Public women, parochial stage: the actress in late nineteenth-century Poland.

Holmgren, Beth

 In 1893 I was invited by the Committee of the World's Fair
 Auxiliary Women's Congress, in Chicago, to take part in the
 theatrical section of the Congress and to say something about
 "Woman on the Stage".... It may be remembered that one of
 the features of the Congress was a series of national women's
 delegations, each of them describing the position of women in
 their country. Among others, there was expected a delegation
 of ladies from Russian Poland, but none of them came to Chicago.
 Apparently they were afraid of the possible conflict with
 their government, and they limited their activity to sending a
 few statistical notes--ah! Most poor, bashful notes!

 In the face of this obstacle, wishing by all means to have a
 representative of our nationality, Mrs. May Wright Sewall, the
 Chairman of the Executive Board, appealed to me, requesting
 most urgently that I appear as the proxy of the Polish delegates
 and speak on their behalf. Mrs. Sewall, who for years has been
 my friend, put such pressure on me that I finally consented....

 The auditorium was packed, and I had some difficulty in
 reaching the platform. The beginning of my speech was an excuse
 for the absence of my countrywomen from the Congress ...
 Warmed up by the subject, and trying to arouse the sympathy
 of the brilliant audience for our cause, I was probably not careful
 enough in the choice of my expressions, but I said such
 words as my heart prompted me at the moment. (Memories and
 Impressions of Helena Modjeska 512-13)

On May 19, 1893, at the World's Congress of Representative Women held at the Chicago World's Fair, Helena Modjeska (1840-1909), the great Polish actress become American stage star, graciously substituted for absent Polish delegates in a panel discussion "about the position of women in modern life." (1) She had delivered her scheduled lecture on "Woman in the True Drama" a few days prior, yet it was this impromptu performance that stirred her public and articulated, in the words of one chronicler, "her most significant statement about Poland" (Coleman 623). Modjeska's "heartfelt" speech celebrates Polish Women--particularly Polish gentry women--as family providers of biblical mettle, willing warriors "against the Turks or the Tartars," and equal partners in enlightened marriages (Coleman 625-26). Although she ultimately contains her incendiary examples with the verbal firewall of "Polish mother," she arrays them beside the militant models of Roman matron and Spartan mother and concludes with a salvo eastward: "Our enemies are making a great mistake if they think that they can kill patriotism. As long as there is one Polish woman left alive, Poland will not die, and the more they persecute us the better it is for us now" (Coleman 630).

Over the years Modjeska's myriad Polish admirers have read this speech for its supercharged patriotic content, the more so because its target, the tsarist authorities in Russian Poland, consequently forbade her return engagements at the all-important Warsaw Imperial Theater. (2) Less remarked, but no less important, is her speech's local political context. The Polish actress had been recruited by May Wright Sewall, a key member of the suffragist National Council of Women, whose proposed Congress invited "discussions of every subject in relation to the woman question." (3) At the first World's Fair which could boast a grand Woman's Building (funded through the efforts of Bertha Honore Palmer and a host of "Lady Managers"), Modjeska joined an impressive cast of female luminaries, including feminists Susan B. Anthony and Julia Ward Howe, painter Mary Cassatt, explorer May French Sheldon, naturalist Anna Botsford Comstock, nursing pioneer Kate Marsden, and fellow actresses Clara Morris, Georgia Cayvan, and Julia Marlowe. Modjeska's speech may have impressed its "brilliant audience" as yet another exotic foreign artifact, not unlike the royal Russian costumes touted as "a curious mixture of Paris fashion and barbaric gorgeousness," but its foregrounding of women's accomplishments and incipient power fully conformed to the political specifications of the Congress's American organizers and attendees (Weimann 274).

Modjeska's speech at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair--the actress's performance as activist--sharply focuses the Polish-American comparison posed by her extraordinary career. Why did Poland's greatest star, a prime force in the reform of the Polish theater, abandon her native land at the height of her fame in 1876 for the "lesser" culture and uncertain fortunes of America? Why then did this newly made American star go public as an impassioned Polish patriot? Such comparative questions interrogate not only Modjeska's exceptional progress, but also the professional, political, and social parameters of other Polish actresses' careers. What did it mean to be a Polish actress in Poland and a Polish actress abroad? How did Polish and American stardom compare?

Star Power and Star Worship

One might attribute Modjeska's bicontinental success to a widely observed "age of the actress" in late nineteenth-century Europe and America, when the actress's celebrity and social status flourished due to growing numbers of "surplus women," heated debate of the "woman question" concerning women's political rights and professional capacities, the embourgeoisement of the legitimate theater, the proliferation of bourgeois melodramas starring a suffering heroine, and the burgeoning of the mass-media press and mass-media publicity. The actress in this period multiply starred as dramatic heroine, empathetic subject (particularly for an increasingly female audience), an example of female professional success, and a desirable model (in terms of looks and lifestyle) to be emulated, fetishized, and sold on stage and in print. The socially damning association of actress with prostitute, both "public women" who made their living through public exhibition and entertainment, eroded with the expansion of the public sphere and the consequent increase in opportunities for women's "respectable" celebrity. (4)

In these decades class lines quarantining stage from audience, declasse performers from middle-class patrons, were continuously breached as women sought suitable employment and eagerly consumed the actress's fashions and opinions. Polish theater historian Janina Hera declares that the theater offered "a last resort for women especially in the second half of the century, as more women suddenly needed a livelihood and had no small difficulty finding one" (Hera 20). Reporting on the American stage, Albert Auster estimates that the number of American actresses swelled 596% (from 780 to 4652) between 1870 and 1880 and 332% (from 4652 to 15,436) between 1890 and 1910 (Auster 31). Tracy C. Davis charts a similar influx of women onto the British stage and itemizes the theater's professional attractions:

 The arts undoubtedly offered the most accessible and suitable
 professional fields for middle-class women who were schooled
 in drawing room accomplishments (and perhaps little else) as
 well as some of the most desirable lines of work for lower
 middle-class and working-class women for whom the social
 stigma of acting, singing, or posturing in public was less
 distasteful than the rigours of manufacturing, distributive, or
 domestic trades.... Compared to teaching, the civil service,
 seamstressing, idleness, marriage, or obscurity, the theatre was
 a powerful lure for thousands of women (including those without
 capital, experience, or artistic talent) who entered the profession
 at all levels. (Davis 16)

