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

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 significant for us, of course, but in a secondary way. All sorts of things piece of art we have been perceiving it for a long time and will continue to perceive it for a long time, placing it not so much in the literary series corresponding to it, 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 Time of Troubles.
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 Zhvanetsky’s monologues or Zadornov’s stories, with that satirical literature, which not so long ago triumphantly emerged from semi-underground under the slogan “you can’t live like that.” 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-out freedom, not by romantic “brothers,” but by everyday rain, under which a motley crowd, mostly consisting of Mrozhek’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 stated 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 whose eyes an inflatable elephant took off, became 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.
A person’s dramatic struggle with absurdity, to which he himself is most often the cause, is main topic creativity of Slawomir Mrozhek. 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’s 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 an unbridled imagination, an uncontrolled dream, even the most sublime, over the natural course of life rightly seems to the writer, along with “lies”, “nonsense” and ignorance, as the main source of absurdity. It is great happiness, Mrozhek notes, that there is “resistance to matter,” “stubborn life,” which does not allow “super-brilliant plans” to be fully realized. various kinds"great leaders" 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 Mrozhek, in a paradoxical, grotesque form explores the possibilities of two seemingly 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 go on the slaughter 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 staunch preacher of moderation; he is disgusted by the hysterical search for final answers to eternal questions, it’s funny to him, he doesn’t know what 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.

Fine educated people They don't state the obvious.

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.

Are people giving up? Come on, hands up!

Mrozek Slawomir

The rapid recognition of readers was not, however, evidence of high literary merits early prose Mrozek. 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 all respects 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 Atomitsy (1959), The 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.

You can only describe what can be described. So, for purely technical reasons, I’m omitting the most important thing.

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 "Przeglyad kulturalni", the weekly "Tugodnik povzesny", the magazines "Dialogue", "Pshekruj", "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 sleds that have a reverse gear is adjacent to the image: sled dogs are tied to the sleds 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).

Mrozek gained his greatest fame as a playwright. His dramatic works are usually attributed to the “theater of the absurd” that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, a quite conventionally named movement, or rather, a certain ethical and aesthetic space in which such different masters worked as the French Eugene Ionesco (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 suits Mrozhek’s plays, where what happens is not so much what “cannot happen,” but through theatrical grotesquerie, with the help of intensifying artistic means, life situations are extremely aggravated and satirically enlarged. Life, as revealed artistic experience XX century, 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 are Policemen (1958), The Sorrows 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 home 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 Mrozhek and his wife moved to France and settled in Paris.

This state of affairs could last as long as desired, but the Prague events of 1968 and the entry of Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia changed everything. Mrozhek spoke with open letter, where he condemned this act of aggression, which was published by the world's largest newspapers. The consequences were not long in coming. When trying to resume foreign passports, the validity of which had expired, Mrozhek, who 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 and sold well on the “black market.”

In 1969, Mrozhek’s wife died from a sudden outbreak of illness, and years of restlessness and lonely wanderings began for him, 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 writings in Poland was lifted just a few years later, and thanks to the changed situation in the country and the entry of the Solidarity association into the political arena, Mrozhek was able to come 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.

My son, your life will be like what you are doing now, and not like what you think now.

Mrozek Slawomir

After the defeat of Solidarity, he came out with 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 Mrozhek married a second time, settled in Mexico with his Mexican wife, where he lived secludedly at the La Epifania ranch, farmed 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 created My Autobiography (1988); here, after the decision was made to return to Poland, on April 13, 1996 he began keeping a Diary of Return.

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

Does the person use the method or does the method use the person?

Mrozek Slawomir

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

In 1998 Mrozhek returned to Poland.

Summing up, he does not consider his experience special: “I just lived in this world. I 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 and in my emigration..."

Writers are engineers human souls, and writing engineers are critics.

Mrozek Slawomir

Someone who deliberately avoids interviews or tries to get rid of newspapermen does nothing meaningful 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, much has changed in his own life - 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 comprehend and rethink something: “In that long life... I haven’t been around for a long time.” I thought about the absurd. And when I finally thought about it, I found out that I was 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 all the time. , but from time to time he is aware of this. And I decided to live more or less absurdly in order to correspond to this thesis. And then I realized that I don’t want to anymore. And now I live without absurdity.”

