will not, however, be an artist until he frees himself from the provinces."

The provinces described with nostalgia but also with the ironic distance of someone who has escaped from them; the aesthetics of grotesque and parody, a fantastic mixture of oldness and newness, but one accurately characterising reality - these are some of the ingredients of Mrożek's world, present from the beginning in his work. What else? Even in Mrożek's early prose works there appeared the conflict between the delusions of the intellect and the ruthlessness of the body, culture and nature. In "Podanie" ["The application"] from the volume "Wesele w Atomicach", the narrator - an old man, living in poverty and being maintained by his son-in-law - writes a petition with a request for the granting to him of authority over the world. The absurdity of this claim, heightened by a flood of ridiculous arguments, reveals the complete helplessness of the protagonist, both mental and physical. This is one of the most important themes in Mrożek's work: the discord between human ambitions and the constructions created by the mind, and reality. The rantings of the old man in "Podanie", his demands for authority over the world, are also a metaphor of another, completely understandable, desire to embrace, control and overcome a hopeless situation or, just the opposite, to escape from it even if into the strangest phantasms.

In 1956, Mrożek published the first of his novels, "Maleńkie lato" ["A tiny summer"] and in 1961 his second and last - "Ucieczka na południe" ["Escaping southwards"]. Both are satires about the Polish provinces - in "Maleńkie lato" we find didactic tendencies but the writer rid himself of them in "Ucieczka na południe".

In 1958, he made his debut as a playwright with the comedy "Policja" ["The police"]. This is a universal portrait of a totalitarian state, but not one set in a concrete place or time. In order to survive, the state needs at all costs the existence of some kind of opposition. The absurdity is born from the manipulation of the notion of freedom - its appearances are to serve exclusively the strengthening of the police regime. It is hard not to see in "Policja" allusions to the domestic reality of the 1950s but the social mechanisms and the attitudes of the people embroiled in them are not only legible in the Polish context.

In the three one-act comedies from the early 1960s - "Na pełnym morzu" ["At sea"], "Karol" and "Strip-tease" - Mrożek analyses the behaviour and the choices of people in situations of danger. The protagonists of "Na pełnym morzu", Mały, Średni and Gruby [Small, Medium and Fat], are drifting without food on a raft and they argue about which of them ought to be eaten by the remaining two. This grotesque idle chatter, and the outdoing of each other with ideas about the "just" choice of victim, only serves to delay the verdict - it is obvious that the law of the strong is on Gruby's side and not on Mały's. In turn, in "Karol", the Optician is visited by Grandad and Grandson, disinterested assailants, who would happily like to shoot someone... In "Strip-tease" two men, imprisoned in a mysterious space, either try to pretend that they are free (Man I) or to regain real freedom (Man II), until the supernaturally large Hand takes away their suits, baring them in both the literal and moral sense. Then Hand handcuffs the men and puts hoods over their heads.

Jan Błoński, referring to Peter Szondi's "Theory of the modern drama", wrote that the one-act play privileges the situation of being trapped with which we are often faced in Mrożęk's world. In one-act plays, according to Błoński, what else works is the opposition between the smart alec and the lout, which is fundamental in Mrożek's work:

"All the figures have to do is to bear until their deaths the situation which they not only did not cause (which would give a tragic taste) but also about whose origins they know nothing... Did the Optician ever hear about hunting for Karol? Or the men about the Hand that roams the streets? What to do now? Either falsify reality, like the smart alecs do, or push on and do your own thing, like the louts do. But the bad faith (of the smart alecs) and the stupidity (of the simpletons who will lose in any case) necessarily evoke laughter. It was such a dramatic form that privileges both of Mrożek's arch-figures (because surely they are not archetypes...). Being trapped means that they can - just like a dirty tribe of moths - spread out all of their misshapen peculiarities."

The most outstanding one-act play based on the confrontation between a smart alec (named AA) and a lout (named XX) will be "Emigranci".

For many years, Mrożek was regarded as a surrealist and critics linked his play with the "theatre of the absurd", as practised by Beckett, Ionesco, Dürrenmatt and Genet. It must, however, be remembered that, as Tadeusz Nyczek noticed, the absurd in Mrożek is born out of observations of the particular social reality of the People's Republic of Poland, while in the western authors it concerned a speculative or metaphorical reality.

