Polska prapremiera "Prometeusza w okowach" Ajschylosa w przekładzie Stefana Srebrnego jako zagadnienie badawcze

Abstract

Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, translated by Professor Stefan Srebrny, was the foundation for the Polish premiere, which was performed in Teatr Polski in Bydgoszcz on the 2nd of December 1961. Stanisław Bugajski, the director of the performance, made the significant transformations in the translation, making cuts in a text and abandoning the archaizing applied by Srebrny in the spirit of the dramatic poetry of Stanisław Wyspiański. The cooperation of Bugajski and the stage designer Jan Kosiński, and the composer Zofia Łosakiewicz, was intended as an artistic experiment in the domain of the mystery-oratory stage form of the ancient Greek tragedy. Such a vision, in principle, complied with the views of Professor Srebrny in relation to the staging of the Antiquity in a modern theatre. Due to the pressure of the political circumstances, the content of the premiere performance was updated in an attempt to impose a message adhering to the governing ideology. The acting of Halina Słojewska as Io and of Jan Zdrojewski as Prometheus did not lose its artistic value. The premiere in Bydgoszcz was connected with the performance of Lysistrata (Gromiwoja/Lysistrate) by Aristophanes in Teatr Wielki in Częstochowa on the 5th of November 1955. The dramatic development, staging and direction were conducted by Eugeniusz Aniszczenko ― a regime creator who reffered to his cooperation with Stefan Srebrny, having been his student at the Stefan Batory Univesity in Vilnius. Actually, the basis for the premiere in Częstochowa was a modernistic translation by Edmund Żegota Cięglewicz. Only the theatre programme included a text concerning the Aristophanes’s antique comedy written by Professor Srebrny, the prominent Polish translator of the comedy writer’s legacy. The grounds for Professor Stefan Srebrny’s text was the intention to commemorate The 2400th Anniversary of birth of Aristophanes, as officially proclaimed by the World Peace Committee. The performance in Częstochowa was used in the course of a disintegration operation of the secret service of the PRL (the People’s Republic of Poland) by the introduction of an anti-church message against Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, the Primate of Poland, at that time interned in Komańcza. Concurrently, the artistic output of Professor Stefan Srebrny, the stage producer of Oedipus the King by Sophocles in the Pohulanka Theatre in Vilnius in 1935 underwent political manipulation. The personal drama of Stefan Srebrny and people close to him has been revealed in the study in relation to the scientific and artistic achievements of the said scholar. The study also refers to the complicated history of the Church and the state in 1945―1962 and to the context of the modern history of the Polish theatre.