I want to be a horse: Satirical stories and plays. Slawomir Mrozek - I want to be a horse: Satirical stories and plays Slawomir Mrozek stories

Slawomir Mrozek. I want to be a horse. Satirical stories and plays. Translation from Polish. M., “Young Guard”, 1990. 318 pp.

Probably, our reader, our critic needs to have behind him two hundred years of a calm life, not disturbed by catastrophes and upheavals, in order to learn to perceive literature (including foreign literature) objectively and holistically, as a form of art, interesting in its difference from reality, determined by the possibilities of its language and the uniqueness of the author’s personality. All this is also, of course, significant for us, but in a secondary way. We have long perceived any work of art and will continue to perceive it for a long time, placing it not so much in its corresponding literary series, but in the context of our today's pains, troubles and grievances. We must be losing a lot by doing this; much that is important for the author does not touch us, “contemporaries of famine and pestilence,” according to Gennady Rusakov. But on the other hand, it is a sin for a writer whose books are read against the backdrop of “famine and pestilence” to complain about misunderstanding - perhaps, in the conditions of such a crisis as our current one, it is truly checked, “according to the Hamburg account”, whether something weighs is a book on the biased scales of history, whether it, no matter how long ago it was written, is capable of developing with us, is its spiritual volume sufficient for us to “read” into it our unique experience of life in troubled times.
The book of Slawomir Mrozhek, a world-famous Polish writer, who was published seriously for the first time in the USSR, I think, will stand the test of our turmoil. Mrozhek will be read, his plays will be staged, and as the spiritual situation develops, more and more new Mrozhek will be revealed to us. His prose and his dramaturgy are true, lofty art, that is, multi-valued. Different times may find different things in it. So, if this book had been published three or four years ago (five years ago it would not have been published under any circumstances), we most likely would have found Mrozhek close and understandable precisely as a satirist writer and his stories such as “The Elephant” ”, “On a trip”, “Punctuality”, “Elevator”, “Quiet employee”, “The path of a citizen”, would easily fit in our minds next to the monologues of Zhvanetsky or the stories of Zadornov, with the satirical literature that was triumphantly published not so long ago from the semi-underground under the slogan “you can’t live like this.” With liberating laughter, we would recognize in Mrozek’s stories and plays the familiar characters of the totalitarian panopticon, the absurd scenes and situations familiar to us from the times of “developed socialism.” The book’s cheerful cover and its subtitle—“satirical stories and plays”—orient precisely to this perception.
But our first attack of satirical euphoria passed surprisingly quickly. Satire said its loud “you can’t live like this”, we laughed until we cried and realized the most unpleasant, the most unflattering for ourselves and the world we built - that So live Can that our ability to adapt is practically limitless and that, despite the satirical barrage that has swept through us, we still live So. The heavy shackles fell, the dungeons collapsed, but at the entrance we were greeted, it seems, not by dreamed freedom, not by romantic “brothers,” but by everyday rain, under which a motley crowd, mostly consisting of Mrozek’s characters, was shivering. And the author, who combined in his view of the world the knowledge that this is not possible with the understanding that, unfortunately, this is possible, in general, does not give us the right to somehow distance ourselves from this crowd. In it, stupidly and clumsily adapting to the highest declared freedom, we are all gathered together - and that zoo director who, for the sake of economy, ordered the production of an inflatable elephant; and those elderly employees who diligently cheat him; and those schoolchildren who no longer believe in elephants at all. “The Elephant” is a typical example of a polysemantic Mrozek story, a masterpiece of the genre, revealing a very approximate relationship between the writer’s work and satire itself, as we are accustomed to understanding it. It is worth dwelling on this story in more detail. It begins as a parody of the official canon of a satirical parable, in the very first line of which the false address of the satire is called and the quintessence of the “morality” permitted by the canon is given: “The director of the zoological garden turned out to be a careerist. Animals for him were only a means to achieve his goals.” These words provide an imaginary rational key to an irrational, absurd situation. The official satirist, contemplating a completely delusional reality, certainly wants to find in it at least some, even negative, meaning: “Obviously, a letter (a letter from the director with a plan to replace a real elephant with an inflatable one. - A.A.) fell into the hands of a soulless official who understood his duties in a bureaucratic way, did not delve into the essence of the issue and, guided only by directives to reduce costs, agreed with the director’s plan.” Of course, the director’s careerism and the bureaucrat’s callousness are roughly punished - the inflatable elephant was picked up by the first gust of wind, carried to the nearby botanical garden, where the elephant, having sat on a cactus, instructively burst. What is satire about? Careerism, bureaucracy, fraud, to be honest, do not worry Mrozhek too much; this is rather the sphere of indignation of the departmental satirist he parodied. And Mrozhek himself writes here about the taming of the absurd, about the plasticity of a person who, in the irrational circumstances offered to him, tries to act reasonably, which leads to various consequences, including, sometimes, even greater absurdity. The key figures for this story are the “elderly people who are not used to such work” who are inflating the elephant. “If things continue like this, we won’t be finished until six in the morning,” one of them said. – What will I tell my wife when I get home? She won’t believe me that I cheated the elephant all night.” A normal “private life”, a reasonable wife – and the inflation of a