Starring Madame Modjeska: On Tour in Poland and America

2. The Making of a Polish Actress

2 ( The Making of a Polish Actress The Poland of Modrzejewska’s youth was po­ liti­ cally turbulent and socially stultifying, possessed of an inspiring past and mired in a present of poverty and oppression. The Polish empire had flourished for centuries under the Jagiellonian dynasty (1385–1569) and as the Repub­lic of Poland-­Lithuania (1569– 1795), boasting prosperous cities, a powerful army, major achievements in the arts and sciences, and a Statute of General Toleration guaranteeing safe haven for Jews, Muslims, and Protestants as well as Catholics. By the eighteenth century, however, the Republic’s wars against the Russians, Swedes, and Prussians had emptied the state’s coffers, and its landed aristocrats further weakened the state’s infrastructure by diverting their fortunes into their own estates. In 1795, the armies of Prussia, Russia, and Austria finally wiped the Repub­ lic off the European map, dividing its lands into three occupied partitions. The Russian partition claimed the capital Warsaw, while the Austrian partition, also known as Galicia, included the city of Lwów (now Lviv in Ukraine) and Poland’s historic capital of Kraków. Despite their separate zones of occupation, Poles preserved “the mind of a large nation in a stateless body” and acted out in consequence.1 They mounted several uprisings against their scorned oppressors in the nineteenth century. Modrzejewska was born in the inter-­ uprising period—between the No­ vem­ ber 1830 uprising and the January 1863 revolt, both of which began in the Russianpartition ,drewparticipantsfromelsewhereinoccupiedPoland, and ended in bitter defeat, as rebels were executed, exiled to Siberia, or conscripted into The Making of a Polish Actress 19 the Russian army to serve in the empire’s most dangerous outposts. Although her hometown of Kraków remained a free city until 1846, when a local uprising angered the authorities, the young Helena endured the city’s greatest po­ liti­ cal and natural trials—Austrian bombardment, the imposition of martial law, several cholera epidemics, and the great 1850 fire which destroyed “one hundred sixty-­five houses, four churches, and three con­vents.”2 As she would insist in later accounts, she early on imbibed a fervent patriotism and survived adversity with staunch resolution and a great deal of hard work. The Kraków of her first decades also confronted her with more problematic challenges which she more or less overcame by temperament and talent. Established as the imperial capital from the eleventh through the sixteenth centuries, Kraków grew into a museum city, accruing impressive monuments of different architectural styles, from the Gothic St. Mary’s Church, situated on the main city square, to the Renaissance castle looming above the city on Wawel Hill. As the Austrians installed their defensive walls and garrisons, these monuments were left to decay, and city streets and buildings became defaced by dirt and trash.3 Through most of the 1840s and 1850s, Kraków was a sorry mess of crumbling grandeur, modest dwellings, and Austrian fortifiThe Wawel Castle overlooking the Vistula River. From Memories and Impressions of Helena Modjeska, 1910 20 Starring Madame Modjeska cations, poorly lit and strewn with garbage, and its once great Cloth Hall on the market square barnacled with little shops and stalls and verging on collapse .4 Nevertheless, as the actress later avowed, she saw only the beauty beneath this disfigurement and daydreamed about the city’s glorious history as she wandered its dirty streets. By mid-­ century, Kraków likewise had deteriorated into a stuffy little provincial city, dominated socially by an exclusive set of aristocratic families, observant of a strict class hierarchy, and bound by puritanical rules of re­spect­ able behavior, punctiliously observed by middle-­ class young women. Mo­ drzejewska would not be equipped to scale this hierarchy until the late 1860s, when Kraków society itself grew more progressive and she could reign on a reformed city stage expressly supported by aristocrats. In the preceding decades she would have contended with strong local prejudices against actresses as women of little education and low morals who regularly enjoyed the material support of their “protectors.”5 Modrzejewska’s Polish biographers emphasize how her unclear parentage and poverty must have shamed her in her youth. Describing Kraków as the sort of place where “everyone knew everything about everyone,” Tymon Terlecki guesses that the young Helena was mortified by rumors of her illegiti­ macy and later gravitated to her seducer Zimajer as a...