The transatlantic popularity of the actress and the success of globetrotting performers such as Sarah Bernhardt certainly smoothed Modjeska's ascent to stardom in late nineteenth-century America, although the Pole would later complain of Americans' indiscriminate embrace of every sort of "entertainment"--from "race walking to operettas." (5) Celebrity in the United States also afforded her surprising access to domestic politics--not only through the congressmen, senators, and presidents who happily patronized her and formally met her, but also through the soapbox of the media and the company of suffragists. Public life in the United States often evolved into some form of political activism. Generalizing about the American actress's influence in the early 1800s, Faye Dudden observes that "[a]lthough [women] could not hope to present themselves as political candidates, pulpit orators, or lawyers, their performances in recitations, declamations, and readings, as well as in drama itself, amounted to a kind of aural inclusion" (Dudden 15). By the century's closing decades, more well-known actresses, in a mutually exploitative collaboration with the mass-circulation press, had forged for themselves the "strong personality and physical vitality" (Glenn 217) that resulted in generic rather than strictly professional celebrity, a public womanhood both acceptable to society and adaptable for women activists. Exploring the link-age between celebrity and power on examples of self-promotional genius (Sarah Bernhardt, Adah Isaacs Mencken), Susan A. Glenn argues women's desire "to use theatrical spectacle as a vehicle for achieving greater voice in culture and politics" (Glenn 3). At ease in the public spotlight and well-schooled in verbal and visual arts of persuasion, the actress demonstrated to other women how they could "go public" effectively and attractively. Indeed, the actress herself often crossed over into the world of politics: "Actresses would be recruited to advocate votes for women, and suffrage organizers frequently borrowed concepts from the stage as they strategized their new style of campaigning" (Glenn 134). The actress, the suffragist, and the respectable lady philanthropist could comfortably share the American public stage, as the women-oriented buildings, exhibits, and events at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair expansively advertised.

Did the player-centered Polish theater of the late nineteenth century similarly equip Polish actresses for activist celebrity? Certainly Modjeska, Poland's most popular star, circulated in some high society salons and playacted the aristocrat, donating the proceeds of benefit performances to numerous charities. (6) In the economically devastating aftermath of the January 1863 uprising, work in the theater proved one of very few professional venues open to Poles in Russian Poland, where "government, court, administrative, and pedagogical jobs were almost unobtainable," and most "cultural life ... was conducted privately" (Hera 17; Sivert 23). Moreover, women's presumed social "descent" to the stage was whitewashed somewhat by sanctioning family ties and amateur theater apprenticeships tailored for girls from respectable families (as in the famous cases of Maria Wisnowska and Gabriela Zapolska) (Tuszynska 23; Rurawski 20). As Hera observes, Polish acting families intersected and branched out through marriage, yielding "the great interconnected clans of the Trapszy, the Leszczynskis, the Bendas, the Ladnowskis, and the Szymanowskis" (22). Modjeska was stagestruck in good part observing the success of her older half-brother, the great actor Feliks Benda. Wiktoryna Bakalowiczowa (1835-74), nee Szymanowska, one of Modjeska's early rivals, not only "inherited her talent" from an acting father and an acting grandfather (according to Wincenty Rapacki's reminiscences), but also could rely on the partisan support of her playwright brother, Wladyslaw Szymanowski (Rapacki 122).

In partitioned Poland, however, the actress performed in an intensely binarized political context. The Polish theater, like its American counterpart, depended on the contemporary bourgeois drama churned out by French playwrights such as Alexandre Dumas fils and Victorien Sardou, along with Polish Positivist variants on this type, but its assertion of respectability was founded on barely covert nationalism rather than middle-class appeal (Sivert 26-27). Perhaps in part due to the theatrophilia of Poland's occupying powers (Prussia, Russia, and Austria-Hungary), the theater survived as one of three public institutions (the other two were the church and the press) "where the Polish language could still be heard" (gdzie moglo jeszcze padac polskie slowo) (Sivert 22). (7) The Polish theater did not merely offer comfort and distraction to the conquered, but also functioned as a worldly sanctuary and dramatic exhibit of "Polishness" (Polish diction, history, costume) for actors, audiences, and that important audience subset of restless, politically disillusioned youth. (8) The post-January 1863 theater absorbed and aestheticized high patriotic feeling, while the actors themselves ideally "represented a priesthood" whose Polish-language performances and private recitations of Polish poetry were passionately attended as national displays (Hera 14; Szczublewski, Wielki i smutny teatr, 56).

In fact, actors reigned over Polish society as public idols throughout the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s, the exponents of gwiazdorstwo, a revered star status, and the inevitable objects of the public's aktoromania (passion for actors) that encompassed their onstage performance and offstage lives. (9) The actor and actress starred in a largely mediocre realist repertoire and in spite or because of the fractious relations between capricious theatrical administrations and their long-suffering or inept directors. Tadeusz Sivert asserts that "the actor's art" compensated for and sometimes revitalized a lackluster dramaturgy. The great stars of the Warsaw Imperial Theater, under the enlightened directorship (1868-80) of Russian Sergei Muchanow and his half-Polish wife, Marie Kalergis-Muchanowa, regularly promoted new plays (or new translations of classics) that best showcased their talents in benefit performances (Sivert 40, 69). Billed the epoch of the actor or the epoch of the stars, this period marked the culmination of the actor's popularity/self-aggrandizement, a phenomenon Jerzy Got traces forward from the early nineteenth century, as actors shrewdly distinguished themselves in their constantly revolving repertory roles, prompted applause with trademark stage business (gierki) during their entrances and exits, and disrupted performances mid-play with multiple curtain calls (Got, "Gwiazdorstwo," 254-57). Got identifies actress Leontyna Halpertowa (1803-95), whose fame peaked in the 1840s-1850s, as the first example of the scene-stopping diva (Got, "Gwiaz-dorstwo," 257, 267). Modjeska's remarkable 1868 debut on the Warsaw stage, engineered by Muchanow and Kalergis-Muchanowa to instate the troupe's prerequisite prima donna, launched the most prestigious and lucrative period in this star-studded epoch (Szczublewski, Wielki i smutny teatr, 58).