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

Slawomir Mrozek - photo

Slawomir Mrozek - quotes

Everything points to the fact that I irritate everyone individually just as much as each individual irritates me. And for the same reasons.

You can only describe what can be described. So, for purely technical reasons, I’m omitting the most important thing.

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,” Slawomir Mrozhek 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 on 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. From bad poetry They don’t die, 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, studied architecture and art 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 only to highlight, but to burn them out with the healing ray of satire. The cycles brought him great popularity humorous stories and drawings published in Polish periodicals and then published separate publications. The stories were collected in the collections “Practical semi-armored cars” (1953), “Elephant” (1957), “Wedding in Atomice” (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), "The 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 in the manuscript and take action. And sometimes I only notice it in print, when it’s already too late. Am I a born preacher? But in that case I would not have felt the hostility towards preaching that I nevertheless feel. I find the preaching style vulgar and suspicious. There is probably something in the inheritance that I received... Since I cannot master the style, the style takes possession of me. Or rather, different styles on which I was brought up. Here it’s preaching, there I suddenly burst into laughter, and here and there a foreign feather flickers,” 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. Mrozhek is disgusted by idle talk: “I dream of some new law of nature, according to which everyone would have daily norm words So many words per day, and as soon as he speaks or writes them, he becomes illiterate and mute until the next morning. By noon, complete silence would reign, and only occasionally would it be broken by the terse phrases of those who are able to think what they are saying, or who treasure their words for some other reason. Since they would be spoken in silence, they would finally be heard.”

The Polish writer fully feels the weight of words and the sharpness of 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 sad 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, one must see how it balances on a tightrope. And only after 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 somersault.

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 in such a way that they form a ship. But all its boards and bolts, all its parts, sub-parts and sub-sub-sub (etc.) - parts yearn for disintegration. It seems to some parts that they will do without the whole and, after disintegration, will no longer be included in any structure. An illusion - because the choice exists only between disappearance and any structure. A board, confident that when the ship falls apart, it will cease to be a ship's board and will lead the free and proud life of a board as such, a board “by itself” - it will perish and disappear, or someone will build a stable out of it.

But for now we’re chattering.”

Sometimes Mrozhek’s morality can be expressed directly, as in the fable: “Even the most modest position requires moral principles” (“The Swan” - however, an ironic connotation is felt here too). But more often the author leads the reader or viewer to the conclusion, trusting him to take the final step himself. Thus, the story “Bird Ugupu” makes us, in connection with the demarche of an angry rhinoceros, think about the interconnection of phenomena in nature and the place of man in the chain of these interrelations. And the geometric parable “Below” shows, using the example of a debate between a convinced supporter of the horizontal and an equally convinced supporter of the vertical, the absurdity of attempts to unify the world, reducing it to one plane and depriving it of “three-dimensionality, and maybe even any dimensionality at all.” A good commentary on this parable can be Mrozhek’s “short letter” “Flesh and Spirit”, which contains a warning against the fact that “any plan for the world order, born in one head, is confident that this is the only plan that the world needs , was implemented automatically and scrupulously. And the good Lord God really did not allow this, giving us time, matter and space, in which, after all, everything should unfold. And all sorts of self-confident maniacs have caused a lot of harm to the world - what if they had a free hand?.. In the theater, directors “with ideas” scare me, because there are those who are ready to direct the whole White light. Manic philanthropists, educators, teachers...”

Physically, in person, Slawomir Mrozhek was in Russia twice: in 1956 - as an ordinary Polish tourist traveling around the Soviet Union, and almost half a century later, in 2002, - already as an honored guest, a venerable writer, a luminary of the theater of the absurd, a living legend . His creative presence in Russian culture is much more noticeable: hundreds of performances, dozens of translations, several book publications. The Russian theme also occupies an important place in Mrozhek’s work: these are the tragic intricacies of Polish and Russian history, which could not always be discussed openly (in one of the feuilletons Mrozhek admitted: “When I wrote a satire about a hole in the bridge, I felt like this , as if this is a satire on something global, maybe even on the entire Soviet Union"); and Chekhov's subtexts, scenery and rehashes of many of his plays, and, finally, an incredible cocktail called “Love in Crimea” , which the master of the absurd mixed at the end of his creative path from Russian history, literature and reality, seasoning this explosive mixture with Shakespeare.

