[In the following excerpt from a work originally published in Polish in 1972, Krzyż anowski discusses Fredro and Korzeniowski as pioneers of Polish Romantic drama.]

The leading representatives of Polish Romanticism—Mickiewicz, Słowacki, Krasiński and Norwid—all endeavoured to create modern Polish drama. The tragic historical events enacted in their times meant that none of them were destined to see their dramatic visions presented on the stage, that they were writing for the "grandson to come", for audiences of some undefined future time. But what was the actual situation as regards theatre repertoire in those times? The answer to this question is given by the names of two writers, almost of the same age, but representing radically differing stages in the development of European drama, namely Fredro and Korzeniowski.

Count Aleksander Fredro (1795-1876), as he was wont to sign himself (for his father, a landowner who had made a fortune, purchased the title of count in Vienna) was a man whose biography contained some exceptional and some very ordinary features. Barely out of his boyhood with only a smattering of education, he was swept into the stream of historical events, when in 1809 the troops of the Duchy of Warsaw entered Galicia and the sixteen-year-old youth, Fredro enlisted; after many military adventures he was only to leave the army after the fall of Napoleon. His memoirs of this period in his life are brilliantly presented in a volume called Topsy-Turvy Talk (Trzy po trzy) written about the year 1845, when the perspective of time had given his adventures the charm of days gone for ever. Back in Poland, this demobilized captain and adjutant of the emperor's general staff became a rustic gentleman, which did not mean that he had no literary or political aspirations. In Warsaw, his elder brother Maksymilian, former officer of Napoleon's army, aide-de-camp to Prince Jó zef Poniatowski and later of Tsar Alexander I, combined the duties of a general with literary work, winning laurels as a playwright (classicist tragedies and translations of Racine) and the young Fredro, not to be outdone, managed to get his play Mr Moneyful (Pan Geldhab) staged and this made him realize that his calling was to be a leading comedy writer of his times. He continued this literary activity for nearly fifteen years, during which more plays of his were put on in the theatre, until 1835, when he suddenly laid down his pen, considering himself gravely insulted by the vicious, critical attacks levelled against him almost simultaneously by the fierce political agitator and Romantic writer Seweryn Goszczyński and a man of his own milieu, the Galician Count Leszek Dunin Borkowski. Aleksander Fredro did, it is true, go back to his literary work after fifteen years, but these works were only brought to light after his death in 1876. This second period of literary activity was to bring quite a lot of political writings, particularly during the period of the Spring of Nations, when one of his works, regarded as lése-majesté all but led to him being sentenced to a long term of imprisonment. Thus, in the middle of the 19th century, this "honest man" of Galicia was also to fall under the curse that hung over the lives of the generation "born in slavery, fettered at birth".

Fredro's theatrical debut was in 1821 and he fell silent as a comedy writer in 1835, two dates which coincide almost exactly with the dates of Mickiewicz's Ballads and Romances and his Master Thaddeus, that is, milestones in the history of Polish Romantic literature. Aleksander Fredro's attitude towards Romanticism is one of the controversial questions of Polish literature, which was settled "on principle" without taking certain facts into consideration, as a result of which the writer whose most intensive and prolific output coincided with the creative years of Adam Mickiewicz, was looked upon either as a precursor of Romanticism or as its opponent. The misunderstandings that arose because of this meant that the origin of Fredro's works was treated one-sidedly, for no consideration was given to the differences between the motives that led him to start his literary activity and the conditions in which his literary career developed. And it is precisely the interaction of these two factors that account for the specific and individual character of the works of this author.

As regards motive, his stay in Paris was behind his decision to write comedies, his imagination being stimulated by his first contact with the theatre in that city, where strains of the swan-song of the classicist comedy originating from the works of Moli ère were already sounding. Going to the theatres of the Paris boulevards, Fredro, who as a boy had composed little comedies for entertainment in his own home, observed the traditional devices brought to perfection by several generations of Moli ère's imitators. But when he started writing his own comedies, he was living in quite different conditions, due to the emergence of the Romantic trend in Polish literature. The result of this duality was something quite unusual. The writer, who looked at life with the eyes of his generation, a generation of romantics, and expressed his observations in the form of comedies of classicist structure, put literary historians in a very difficult position, for they had become accustomed to classify literary phenomena according to certain accepted criteria. But his message had its eloquence and—like all classics—still has its eloquence for theatre-goers, who are not concerned with the criteria applied by the researcher and expect a literary work to provide them with entertainment, if nothing else.