To a significant extent, Polish gwiazdorstwo and aktoromania parallelled the cultivation of media-touted public stars in America, particularly in terms of the actor's commodification. Star worship truly determined theater patronage: "In Warsaw no one went to a specific play, but 'to see Modrzejewska,' or 'to see Zolkowski,' or 'to see Derynzanka'" (Got, "Gwiazdorstwo," 264). Once again the phenomenal Modjeska set the standard, masterminding unprecedented publicity campaigns and winning unprecedented personal celebrity. Before her performances "the theater's box office was under siege, tickets were scalped at several times their original price; the Imperial Theater became the site of a general pilgrimage for those anticipating an on-stage miracle" (Szczublewski, Wielki i smutny teatr, 47). The acting "priests and priestesses of Polishness" received much earthly tribute, were showered extravagantly with flowers, candy, and expensive jewelry, and drawn through the streets in carriages pulled by their fans (Got, "Gwiazdorstwo," 260-62, 266). Their images, in turn, appeared on candy wrappers, and their self-styled "brand" surnames graced sundry products; examples include "Modrzejewska" or "Zolkowski" cigarettes (Alojzy Zolkowski was the Warsaw Imperial Theater's premier comedian) and a "Marcello" tort named after Helena Marcello (1857-60?-1939), one of Modrzejewska s famed successors (Got, "Gwiazdorstwo," 267).

Good Women

The female stars, clustered around the brilliant Modjeska, shone brightly in late nineteenth-century Poland, attracting audiences, spiking profits, and generating media and material tributes as successfully as their American sisters. Yet their progress from star worship to any sort of proto-feminist power faltered before distinctly Polish social and political hurdles. Within a decade of her triumphant Warsaw debut in 1868, the almost always exceptional Modjeska resolutely prepared for flight, restless for the larger glory that tempted Polish actresses throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As her stage history and those of other Polish actresses intermittently document, the positive scope of "public women" in Poland was necessarily bound by local notions of what both women and public figures were allowed.

In contrast to America's vast, dispersed society of middle-class aspiration and great ethnic and religious variety, Poland's lingering valorization of the upper class, relative ethnic homogeneity, and religious conservatism deepened the chasm between stage and society that any socially ambitious actress would attempt to bridge. Modjeska wrought a miracle of upward mobility in marrying Count Karol Chlapowski, an aristocrat and proven patriot in the January uprising, for that marriage conveniently, if imperfectly, obscured her first liaison with the impresario Gustaw Sinnmayer (polonized as Zimajer) and the illegitimacy of their surviving child. She perhaps wished to emulate the example of the "lady-actress" made world famous by Adelaida Ristori, an Italian performer who divided her days between the stage and leisured life as a margravine in her palace (Szczublewski, Zywot Modrzejewskiej, 106). (10) But Modjeska's scandalous past was regularly unearthed and embellished upon by Polish journalists and bested colleagues. Decades after her death, Bronislawa Ladnowska, one of her early rivals, was still airing unfounded gossip about the young Modjeska's sequential "protectors" as she toured the provinces (Szczublewski, Zywot Modrzejewskiej, 42).

Other actresses predictably settled in a social demimonde, as, for example, Antonina Hoffmann (1842-97), Modjeska's chief rival in the Krakow theater, the lifelong mistress of the professionally powerful director Stanislaw Kozmian. (11) Hoffmann, nonetheless, continued to perform almost until her death, well treated and managed by her partner. Leading actresses, in contrast to starring actors, often faced a bald either/or choice between society and stage. Hera surmises that many women likely pursued marriage as the ultimate goal of their acting career, and "many of those who succeeded left the theater even after taking an actor for a husband" (Hera 20). For the accomplished "naif" Romana Popiel (1849-1933) or the volcanic tragedian Maria Derynzanka (1857-1918) marriage promised a natural social ascent predicated on professional retirement. In Modjeska's case, her husband's tolerance of both her profession and stardom ultimately drew the malice of her envious peers, reportedly influencing her decision to leave the Polish stage for less socially parochial environs. When a Warsaw actor mimicked Chlapowski onstage, lisping that he "lived off his dear wife's money," Modjeska was painfully reminded of the limits of a Polish woman's public success. (12)

In his retrospective portrait gallery of the Warsaw stage, the actor, playwright and director Wincenty Rapacki'spotlights one great actress whose career was inexorably destroyed by motherhood. The beautiful, talented Aleksandra Rakiewiczowa, daughter of Krakow actor Aleksandr Ladnowski, acquitted herself with much promise in tragic leads (Adrianna Lecouvrer, Mary Stuart, Macbeth), yet, in Rapacki's sympathetic formulation, she ultimately "wasted her strength on trifles": (13)

 The reason for her poor repertoire stemmed from the fact that
 she was blessed with a large brood of children, who interfered
 with her work and necessitated her frequent replacement on-stage.
 When she returned to the stage, it was difficult to reclaim
 her roles, for these were already in her successors' hands;
 hence her constant conflict with the director, her taking leaves
 and then returning to work. The talent of a great actress was
 ruined in this battle between maternal duty and artistic ambition.
 (Rapacki 130-31)

Those actresses who achieved stardom despite marriage, children, irregular liaisons, and social slights negotiated other social strictures bounding woman's proper "essence" and behavior. The actress necessarily restrained her performance to avoid social censure: "Women on the stage were forbidden much in terms of words, gestures, ways of walking and sitting, costume, characterization, and, especially, expression. The mildest double entendre was construed as outrageous" (Szczublewski, Zywot Modrzejewskiej, 69). In his 1879 Strengths and Methods of Our Stage (Sily i srodki naszej sceny), theater critic and erstwhile director Wladyslaw Boguslawski, Modjeska's early champion, nonetheless declares that "only one sphere of action exists for women, that of feeling, and there the only feeling is love, the only situation the struggle for love, and the only relationship her feeling for her beloved or loving man. Life has removed her from the rest of the world, from the collision of other interests, from the action of human drama...." (Boguslawski 195). Little wonder, he reasons, that despite women's life conditioning in deception and diplomacy, there have been far fewer great actresses than actors (194).