The year 1960 gave us "Indyk" ["The turkey"], "a melo-farce in two acts", in which Mrożek crushed the Romantic myth. From this myth after all come all the protagonists of the play, gathered in an inn "on the territory of the duchy". All of the figures are paralysed by total indolence. Neither lofty ideals nor even the simple will to act can be turned into real activity and break down the ubiquitous hopelessness. What is worse, you can even somehow get by in this hopelessness:

"Poet: Oh, we have guaranteed upkeep in this inn. Albeit modest but guaranteed - it is enough to live on. There are not many views of the future, merely a few. But it is warm, even though it smells a bit - but not too much. In any case we cannot escape from here even if we wanted to, because there is nowhere to go, the roads are bad and the wilderness all around is frightful. Of course, you could set about doing this or that, but what for? It won't change anything, it won't make anything better, it won't make anything worse or alter anything at all. In any case, there is still no answer to the principal question."

Helplessness and universal apathy also rule in "Zabawa" ["The party"] (1962). Three Farmhands, hearing the sounds of music look for "the party" and when they finally get into the "club room", where the supposed party was to take place, they are met with silence and emptiness. Tadeusz Nyczek saw in this play a metaphor for post-war Poland: the hope and bitter disenchantment connected with the new system, promising a "better tomorrow". Jan Błoński on the other hand drew attention to the fact that the protagonists of "Zabawa", typical Mrożek louts, differ from the simpletons in earlier plays because they want not only entertainment but also access to culture - although, and this is the whole snag, they cannot even make themselves aware of this need:

"Because it is not only the conditions in which a person lives but also in himself that there exists the puzzle of shallowness and limitation. (...) Who is preventing our threesome from enjoying themselves modestly and with moderation? (...) But the Farmhands generally cannot articulate their needs, and even more so blubber out any values whatsoever capable of satisfying those needs. That is why they are ridiculous. Yet they do feel those needs, they desire the existence of those values! We are in a world of eternal frustration to which the lout has been condemned. But from the moment when he feels this frustration he begins to take on features that are more profoundly human! The conflict between the need and the possibility of satisfying it takes on also if not an air of tragedy then at least one of seriousness..." ("Wszystkie sztuki Sławomira Mrożka")

The Farmhands in "Zabawa", longing for these "higher values", do not suspect the distortion of culture and its representatives, they are not aware of the pseudo-scientific hypocrisy of which, in "Emigranci", the dull XX accuses the intelligent AA.

The year 1964 was a breakthrough in Mrożek's career - this was the date of the publication of "Tango", which brought its author worldwide fame. In the same year, "Krawiec" ["The tailor"] appeared - a play so similar to Gombrowicz's "Operetka" ["Operetta"], which was about to appear, that Mrożek decided not to print his play and only published it in 1977. This incident prompted him to write "Uzupełnienia w sprawie Gombrowicza" ["Supplements to the Gombrowicz matter"], an article in which he took a stand on the most important of his literary antecedents (which included Witkacy, Wyspiański and Fredro):

"I started reading his [Gombrowicz's] books when I was twenty-something years old and they made a significant impression on me. (...) Then for the next few years he was present in my mental life, firstly as a master then as an opponent. (In the sense that I was still under his charm but I was discussing with myself the versatility of his theses and style.) When I was writing 'Krawiec', I was still within his sphere of influence. (Not only his - I was always affected at the same time by many people and by many things.) The opposition of culture and of nature was obviously not his invention and I came upon that myself, as everybody must always come upon this. On the other hand, what was his was the literary method of expressing and treating this opposition. I did not read 'Operetka' before writing 'Krawiec' because 'Operetka' was not yet ready. But I had been reading his books, in which the notions of mask, costume, nudity, form and element are so persistent although not yet assembled in the synthesis of 'Operetka'. (...) The listing so beloved of critics of who influenced whom or who ensued from whom is incredibly boring and nothing ever really comes from it. But in this case I ought to say that if Gombrowicz had not written 'Ślub' ['The wedding'], I would not have written 'Tango' or at least not in the form in which I wrote it." ("Małe listy", 1982)