rubber elephant. That's the problem Mrozek always faces. A person will not go crazy, he will explain to himself the rationality and necessity of any absurdity, he, in the end, will not particularly think about the meaning of his actions. But such stability of a person means, in a sense, the stability of the absurd - life, as it were, flows around the rubber monster, includes it within itself, but at the same time it itself becomes less and less reliable. It is not for nothing that they no longer believe in elephants, and schoolchildren, in front of whom an inflatable elephant took off, have become hooligans. The absurd “wireless telegraph” from the story “On a Trip” is not as scary as its “reasonable” explanation by the driver: “... it’s even better than an ordinary telegraph with wire and poles. It is known that living people are always smarter. And the storm won’t hurt, and you’ll save on wood, but we have few forests left in Poland, they’ve all cut them down.”
In a word, within the usual satirical form Mrozhek is engaged in very responsible philosophizing, and the main object of his reflections is a person in a crisis world. Moreover, the person is primary, not the crisis. What is the use of dramatizing the crisis state of the world if the last centenarians do not remember the “golden age”? A crisis is simply a condition of life in our century; its presence does not relieve a person of the obligation of moral self-determination. Mrozek, despite the fact that he speaks with alarm about the old age and fatigue of the “ship” of civilization, is completely alien to eschatological pathos. Yes, in the world at every step you come across rubber elephants or “wireless telegraphs”, the world is half absurd, but it is not hopeless, because absurdity is not allowed to fill the entire volume of human consciousness.
The dramatic struggle of a person with the absurd, which he himself is most often the cause of, is the main theme of Slavomir Mrozhek’s work. In this struggle, a person is both bad and good, he wins victories and suffers defeats, but this struggle, thank God, does not stop for a minute, and Mrozhek the philosopher, Mrozhek the moralist, tries to the best of his ability to identify the temptations and dangers fraught with absurdity that lie in wait for a person at every step.
Mrozhek is a consistent anti-romantic. In the essay “Flesh and Spirit” from the book “Short Letters” (it is a pity, by the way, that there was no place for them in the collection published by the Young Guard), he writes: “It’s scary to think what would happen if every “thought was translated into reality” into action,” which is what the romantics call us to do.” The violence of unbridled imagination, uncontrolled dreams, even the most sublime, over the natural course of life rightly seems to the writer, along with “lies”, “nonsense” and ignorance, the main source of absurdity. It is great happiness, Mrozhek notes, that there is “resistance to matter,” “stubborn life,” which does not allow the “ultra-brilliant plans” of various kinds of “great leaders” to be fully realized. But it cannot be said that the writer, having doubted the indispensable height and purity of the “spirit,” is ready to blindly trust the “flesh.” The collection includes the play “Slaughterhouse,” where Mrozek, in a paradoxical, grotesque form, explores the possibilities of two apparently opposing, if we follow romantic logic, spheres - art and life. The hero of this play is the Violinist, an image that quite clearly refers to the romantic worldview, a symbol of the artist as such. “Slaughterhouse” has many meanings, it has several problematic motives, but the main one is the artist’s, and indeed man’s, search for truth and authenticity. What is the truth - in art, in life, in death? The violinist is a maximalist; like a true romantic, he seeks the last, final truth: “... there should be only one truth. One and only, indestructible and unchanging. The truth cannot be small, insignificant and mortal, because then it is not the truth.” Guided by such ideas about truth, the Violinist is consistently disappointed in art, since it turns out to be too fragile to withstand the rough pressure of the flesh, and then in life, since it is fluid, mortal and sometimes insignificant. The only thing that meets the proposed criteria of truth turns out to be - quite logically - death. It is difficult to doubt its “authenticity” and “truthfulness”. The search for the Violinist ends with death. Mrozhek shows in this play that art isolated from life is infantile, inferior, unmanly, but life without art, with only “truth” inevitably turns into the triumph of flesh destined for slaughter. An artist obsessed with the idea of ​​the only truth is doomed to become a butcher. But a butcher does not have to be an artist. When the Violinist, already ready to enter the slaughterhouse stage, nevertheless commits suicide, the concert continues. The director of the former Philharmonic, now combined with a slaughterhouse, says: “Anyone can kill, always and everywhere... So, who wants to replace the performer?”
Mrozhek is a convinced preacher of moderation; he is disgusted by the hysterical search for final answers to eternal questions; he finds it funny that he does not know what the basis of the confidence of those answering is based on. He believes that a person has more important concerns and more serious difficulties. For example, “live the next five minutes.” “True heroism,” writes Mrozek in the brilliant essay “Difficulty,” also, unfortunately, not included in the collection under review, “is to live the next five minutes. So-called heroic situations, exceptional moments, extraordinary circumstances - they themselves endow us with heroism. The next five minutes are naked, dumb and blind. They don’t tell us anything, don’t give us anything, and don’t even demand anything special. Actually, this is the highest requirement.”
These five minutes - a symbol of the present that always eludes definition - are the gap through which the absurd squeezes into a person’s life. It is in the “next five minutes” that it is most difficult for a person to remain human, to avoid the temptation to “be a horse.” To curb cowardice, to turn away from “nonsense and lies,” at least to tame the absurdity around oneself, if one cannot destroy it, is the feat of everyday life, the feat of living “the next five minutes,” to which Slavomir Mrozek calls people without pathos, but with hope. ■