Boguslawski's controversial ranking of Wiktoryna Bakalowiczowa's artistry over that of the legendary Modjeska also conveys his fascinating discomfort with a public woman's social prowess and sex appeal, or, as he so decorously phrases it, her potent blend of talent with a fail-safe Eternal Feminine (Boguslawski 24-27, 201). Boguslawski approves Bakalowiczowa as more artist than woman, as a serene creature whose unself-conscious and purely poetic charm superbly equipped her for "nalf" roles (204-07, 209). To this naturally "good" actress, "schooled at a time ... when individuals consecrated their all on the altar of art for the good of the country's theater" (205), Boguslawski contrasts Modjeska, whose "studied" charm, "aware of its power," facilitates her specialization in "high-class coquettes" and "the uneasy, passionate, nervous, progressive heroine" of "today's realist drama" (214, 216). (14) Reviewing her career in 1879, he could not know that Modjeska would introduce Henrik Ibsens Doll's House to both

Polish and American stages, but he successfully predicted her capacity to play Nora. Modjeska, in his estimation, was primed to act the (almost) emancipated heroine. (15) The 1878 photograph reproduced below captures Modjeska's "reserved, gentle, intense" portrayal of her most feted "high-class coquette" role, as Marguerite Gautier in Dumas fils' La Dame aux Camelias (see fig. 1-1 following page 92). (16)

Boguslawski does not deny Modjeska her successes, but he harshly judges the calculation and ambition he reads from her mannerisms and affectations (202). Although Modjeska later performed Shakespeare in English to great acclaim in the United States and Poland, Boguslawski pronounces her Shakespearean performances flawed because she is incapable of incarnating difference; her acting, he claims, always derives from her carefully cultivated "personality" (227). Indeed, he seems most irked by Modjeska's offstage popularity, her pursuit of a "virtuosity" that "leads to fame rather than excellence" (230). With her "regular, statuesque features, elegant figure, refined and distinctive movements, sophisticated taste in clothes, grande dame manner, ringing and oddly sympathetic voice, [and] beautiful gaze," Modjeska allegedly deploys the Eternal Feminine to devastating onstage and offstage effect-especially in realist drama (211, 215). To Boguslawski's consternation, Modjeska both fools and seduces her public as herself:

 Modjeska needs only to appear in the full radiance of her
 beauty, to pitch her diction on a lyrical note, and to bedazzle
 her viewers here and there with her mastery of stage technique,
 and she has captured all hearts, which beat the faster without
 knowing if they beat for the heroine or the actress herself. (227)

In essence, Boguslawski faults Modjeska for personalizing her performance in the fashion of international stars.

Women Out of Control

Whereas Modjeska's performance of the "nervous" new woman wrests Boguslawski's somewhat grudging approval, he warns other actresses to proceed at their peril. The implicit connection between role and reputation always poses a moral risk to the actress, he maintains, but the new "drama of emancipation," with its insistence on the sexes' equal rights and its tolerance of the heroine's "liberating" infidelity, exposes the female performer to the greatest opprobrium. Revisiting the problem of public womanhood, he argues that the new plays divest the actress of both charm and "mask": "When she played Phedre, [the actress] sounded a tragic alarm, and when she was Juliet or Desdemona, she surrounded herself with charm and natural allure. As the heroine in dramas by Feuillet, Sardou, and Dumas, she gives everyone the right to touch her sore spot and ask: how much does the wound the author inflicted on his heroine also pain the actress herself?" (199)

Modjeska largely eluded this "pain" by cultivating offstage respectability, accentuating the "positive" features of all her leading roles (including that of Lady Macbeth), and, ultimately, rationing her presence and exposure in her native land. (17) A mere decade later, how-ever, such actresses as Maria Wisnowska (1858-60?-90) and Gabriela Zapolska (1857-1921) repeatedly braved the "gossip and psychological vivisection" that Boguslawski glumly foretold. These ambitious female artists violated the boundary between person and dramatis personae with defiance and flair. Wisnowska chafed at her prolonged bland casting as "naif" (no serene Bakalowiczowa she) and instead "imbued her roles with a predominantly nervous life," incarnating on stage the vogue for "nervousness, agitation, and hysteria" (Tuszynska 100, 119). Sifting through the gossip and legends surrounding Wisnowska's bizarre biography, Agata Tuszynska detects the young actress's keenly calculated and self-aggrandizing effects:

 She tried every means to draw attention to herself, eagerly
 mastering the staging for her own exhibition. If she had no
 leading role, she indefatigably selected the right costumes and
 practiced the right poses to best the other actors who remained
 faithful to the letter of the play or its historical realia. (96)

Wisnowska outrageously exploited the sex appeal that made her popularity, acceding to the fierce competition between her male student claque and rival actress Joanna Czaki s (1860-1921) admirers. Garbed in Greek tunic, oriental robes, or peignoir, she virtually seduced the influential men she hosted in her boudoir salon and periodically scandalized the public with rumors of her romantic affairs, her pregnancy, and her flirtation with self-destruction. The 1881 photo of Wisnowska as Sella in J. Letowski's Israel in the Wilderness featured here conveys her signature coy charm and girlishly seductive dress (see fig. 1-2 following page 92). (18) Wisnowska's eventual murder by her Russian officer lover, a crime many guessed that she had planned to be a joint suicide, ensured her posthumous infamy and forever prevented her professional eclipse, the concomitant decline of her sex appeal and career. (19) Yet Wisnowska pursued a solipsistic ambition, aiming, even with her death, at sensational self-display. Her rebellion seemed staged for no cause other than attention.

Zapolska's more extensive and far more impressive professional and social transgressions nonetheless resulted in a similar disconnect between onstage performance and worldly influence. Like Wisnowska, this headstrong actress courted social disapproval with her extravagant wardrobe and freewheeling lifestyle. Yet, to a painful degree, the well-born Zapolska "became an emancypantka out of necessity" and ventured onto the stage already stripped of her good reputation, separated from her first husband, rejected by her upper-class family, and pilloried for her romance with the married Marian Gawalewicz, director of Warsaw's Philanthropical Theater and her first dramatic mentor. Zapolska regularly had to flee the scenes of her scandals--an illicit romance and pregnancy, an attempted suicide, reputed fraternization with Russian protectors--but she persisted in her modestly successful acting career, performing in Lwow, Poznaxi, Lodz, Warsaw, and Krakow, and studying and intermittently working in Paris (as actress and writer) from 1891 to 1895. The consummate "new woman" on stage, Zapolska first introduced Russian audiences to Ibsen s Nora in 1883, a role she played until the end of her acting career and in which she claimed to invest "much of her life and soul" (Czachowska 22). A 1906 photo elaborates this emancipated image offstage, as Zapolska stands haughtily "at home" for her viewer, costumed in a bold plumed hat, tight dress, and suggestively dangling lorgnette, and poised against the rope of her boa like some pugilist ready to enter the ring (see fig. 1-3 following page 92). (20)

Zapolska's Polish performances elicited mixed reviews ranging from Boguslawski's critique of her 1887 Warsaw debut for "excessive realism, a penchant for extreme melodramatic effects, and provincial overacting" to Teofil Trzecinski's summary impression of her excellence "in modern works playing subtle, brilliant, witty, ironic, and even unconsciously comic women triumphing over their surroundings" (Czachowska 63, 185). Yet Zapolska never attained the star status of her idol, Modjeska, and her forced retirement from the stage in 1900, which caused her "unbelievable pain" (Rurawski 67), reportedly stemmed from her difficult personality--in a sense, her inability to control herself. (21) Her deteriorating relations with Tadeusz Pawlikowski, the powerful director of first Krakow's and then Lwow's major theaters, effectively ended her stage career, although we might surmise that her age and fading good looks contributed as well. Zapolska could not compensate for her misbehavior and salvage her performing career with youth, beauty, or a good reputation.

