Abstract
The poem ‘To Stanisław Wyspiański’ from which the above fragment has been extracted, is so well known to all Katherine Mansfield scholars that it almost requires no introduction. Mansfield’s discovery of Stanisław Wyspiański and his work seems to have been a coincidence — she could not have heard about him in New Zealand or later in London, as Wyspiański’s name and work at the time and for many years after, was more or less restricted to his Polish homeland. Mansfield heard about the Polish artist for the first time in Bavaria. A stay in Bad Wörishofen, forced on her by her mother, was a period of extreme loneliness as well as being a traumatic experience. It was there that she gave birth to a still-born child, which led to depression and the overuse of veronal. She was badly in need of intellectual stimulation, which, it seems, was more than her German hosts were able to offer. In Bad Wörishofen Mansfield befriended a group of Polish literary visitors to the resort, who provided her with much needed literary conversation. Among them was Floryan Sobieniowski, a Polish literary critic and aspiring translator. He was charming and intellectually inspiring enough for the relationship between the two to become intimate. Sobieniowski shared with Mansfield his literary and artistic fascinations, and in particular his admiration for Stanisław Wyspiański.2
From the other side of the world,
From a little island cradled in the giant sea bosom, […]
I, a woman, with the taint of the pioneer in my blood,
[…]
I sing your praises, magnificent warrior;1
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Notes
Bertram Rota, ed., Katherine Mansfield, To Stanisław Wyspiański (London: The Favil Press, 1938).
In an introduction to his translation of To Stanisław Wyspiański, published in the Literary Supplement to Gazeta Poniedzialkowa, a Kraków weekly, in 1910, Sobieniowski explains that Mansfield, familiar with those works of Polish literature which she could read in English, French or German translation, showed ‘a profound enthusiasm for works that opened a completely new world of thought and feeling; and she decided to learn the Polish language’. She was impressed with the works of Wyspianski, whose plays The Judges and The Curse she ‘studied and learned’; he adds that acquainted with ‘Wyspianski’s entire creative work (from summaries by myself), based on Polish history of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries and the changes of the Polish social thought, she was able to empathize with the tragic life of the author of The Wedding […]’. Jeffery Meyers, ‘Katherine Mansfield’s “To Stanisław Wyspiański”’, in Jan Pilditch, ed., The Critical Response to Katherine Mansfield (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), pp. 179–83 (p. 181).
Alicja Okonska, Stanisław Wyspiański (Warszawa: Wiedza Powszechna, 1971), p. 467 (my translation).
Angela Smith, Katherine Mansfield: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), p. 24.
John Sinclair, ed., Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary (London and Glasgow: Collins, 1990), p. 1488.
Antony Alpers quotes a note which Mansfield made in Bavaria (at the time when she met Sobieniowski and discovered Wyspianski), when she was fighting her depression: ‘I must fight, to be able to forget; I must fight so that I can respect myself again. I must make myself useful so as to be able to believe in life again’. Antony Alpers, The Life of Katherine Mansfield (London: Viking, 1980), p. 98. Wyspianski’s indefatigable energy and his deep trust in the sense of artistic activity, in spite of his personal tragedy, must have been inspirational to Mansfield, resulting in a poem addressed to him, which, as Kathleen Jones observes, is ‘a poem of rebirth and regeneration, lyrical and personal’.
Kathleen Jones, Katherine Mansfield: The Story Teller (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), p. 118. 9.
In a letter to Vera Beauchamp (April–May 1908), Mansfield complains: ‘I am ashamed of young New Zealand, but what is to be done. All the firm fat framework of their brains must be demolished before they can begin to learn. They want a purifying influence — a mad wave of pre-Raphaelitism, of super-aestheticism, should intoxicate the country.’ Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, eds, The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984–2008), Vol. 1, p. 44. Hereafter referred to as Letters, followed by volume and page number.
Margaret Scott, ed., The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, 2 vols (Canterbury, NZ: Lincoln University Press and Daphne Brassell Associates, 1997), Vol. 1, p. 32.
‘One must accommodate one’s past to have a present’, explains Jacob Golomb, a Heideggerian philosopher. Jacob Golomb, In Search of Authenticity: From Kierkegaard to Camus (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 114. Mansfield’s turning to her past was a necessary step in her artistic development — only when she admitted what had been suppressed until then — her New Zealand identity, when she explored what was authentically hers, could she mature as a writer. Childhood was an important artistic inspiration also for Rainier Maria Rilke, who admitted that ‘the roots of his life’s work went back far into his childhood’.
Rainier Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. R. S. (www.bnpublishing.net, 2008), p. 46.
Gerri Kimber, ‘Mansfield, Rhythm and the Émigré Connection’, in Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber and Susan Reid, eds, Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism (London: Continuum, 2011), pp. 13–29 (p. 24).
Marta Tomczyk-Maryon, Wyspianski (Warszawa: Panstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 2009), p. 151.
Gerri Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan, eds, The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), Vol. 2, pp. 353–4. Hereafter referred to as Fiction, 2.
Gerri Kimber, A Literary Modernist: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Short Story (London: Kakapo, 2008), p. 28.
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© 2015 Mirosława Kubasiewicz
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Kubasiewicz, M. (2015). Katherine Mansfield and Stanisław Wyspiański — Meeting Points. In: Kascakova, J., Kimber, G. (eds) Katherine Mansfield and Continental Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137429971_6
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