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Ep i l o g u e ( Finding Mo­dje­ska Today For those of us intrigued by the biography of Mo­dje­ska, a long-­dead stage actress , the Ameri­ can memorial trail is at best elusive. We have no recordings to thrill us with a living voice, no filmed performances or home movies to scrutinize and replay. Ameri­ cans were the intended audience for Mo­ dje­ ska’s Memories and Impressions, and Gilder’s publishing house produced for his dear old friend a lavish edition, complete with state-­of-­the-­art reproductions of her photos. But we possess very few translations of her copious correspondence and no reprint of the many letters she wrote in English, in which her opinions are sharper, her style livelier, and her self-­ image less carefully composed . Nor can we visit Mo­ dje­ ska’s grave on this side of the ocean to commemorate the anniversaries of her death. In contrast, the Poles have become practiced keepers of her flame, successful in large part because they had less territory to cover and more national impetus to invest in her memory. The relatively small area of Kra­ ków’s Old City, Modrzejewska’s first world, encompasses a much-­ abridged, somewhat meandering walking tour of her life, provided one knows the landmarks beforehand . A crudely carved plaque marks the site, if not the actual building, of Modrzejewska’s birthplace on Dominican Square.1 Kra­ków’s Old Theatre, now named after the actress, still stands on Jagiellońska Street, just the other side of the city’s main square. Here Modrzejewska dueled with Hoffmann and performed opposite her beloved brother Feliks. The Theatre Museum, on the corner of Szpitalna and St. Mark, offers the richest immersion in Modrzejewska artifacts, featuring a permanent exhibit of costumes, photographs, paint- 310 Starring Madame Modjeska ings, photographs, trinkets, and everyday objects such as the star’s ashtray shaped like a lizard, her tiny deck of playing cards, and a device for stretching her gloves.2 The best spot to absorb Modrzejewska’s physical grandeur is in the National Museum atop Kra­ków’s Cloth Hall, where her portrait by Ajdukiewicz shares a gallery room with Matejko’s enormous tableaux of Poland’s glorious imperial past. Here the star radiates beauty, majesty, and voluptuousness—a late nineteenth-­century mistress of the stage and the salon who complements the strapping Polish warriors of earlier centuries. A reproduction of this portrait also fills the wall of a lounge in Kra­ ków’s Hotel Pollera, one of the actress ’s favorite stopping places, a building located directly opposite the Square of the Holy Ghost. The tour concludes by retracing Modrzejewska’s last journey from the Church of the Holy Cross, in which her plaque and epitaph still hang, past the Słowacki Theatre, where she and Wyspiański co-­ created new work, to her grave in Rakowicki Cemetery. A particularly ardent fan might then head south to visit the trade school the actress founded in Zakopane, an institution now called the Modrzejewska Complex of Professional Schools in Textiles and Clothing. Up north in War­saw, visitors can tour the Great Theatre, rebuilt after its destruction along with most of the city during World War II; until the economic transition of the 1990s, its resident Theatre Museum maintained a permanent exhibit of Modrzejewska’s costumes and artifacts as part of a general tribute to War­saw’s “epoch of the stars.” Coordinating any of these trips with Modrzejewska’s jubilees , marking every fifty years since her birth and death, would afford visitors new glimpses of the prima donna. During the 2009 commemoration of her death, a major exhibit titled “For Love of Art: Helena Modrzejewska”­(Z miłości do sztuki: Helena Modrzejewska) and organized by the Kra­ ków Theatre Museum curator Małgorzata Palka went on display in Kra­ków and War­ saw. “For Love of Art” drew on Polish and Ameri­can museum holdings as well as the extensive private collection of Krzysztof Ciepły and experimented with a computer-­ generated montage of the actress’s photos in sequential poses, a brief “moving picture” accompanied by a narrated passage from Memories and Impressions.3 Polish scholars have also seen to Modrzejewska’s legacy in print, pub­ lish­ ing an annotated translation of her memoirs, Szczublewski’s year-­ by-­ year chronicleof herlife,severalbiographies,andnumerousanalysesof herperformances . By 1965, the two chief pioneers in Modrzejewska scholarship, Got and [18...

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