And Fredro entertained his audiences from the very beginning to the end of his career, introducing ideas into his works which were intended not so much to strengthen or improve the morals of his audiences as to evoke laughter, in other words, true comedies in the strict sense of the word. And for this reason he did not reject farcical ideas, which did not find favour with the Romantic critics, although it was not this element of his works that they attacked. So in Ladies and Hussars (Damy i huzary) and Good Lord! What the Devil is This! (Gwałtu, co się dzieje) Fredro gave us two excellent farces, composed of an unending chain of comic situations. In the former, these situations were created by the belated love affairs of sworn bachelors well advanced in years, caused by the "invasion of ladies" who arrived in a remote locality where a typical small garrison was stationed. The hilarious piling up of comic situations does not, however, become so farcical as to hide the truth of life. An elderly major realizes that he was on the point of "making the same sort of fool of himself when he hears from one of his companions of the same age that he intends to get married, following the example of their commander. The proverbial motif of the distorting mirror is replaced here by observation of the motives behind human behaviour. At the same time, through all the complications of the farce, one senses a situation which is far from comic. A girl who wins the affections of an elderly officer is in love with his young nephew, so the farce contains elements of conflict that are no laughing matter. It is only in Good Lord! What the Devil is This!, where the scene is set in the little town of Osiek, known for the proverbial stupidity of its populace, and the action is based on the motif of "the rule of the fair sex" that we have pure situational comedy of the circus type. The heroines of this farce are the garrulous wives of the town, who make their unfortunate husbands do all the housework and take their place in managing the affairs of the town, only to return to their kitchens when danger allegedly threatens. The artistic aim of the author is the same as that of comedy through the ages—to make people roar with laughter.

But these excursions into the realm of comedy for comedy's sake, though repeated later too, were just excursions, for the author of Ladies and Hussars was influenced by the literary tradition that made comedy an instrument of instructing the reader or audience, making fun of bad habits and customs, so these accents are usually to be found in Fredro's works, although they are never brought to the fore to overshadow the scenes from life that he paints. They were more evident in his earliest works, in Mr Moneyful (Pan Geldhab, 1821,) and Husband and Wife (Maż i żona, 1822). The comedy of Mr Moneyful, a nouveau riche social climber, which was quite topical at the time it was written, for in the life of those days there were a number of people who had by their cunning amassed fortunes as suppliers to the army, tells of the very amusing adventures of the "swaggering fool" and his daughter in hot pursuit of a good match, a prince without a penny to his name. All through this comedy in verse we find mockery of the snobbery of the new rich, exemplified in the concluding couplet:

Of princely estate didst think too much, the prince of money only,
You were left out in the cold, your daughter jilted and lonely. . . .

In Husband and Wife, we have a comedy of four characters; apart from the husband and wife we have the friend of the family and the maid, and thus instead of the eternal triangle we have four persons and four love intrigues, making this play different from previous ones on the subject of marriage and betrayal. It is a comedy which could easily have been turned into a melodrama ending with murder or at the best a duel, or into a satire on the immorality of a world in which the Count deceives his wife and has a love affair with the maid and in turn is deceived by his wife who is also having a love affair, the whole thing ending in a compromise, the only victim being the maid, who is sent to a nunnery. But it is a calmly observed, objective picture of life. There was, from time to time some indignation at the amoral character of the comedy, and an attempt was even made to heighten its eloquent message by defence of the alleged victim of the whims of the highborn. The thing that makes Husband and Wife different from other comedies is the realistic approach to the whole problem, the new presentation of the soubrette originally created by Molière, as a participant in various intrigues on a par with her employers, or in other words, the use in comedy of the principle of realism, found rather in the romantic novels of the times than in plays.