Mrozhek's relationship with the Russian theater was not easy. Under the guise of “Soviet-Polish friendship,” several of his stories were translated and published, they tried to stage something in the theater, but when in 1968 Mrozhek allowed himself the luxury of expressing his own, very impartial opinion on the topic of “fraternal assistance to Czechoslovakia,” his career The Soviet Union ended before it really began. When glasnost and perestroika shook the foundations of the Soviet world, the banned Mrozhek triumphantly returned to the Russian stage, and when the situation stabilized, he quietly moved into the “classic” category. Thus, in the history of the appearance of Mrozhek’s dramas on the Russian stage, four periods can be distinguished.

The first, the stage of acquaintance, occurred during the Khrushchev Thaw and was associated with the attempts of the Soviet theater to start a dialogue with Western culture. As the next plays of the young but already famous writer in his homeland appear, they are translated, published and staged in theaters. This period was short, but the acquaintance took place, and Mrozhek’s name was imprinted in the memory of Russian intellectuals, who later began to be called the sixties. It is to this generation, which preserved what was removed from libraries and removed from the repertoire, that Mrozhek owes the explosion of popularity that came in the late 80s.

In Poland, several generations of spectators grew up listening to Mrozhek's dramaturgy: his plays were staged by leading directors, almost everything he wrote regularly appeared in print (the ban on his works in his homeland lasted only a few years, in Russia - several decades), and the best literary critics were sensitive to followed his work. In the minds of the average Pole, it was thanks to Mrozek that the theater of the absurd and the absurdity of everyday life were intertwined into a single, inextricable whole, as the author himself humbly admits: “The concept of the absurd went to the people and, accordingly, having become vulgar, remained there.” His name was included in colloquial: Poles immediately comment on everyday, and especially bureaucratic absurd situations, “Like from Mrozhek!” or “Well, Mrozek wouldn’t have come up with that!” In Russia the situation was different. If the term “theater of the absurd” appeared in the press, it was invariably accompanied by the definitions “bourgeois, rotten, degenerate.” When his drama “On the High Seas” was published in the anthology “Modern Polish Plays” in 1967 , it was assumed that the reader would interpret the illogicality of what was depicted as a parody (!) of the fashionable theater of the absurd. About some phenomena modern culture in the Soviet Union you could write either badly or nothing. Only occasionally did valuable critical articles appear in print, but it is difficult to judge the true intentions of their authors today. For example, after the key phrase: “The decay of the rotting bourgeois world even penetrated the stage,” it was possible, not without irony, but to retell in detail the content of Beckett’s main plays. “The theater of the absurd, rooted in the decaying bourgeois culture, is direct evidence of its degeneration, its progressive spiritual squalor” - this is how another critic motivates his “righteous anger”, after which with a clear conscience he sets out the main postulates of the fundamental work of Martin Esslin, telling the history of the theater of the absurd , points out its philosophical foundations, existential roots, basic artistic techniques and sets out a brief summary of two dozen plays that are unknown to the Soviet reader and have no hope of translation or publication.

The second - the longest - period of Mrozhek's interaction with official Russian culture can be described as his complete absence from it. In 1968 Mrozhek was blacklisted and was no longer published in the Soviet Union. Paradoxically, the censorship ban concerned, first of all, the name; the very work of the rebellious Polish writer did not cause sharp rejection by the authorities, so it was possible to stage and show Mrozhek’s play under the name of a certain mythical NN. State theaters Such conspiracy was feared, but the students did not deny themselves the pleasure of touching the unknown theater of the absurd.

The third stage - the real fashion for Mrozhek - was prepared by the previous two; the Polish author was already known - at least in the theatrical environment, they remembered his early plays, caricatures and stories, followed - as far as possible - the development of his work and dreamed that someday... maybe... it would be possible to -put it. Perestroika, glasnost, etc. provided such an opportunity. You don’t have to publish the author, you don’t have to mention him, but you can’t forbid him to be remembered. And people remembered. Without this memory, there would not have been a whole series of Mrozhekov’s productions at the Chelovek Studio Theater, including “Striptease” (directed by Lyudmila Roshkovan) - the most “long-lasting” of all his performances, and the underground “Emigrants” (directed by Mikhail Mokeev), would not have played for 17 years in a row at the St. Petersburg theater on the Fontanka “Tango” (directed by Semyon Spivak).