Yet Zapolska eclipsed all of her professional female peers through her achievement as a playwright. Even before her theatrical debut Zapolska forged a parallel and no less provocative career as novelist, dramatist, and journalist, resorting to the pen when stage work was not forthcoming. Zapolska's plays initally provoked the critics' consternation at their blatant naturalism, but over time specific works such as Zabusia (Tootsie, 1897), Ich czworo (The Four of Them, 1907), and, especially, Moralnosc Pani Dulskiej (The Morality of Mrs. Dulski, 1907) won praise for their deft satire, well-handled dialogue, and expert stagecraft (Czachowska 38). That critics often read the prolific output of this "pisarka-aktorka" (writer-actress) as an extension of her turbulent private life attested to their own gender bias (a woman writes emotionally, impulsively, uncontrollably), but also her sensational and lucrative popularity. (22) Zapolska was simply too provocative and efficient a playwright to be disregarded by repertoire--and revenue-hungry directors. Her very notoriety attracted audiences. Even after Pawlikowski had dispensed with her services as an actress, he continued to commission her writing for the stage. (23)

In intriguing contrast, Zapolska's idol Modjeska "pled woman-hood" to explain her ineptitude for playwrighting and lamented her lesser achievement as a performer in a nation of great poets, her "parroting" rather than creative artistry. (24) Indeed, Modjeska sought out Zapolska, among other promising Polish playwrights, to compose a new work for her repertoire. The "creative artist" Zapolska, in turn, still spellbound by Polish star worship, responded to Modjeska's request with desperate adoration and pledges of service. "You give me a glimpse of the other world, you are an open window letting a breath of fresh air into my prison," Zapolska rhapsodizes in a February 10, 1903 letter to the older actress and subsequently claims that she of all playwrights most keenly feels Modjeska's "each tremor and tone" (April 11?, 1903). (25) Although her "unmasking" naturalist satires were diametrically opposed to the female star vehicles fashioned by Dumas and Sardou, Zapolska promised Modjeska a five-act Polish historical play "with an effective leading lady role" (April 25?, 1903).

The 1902-03 correspondence between Poland's remarkable "writer-actress" and consummate female star, the two most prominent women in nineteenth-century Polish theater, poignantly conveys the limits of their power. Still smarting from her own involuntary retirement, Zapolska had founded an acting school, what she envisioned as a new Theatre-Libre, and she debuted her students' work to good notices in 1902. Zapolska, in effect, had launched the sort of formal training that Modjeska improvised, but never managed to institutionalize, in an entertainment-oriented, unsubsidized American theater. Yet Zapolska could not sustain the endeavor financially or temperamentally. As she complains in an October 16, 1902 letter to Modjeska: "I've rather a hard life now, but I'm resigned to bear it and think that after all there will be moments when I wont have to ruin my lungs six hours a day teaching pupils" (Got and Szczublewski 2: 283). She longed instead for her star to trailblaze female leadership and female mentoring in the theater: "I so wish that you would take over the Krakow Theater. Then you'd engage me, give me some sort of salary, and I'd sometimes perform and continue to write" (October 26, 1902).

Zapolska was not alone in her dreams of Modjeska as director. The star's influence on repertoire development, rehearsal practices, and production standards was already palpable, if informal, in her work on the Warsaw stage. But it was only after she had achieved the untouchable aura and box office of visiting deity that she was courted as a director. In 1892 her former mentor Stanislaw Kozmian urged her to found an acting school or to commit her talents to the artistic direction of the Krakow theater. Approximately a decade later, Count Andrzej Potocki, a state marshal, offered her the directorship of not one, but two major theaters--in Krakow and Lwow (Szczublewski, Zywot Modrzejewskiej, 538, 624). Modjeska's preemptive response, printed in the January 6, 1891 issue of Kurier Warszawski (The Warsaw Courier), was loftily phrased, but pragmatically motivated: "I would not be capable of combining the positions of artist and entrepreneur" (Szczublewski, Zywot Modrzejewskiej, 511). She in fact regularly shouldered the double duties of actress and artistic manager on tour in America, but she could not afford a managerial post in Poland that would drastically limit her spectacular American earnings. Both Modjeska and Zapolska, Polish theater's greatest female pioneers, were too burdened materially and psychologically to consolidate the professional power eventually available to them. (26) Their landmark accomplishments accrued instead to the next generation of actresses--performing artists such as Irena Solska (1877-1958) and Stanislawa Wysocka (1877-1941) who undertook directing with varying degrees of success. (27)

Good Poles

If the actress typically kept up lady-like appearances to prosper and endure as an acceptable public woman in Poland, she just as assiduously cultivated her reputation as a good Pole. National martyrdom, after all, had rendered the Polish-declaiming actor an idol by default, and theatrical performance already doubly fulfilled the actor's patriotic duty as a public demonstration of the Polish word and Polish art. At the same time the antagonism between occupying powers and nationalist Poles subsumed all other political causes and, to a large extent, circumscribed or censured individual aspirations. In a nation muzzled in its quest for sovereignty, actresses simply did not possess the "culture and society" of multiple constituencies and agendas in which, as Glenn shows, American actresses could "achieve a greater voice." In the Russian, Prussian, and Austrian partitions, public action was restricted for subject Poles, and the advancement of any special interest, including one's continued employment, necessitated some collaboration with "enemy" administrations. Actors had to negotiate their very public livelihood with care before both an oppressive authority and a vigilantly oppositionist audience. Modjeska, for example, deftly conducted a politics of selective collaboration and absence, cooperating with the enlightened Russian Muchanow, but availing herself of sick leave whenever the tsar was slated to attend her performances. Both Zapolska and Wisnowska sought influence through and incurred notoriety for their cultivation of Russian supporters and "friends."