This break-away from the conventions of the comedy determined the character of Fredro's next three works, which are generally regarded as his best. They are Mr Jovial (Pan Jowialski), Maiden's Vows (Śluby panieńskie) and Revenge (Zemsta), and a fourth, Life Annuity (Doż ywocie) is usually included among Fredro's recognized masterpieces, which marked the close of the first period of Fredro's activity as a playwright. Mr Jovial is one of the most singular of his plays, for it is a complete departure from the first ones that had a simple one-thread plot and combines old and new motifs into a richly constructed whole. So we have the traditional story known from Baryka's little comedy Peasant into King, the only difference being that it is rather an upside-down version, for the poor man who is to be made a fool of for the amusement of the inhabitants of the manor house turns the tables on them when they discover that the "poor man" has played a trick on them. In Fredro's comedy the poor man is a writer called Ludmir who goes wandering in disguise searching for new experiences and is quite capable of making a dupe of his opponent, the squire's son, and what is more, when inside the manor where the inmates intend to amuse themselves at his cost, he finds his lost mother and wins the affections of the fiancee of the squire's son. So the old story is enriched by Fredro's ideas to such an extent that the comedy seems to be one with a multi-thread plot, a comedy showing Polish life, in which an artist wandering through the country in the summer was nothing uncommon in those days. Another thing increasing the impression of rich content is the large number of characteristic types going to make up the family of Mr Jovial, namely, the old gentleman himself, who loves telling anecdotes and quoting proverbs, his son, an idiot and the husband of a snobbish vixen, his daughter, a maiden lady whose head has been turned by reading romances. All of these characters live in a world of their own and each of them stands out distinctly against those surrounding them. Prominence is given to old Mr Jovial who has a proverb or a tale to tell on every occasion, a seemingly inexhaustible store of such entertaining anecdotes that they are enough to make a separate thread of the story by themselves. This comedy, which is one of the most amusing of Fredro's repertoire, in which laughter bubbles up constantly from beginning to end, is almost a farce, an effect heightened by the prosaic course of events, but it also contains certain satirical elements, and satire of a political nature. For there is undoubtedly some truth in the suggestion that Mr Jovial is a caricature of the systems prevailing in central and eastern Europe in the period of the Holy Alliance, though this side of the comedy should not be overestimated. However, Fredro's political poems and his later comedy The Revolver (Rewolwer), allow one to assume that the spectacle of the "Sultan" in Mr Jovial was aimed against the system of the Russian government that proclaimed it had originated from God.

The comedy of the salon, Maidens' Vows or the Magnetism of the Heart (Śluby panieńskie czyli magnetyzm serca, 1833) is quite different, the very title indicating that it is linked with the Polish sentimental novel genre, from which one of its characters, the tender lover, is taken. It also contains accents of the romantic-magnetic notions of the birth of love and what causes it to flower, notions that the reader will have already have found in Forefathers' Eve. But it is not the sentiments of the romantic novel that are brought to the fore, rather a subtle and penetrating analysis of the awakening of feelings of love, the tone being a far cry from the romantic stereotypes and more like the light comedies of the 18th century in which "a dandy goes acourting", or a genre scene from the life of Napoleonic officers, excellently described by Fredro in his Topsy Turvy Talk. The new dandy, bearing the name of Gustaw, which had its eloquence for readers of Mickiewicz's Forefathers' Eve, is trying to win the hand of one of the maidens, and succeeds by a simple artifice. Pretending to be wounded he asks her to write a letter on his behalf to his alleged lady love from whom he is parted. The maiden agrees and writes the letter, but while Gustaw is dictating it to her, she shows some confusion, betraying that her attitude towards him is far from indifferent, and so the comedy comes to its happy end. It is an unusual comedy, for contrary to Mr Jovial, it has very little action and the plot is built on an intrigue so thinly disguised that a few explanatory words would have sufficed to replace the letter which causes the "magnetic action" of the heart. And if the preceding and following comedies by Fredro could be called "epic" comedies, Maidens' Vows is more of a lyrical comedy, on condition that this term is not understood to mean the sombre and passionate Romantic lyric poetry, but the serene and elegant love poems of earlier times.