Alexander Ageev,
Ivanovo

OCR: fir-vst, 2016

Slawomir Mrozek (born 1930), Polish novelist, playwright, artist.

Born on June 29, 1930 in the village of Bozhenczyn, Brzesko County, Krakow Voivodeship. The date June 26, given in all official biographies and encyclopedic articles, arose due to an incorrect entry in the church book, on the basis of which documents were subsequently issued.

Well-mannered people do not state obvious things.

Mrozek Slawomir

Father - Antoni Mrozhek, the son of a poor peasant, had only primary education and miraculously received the position of a postal official, mother - Zofia Mrozhek (nee Kendzier).

Having entered the Faculty of Architecture of the Krakow Polytechnic Institute, Mrozhek left home (later he recalled that during this period he “slept in the attic of friends, ate soup for the homeless at the nuns’ shelter”), and also attended the Krakow Academy of Arts.

He began his literary career in the Krakow newspaper Dziennik Polski, where he initially worked “as an editorial errand boy”, was engaged in current newspaper work, and wrote on various topics. The first feuilletons and humoresques were published in 1950. The works published in periodicals comprised the collection Practical Half-Shells (1953), and the story Little Summer (1956) was also published. In 1956 Mrozhek was abroad for the first time; he visited the USSR and was in Odessa.

The rapid recognition of readers was not, however, evidence of the high literary merits of Mrozhek's early prose. By his own admission, the communist ideals absorbed in his youth (which was facilitated by his special character and temperament) were long and difficult to overcome. The book that he considers his first serious work is the collection Elephant (1957). It was a great success. Mrozek notes: “It was a collection of short, very short, but in every way poignant stories.<…>Individual phrases from the book turned into proverbs and sayings, which proves how close and understandable my thoughts were then to my compatriots." This was followed by the collections Wedding in Atomice (1959), Progressist (1960), Rain (1962), and the story Flight to the South ( 1961).

It has been repeatedly noted in the literature that Mrozhek’s work is associated with his predecessors, in particular V. Gombrowicz and S.I. Witkevich. This is true, but the connection of his prose with the traditions of Polish humor is much more obvious - foppish, slightly sad and invariably subtle. However, Polish wit has such peak achievements as the aphorisms of S.E. Lec, the satirical poems of Y. Tuvim, the comic phantasmagoria of K.I. Galchinsky. Mrozhek’s stories and humoresques are, as it were, life situations projected into infinity. So, in the story The Swan, an old watchman guarding a lonely bird in the park decides to go to a pub to warm up and takes the bird with him - it can’t sit unprotected, especially in the cold. The watchman warms up with a glass of vodka and sausages, and orders the swan a delicacy in the form of a white roll soaked in heated beer with sugar. The next day everything repeats, and on the third day the swan invitingly pulls the old man by the hem of his clothes - it’s time to go warm up. The story ends with the fact that both the watchman and the bird, which, sitting on the water, swayed, terrified the walking mothers and children, were kicked out of the park. The plot of the story contains a peculiar algorithm of Mrozhek's prose.

1959 became an important year in his life - he married a woman for whom he had strong feelings, and in the same year, at the invitation of Harvard University, he visited the United States, where he took part in a summer international seminar, headed by political science professor Henry Kissinger. Two months spent overseas radically affected Mrozek's consciousness.

Are people giving up? Come on, hands up!