"Tango" immediately won the great acclaim of theatre critics and audiences which it still enjoys today. From the point of view of the accuracy of the social diagnoses it was placed on the same level as Wyspiański's "Wesele" ["The wedding"]. In the opinion of Tadeusz Nyczek, Mrożek's play is one of the three most important post-war plays in Poland, alongside Różewicz's "Kartoteka" ["The card index"] and the aforementioned "Ślub", which had inspired the creation of "Tango". The wedding ceremony planned in "Tango" by Artur is supposed, as in Gombrowicz's play, to restore order in a world deprived of all norms:

"Nothing is important in itself, it is not in fact anything at all," says Artur to his fiancée when persuading her to marry him. "Everything is neutral. If we do not impart some character to things, we will sink in this dullness. We have to create some meanings if they do not exist in nature."

The only structure to have survived in the world of "Tango" but which will before our very eyes undergo decomposition is the family, which is at the same time the symbol of society. What sort of family is it, however, in which all the roles are reversed: the father, Stomil, is as carefree as a child and is a parody of an avant-garde artist, while his 25-year-old son demands responsibility, respect for tradition and the observance of clearly defined rules. In the face of a lack of hallowed values against which you could rebel, the only available form of protest is to demand just such values. So Artur's youthful rebellion takes on the paradoxical form of conservatism. The author has used the family drama and the universal motif of the generation war to show the rules governing social processes. In portraying the conflict between the son and the father,

"Mrożek brilliantly captured," wrote Tadeusz Nyczek, "the specific nature of a twentieth-century family in which conservative and progressive, positivist and anarchist etc., behaviours are alternately repeated. But this would not be the real strength of 'Tango' because these structures could be applied not only to the twentieth century. So the greatest invention of Mrożek's was the observation that their co-presence immediately leads to a mutual assault making impossible any chances of oppositional coexistence. The lefty anarchist Stomil 'assaults' both the conservative uncle Eugeniusz and his sister, grandma Eugenia, and his as yet ideologically unshaped son, Artur. This two-directional Gombrowiczian assault is repaid by a secondary assault when, united in common opposition, Artur and Eugeniusz 'assault' Stomil before in the end they are all assaulted by the idea-less Edek."

Edek is the essence of the Mrożek lout. Amoral, always and everywhere "knows what's what"; he is driven by animal instincts and is ready to use violence to ensure comfort and entertainment for himself. He is the incarnation of naked biology and of ruthless nature which will always defeat culture in the end. Edek's triumph is the victory of nihilism.
You can also, taking after Jan Błoński, read "Tango" as a philosophical treatise about the history of freedom. In such an interpretation, the reason for Artur's defeat would be his love for Ala and his inability to understand that absolute freedom demands absolute solitude.

In 1963, Mrożek emigrated from Poland (he was already a well-known author, not only in Poland as his works had been translated into German and French). He remained abroad until 1996, living in Italy, the USA, Paris and Germany and, from the end of 1989, in Mexico. In August 1968, he protested in the columns of the Parisian "Kultura" against the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the armies of the Warsaw Pact countries and he applied for political asylum in France.
He wrote many times about emigration and the associated quandaries in his correspondence with his friends. He wondered what it actually meant "to be at home" and "to be foreign". In one of his letters to Błoński, he confessed:

"How can I help it if in my organism I am irritated by my 'our-ness' and I screw it. I feel better when I am not 'one of us' because then the external situation is closer to the truth, i.e. to the internal situation. (...) I screw it when, in order to go in somewhere, someone comes up to me and says something like. 'Oh, here is our Mrożek', that is why I left Kraków so as not to be 'ours', one of the figures, like the tower of St Mary's Church is 'ours'. Our-ness, class-ness, mate-ness - in all of this everything somehow stupidly gets blurred, above all individual responsibility. How 'ours' - what does 'ours' mean? Can someone live my life for me? Can anyone help me cope with myself? That is why, when not 'ours' but foreign, I feel that the situation is psychologically clearer and I can rest." (Chiavari, 19 October 1963)

The experiences of a man who has come from a poor Communist country in Eastern Europe and tries to find his place in the Western world of prosperity are used by Mrożek in "Emigranci" (1974). The East-West relations will also be analysed in the plays "Vatzlav" (1968), "Ambasador dz_mrozek_ambasador" ["The ambassador"] (1982), "Letni dzień" ["A summer's day"] (1983) and "Kontrakt" ["The contract"] (1986) and in his tale "Moniza Clavier" (1967).