Revenge (1834) again is the epic type of comedy written at the same time as Master Thaddeus and, though this was unintentional, has some kinship with Mickiewicz's work, which was also based on a traditional motif known from the drama of earlier times: Shakespeare used this motif in his Romeo and Juliet and Zabłocki based a comedy on it (Sarmatism), or rather on the work of his French predecessor. It is the subject of stubborn antagonism between two neighbours, which is brought to an end by the marriage of their children. It is a motif not only taken from literature, for it reflects quite a frequent and typical situation in people's lives. Fredro might well have based his comedy on the story of the old castle of Odrzykoń, which his wife brought to him in her dowry, or on the tales told in the Lublin region, which were recorded by Koźmian, many years after the writing of Revenge, in his Diaries (Pamiętniki). Wherever Fredro took the original plot from, he worked upon it in his own way, concentrating attention on two deadly enemies, neighbours who keep on picking quarrels with each other about very trifling matters. They are the tempestuous Mr Raptusiewicz, an old military man whose bark is worse than his bite, and the wily old lawyer Mr Milczek, out for gain, who bites without barking. These two men of completely opposite characters might be compared to the lion and the fox in the old fables. In creating these two characters the author was clearly aiming at preserving the "local colour". Among his papers a small dictionary of archaic words was found, compiled from Linde's dictionary. He makes such skilful and subtle use of these words in his octosyllabic verse that he obtains a specific atmosphere of the old times throughout the play, without any impression of artificiality. He links up his two antagonists very ingeniously with another character, Mr Papkin, a man who always pays visits at meal times, a liar, coward, humbug and braggart who brings into Revenge something of the atmosphere of the old folk comedies of Italy—the commedia dell'arte—or similar Polish comedies modelled on them. In comparison with these strongly drawn characters, the lovers appear rather insipid. Their marriage, the result of the unsuccessful "revenge" of Mr Raptusiewicz, is actually a mechanical device to bring the action to the desired end, the "action proper" being the plots and counter-plots of the two antagonistic neighbours, who are typical characters of the old Polish culture, brought to life in two highly individual dramatic creations.

Chronological considerations usually dictate the addition of a fourth of Fredro's comedies to the previous three, namely Life Annuity (Doż ywocie), the story of an usurer trying to get his hands on what has remained of the estate of the young rake Mr Birbancki. This play, despite the excellently drawn character of Mr Łatka the usurer, does not come up to the level of the other three comedies as it contains an excess of farcical ideas.

Returning to his literary work after fifteen years, Fredro wrote nearly as many comedies as he did before 1834, but none of them attained the high artistic level of his earlier works and none of them won such great popularity as Revenge or Maidens' Vows. But there are among them some very good comedies, for instance, The Revolver, which is an excellent satire on the relations in a police state, which Fredro locates in distant Parma, although the action might just as well be set in Cracow or Lwó w about the year 1861, when the play was written. It tells of the adventures of the cowardly Baron Mortara, residing in a town where the possession of firearms is a punishable offence, whom malicious fate presents with a cigar lighter in the shape of a revolver. This motif is built up into a satire with grotesque and farcical accents and a wealth of comic situations reminiscent of the times of Mr Jovial. Another play written about the same time The Fosterling (Wychowanka) is quite different in character, being a comedy of customs and manners, which did not please the great admirers of the playwright, for it lacked the hilarious scenes they had come to expect from this author. And indeed, the story of Zosia, a country girl, the alleged daughter of a forester Bajduła, brought up in a manor house under the guardianship of the Morderski family, is more like the "plays" of the end of the 19th century than the comedies usually written by Fredro, and even less like the plays in Moli è re's style. True, the finale is traditional—an unexpected change in the situation of the "fosterling" when it turns out that she is the daughter of a gentleman who fought in the Rising whom the forester had taken into his home—and brings the happy end of the comedy, but the life of the girl in the manor house of the Morderski family, the blackmail to which she is subjected by her alleged father, the eternal faultfinding of an ill-tempered vixen in the home of her guardian and the annoying attentions of the suitors for her hand, or rather for the dowry which her guardian, believing her to be his illegitimate daughter, intends to give her, all creates an atmosphere of gloom which audiences in later times were to know so well from the dramatic story of another fosterling, in T. Rittner's James the Fool (Głupi Jakub). But The Fosterling was an unusual example of Fredro's realism, which was heightened by the bitter experiences of the author, who intended shortly to publish his Notes of an Old Man (Zapiski starucha), a collection of pungent aphorisms on various afflictions of human life, published after the death of the author (1880) in the volume Works (Dzieła), as were his memoirs Topsy Turvy Talk.