Mrozek Slawomir

In the early 1960s he left Krakow and moved to Warsaw, where he was greeted as a literary celebrity. He publishes a lot in periodicals, including the newspaper "Přeglyad kulturalni", the weekly "Tugodnik povzešni", the magazines "Dialogue", "Pšekruj", "Kultura", "Tvorzchozs", writes regular columns, acts not only as a prose writer, but and as a kind of cartoonist. Although Mrozek himself notes that “the art of graphics consists of characterizing a character with a couple of strokes,” his graphics are tightly linked to words. This is either a funny drawing, accompanied by a short caption or dialogue, or a small series of pictures, somewhat similar to a comic book. Neither a drawing without text, nor text without a drawing can exist separately. For example, the words “A phenomenal football team will soon arrive in Poland” are accompanied by a drawing of members of the team, each with three legs. A message about a new model of Eskimo sleigh, which has a reverse gear, is adjacent to the image: sled dogs are tied to the sled at both ends, and part of the dog team is tied so that it can only run in one direction, and the other part can only run in the other. It is clear that this is impossible. This light absurdity in its visual design is directly related to the tradition of Polish posters of the 1960s-1970s. Mrozhek's works as an artist are collected in the publications Poland in Pictures (1957), Through Slawomir Mrozhek's Glasses (1968), Drawings (1982).

Slawomir Mrozek

Born June 29, 1930 in the village of Bozhenczyn, Brzesko County, Krakow Voivodeship. Date 26 June, given in all official biographies and encyclopedic articles, arose due to an incorrect entry in the church book, on the basis of which documents were subsequently issued.

Father - Antoni Mrozhek, the son of a poor peasant, had only primary education and miraculously received the position of a postal official, mother - Zofia Mrozhek (nee Kendzier).

Having entered the Faculty of Architecture of the Krakow Polytechnic Institute, Mrozhek left home (later he recalled that during this period« slept in friends' attics, ate soup for the homeless at the nuns' shelter»), also visited the Krakow Academy of Arts.

He began his literary career in a Krakow newspaper"Dziennik Polish" where he was at first« as an editorial errand boy», was engaged in current newspaper work, writing on various topics. The first feuilletons and humoresques were published in 1950. Works published in periodicals formed a collectionPractical half-shells (1953), the story was published Little Summer (1956). In 1956 Mrozhek was abroad for the first time; he visited the USSR and was in Odessa.

The rapid recognition of readers was not, however, evidence of the high literary merits of Mrozhek's early prose. By his own admission, the communist ideals absorbed in his youth (which was facilitated by his special character and temperament) were long and difficult to overcome. The book, which he considers his first serious work, is a collection Elephant (1957). It was a great success. Mrozek notes:« It was a collection of short, very short, but in every way poignant stories.<…>Some phrases from the book turned into proverbs and sayings, which proves how close and understandable my thoughts were then to my compatriots». Then came the collectionsWedding in Atomice(1959), Progressist (1960), Rain (1962), story Flight to the South (1961).

It has been repeatedly noted in the literature that Mrozhek’s work is associated with his predecessors, in particular V. Gombrowicz and S.I. Witkevich. This is true, but the connection of his prose with the traditions of Polish humor is much more obvious - foppish, slightly sad and invariably subtle. However, Polish wit has such peak achievements as the aphorisms of S.E. Lec, the satirical poems of Y. Tuvim, the comic phantasmagoria of K.I. Galchinsky. Mrozhek’s stories and humoresques are, as it were, life situations projected into infinity. Yes, in the story Swan An old watchman guarding a lonely bird in the park decides to go to a pub to warm up and takes the bird with him - it can’t sit unprotected, especially in the cold. The watchman warms up with a glass of vodka and sausages, and orders the swan a delicacy in the form of a white roll soaked in heated beer with sugar. The next day everything repeats, and on the third day the swan invitingly pulls the old man by the hem of his clothes - it’s time to go warm up. The story ends with the fact that both the watchman and the bird, which, sitting on the water, swayed, terrified the walking mothers and children, were kicked out of the park. The plot of the story contains a peculiar algorithm of Mrozhek's prose.

Became important in his life 1959, – he married a woman for whom he had strong feelings, and in the same year, at the invitation of Harvard University, he visited the United States, where he took part in a summer international seminar led by political science professor Henry Kissinger. Two months spent overseas radically affected Mrozek's consciousness.

At the beginning of 1960- x he left Krakow and moved to Warsaw, where he was greeted as a literary celebrity. He publishes a lot in periodicals, including in the newspaper« Przeglyad cultural center", weekly " The old-timer", magazines "Dialogue", "Pshekruj", "Culture", "Tvorzchozs", conducts regular columns, acts not only as a prose writer, but also as a kind of cartoonist. Although Mrozek himself notes that« This is the art of graphics, to characterize a character with a couple of strokes», its graphics are tightly linked to the word. This is either a funny drawing, accompanied by a short caption or dialogue, or a small series of pictures, somewhat similar to a comic book. Neither a drawing without text, nor text without a drawing can exist separately. For example, words« A phenomenal football team will soon arrive in Poland» are accompanied by a drawing depicting members of this team, and each of them has three legs. A message about a new model of Eskimo sleigh, which has a reverse gear, is adjacent to the image: sled dogs are tied to the sled at both ends, and part of the dog team is tied so that it can only run in one direction, and the other part can only run in the other. It is clear that this is impossible. This light absurdity in its visual design is directly related to the tradition of Polish posters 1960–1970- X. Mrozhek's works as an artist are collected in publicationsPoland in pictures (1957), Through the glasses of Slawomir Mrozhek(1968), Drawings (1982).