In "Moniza..." the narrator is a Young Pole, a tourist from the provinces, who wanders around Venice with a cardboard suitcase full of kabanos sausages. By chance he catches the eye of a famous actress and he is invited by her to a reception which is full of artists, snobs and rich dandies. Nobody, not even the beautiful Moniza who is enchanted by him, knows his real identity. Full of complexes and lonely, he is unable to find himself in this exclusive demi-monde and tries to impress the company by referring to the Romantic stereotype of a hero from behind the Iron Curtain who lost his teeth when fighting for freedom. When, as a result of this masquerade, Moniza's society friends take him for a Russian, he eagerly exploits the misunderstanding and pretends to be a picturesque stranger from the wild steppes... until the poor provincial man is unmasked by an unexpected meeting with a countryman.

The author showed in a masterly way in "Moniza Clavier" the power of stereotypes shaping the attitude of Poles in the 1960s (and probably today as well) to a "better" Europe and the imaginings of this Europe about the inhabitants of its Eastern borderlands. But "Moniza..." is also a tale about the emigrant's feeling of being lost. Like so many of Mrożek's protagonists, gripped by fear, the feeling of inferiority, fighting for the acceptance of the surrounding society and for social advancement, he puts on a mask, plays out a hastily devised role and seeks a safe haven in stereotypes.

Also in "Vatzlav", a political anti-utopia, the expectations and hopes of a Slavic castaway collide with the unhappy reality of the island which he reaches - and everything is told in the convention of an Enlightenment philosophical tale.

Finally, "Emigranci", a biting portrait of Poles in a foreign land and a universal study of the condition of an exile. In an obscure basement, two flat-mates are talking to each other: the political émigré AA and the economic migrant XX. The first weaves dreams about the work of his life which he will write one day while the other accumulates money, dreaming that one day in an aura of success he will return to his home village and build a house. Their dialogue takes on the form of a duel, in which AA and XX step by step achieve their own unmasking. The smart alec pitilessly shatters the naïve illusions of the lout, revealing his stupidity, while the lout discovers the smart alec's secret: the hypocrisy and pseudo-intellectualism which mask his solitude:

AA: (...) You have come to me like a bolt from the blue and like inspiration. (...) I, thanks to you, will finally write my great work. Now you know why I need you.
XX: That's not why at all.
AA: Do you think I would sit here voluntarily in this - as you yourself said - shit, if I were not guided by such a great thought, such a mission?
XX: And I am telling you that that's not the reason.
AA: So why am I sitting here with you? (...)
XX: Because you want to talk.
(...)
AA: That's not true - I have a great thought, I... my work...
XX: Rubbish, your work. Perhaps I don't see how you squirm when I get a letter from my family? You go into the corner and read a book upside down. I feel sorry for you. Because you don't get any letters.

Critics emphasised that AA and XX are the most psychologically nuanced figures in the work of Mrożek hitherto. The protagonists of the earlier tales and plays, moulded from social, literary and characterological stereotypes, had the status of puppets manipulated by the author to achieve comic effect. The figure of Artur in "Tango" was, however, shaped differently. As Błoński noticed, Artur is admittedly not yet an individual "living person" but neither is he a stereotype; because his actions bring to the action the factor of unpredictability there can be seen in him a dynamic model of family and social behaviours. In "Emigranci", Mrożek drew multi-dimensional portraits of exiles. And the confrontation between the smart alec and the lout is a metaphor of the duality that exists in every one of us:

"I tried many times to imagine 'Emigranci' as a monodrama," wrote Tadeusz Nyczek in "Tango z Mrożkiem". "These two roles, seemingly completely contrasted: the intelligent, educated AA and the loutish XX, eager for plain well-being, are after all just one person. Dialogue between them seems impossible but in fact the existence of one is not possible without that of the other. They are contradiction itself but the sense of their existence lies in complementation and not the exclusion of arguments. Neither is completely good or completely evil. They are the most penetrating metaphor, the essence of a Pole, that I know in the whole of contemporary Polish literature. Precisely as one - dramatically doubled. And I think this is the fullest self-portrait of Mrożek himself, the man of the world from Borzęcino."