The peak of Mrozhek's popularity in Russia came in the 1988/89 season, when more of his pieces were staged than either before or since. The outbreak of interest was not accidental. Mrozhek appeared on the Russian stage at the most opportune moment: freed from censorship, the theater - aware of its backwardness in the field of stage technology, tired of the journalistic squabbles about the historical past that filled Russian drama - rushed in search of new dramatic material that would allow not only refresh the acting skills, but would also be in keeping with the spirit of the times. “Unexpectedly” - thirty years late - the theater of the absurd that appeared on the horizon was received with enthusiasm. Mrozhek triumphantly enters the Russian stage. And it is very indicative in what “company”: Beckett, Ionesco, Genet. Moreover, it was Mrozhek who turned out to be most understandable to the simple viewer, who was not prepared to perceive this type of drama, which has become classic in the West, but is practically unknown in Russia. It is also important that the gaps in the education of the Russian viewer were not limited to this - in the late 80s it turned out that there were many blank spots on the cultural map (the philosophy of Berdyaev and Solovyov, the work of Nabokov, Gumilyov, Brodsky, Tsvetaeva, Remizov...); all this was printed, studied, commented on and mastered at an incredible pace. The fact that Mrozhek’s work was not lost in the avalanche of new names and trends is a merit, first of all, of the directors. Moreover, in a narrow circle of intellectuals, the dramaturgy of the absurd “went from hand to hand” in printouts, and stage performances significantly outpaced the publication of translations.

The “Theater of the Absurd” turned out to be the key that opened the door for the Polish playwright that not a single one of his compatriots was allowed to enter. There was nothing similar in the history of cultural contacts between Russia and Poland. Polish drama was represented on the Russian stage very modestly, and Mrozek's almost obligatory presence on the posters of the late 1980s and early 1990s was a real event, his plays were staged in capitals and provinces, from Vilnius and Minsk to Yerevan and Komsomolsk-on-Amur - throughout the Soviet Union.

The “quantitative” success of the 1988–1990s did not immediately translate into “qualitative” success. The short, condensed form of one-act plays interested the young Russian avant-garde, which overfed Stanislavsky's system and rushed in search of a new stage language. The theme of Mrozhek’s parable plays also turned out to be close to the Russian audience: the state shamelessly invading personal living space, manipulating people with the help of ideological clichés and slogans, fear of power leading to the loss of one’s own self. Perhaps the performances of that period were not distinguished by the novelty of their interpretation, but they introduced the author’s name into wide theatrical use, and most importantly, translations that had been gathering dust in library departments began to appear in print.

A characteristic feature of the fourth period was the elimination of the backlog: starting with “Portrait” , Mrozek's plays appear on Russian stages no later than a year after their Polish premieres, and Widows », staged in Moscow in January 1994 under the title “Banana”, turned out to be the first foreign premiere of the play. At the same time, in the 90s, some doubts appeared about the longevity of interest in the work of the Polish author. Mrozhek occupies Russian theaters together with the absurdists and, together with them, begins to gradually disappear from the posters to give way to the fledgling modern national drama. The repertoire changes observed in the Russian theater in the 1980-1990s could be schematically expressed as follows: from journalistic drama through the theater of the absurd to the drama of the so-called “new wave”. The mechanism of this process seems to be quite transparent. In the mid-1980s - when political and aesthetic freedom seemed to be concepts of the same order - social drama was especially popular, and the stage was filled with "chernukha" - plays that demonstrated disgusting reality, degradation of values, lack of prospects, but also theater, and, more importantly, the viewer quickly got tired of all this. Isolated from the world theatrical process and its own past, the Russian theater began to fill gaps that were no longer historical, but of an aesthetic nature. Studying with Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, and Mrozhek allowed directors to take a different look at the work of Russian playwrights. For the Russian stage, Mrozhek’s dramaturgy turned out to be a valuable experience - it played the role of a kind of catalyst, which not only “provoked” the emergence of new acting techniques and means of expression, but also mercilessly exposed the helplessness of those who turned to Mrozhek’s work in pursuit of fashion. Directorial and acting failures exposed the irrelevance and inadequacy of old theatrical forms and showed that it is impossible to change without changing, it is impossible to take on a new type of dramaturgy without taking into account new stage requirements.