Mrozek gained his greatest fame as a playwright. His dramatic works are usually considered to be formed in 1950–1960s “theater of the absurd”, quite conventionally named direction, or rather, a certain ethical-aesthetic space in which such different masters as the French Eugene Ionesco worked ( 1912–1994), Jean Genet (1910–1986), Irishman Samuel Beckett ( 1906–1989), Spaniard Fernando Arrabal (b. 1932), Englishman Harold Pinter (b. 1930). E. Ionesco himself called his dramatic experiments« theater of paradox». This definition also fits well with Mrozek’s plays, where what happens is not so much that« can't happen», how much through theatrical grotesquery, with the help of intensifying artistic means, life situations are extremely aggravated, satirically enlarged. Life, as revealed by artistic experience XX c., in itself, is both extremely absurd and monstrously paradoxical. Mrozhek's plays, both multi-act and one-act, were successfully performed on the stage of Polish theaters, and then theaters all over the world. Among the early plays - Cops (1958), The sufferings of Peter O'Hay(1959), Turkey (1960), On the High Seas (1961), Karol (1961), Striptease (1961), Death of a Lieutenant (1963).

While still living in his homeland, he gained wide popularity abroad, his books were translated and his plays were staged, which, in turn, increased his fame in Poland. But the desire to change his fate, to become a European writer, forced him to decide to leave his native country. 3 or (according to other sources) June 6, 1963 Mrozhek and his wife flew to Rome on a tourist visa. He later recalled:« My plans included creating a precedent - acquiring a special status for a Polish writer living abroad at his own expense and outside the jurisdiction of the Polish state». Debates with the state continued for five years, in the end the state offered to obtain a long-term foreign passport, while Mrozhek was supposed to become a kind of illustration of the creative freedom of the Polish writer, not at all criticizing the political situation in Poland, but, on the contrary, assuring the West that everything was going well. His plays continued to be staged in his homeland, his books were regularly published, because the authorities considered it inappropriate to impose a ban on works that were so popular among readers and viewers. Many had no idea that the author lived abroad. In February 1968 Mrozek and his wife moved to France and settled in Paris.

This state could last as long as desired, but the Prague events 1968 and the entry of Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia changed everything. Mrozek issued an open letter condemning this act of aggression, which was published by the world's largest newspapers. The consequences were not long in coming. When attempting to renew his expired foreign passports, Mrozhek, who had visited the Polish embassy, ​​was ordered to return to Poland within two weeks. A refusal followed, after which his plays in his homeland were removed from the repertoire, his books were withdrawn from sale, and the few copies remaining in private libraries began to circulate from hand to hand and sold well at"black market".

In 1969 Mrozhek's wife died from a sudden outbreak of illness, and for him began years of restlessness and lonely wanderings, he visited, in particular, Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, lived in the USA, taught for some time at the University of Pennsylvania, lived for a year in West Berlin . To sum it up, he says:«… I have traveled almost the whole world. And in the professional sphere, the adventure was a success (including attempts to act as a screenwriter and director in cinema)».

The ban on his works in Poland was lifted just a few years later, and thanks to the changed situation in the country and the entry into the political arena of the unification"Solidarity" Mrozhek was able to return to his homeland after a decade and a half of voluntary exile. By that time, he already had French citizenship, which he could apply for as a political emigrant.

After the defeat of Solidarity delivered a series of harsh and topical essays directed against the Polish authorities and imbued with anti-communist sentiments. The essays were published in the West, and in Poland they were distributed in samizdat. In this regard, his entry into his homeland was again closed.

In 1987 Mrozek married a second time, settled in Mexico with his Mexican wife, where he lived secludedly on a ranch"La Epifania" He did housework and wrote. According to his admission, he never got to know the country properly, but he realized that there are other, non-European ways of development, a different rhythm of life, and other values. In Mexico he createdMy autobiography (1988), here, after the decision was made to return to Poland, he April 13, 1996 began broadcasting Return Diary.

Prose written after leaving for emigration, which divided the writer’s life into two parts, is collected in books Two Letters (1973), Stories (1981), Short Letters (1982), Denunciations (1983), Stories (1994), Stories and denunciations (1995). After leaving, plays were also written Tango (1964), Tailor (1964), lucky chance(1973), Carnage (1973), The Emigrants (1974), Beautiful View (1998) and others.

Plays and stories have been filmed several times. Among the films where he acted as a screenwriter are television and feature films Cops (filmed - 1960, 1970, 1971), Striptease (1963), The sufferings of Peter O'Hay(1964), Emigrants (1977), Love (1978), Tango (filmed - 1970, 1972, 1973, 1980), Last cocktail(1993), Cooperative 1 (1996), Revolution (2002).