A year before "Emigranci", Mrożek published "Rzeźnia" ["The slaughterhouse"] (1973), a radio play whose stage adaptation was presented by Jerzy Jarocki at Teatr Dramatyczny in Warsaw (1975). In "Rzeźnia", the author wrote about the condition and sense of art, showing in a distorting mirror the conflict between tradition and the avant-garde and between culture and nature. The protagonist of the radio play, the Violinist, an untalented mummy's boy, gives his youth to Paganini in return for musical genius - everything in order to win back the Flautist. In turn, Paganini turns into a butcher and the philharmonia becomes a slaughter-house in which there is to take place a concert for two oxen, a battleaxe, a knife and an axe. The author mocks here the Witkacy myth of the artist to whom is revealed the Mystery of Existence and of such art which wants to compete with life from the point of view of "guts".

"Mrożek says quite clearly," wrote Błoński about "Rzeźnia" "that he cannot believe in the metaphysics of art; but also that rolling around in meat and splashing passers-by with paint arouses within him reluctance and disgust. (...) He asked, as it were, for moderate art but at the same time, at least in 'Rzeźnia', he admitted that he can only summon moderation through mockery." ("Wszystkie sztuki Sławomira Mrożka")

Błoński noticed, however that the whole action of "Rzeźnia" takes place in the imagination of the Violinist, which emphasises the author's distance to the events and arguments presented in the radio play. It is quite possible that everything here is just the creation of an individual psyche with which the author does not identify himself. "Rzeźnia" can, therefore, be counted, like Gombrowicz's "Ślub", in the trend called Ich-Dramaturgie - "I" dramaturgy. The individual and his subjective world became in time increasingly important in Mrożek's creative work.

This can already be seen in the tale "We młynie, we młynie, mój dobry panie" ["In the mill, in the mill, my good sir"] (1967). This mysterious story with its grotesque oneiric plot is the monologue of a man who "was a farmhand for a miller" and who is now critically reviewing his own past. The memories of people and events come back to him in the form of dead bodies borne by the river. The first drowned body is a moustachioed gentleman with a gold star, once a figure of great authority for the protagonist - you might even see in this dead "overlord" the figure of Stalin. Soon, the farmhand fishes out other corpses, including a friend from the army and a woman he once loved. He buries in turn his old loves, friends and acquaintances - the whole of his past life. When, however, the waters bring his own corpse he cannot bury it like the others because that would mean burying himself alive. The protagonist, regaining himself from the past (even if it is a corpse-self) rediscovers his autonomous "I". But this means that he feels foreign in the human community. He moves off, therefore, on a lonely journey alongside the river, leaving the corpses to the current so as always to keep an eye on it.
The language of this tale, old-fashioned, anecdotal, has a function that is different from that in previous works - it no longer serves to make fun of provinciality and backwardness:

"Before 'We młynie...', stylisation usually served parody in Mrożek's works," wrote Jan Błoński. "(...) In 'We młynie', however, the old-fashionedness allows us to talk about the beginning and the essence: the beginning and the essence of our own experience, which is based on that which is the most simple, the most elementary. It allows us to penetrate the interior of the protagonist: it refers us after all to primeval symbolics. To the water of time and the mill of events, to a forest homestead, which is an image of safety, to the journey of life which of course cannot be taken other than on foot, from the inn to the town and from the farmer's market to the church fair... In the same way, the anachronism (of the presented world) and the stylisation (genre and language) do not have any longer as an ultimate aim a parodistic clearing away of relics. They do not make us think about a false or mystified 'I': on the contrary, about the most authentic 'I'." ("Wszystkie sztuki Sławomira Mrożka")

The growing importance of introspection is one of the dimensions of Mrożek's creative evolution. Apart from that, in the works from the 1980s the writer increasingly undertook political and ethical themes in a direct way, abandoning masks, allusions and surrealistic metaphors. As an émigré, he all the time observed and experienced Polish matters, proof of which could be, for example, "Alfa" ["Alpha"], a play about Wałesa, noble in intentions but unsuccessful, as the author himself admitted in a letter to Wojciech Skalmowski. After the introduction of martial law, it was forbidden to stage "Alfa" (published in 1984 in Paris) and also two other plays by Mrożek: "Vatzlav" and "Ambasador" (1982).