Over the long run, nation rather than empire posed the largest obstacle to a Polish actress's career. Indeed, the division of Poland into three imperial satellite territories forced Polish actors' attention outward for standards of artistic skill and commercial success despite the ambition of Muchanow and, especially, Kalergis-Muchanowa, to establish the Warsaw Imperial Theater as a first-rate "European" enterprise (Szczublewski, Wielki i smutny teatr, 26, 27). In its heyday, the Warsaw Theater attracted "provincial" actors primarily from Krakow and Lwow as Poland's premier stage, but the imperial theaters of Vienna, Berlin, and St. Petersburg truly afforded Polish actors international visibility and guaranteed the quality of their training and performance. It is significant that both Modjeska's German impresario lover and her patriotic Polish husband regretted her restriction to the parochial Polish stage, where her scope was narrowed by inconsistent "colonial" administration, a finite pool of backbiting talent, and the relatively small corpus of great plays translated into her native tongue. (28) An actress wedded to the Polish language and Polish venues could not take advantage of the extraordinary new possibilities for touring performers and, especially, attractive female stars. Yet an international touring career entailed great moral risk as well as Herculean effort, for it implied the actress's "selfish" pursuit of ambition, (uncertain) wealth, and solitary professional success (or likelier failure) in lieu of remaining loyal as a local star. An editorial in the September 6, 1884 issue of Echo Muzyczne i Teatralne (The Musical and Theatrical Echo) typically, albeit diplomatically, criticizes the careerist: "Modrzejewska has passed like a bright meteor over Krakow's narrow heaven ... she quickly flew off to wider and more tantalizing horizons. Antonina Hoffmann has remained true to the city with which she has shared her life and fate.... [As the actress wrote her friend], 'I hadn't the heart to abandon the national stage for material gain'" (Szczublewski, Zywot Modrzejewskiej, 420).

Even before Modjeska's "meteoric" flight Polish actors and actresses had migrated to German-language stages in Vienna and elsewhere, to the disapproval of their compatriots (Szczublewski, Zywot Modrzejewskiej, 31, 40). (29) Daredevils such as Gabriela Zapolska and Maria Wisnowska traveled to Paris, a politically sympathetic European capital for Poles, to further their training and enlarge their fame. Although Zapolska eventually obtained a contract with the Theatre Antoine and schooled herself in its "progressive" naturalistic acting methods, she played small roles at irregular intervals in Parisian theaters, and her poor French accent consigned her to exotic parts or bad reviews (Rurawski 36-39). Encouraged by Dumas himself, Modjeska also had pondered the conquest of Paris, but soon realized the inadequacy of her French. Modjeska instead pioneered an ingenious balancing act between patriotism and international stardom by establishing herself as an English-language actress in America, where her lingering foreign accent was well tolerated and her defection posed neither political betrayal nor cultural threat to her fans back home. Casting herself as an exile from a malicious Polish society and jealous colleagues, Modjeska nonetheless returned repeatedly to Poland to pledge her spiritual allegiance, to renew her art, to shine before an abjectly grateful public, and to complain about the culturally ignorant, business-obsessed Yankees. Her solution was by no means ideal. In America she toured ad nauseam in her lucrative star vehicles, slaving away for her expensive extended family and her star lifestyle, and longing in vain for a lady's refined retirement.

But the fact remains that Modjeska spent the bulk of her career in America, where the star actress could play herself on as well as off the stage for great profit and to considerable political and personal advantage. Respectably accompanied by her husband, Modjeska preserved a lady-like equanimity by casting Chlapowski as her choleric agent and sometime impresario. Yet she headed her own theater company in name and fact, plotting its artistic course, cultivating and commissioning her own repertoire, negotiating her own terms of engagement, and regularly rehearsing and directing her troupe. (30) When Modjeska toured a season with the famed tragedian Edwin Booth, she insisted on and won equivalent co-starring rather than leading lady status. In her American repertoire Modjeska relied on "weeping Magdalene" melodramas as well as Shakespeare as crowd-pleasing high culture, no mean feat for any touring star of her day, but she also sometimes risked new productions with emancipated heroines, assaying, for example, the American debut of A Doll's House in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1883 and, a decade later, mounting Herman Sudermann's Heimat (renamed Magda), an even more socially provocative play featuring a famous actress "with a past" in the title role. (31) Modjeska also selected, schooled, and mentored the members of her troupe, especially such young actresses as Maud Durbin (who wed another renowned Modjeska player, Otis Skinner) and the future suffragist Mary Shaw, who performed in Modjeska's first Doll's House and was inspired by the Pole's "great charm and intelligence" and strong political convictions (Auster 75). (32) As activist, spokeswoman, and occasional "scholar," Modjeska labored until her death in 1909 for the large causes of Polish independence and a national American theater. (33)

Modjeska's public performance at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair should be read, therefore, in concentric national contexts--as reflective of Polish stardom embedded in a more free-ranging American stardom. In Poland this ambitious, talented, beautiful actress benefitted fabulously from a player-centered theater and was patronized, along with a select set of her professional peers, as the main attraction in an era of lackluster playwrights and directors. As Modjeska's career best shows, the successful actress in late nineteenth-century Poland enjoyed great material tribute, media attention, and claques of devoted followers. If she was lucky enough to win a contract with one of the major regional theaters, she trained and performed in a standing repertory company before a house of appreciative, experienced theatergoers. And if she reigned as a star, as a flamboyant and eloquent purveyor of Polishness, then she achieved the status of national idol in an occupied and censored state. The phenomena of gwiazdorstwo and aktoromania flourished in the Polish theater through this peculiar confluence of theatrical, political, and commercial circumstances.

We can interpret Modjeska's militantly pro-Polish speech at the Fair as another variant on her professional/political balancing act, her most explicit profession of patriotism, her transformation from national idol into national spokesperson. The Fair's podium, like the American mass media, freed her of one kind of political censorship, enabling Modjeska to author her role as good woman and good Pole. Yet her participation in this American Women's Congress also heralds her strikingly American-style public womanhood, for she had been invited to share a public stage with accomplished female artists and scientists, high society matrons and philanthropists, and forthright feminists. Sixteen years after her American debut, Modjeska was being courted and showcased as a successful woman in her profession, accorded at last the sort of evaluative and speaking authority that Boguslawski simply presumed in judging and prescribing women's "lesser" performances. Honored as an expert, Modjeska had "achiev[ed] a greater voice" in this general women's forum to testify about Poland, to place Poland's cause on Americans' political agenda. That is, her American career included and abetted her Polish patriotism, but was not contained by it. For in a socially fluid and culturally aspiring United States Modjeska was free to exercise and, to a lesser extent, advertise the professional power (as producer, director, designer, costumer, reformer, commentator) that her commercial success could underwrite. Good business in America crudely dictated worth, but also tolerated implicitly feminist liberties.