In 1998 Mrozhek returned to Poland.

To sum it up, he doesn't consider his experience special:« I just lived in this world. He survived the Second World War, the German occupation of Poland, Stalinist communism and its continuation, but there is nothing to boast about, millions of people managed the same thing. There is nothing exceptional about my emigration either...».

Deliberately avoiding interviews or trying to get rid of newspapermen with meaningless phrases, he does not like to make far-reaching statements in both prose and plays. Noticing a moral teaching that has unexpectedly slipped onto the page, he crosses it out. Moreover, a lot in his own life has changed - after a serious heart disease, which knocked him out of the working rhythm for a long time, he wants to return to work again, and for this he needs to think and rethink something:« In that long life... I didn’t think about the absurd for a long time. And when I finally thought about it, I found out that I was precisely in the absurd. And I even began to write something about the absurd, but then I got tired of it. There is a thesis that a person lives absurdly and does not think about it constantly, but from time to time he is aware of it. And I decided to live more or less absurdly in order to correspond to this thesis. And then I realized that I didn’t want it anymore. And now I already live without absurdity».

In 2002 Mrozhek visited Russia again as an honorary guest of an international theater festival"Baltic House" visited St. Petersburg, where he was received as an undoubted classic, one of the popular playwrights 20th century

Berenice Vesnina

The book by the remarkable Polish writer and playwright Slawomir Mrozhek includes satirical stories and plays. His writing style is characterized by irony and grotesque, revealing the absurd aspects of life, often parable-like and farcical features. Mrozhek rebels against the primitivization of life and thinking, the spiritual impoverishment of the individual, and against vulgar didacticism in art. Mrozhek's works - from "full-length" plays to miniatures, both verbal and graphic - are distinguished by genuine originality, sharpness of thought and inexhaustible imagination.

Slawomir Mrozek

Somersault morale by Slawomir Mrozek

“I describe only what is possible to describe. And so, for purely technical reasons, I keep silent about the most important things,” Slavomir Mrozek once said about himself.

He leaves it to the reader to speculate and guess about the most important things. But at the same time it gives him very significant and original “information for thought.”

The writer emphasizes: “Information is our contact with reality. From the simplest: “fly agarics are poisonous, saffron milk caps are edible” - and right up to art, which is essentially the same information, only more confusing. We act in accordance with the information. Inaccurate information leads to rash actions, as anyone who has eaten a fly agaric knows, having been informed that it is a saffron milk cap. People don’t die from bad poetry, but they are also poison, only in a unique way.”

The stories and plays of Slavomir Mrozhek, for all their seeming unreality and “intricacy,” provide accurate information about the fly agarics and toadstools of the surrounding reality, about everything that poisons our lives.

Slawomir Mrozek is a famous Polish satirist. He was born in 1930 and studied architecture and fine arts in Krakow. He made his debut almost simultaneously as a prose writer and a caricaturist, and since the second half of the 50s he has also been acting as a playwright (he also wrote several film scripts). In all three “guises,” Mrozhek appears as a keen-sighted and insightful artist, focusing his attention on the sad (and sometimes gloomy) sides of modern life and striving not just to highlight, but to burn them out with the healing ray of satire. Great popularity was brought to him by the cycles of humorous stories and drawings published in Polish periodicals and later published in separate editions. The stories were collected in the collections “Practical semi-armored cars” (1953), “Elephant” (1957), “Wedding in Atomitsy” (1959), “Rain” (1962), “Two letters” (1974); drawings - albums "Poland in Pictures" (1957), "Through the Glasses of Slawomir Mrozhek" (1968). In addition, the writer’s literary baggage includes the stories “Little Summer” (1956) and “Flight to the South” (1961), a volume of selected essays and articles “Short Letters” (1982), and about a dozen plays, among which “ Police" (1958), "Turkey" (1960), triptych of one-act farces "On the High Seas", "Karol", "Striptease" (1961), "Death of a Lieutenant" (1963), "Tango" (1964), "Tailor" "(1964), "Happy Accident" (1973), "Slaughterhouse" (1973), "Emigrants" (1974).

Since 1963, Slawomir Mrozek lived in Italy, and in 1968 he moved to Paris. But he remains a citizen of Poland and a very Polish writer who does not break ties with his homeland and the national literary and theatrical tradition. At the same time, his artistic and philosophical generalizations go beyond national experience and acquire universal significance, which explains the wide international recognition of his work and the production of plays on all continents.

Through the glasses of Slawomir Mrozhek (to use the name of the column that he constantly wrote for fifteen years in the Krakow magazine Przekruj), the world is not seen in a rosy light. Therefore, his manner is characterized by irony and grotesqueness, identification of the absurd features of existence, a penchant for parable-likeness and farce. His satire often smacks of bitterness, but not lack of faith in man.