The fashion for absurdity has gone, but interest in Mrozhek’s work has remained and “stabilized” at the level of 2-3 premieres per season, and the geography of productions is still expanding. Mrozhek is now rarely staged, but aptly: almost everyone new performance becomes an event in theatrical life, and productions are distinguished by their novelty of approach. Mrozhek's plays remain attractive to the Russian stage, and perhaps this stability is more indicative than the theatrical boom of the late 80s: if today a director takes on Mrozhek's production, then this is no longer a tribute to fashion, but an internal need.

Russian productions of Mrozhek's plays differ significantly, if not dramatically, from Polish ones. Two mutually exclusive trends can be distinguished: on the one hand, Mrozek, who was perceived as an absurdist author, served as a reason for theatrical experimentation; on the other hand, the Russian stage tradition and acting school forced actors to seek and, more surprisingly, find deep psychological truth in his sketchy characters. And although main feature The perception of Mrozhek in Russia was still a look “through the glasses” of the absurd; it would, however, be a great simplification to reduce Mrozhek’s entire “career” in Russia only to the fashion for the absurd. The end of the 1980s was not only a turning point, but also a crisis: disappointment, collapse of ideals, revaluation of values ​​- these are character traits this period. Interest in plays of Mrozhekov's type is explained by the similarity of sentiments prevailing in post-war Europe and post-communist Russia, especially since the freshness of dramatic material opened up new opportunities for the theater. Mrozhek's plays enriched the theatrical language, forced directors to go beyond the boundaries of the known, actors to look for a manner of performance appropriate for vague dialogues and schematic characters; in a word, for many they have become a real school of conceptual directing and conventional theater, an exciting adventure and a kind of master class.

Unlike the Polish theater, in the Russian theater - despite the thirty-year censorship ban (or perhaps precisely because of it) - Mrozhek did not acquire the status of an acutely social author. The political slogan of his work: “the fight against communism” - exploited so actively in Poland that when this slogan lost relevance, Mrozhek’s plays fell from posters like overripe apples - was practically not heard on the Russian stage. Where the Polish viewer saw sharp political satire, the Russian viewer looked for and found psychological drama. The socio-political orientation, in a sense, is generally alien to Russian culture, so the theater persistently looked for something hidden deep inside Mrozhek, ignoring what was visible to the naked eye, preferring the universal to the concrete political, exploiting psychological and everyday motives. Mrozhek might seem too dry and critical to Russian viewers. Overly intellectual. His “cold cruelty” towards his own heroes came into conflict with the established Russian tradition, according to which the author must, if not sympathize with everyone “humiliated and insulted,” then at least treat him with understanding. Although Mrozek revealed the operation of socio-psychological mechanisms, he refused to sympathize with them. This conflict between established tradition and Mrozek's approach sometimes made viewers suspect the Polish author of misanthropy. Even the most loyal fans of the master, which, without a doubt, include director and actor Roman Kozak, reproached him for emotional coldness and indifference to the characters. Kozak, working on the play “Love in Crimea,” which, however, did not arouse much interest among the Russian public and quickly disappeared from the Moscow Art Theater repertoire, admitted: “For him, our country is of thematic interest because of its exceptional sincerity, which Mrozhek himself probably lacks a little.” enough." This idea sounded even sharper among theater critics, who constantly reproached actors and directors for the fact that, when playing Mrozhek, they focused not on the guilt of the characters, as the author intended, but on their misfortune, which supposedly contradicted his idea.