In Poland, however, the actress's career remained in thrall to a minor nations oppositional, but abidingly patriarchal standards and prejudices. Aktoromania and gwiazdorstwo had elevated, but not emancipated the female star; the worship of nineteenth-century Polish society prescribed, restricted, and objectified her performative power. Polish actresses regularly sacrificed profession for social standing and a good range of roles for a good reputation. A few bold players dared to wield beauty, popularity, and scandal--time-limited leverage--to advance their careers and win specific parts. But Polish actresses in this era almost never gained the larger control of writing their own plays, schooling their own ensembles, directing their own productions, managing their own theaters, and, of course, writing theater history. The patriotism that ennobled their worship radically limited their training, repertoire, audience, celebrity, and influence; their public womanhood remained parochial in content and scope. And so it happened that nineteenth-century Poland's most ambitious and perhaps most accomplished star-feted, obligated, essentialized, disciplined--ran off to America in quest of international fame and "female spectacle" unbound.

(1) This Polish star debuted in Poland under the wholly concocted stage name of Modrzejewska, which she subsequently shortened and simplified to "Modjeska" for Americans' ease of pronunciation. I refer to her as Modjeska in my text; quoted texts may feature the Polish version of her stage name. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the Polish are mine.

(2) In his copious Zywot Modrzejewskiej, Jozef Szczublewski remarks on the speech's potency as political contraband: "Its Polish version would make its way into the country and pass as a conspiratorial text from hand to hand in numerous copies throughout the three partitions" (Szczublewski 554). In her Memories and Impressions Modjeska admits her "grievous disappointment" at the consequent prohibition, which encompassed both Warsaw and St. Petersburg performances and, eventually, her travel everywhere in Russian Poland (513-18).

(3) Jeanne Madeline Weimann's richly illustrated The Fair Women (1981) details how a powerful working group of women philanthropists, activists, and professionals facilitated the construction of the Woman's Building and accompanying exhibits and lectures at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.

(4) Faye E. Dudden explains the coinage of "public women": "Ever since their initial appearance on the English-speaking stage in the Restoration, actresses were associated with sexual immorality. The women who made their living performing on the stage worked in uncomfortably close proximity [sic] to the 'public women'-slang for prostitutes-who crowded the third tier" (Dudden 21).

(5) See Modjeska's March 30, 1879 letter to an unidentified addressee: "There is a circle of educated people in every [American] town, but they won't fill a hall. A different class of public prefers race walking or operettas like Pinafore" (Got and Szczublewski 1: 446). Modjeska wryly remarks that she'd make a greater fortune if she knew how to walk fast or swim a river.

(6) In his history of the Warsaw Imperial Theater, Szczublewski notes Modjeska's capacity to "play the princess" both on and off the stage; such performances spiced the generally circulating rumor that she was the illegitimate daughter of Prince Sanguszko (Szczublewski, Wielki i smutny teatr, 132-33).

(7) Hera notes that the Russians organized their own amateur theater groups in "gray" post-1863 Warsaw (15). Jerzy Got cites another characteristic example of the Russian authorities' indulgence when, in the politically turbulent decade of the 1830s, a Russian police commissioner in Kalisz not only allowed students to perform forbidden patriotic plays, but also shared his apartment with them (Got 260).

(8) For example, Jan Krolikowski, the male dramatic lead at the Warsaw Imperial Theater, was adored by students throughout the partitions for his masterful declamation (Szczublewski, Wielki i smutny teatr,162).

(9) See Jerzy Got's excellent article on these dovetailing phenomena: "Gwiaz-dorstwo i aktoromania w teatrze polskim w XIX wieku," in Teatr i teatrologia (Krakow: Universitas, 1994),253-69.

(10) Modjeska's life model likewise attracted imitators such as Aleksandra Lude, a star in fin-de-siecle Warsaw theater who hosted a salon, cultivated a garden to rival the older actress's California "estate," and played Rosalind in As You Like It--one of Modjeska's signature Shakespearean roles (Szcublewski, Zywot Modrzejewskiej, 601).

(11) Memoirist Kazimierz Chledowski recalls Hoffmann as "a stronger, more passionate figure [than Modjeska]," "with perhaps greater resources to become a true dramatic artist." He attests that the director and the actress had

several children, lived in the same building or next door to each other, and remained together until Hoffmann's death (Chledowski 146).

(12) The play in which an actor deliberately caricatured Chlapowski, titled The Bat, was written by Wladyslaw Szymanowski, the aforementioned brother of the actress Bakalowiczowa.

(13) Szczublewski offers a different assessment of the martyred mother actress Rakiewiczowa: "She had children too often, dropped out of productions too often, and when she returned she sowed discord bidding for Modrzejewska's and Paliriska's roles. Once she got a good role, she was a poor box office draw" (Zywot Modrzejewskiej 160).

(14) In an earlier comparison, written as a eulogy for the actress Salomea Paliriska, who died in 1873, Boguslawski'similarly positions the refined star Modjeska as foil to Paliriska the modest actress (Szczublewski, Zywot Modrzejewskiej, 161).

(15) Sally Ledger traces the importance of Ibsen's work for both nineteenth-century actresses and feminists in her essay "Ibsen, the New Woman and the Actress" (2001).

(16) Photograph included in Szczublewski, Zywot Modrzejewskiej, opposite p. 224; original is held in Muzeum Teatralne collection in Warsaw. In Memories and Impressions (1910) Modjeska declares that she takes Arsene Houssaye's characterization of Camille's real-life prototype, Marie Duplessis, as the model for her "more refined" version of this famous fallen woman: "It pleased my imagination to present Camille as reserved, gentle, intense in her love, and most sensitive,--in one word, an exception to her kind" (356).

(17) As Chledowski observed and Szczublewski summarizes, Modjeska scrupulously censored her behavior once she left Sinnmajer (Zimajer) and reestablished herself in Krakow (Chledowski 137-38; Szczublewski, Zywot Modrzejewskiej, 69-70).

(18) Photograph taken from Agata Tuszyriska, Wisnowska (Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Artystyczne i Filmowe, 1990), between pp. 64-65.