"Ambasador" is a play about indomitability, in the spirit of Zbigniew Herbert. The action takes place in the embassy of a democratic country on the territory of a totalitarian state. The Ambassador is visited by the Plenipotentiary of the local government, who offers him a present - an enormous globe on which the continents have not been drawn because "politically, they are not yet exactly as they should be". A while later, the blue globe bursts open and a Man comes out - he is an escapee from the globe factory and he asks for asylum on the territory of the embassy. When the Plenipotentiary demands the handing over of the escapee, the Ambassador refuses. Then he finds out that his democratic government, with which he has not for some time been able to make contact, has ceased to exist. The local authorities are, however, ready to maintain the embassy of the non-existent country because they need an enemy, even a fictitious one, against which they can unite the society that has been stuffed with propaganda. The Ambassador does not intend, however, to take part in this manipulation.

"His decision to refuse to cooperate, i.e. a heroic decision, is from the beginning a disinterested act and, what is more, one devoid of practical consequences. It does not change anything and does not help anyone, unless it is morally. (...) After a lengthy discussion with the Plenipotentiary, [the Ambassador] states that, in the face of total nihilism, only resistance up to and including the sacrifice of one's life can offer evidence that 'all of this' is not just 'one great cosmic bluff'. Because it is this sacrifice, although motivated only by honour, which proves that man can go beyond the order of nature, beyond the order based on naked power, namely on necessity." (Jan Błoński, "Wszystkie sztuki Sławomira Mrożka")

The Ambassador, in complete solitude and abandoned not only by his distant government but also by the people closest to him, remains indomitable until the end. It is also to the end that he feels responsible for the Man to whom he has granted asylum. Such a protagonist - noble and indomitable - had not been seen in Mrożek's work to this time. Never before had the writer spoken so openly about the need for courage and solidarity in the face of violence.

This does not mean that in the 1980s the spirit of contrariness abandoned him. During martial law, Mrożek also wrote such "Donosy" ["Denunciations"]:

"TO THE MINISTRY OF CULTURE

I report that we as volunteers has completed the action of fighting illiteracy in our poviat. The last illiterate was hiding in the bushes on Górka Piastowska but we has found him. He defended himself a bit but me brother-in-law whacked him with a stanchion and I gave him one as well. So there are no more illiterates.
When fighting, we has found some glasses and a book in a foreign language entitled "Les Pensées". That means that he could not read in Polish.
In his right pocket, he had a membership card of the Union of Polish Men of Letters but his Union was disbanded long ago, which means that the membership card is invalid.
That is why we ask you to call off the investigation and offer us a reward as educational activists in the field.

Alphabetically yours,
Me and my brother-in-law"

In the play from this period, however, a serious tone dominates: a bitter diagnosis of reality, earlier smuggled through in a light form, appears in the plays of the 1980s without camouflage. The moral message no longer makes use of the screen of humour.

In "Portret" ["The portrait"] (1987), full of references to "Dziady" ["Forefathers' Eve"], "Kordian", Gombrowicz and Miłosz, Mrożek settled his account with his youthful fascination with Communism. This play is about "Stalin's children", those people whose life stories were destroyed either by blind obedience to the regime or by the destructive battle against dictatorship. The author confronts Bartodziej, a former informer, with Anatol, a political prisoner, who, after serving fifteen years, is released from prison. The confrontation of their fates, seemingly completely different, reveals the hidden similarity of the protagonists - both are weak people, without ideas for life, and for both the dreadful tyrant was really the only sense for their existence, an incarnation of the Spirit of History.

