The Undivine Comedy or The Un-divine Comedy ( or ), is a play written by Polish Romantic poet Zygmunt Krasiński in 1833, published anonymously in 1835. Its main theme is sociopolitical conflict – in Krasiński's words, "[between] aristocracy and democracy". It is Krasiński's best-known work and is regarded as one of the most important works of Polish Romantic literature.
History
Krasiński began work on The Undivine Comedy in June 1833 in Vienna, and finished it in autumn the following year in Venice. It was published in Paris in 1835 anonymously, likely to protect the author's family from any repercussions in the Russian Empire, of which they were subjects. Krasiński's writings often contained thinly veiled references to current politics.
Krasiński would later work on another drama related to The Undivine Comedy. He considered composing a trilogy, of which the Undivine Comedy would likely have been the middle part, but he never finished the project (the draft of the first part would eventually be published in 1852 as Sen. Pieśń z „Niedokończonego poematu”, wyjęta z pozostałych rękopisów po świętej pamięci J. S., and more extensively, posthumously as Niedokończony poemat – The Unfinished Poem in 1860). The entire trilogy was to have featured the same protagonist, Count Henry, called "The Youth" in the unfinished prequel, and "The Husband" in The Undivine Comedy.
The play has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Within a few years it received a French translation by . Based on the French translation, in 1868 Robert Lytton published a drama titled Orval, or the Fool of Time which has been inspired by Krasiński's work to the point it has been discussed in scholarly literature as an example of a "rough translation", paraphrase or even plagiarism.The Undivine Comedy was first translated to English in 1864 by Marthy Walker Cook (although she based it on earlier French and German translations), again in 1924 (by Harriette E. Kennedy and Zofia Umińska, with a preface by G. K. Chesterton), for the third time in 1977 (By Harold B. Segel) and most recently in 1999 (by Charles S. Kraszewski).
Initially it was considered too difficult to be adopted properly into a theatre, and it was never staged during Krasiński's liftetime. It was finally put on the stage in 1902 in the Juliusz Słowacki Theatre in Kraków by and since that time it has been staged numerous times in Poland and abroad. Gordon M. Wickstrom, writing in 1972, noted that "since World War II nearly all leading Polish directors have undertaken" directing the play, also noting that while it has been produced in a number of other European countries, it has remained "unproduced and nearly unknown in English". In 1988 Michael Finnissy directed an operatic version of it, shown in Paris and London. In Poland, it has been directed by among others Arnold Szyfman (Warsaw 1920), Leon Schiller (Warsaw 1926, Łódź 1938), (Warsaw 1959), Konrad Swinarski (Kraków 1965), Adam Hanuszkiewicz (Warsaw 1969) and (Warsaw 2002) to the music of composers such as Ludomir Różycki, Jan Maklakiewicz, Grażyna Bacewicz and Krzysztof Penderecki staged the play from the 1920s onward.
It has been a part of secondary-education curriculum in Poland since at least 1923.
Plot
The plot of the drama takes place in the near future, where Krasiński used recent contemporary events, such as the French Revolution, and the ensuing power struggle between the Jacobins and other factions as inspiration and extrapolating a number of social trends, describing a fictional pan-European revolution against the Christian aristocracy. The protagonist of the drama, Count Henry (in Polish, Henryk), is a conflicted poet, who finds himself leading, together with his fellow aristocrats, a defense of the Holy Trinity castle, against revolutionary forces professing democratic and atheist ideals, commanded by a leader named Pancras (in Polish, Pankracy). In the end, both sides are portrayed as a failure: while the revolutionaries take the castle, their leader increasingly doubts the righteous of their cause, and the drama ends with him seeing the vision of the Christianity being triumphant after all.
The play is divided into four parts and thirty-two scenes. The first two parts of the work build up the character of Count Henry, focusing on his private life as a husband, father, and artist; while the next two are focused on large revolutionary struggle.