The artist rebels against the primitivization of life and thinking, the spiritual impoverishment of the individual, and against vulgar didacticism in art. Although sometimes he suddenly catches himself on the fact that he, too, is not free from a preachy tone and wonders - where is he from? “Sometimes I notice it even in the manuscript and take action. And sometimes I notice it only in print, when it’s already too late. Am I really a born preacher? But in that case, I wouldn’t feel the hostility towards preaching that I nevertheless feel. the style is vulgar and suspicious. Probably there is something in the inheritance that I received... Since I cannot master the style, the style takes possession of me. Or rather, the different styles on which I was brought up. Here preaching, there suddenly attacks me. , and here and there a foreign feather will flicker,” Mrozek reflects on the origins of his own creativity in the essay “The Heir” from the book “Short Letters.”

Critics have detected in Mrozhek's works the influence of Wyspianski and Gombrowicz, Witkaca and Galczynski, Swift and Hoffmann, Gogol and Saltykov-Shchedrin, Beckett and Ionesco, Kafka and other illustrious predecessors and contemporaries, who acutely felt the imperfection of man and the world in which he lives. But after a victory, there are always more heroes than there actually were. And the abundance of Mrozhek’s supposed literary “godfathers” only convinces of the originality and originality of his talent.

This originality is manifested, in particular, in the amazing laconicism, the parsimony of those strokes that delineate the multidimensional space of the narrative, which only makes the flight of thought freer. Circumstances and figures devoid of specifics acquire a painfully recognizable reality. Mrozek is disgusted by idle talk: “I dream of some new law of nature, according to which everyone would have a daily quota of words. So many words per day, and as soon as he speaks or writes them, he becomes illiterate and dumb until the next morning. By noon There would be complete silence, and only occasionally would it be broken by the meager phrases of those who are able to think what they are saying, or who treasure their words for some other reason. Since they were spoken in silence, they would finally be heard.”

The Polish writer fully feels the weight of the word and the sharpness of the thought, sharpened on the touchstone of pain for a person and polished with wit - a thought like a sensitive surgeon’s knife that is able to easily penetrate under the cover of living reality, diagnosing and treating it, and not just dispassionately anatomizing a corpse of cold abstractions. Mrozhekov's works - from "full-length" plays to miniatures (both verbal and graphic) are distinguished by genuine originality and inexhaustible imagination, growing in the field of woeful notes of the mind and heart.

At times his paradoxes are reminiscent of Wilde’s (for example, when he asserts that “Art is more life than life itself”). The author of The Picture of Dorian Gray stated: “The truth of life is revealed to us precisely in the form of paradoxes. To comprehend Reality, we must see how it balances on a tightrope. And only by looking at all the acrobatic things that Truth does, we can correctly judge it.” . Slawomir Mrozek also more than once resorts to paradox as a means of comprehending the Truth and verifying or refuting worn-out “truths.” Perhaps, more than anything else, he fears banality, which, in his words, kills the most immutable truths. That's why a writer is not averse to making a banality stand on its head or performing a stunning moral flip.

Is Mrozhek a moralist? Undoubtedly! (Hence the unobtrusive taste of preaching that he himself feels). Quite often in his works, behind the grotesqueness of situations, the parody of the text and the amusingness of the dialogue, it is easy to discern a philosophical, ethical or socio-political subtext. And the parabolas he draws are very instructive. For example, this: “...We are like an old ship - it is still sailing, because the elements from which it is built are composed exactly in such a way that they form a ship. But all its boards and bolts, all its parts, sub-parts and under-under-under (etc.) - the parts yearn for disintegration. Some parts think that they will do without the whole and, after disintegration, will no longer enter into any structure. Illusion - because the choice exists only between disappearance and any structure. , confident that when the ship falls apart, it will cease to be a ship's plank and will lead the free and proud life of a plank as such, a plank "by itself" - it will disappear and disappear, or someone will build a stable out of it.

But for now we’re cracking.”

Slawomir Mrozek

Mrozek is the most famous Polish avant-garde playwright. His first play, The Police, which premiered on June 27, 1958 in Warsaw, is a typically Kafkaesque parabola. The action takes place in a certain country in which the secret police are so powerful that there is no opposition to the ruling tyrannical regime. There is only one leftist under suspicion, who has been achieving his goal for years, stubbornly not deviating from his chosen path. When he, wanting to lead the police on a false trail, declares that he agrees with the ruling ideology, the secret police loses raison d'être. Not wanting to deprive so many loyal people of their livelihood, the chief of police charges one of them with committing a political crime.

