The Drama of the saint in Stanisław Wyspiański and Thomas Stearns Eliot: some comparative sketches

LTReikšminiai žodžiai: Stanislaw Wyspianski; Tomas Sternsas Eliotas; Poezija; Stanislaw Wyspianski; Thomas Stearns Eliot; Poetry.

ENMy original intention was to discuss Stanisław Wyspiański’s dramas in relation to the dramas of the British playwright William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) to reveal how much the Polish author fits into the universal context of the European Modernist dramatic art. But when listening to the guide who described the manifold genius of Wyspiański, I happened to discover that the playwright wrote a drama of the saint titled Skałka (A Little Rock) (1907). Being well familiar with another Modernist play of the saint composed by an Anglo-American author Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965) titled Murder in the Cathedral (1935), I have made my final decision to concentrate on the comparative analysis of these two dramatic works. The more so that the common interdisciplinary project “A Neighbourhood of Cultures, the Borderlines of Arts” carried out by Jesuit University of Philosophy and Education Ignatianum in Krakow and the Kaunas Faculty of Humanities of Vilnius University was launched in the year 2009, which was facing the celebration of the one-thousandth anniversary of the mentioning of the name of Lithuania in the annals. One might ask what it has to do with Wyspiański’s, or Eliot’s drama. The answer is as follows: the name of Lithuania was mentioned in relation to the murder of the saint, i.e., St Brunonus. And that is not all. Here come into focus the names of the two Polish rulers, both Bolesławs – Bolesław I the Brave (967–1025), and Bolesław II the Bold (c. 1040–1081). The former took royal effort to honourably bury the remains of the murdered St Brunonus; the latter either passed his order to kill, or killed himself another saint – St Stanislaus. As an additional parallel fitting into the frame of the project might serve the very fact that the Vilnius Cathedral bears the name of St Stanislaus who is worshiped as one of the patrons of Lithuania. [Extract, p. 161]