No particular difficulties are encountered in summing up the works of Aleksander Fredro and establishing his attitude towards the literary trends he came in contact with. Brought up in the traditions of the Enlightenment period, he reached artistic maturity at a time when Romanticism was flourishing and the end of his creative life coincided with the decline of Romantic literature. Although he allegedly turned his back on Romanticism, his works came very near to its realistic trend, which in Polish literature was only rarely found in epic and dramatic poetry, though it was fully evident in novels and comedies in prose. The attitude of the writer to the contemporary literary trends was a result of his particular kind of artistic talent, remarkable for his keen perception and observation of his surroundings, his great sense of the comic side of life and his predilection for a specific style of language. His comedies bring a rich gallery of pictures, large and small of the life of the landowner class, a wealth of details of customs and manners, which can equal the best novels of the times in which he lived, and his multitude of human characters, usually drawn with emphasis on their individuality mostly appear in comic situations which are treated with light humour, ironically or in the satirical vein. So we have resolute young girls, young rakes, old servants, contented old people—all of whom are characters the playwright was very fond of creating. His artistic language, both prose and verse, is enriched by a variety of excellent ideas, plenty of wit and generously seasoned with gnomic elements, proverbs and aphorisms penned with ease by the author, who liked to quote Andrzej Maksymilian Fredro, his predecessor of the 17th century, and in his old age, followed his example and wrote his own collection of maxims.

Fredro's great writing skill made all this possible. He had felt the urge to write from his early youth and his pen was never idle all through his life. He would write poems for himself and for his friends, very few of which were printed, but there are so many of them that they go to make up two large volumes of collected works. A thorough study of this "colloquial" poetry will one day show how the literary culture of the author developed and finally took shape, to find full expression in the verse and prose of his comedies, which were not written spontaneously but were altered and corrected many times, for the author spent a lot of time on them before his exacting requirements were fulfilled and the work was completed. And just how exacting he was towards himself is shown in his diary Topsy Turvy Talk, a seemingly chaotic and disorderly collection of stories about his childhood and youth and taking the reader up to the moment when as a young officer he gave up the military life and settled down to the life of a gentleman farmer. These colourful, pithy scenes, the boy's excursion in the Bieszczady Mountains, the adventures of the young officer in the army commanded by Prince J ó zef Poniatowski, his experience of the hardships of army life, crossing Europe on horseback, with episodes such as the march on Moscow and the battle of Leipzig, are all modelled on the method of composition used by Laurence Sterne, whose books (The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy) were greatly admired all over Europe due to their original structure and humour. Topsy Turvy Talk is the most outstanding example of "Sternism" in Polish prose.

Another pioneer of Polish drama, J ó zef Korzeniowski (1797-1863), a little younger than his fellow-countryman Fredro was just the opposite of the author of Revenge in every respect. A man with a very good education, who taught at the Krzemieniec Lyceum and who, towards the end of his life, became a high official organizing the educational system in Warsaw, including the Central Academy of Learning, was a serious scholar, the author of theoretical works on poetry, an untiring translator of dramas, including the works of Schiller and Shakespeare, and at the same time an unusually prolific writer. He published about fifty plays, that is, ten more than his eminent rival.

As a playwright, Korzeniowski worked hard, patiently and systematically carrying out a programme almost identical to that of Słowacki, with the aim of creating Poland's own national drama, and like the great, lone émigré writer, he carried out a large number of experiments before he found the path he wanted to take. And when he had achieved this he gained a position equal to that of Fredro's, or even higher up the scale, and managed to keep this position till the end of the 19th century, his plays being constantly included in the theatre repertoire and staged not only in public theatres, but also by amateur groups of players.

His experiments were aimed, first of all in the direction of historical tragedies, and his debut in this field was with The Monk (Mnich, 1830,), the story of the crime and penance of the exiled king Bolesław the Bold, written in the ancient style. Other plays which won popularity were his dramatized version of Malczewski's Maria, which was staged in Lwó w in 1831 and the play Dmitri and Maria (1843). Another play of this group was Andrzej Batory (1846), telling the tragic story of the efforts of the Bishop of Warmia and the king's nephew to win the throne of Transylvania. These first dramas show great mastery of the art of writing, but they lacked the vitality of real poetry. And it is rather amusing to note that Korzeniowski succeeded in putting this vitality into a play based on the life of the Huculs (highlanders of south-east Poland) with whom he came in contact during a holiday spent on the banks of the Czeremosz. He used the stories heard while he was there as the basis for his Carpathian Highlanders (Karpaccy gó rale, 1843,), a classic example of the melodrama genre, which told of the adventures of a noble youth who was recruited to the army by artifice, his desertion and his colourful life as a robber, which ended with his death on the gallows. By some strange coincidence, Korzeniowski's drama was written almost at the same time as Kraszewski's The Story of Sawka (Historia Sawki) and Pol's Scenes from Life and Travels (Obrazy z ż ycia i podróż y), going to make up a triptych which introduced into Polish literature the subject of the wrongs done to the peasants and their love of freedom. One of the lyrical interludes of Carpathian Highlanders, the song of freedom "A sash of red, with weapon hid there" ("Czerwony pas, za pasem broń") has become an unfailingly popular song, though the author's name is not generally known.