The lack of keen interest among Russian directors in politics, especially in the “fight against communism” that Mrozhek tirelessly led, changes the meaning of his plays. The political motives that dominate in Polish stage interpretations and seem to be close to our experience were not heard in the Russian theater, which resolutely preferred to deal with universal human problems, extracting from Mrozek’s drama the absurdity of the cosmic structure of the world, rather than the illogicalities of a specific political system. Why? The answer is largely due to the difference in understanding the tasks of the theater and its place in the culture and society of Poland and Russia. The Russian theater - after several attempts and subsequent failures (both artistic and commercial) - prefers not to particularly sort out its relationship with the communist past. After a period of intensive research into the “blank spots,” historical and political themes do not even fade into the background, but from the theater altogether, giving way to ethical and aesthetic issues. A deep analysis of the mechanisms of human enslavement and manipulation, interference of the state and authorities in private life ceases to interest the public, since it does not correspond to its needs and desires, as a result of which the stage interpretation of Mrozek requires a much broader context than that used in the Polish theater, for of which one of the most significant issues is the exposure of the socialist system. In Poland, Mrozhek’s work has always been perceived through the prism of politics, where the art of reading between the lines sometimes reached such heights that the public saw political hints even where the author did not have them. And in general, a typical feature of Polish theater has always been its commitment to politics. There the theater more than once went underground, actively participating in political struggle, which was understood as a struggle for independence, for the preservation national identity. In Russia, the theater, with the exception of a short period of agitprop, did not engage in pure politics and from those imposed on it in Soviet time the functions of an ideological tribune fled into psychologism. Its characteristic feature was metaphysical and literary character. This alone was enough for Mrozhek's plays in Russia to cease to be political commentaries. Moreover, in the Soviet Union the grotesque turned out to be too weak a camouflage for unsafe ideas, and after perestroika the need for Aesopian language completely disappeared. However, it turned out that an apolitical interpretation of Mrozek’s plays is not only possible, but also interesting, since thanks to the polysemy of the text, the characters move into the context personal experience, and the universality of the method of reduction to absurdity and the humor of the dialogues make it possible to pose questions of a universal human nature. Considering the experience of Russian theatrical productions, Polish interpreters of Mrozhek can even be reproached for narrowing Mrozhek, reducing the content of his plays to political satire. But the Russian theater, which bypassed Mrozhek the politician, impoverished Mrozhek to some extent. There were, however, positive sides: Russian theater managed to solve the problem of “talking heads”, which Polish directors could not cope with. Polish criticism, for its part, more than once scolded Mrozhek’s plays for being static, unstageable, and excessive intellectualism, but Russian actors were not bothered by Mrozhek’s static “talking heads”; thanks to their technical capabilities, they easily “filled” such a “head” with inner life.

At the end of perestroika, the Russian theater’s attempt to abandon Stanislavsky’s system (until then officially accepted and the only one recognized in the country) failed miserably. Stage theory and the directing and acting method developed by Stanislavsky are still cultivated in Russia and form the basis of practical training, constituting the pride of the Russian theater. In the Polish theater, relations with Stanislavsky's system did not work out for a number of political reasons, and the development of acting took a different path. According to eyewitnesses, after watching the Russian “Emigrants” and “Striptease,” which were shown at the 1990 Krakow festival dedicated to Mrozhek, the author was touched by the respect with which Russian theaters treated his texts. The detailed and subtle psychological elaboration, typical of most Russian productions, is the original contribution of the Russian theater to Mrozhek's reading. Does such psychological deepening distort Mrozhek’s schematic images? big picture his dramaturgy? Evil Mrozhek with " human face" - why not? His cold, dispassionately intellectual dramaturgy seemed to provoke internal resistance among the performers. The actors persistently searched for psychological motivations for the characters’ behavior - this is how a strange hybrid of conceptual directing and psychologized acting, sincerity and intelligence appeared, which is characteristic feature Russian Mrozhekov's performances recent years. With such a psychologically realistic manner of execution, Mrozhek’s grotesquely absurdist text receives an unexpectedly strong comic charge, because the author’s humor sounds especially clear, and the dialogue acquires unexpected expressiveness. The Russian history of Mrozhek's stage life opened up a new field of interpretative possibilities, which the Polish theater had passed by indifferently. A deep rethinking of the playwright’s works by the Russian theater made it possible to escape from traditional Polish readings, to see a different face of Mrozhek and to expand the boundaries of understanding beyond which the writer himself may not have intended to go.

Biography

Slawomir Mrozek was born on June 29, 1930 in Bozhenczyn, near Kraków, the son of a postman.

He began his literary career in the Krakow newspaper Dziennik Polski, where at first he stayed “as an editorial errand boy”, was engaged in current newspaper work, and wrote on various topics. Published drawings in a popular weekly magazine Przekruj. The first feuilletons and humoresques were published in 1950. The works published in periodicals comprised the collection “Practical Half-Shells” (), 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.

At the end of the 1950s, the writer left journalism, turning to drama, and in 1958 his first play, The Police, was staged.

He left the country (but retained his citizenship), lived in Paris, the USA, Germany, Italy and Mexico. C is a French citizen. In the early 1990s, S. Mrozhek's plays were staged in many Soviet theaters, but quickly disappeared from the stage due to low attendance.

C published notes and drawings in Newspaper Wyborcza. In 1996 he returned to Poland. He survived a stroke, which resulted in aphasia, and in the fight against it Mrozhek wrote an autobiography Belshazzar(). B left the country again and lived in France.