(19) Although Wisnowska clearly had been shot by her Russian lover, the evidence presented at her lover's trial indicated her vague plans for a joint suicide. The lurid "Wisnowska affair" elicted a number of nonfictional and fictional treatments, including Aleksandr Elenin's Ubiistvo artistki varshavskogo teatra and Ivan Bunin's "Delo korneta Elagina." Bunin's story endows his protagonist Sosnovskaya with many of the particulars of Wisnowska's biography, including her diary confessions and lamentations. For more information, see Tuszyriska's 1990 monograph on the actress.

(20) Photograph taken from Jadwiga Czachowska, Gabriela Zapolska (Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1966), opposite p. 304; original is in M. Janowska's collection.

(21) As Tomasz Weiss notes in his introduction to the Biblioteka Narodowa edition of Zapolska's most famous play, Moralnosc Pani Dulskiej, Zapolska "dreamed of the fame that Helena Modrzejewska had attained in America" (v).

(22) As Weiss summarizes: "The critics were unable and often unwilling to distinguish the writer's problematic private life from her work. They sought traces of her private, intimate experiences in her writing. The moral judgement they directed against her lifestyle automatically applied to her oeuvre" (vii).

(23) Czachowska notes that Zapolska reworked her novel Zycie na zart into a play for Pawlikowski's April 1901 production (245). Rurawski recalls an earlier episode when Pawlikowski supported Zapolska (whom a reviewer for Glos narodu had declared "old") because she was such a profitable dramatist. Her 1898 play Tamten (That One), a "patriotic play" focused on the tsarist police, was seen by 50,000 theatergoers and grossed 58,000 korons, approximately twice the patronage of Anczyc's famous Kosciuszko pod Raclawicami (49).

(24) Modjeska particularly castigates herself after Wincenty Rapacki, her colleague and friend, scores a success with his play about the medieval Polish artist, Wit Stwosz. In her October 28, 1874 letter to actor Gustaw Fiszer, she exhorts him to try his hand at writing, lamenting that she, a mere woman, doesn't have the strength to do so (Korespondencja 1: 254). She elaborates in another letter written on the same day to her close friend Anna Wolska: "I feel sort of sorry for myself that I've written nothing thus far, that all that I've thought of has drifted off like smoke, formless, and has left no trace. But I cheer myself up with the thought that nothing is more unbearable than a woman who writes and then I'm at peace, although I'm not entirely pleased with myself. You see how my ambitions afflict me from time to time!" (1: 256).

(25) These letters are published in the second volume of Korespondencja Heleny Modrzejewskiej i Karola Chlapowskiego. In her January 13, 1903 and January 27, 1903 letters to Modjeska, Zapolska mentions the dramatic sketch that she composed, Jesiennym wieczorem (Autumn Evening), in which Modjeska performed during her return visit to Krakow in 1903 (Got and Szczublewski 2: 298,300).

(26) In her correspondence, Zapolska approaches Modjeska as benefactor, but in a January 30?, 1903 missive she empathizes with the star over the anonymous nasty letters that she has been receiving while in Poland and hopes that the white roses she has sent her will help Modjeska forget "the swamp of human souls" (Got and Szczublewski, Korespondencja, 2: 303).

(27) For condensed biographies of these actress-directors, see Slownik biograficzny teatru polskiego, 1765-1965 (1973), 667-68, 818-19. See also Szczublewski's citation about the Modjeska-Wysocka relationship taken from the younger actress's memoir, Teatr przyszlosci (1973): "Since childhood Modjeska had been her fairytale heroine, for when her mother had run out of bedtime tales she had created a series of stories about a goddess of the theater named Modrzejewska" (Zywot Modrzejewskiej, 629-31). Jane Kathleen Curry's monograph Nineteenth-Century American Women Theatre Managers describes a very different American scene, cataloguing a surprising number of women theater managers active in nineteenth-century America.

(28) Szczublewski estimates that Modjeska performed twice as many Shakespeare plays in the United States as she played in Poland (Zywot Modrzejewskiej 199, 200).

(29) The great actor Bogumik Dawison (1818-72) not only succeeded on the German-language stages in Vienna, Hamburg, Berlin, Munich, and Dresden, but also attempted an American tour during the 1866-67 season. Cf. Slownik biograficzny teatru polskiego 119-20.

(30) See, for example, Szczublewski's account of her third American tour (Zywot Modrzejewskiej 361).

(31) In "The Problem of Interpretation: Bernhardt, Duse, Fiske and Modjeska Perform Magda," Ellen Donkin critiques Modjeska's calculatedly a-feminist approach to the role: "Modjeska's Magda ... was promoted in advance as a play which was being performed in spite of its unfortunate feminist leanings, and that its feminism was to be downplayed as much as possible in order to allow for the much more sanitary themes of high art and the return of the prodigal son/daughter. I have stated that Modjeska's promotional scheme was probably pitched directly towards her most conservative critic, William Winter. It was his approval in particular that she needed for the survival of the production. Stated in different terms, where Bernhardt sought to seduce her audience by fairly direct sexual means, Modjeska seduced the critics rather more indirectly, by demonstrating compliance with a phallic order that might understandably be a little disturbed by the play's content" (57). Donkin's reading shows little familiarity with Modjeska's professional training and achievements, but her evaluation of Modjeska's "ennobling" a provocative role bears out a general pattern in the Polish actress's interpretation of sexually suspect heroines.

(32) Shaw's invitation to speak on "The Stage as a Field for Women" at the 1899 Women's Congress stemmed directly from Modjeska's memorable 1893 performance (Auster 77).

(33) Modjeska' sometimes lectured as a Shakespeare expert. See, for example, Szczublewski, Zywot Modrzejewskiej, 536.

Works Cited

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Coleman, Marion Moore. Fair Rosalind: The American Career of Helena Modjeska. Cheshire, CT: Cherry Hill Books, 1969.

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--. Korespondencja Heleny Modrzejewskiej i Karola Chlapowskiego. Vol. 2,1881-1909. Warsaw: Panstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1965.

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Weiss, Tomasz. "Wstep." In Moralnosc Pani Dulskiej, by Gabriela Zapolska, iii-lxxxii. Wroclaw: Zaklad Narodowy im. Ossolinskich, 1966.

Dept. of Slavic and Eurasian Studies

Duke University

316 Languages Building, Box 90259

Durham, NC 27708-0259 USA

beth.holmgren@duke.edu