Mrożek had returned to his youth or rather to the period of maturing in "Pieszo" ["On foot"] (1980), a play written seven years earlier. The play presents the climacteric moment in the history of Poland - the last moments of the Second World War and the beginnings of Communism. The Father and his fourteen-year-old Son, in whom it is not difficult to see the alter ego of the writer, are wandering along the advancing front, wanting to find the boy's sick mother. At an abandoned railway station, they meet other wanderers: the eccentric thinker-artist Superiusz (a figure based on Witkacy) and the Lady tormented by him, a lonely Teacher, a devious Woman - a trader and her pregnant daughter, the dodgy Lieutenant Zieliński and the Bruiser. They all spend the night on the platform, waiting for a train and drinking moonshine from the Woman's supplies while the blind Musician plays the violin. When they finally hear the noise of the approaching wheels, it turns out that it is the approach of a hostile invisible ghost train, which the Teacher sums up in one word: transport. The exhausted wanderers fall asleep, with the exception of the terrified Son and Superiusz. The latter takes his own life, like his prototype Witkacy had done in 1939.
When, in the epilogue, the protagonists of the play meet again, after the "liberation" of Poland by the Red Army, we see them in new roles and configurations. Only the Father and the Son are not fooled by the temptations of Communism but the outbursts of rebellion are also alien to them - they only want to return home and begin a normal decent life. In accordance with the simple motto of the Father: "A man should be honest and that's all".

"Pieszo" is an example of epic dramaturgy. Where does the epic nature appear? First of all, in the equal distance of the author to the figures. Secondly, in the lack of dramatic tension between them - their interactions are in principle random; it is not a conflict of attitudes but the historical turmoils that decide how the fates of the protagonists will turn out and cross. Tension in the play, as Błoński noticed, comes, therefore, not from the interpersonal events but from the universal fear of death. Finally, the epic nature of "Pieszo" is testified to by the fantastic scenes: they betray the presence of a concealed omnipotent narrator who selects successive episodes and presents them to the public.

In the 1980s, this play was read as Mrożek's polemic with the falsified vision of reality in Poland in Andrzejewski's "Popiół i diament". To this day, "Pieszo" remains a perceptive panorama of Polish society from the times at the end of the war and the beginning of the People's Republic of Poland. And also a play about a world shattered by death and about the phantoms in the memory and in the conscience. "Pieszo" can also be interpreted, as it was by Tadeusz Nyczek, as the story of the maturing of the young writer:

"This work, one of the most uncommon written by Mrożek, can be, although this association is a little risky, traced back to the Dantesque trend: the Father - Virgil - leads the Son - Dante, the future author, through the hell of war. They meet souls tormented in various degrees: the rural women, the National Army soldier, the teacher, the artist, the philosopher. All are travelling through the wartime hell connected by a common fate and it is left to the Son to observe this strange motley collection, Poland in a nutshell. The Son will one day mature and be one of them, an adult; he will, however, remember forever the experiences of the teenage witness. He will be a participant and at the same time an observer, divided within himself." ("Tango z Mrożkiem")

Among the four play by Mrożek written in the 1990s, the most important is "Miłość na Krymie" ["Love in the Crimea"] (1993), in which the emotional thread is linked with an attempt at a synthetic portrayal of the history of Russia - Tsarist, Bolshevik and post-Soviet.

The last decade of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first were a difficult time in the life and work of the writer. In 1996, Mrożek returned from abroad - to a Poland completely different from the one he had left. Six years earlier, he had undergone a serious operation in connection with an aneurysm of the aorta. In 2002, he suffered a stroke, which caused aphasia. As part of his therapy, which served to restore the memory lost as a result of the illness, there arose Mrożek's autobiography - "Baltazar" (2006). Later, the writer also published "Uwagi osobiste" ["Personal remarks"] (2007), a collection of feature articles published earlier but now with an introduction in which the author, "just in case, said farewell to the Public".

Even if Mrożek does not write any more, he is preparing a great surprise for his readers - at the end of 2010, Wydawnictwo Literackie will publish his diary: two volumes with over two thousand pages of his notes written in 1962-1999. Recently a volume of Mrożek's correspondence with Adam Tarn was also published: "Listy. 1963-1975" ["Letters. 1963-1975"], WL, 2009).

In June 2008, Mrożek moved with his wife to Nice, France.

Author: Krystyna Dąbrowska, September 2009,
English translation © Tadeusz Z. Wolański.

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