On the morning of August 15, 2013, the publishing house Noir Sur Blanc reported the death of the writer in Nice.

Creation

Editions in Russian

• I want to be a horse: satirical stories and plays. M.: Young Guard, 1990. - 320 pp., 100,000 copies.
• How I fought and other equally amazing stories from various books and magazines, 1951-1993. M.: Vakhazar, 1995
• My beloved Crooked Legs. St. Petersburg: Amphora, 2000. - 312 p.
• Testarium: Selected plays and prose. M.: Art-Flex; Vakhazar, 2001-832 p.
• Return Diary. M.: MIK, 2004
• Belshazzar. Autobiography. M.: New Literary Review, 2008. - 232 pp., 1,000 copies.

Productions on the Russian stage

• Moscow Theater of Satire, CONTRACT. Directed by Mikhail Sonnenstrahl, 1988
• Theater of the Russian Army, CONTRACT FOR MURDER. Director Alexander Vilkin, 1988
• Moscow Art Theater named after. A.P. Chekhov, PORTRAIT. Director Valentin Kozmenko-Delinde, 1988
• St. Petersburg Youth Theater, TANGO. Directed by Semyon Spivak, 1988
• Academic Theater named after. V. Mayakovsky, THE HUNCHBACK. Director Andrey Goncharov, 1992
• Theater "Baltic House", STRIPTEASE. Directed by Victor Kramer, 1994
• Moscow Theatre of Drama“Benefit Performance”, LOVE TOUR (based on the play “Summer Day”), 1996
• Modern Theater, HAPPY EVENT. Director Svetlana Vragova, 1998
• Theater named after Lensoveta, BANANA. Director Oleg Levakov, 2001
• "Theatr 101" (St. Petersburg), EMIGRANTS. Director Igor Selin, 2002
• “Enterprise of Ekaterina Orlova” (St. Petersburg), CONTRACT. Director Evgeny Voloshin, 2008
• Kursk Drama Theatre, MAGICAL NIGHT. Director Artem Manukyan, 2008
• “Our Theater” (St. Petersburg), STRIPTEASE. Director Lev Stukalov, 2011
• Theater named after Ermolova, TANGO. Director Vladimir Andreev
• Polish theater in Moscow, TANGO. Director Evgeniy Lavrenchuk

Television productions

• "Enchanted Night", directed by Vladimir Geller, Lentelefilm, 1989
• "Happy Event", director Svetlana Vragova, Performance at the Modern Theater, 2002
• "Contract", director Vladimir Mirzoev, New Wave Production commissioned by State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company "Culture", 2012

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Literature

• Mrożek i Mrożek: materiały z sesji naukowej zorganizowanej przez Zakład Teatru Instytutu Filologii Polskiej Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 18-21 czerwca 1990/ Ewa Widota-Nyczek, Józef Opalski, eds. Kraków: Mrożek Festival, 1994
• Sidoruk E. Anthropologia i groteska w dziełach Sławomira Mrożka. Białystok: Tow. Literackie im. Adama Mickiewicza, 1995
• Sugiera M. Dramaturgia Sławomira Mrożka. Krakow: Universitas, 1996
• Stephan H. Transcending the absurd: drama and prose of Sławomir Mrożek. Amsterdam; Atlanta: Rodopi, 1997
• Zmatlík I. Čechov a Mrożek, aneb, Listování v paměti. Praha: Arthur, 2001
• Gębala S. Teatralność i dramatyczność: Gombrowicz, Różewicz, Mrożek. Bielsko-Biała: Wydawn. ATH, 2005

Notes

Awards and recognition

• Kościelski Foundation Literary Prize ()
• Austrian Franz Kafka Prize ()
• Honorary Citizen of Krakow ()
• Commander with star of the Order of the Renaissance of Poland ()
• Order of the Legion of Honor ()
• Gold Medal for Cultural Achievement Gloria Artis ()
• Prize of the Polish PEN Club named after. Yana Parandovsky (2010)
• Honorary Doctor of the University of Silesia ()

Links

• in the "Magazine Hall"
• . Inout.Ru. Retrieved August 16, 2013. .
• Yanovskaya K.// New Poland. - 2006. - No. 3.

Excerpt characterizing Mrozhek, Slawomir