Almost at the same time as Carpathian Highlanders, Korzeniowski published a long comedy of customs and manners The Jews (Żydzi, 1843,), which was preceded by a few short pieces written to acquire proficiency in this field. The Jews gave a wide review of the prevailing customs and was an eloquent social satire, probably written under the influence of French drama, where the leading writer was Eugène Scribe, who was about the same age as the Polish writer. In this play Korzeniowski introduced problems which were earlier raised by the author of Fantasius and which were the subject of lively debate in the novels being written at the time, namely economic relations and their social consequences, the ruin of the estates of the magnates and the question of loans, in other words, problems which were to appear on the stages of Poland for many years to come. The gentlemen and the "semigents", as the upstarts on the make were called, the gentry, up to their eyes in debt and the Jewish bankers—this was a new world in which the Jews were not authentic adherents of the faith of Moses, but usurers bleeding the unfortunate debtors, that is, the titled landowners and the parvenues surrounding them.

The knife edge of his satire was aimed here at the privileged classes, not at the type of individual personified in Fredro's Mr Moneyful, but at a definite social group, which was also being attacked by Kraszewski in his novels, and who was to be aided in this by the author of The Jews.

Korzeniowski was nearer to Fredro in another field, namely in his comedy Madam Maiden (Panna męż atka, 1845,) regarded—and rightly so—as the best of his dramatic works. It is based on the same motif as Maidens' Vows, that is, the artifice employed to compel a young lady firmly resolved to stay single into making a confession of love, and this story, written with the same subtlety was given such an original form that there can be no mention of it having been written under the influence of Fredro's earlier work. Other comedies by Korzeniowski deserving of mention are The Old Husband (Stary Maż, 1842; and The Authoress (Autorka, 1849; based on the motif of Sappho, withdrawing from the life of a loved one who is in love with someone else. An elderly man who marries the young daughter of his friend, realises that he cannot make her happy; he chooses a young officer of the same name, contrives meetings to let their love grow and starts divorce proceedings to allow the young lovers to find fulfilment of their dreams. Korzeniowski, who had already provoked public opinion to charge him with philosemitism, threw down the gauntlet again with his play The Old Husband, which was a challenge to the current opinions of the power of love, showing this emotion in an unusually sublimated form, without any melodramatic effects such as are found in Słowacki's arch-romantic work Horsztyński.

In Korzeniowski's comedies, written also in Russia, where he worked for several years in lycea, and later in Warsaw, more individual features emerged in this writer's evolution, modern ideas which made him different from his predecessors. The playwright, who had left the world of the petty gentry and moved in the intellectual circles of the city, took the themes for his comedies from city life, introducing the townsfolk into the theatre, such characters as public officials and representatives of the theatrical world, and even (in his Master and Apprentice—Majster i czeladnik, 1847) found his characters among the artisans, thus bringing to the stage a side of life and its problems which had not so far caught the attention of playwrights.

All these new elements gradually led to a change in the old literary conventions but the process was slow, for the man who brought them into drama was a rather pedantic scholar and official, without the impetus of a real revolutionary, capable of overthrowing the old ideas, although he brought a lot of harsh criticism upon himself. However, he systematically introduced the principle of moderate realism in a field where he undoubtedly deserves the greatest credit, namely the theatre repertoire, which he produced in the course of thirty years, and which though not of the highest level, was good theatrical material. This continuator of Zabłocki, Bogusławski and of Fredro, who had then become silent, did not attain the peaks of drama, but he maintained the good level attained by his predecessors, added his own ideas and raised its rank, which in the conditions of those times not only had literary merit, but also social value. And it is in this light that one should look at Korzeniowski and his contribution to the Polish theatre. The example he set encouraged others to learn from him and strike out more boldly in the same direction, for instance, Stanisław Bogusławski—son of Wojciech—in Warsaw, the eminent historian Karol Szajnocha in Lwó w and the poet Władysław Syrokomla in Wilno.