“On the High Seas” (1961) three people, fat, thin and of average fatness, find themselves on a raft after a shipwreck. In order not to die of hunger, they decide to eat one person. In determining the victim, they resort to all types of political methods - elections, debate, scientific reasoning - to establish which of them lived better and therefore should die first. But no matter what method they use, the potential victim is always the thin one. He doesn't want to be eaten. But when the fat one convinces him that such a death is a heroic, artistic act, the thin one agrees. At this moment, a character of average fatness, in search of salt, finds a can of beans with sausages. The need to kill the bad disappears. But the fat man orders his henchman to hide the can. “I don’t want beans,” he mutters. “Anyway... Don’t you understand? He will be happy to die!

In "Striptease" (1961), two people are locked in an empty room. They are deeply outraged by their situation. A huge hand appears and gradually removes their clothes. They come to the decision that the best thing to do in their situation is to ask the hand for forgiveness. They humbly ask the hand to forgive them and kiss it. A second hand appears “... in a red glove. The hand forces them to come closer and puts jester's caps on them, plunging them into complete darkness." They are ready to follow where the red hand points. “If they call you, you have to go,” says one of them...

These two plays and the one-act plays “The Torment of Peter Ohey”, “Charlie”, “The Witching Night” are poignant political allegories. "Fun" (1963) aspires to more. Three men are invited to a party, or so they think. They come to an empty place looking for entertainment. There is no party in sight. Wanting to have fun, they persuade one of them to hang himself so that something will happen. They are already close to carrying out their fun when the sounds of music are heard in the distance. The party probably took place after all. The play ends with one of the characters asking a question to the public:“Ladies and gentlemen! Where is the party anyway? There are clear echoes of Waiting for Godot, but the atmosphere is rich in Polish folklore and folk culture with a village orchestra and strange dancing masks.

Mrozek's most famous play to this day remains Tango. The premiere took place in January 1965 in Belgrade, in Poland - in June 1965 in Budgoszcz; July 7, 1965 with triumphant success - in Warsaw, at the Erwin Axer Theater Wspolczesny, and this performance became the most outstanding event in the history of Polish theater in the mid-century.

"Tango" is a complex play, a parody or paraphrase of "Hamlet". The hero is a young man who horrifies his parents with his behavior. He feels deep shame for his mother, who cheats on his father, and for his smug father. The young man’s bitter attacks on the generation that allowed the war, occupation and devastation of the country are also understandable. Arthur grew up in a world devoid of values. His father, a careless man who pretends to be an artist, wastes his time on useless avant-garde experiments. The mother sleeps with the boorish proletarian Eddie, who hangs around the unkempt apartment the family calls home. Someone accidentally ordered the grandmother to be put in the coffin of her last husband, and she lies in a coffin that they never got around to taking out. An uncle with aristocratic manners and a crooked brain also lives here. Arthur longs for a normal life with order and decorum. He tries to convince his cousin Alya to marry him, as was customary before. Alya doesn't understand what the ceremony is for. If he wants to sleep with her, she agrees without any ceremony. But Arthur insists on observing them. He grabs his father's gun and starts a revolution, forcing the family to dress decently, tidy up their cluttered, dirty apartment and prepare for his wedding. But he is not able to cope with all this. Realizing that the old order cannot be restored by force, he gets drunk. Old values ​​are destroyed and cannot be restored by force. What's left? Naked power. “I ask you, when there is nothing left, and even rebellion is no longer possible, what can we take into life from nothing?.. One force! Only strength can be created from nothing. It is always there, even if there is nothing. ...Only one thing remains - to be strong and decisive. I'm strong. ...In the end, force is also a protest. Protest in the form of order..."

To prove his point, Arthur is ready to kill his old uncle. Alya tries to divert Arthur's attention and shouts that she, his bride, slept with Eddie on the eve of the wedding. Arthur is shocked. He is too humane to put into practice the doctrine of absolute power. Eddie has a different point of view. With wild force he attacks Arthur. Power has triumphed. The family obeys Eddie. The play ends with Eddie and the old aristocratic uncle dancing a tango around Arthur's dead body.

Tango is a symbol of the impetus for rebellion. When tango was a challenging innovation, Arthur's parents' generation fought for the right to dance it. When the rebellion against traditional values ​​destroyed all values, there was nothing left but naked power - Eddie's power, the power of the mindless masses, dancing tango on the ruins of civilization.

The meaning of this exercise in revolutionary dialectics is quite clear: the cultural revolution leads to the destruction of all values ​​and, as a consequence, to an attempt by idealistic intellectuals to restore them; however, following these values, once destroyed, is impossible and therefore only naked force remains. As a result, due to the fact that intellectuals cannot be cruel to the required extent and show strength, it is shown by Eddies, of whom there are plenty in the world. “Tango” is relevant not only for communist countries. The destruction of values ​​and the rise to power of the vulgar man of the masses is also familiar to the West. "Tango" is a play with broad meanings. It's brilliantly constructed, has a lot of inventiveness, and is very funny.