Chapter 9 - The Vision and the Symbol

Summary

Tymon Terlecki writes that Akropolis is, “perhaps, the strangest and most baffling of Wyspiański's dramatic works.” At the crossroads between the Romantic and avantgarde traditions, in many ways Wyspiański was ahead of his time, anticipating the twentieth century's crisis of representation. Łempicka notes that Akropolis is a literary hybrid both structurally and thematically: part drama, part opera and part poem, with themes that stretch across cultures and epochs. It was partially this conglomeration of themes, motives, and genres that prompted Solski to reject the idea of staging it. A few literary critics of the time agreed with Solski, suggesting that the play is proof of Wyspiański's weakening mental condition, of the “disintegration of the great talent's creative elements,” claiming that “such chaos and disorder was never before seen in poetry.” Critics contended that the play reflects Wyspiański's “sick imagination,” that “the entire first act is an aberration,” and that the play “is maddening and sick.” More generous, Antoni Mazanowski stressed the stylistic inconsistency of the playwriting:

Each act of Akropolis could stand on its own. Like tapestries and sculptures which ended up in the cathedral accidentally and can be moved somewhere else without losing their meaning, so the acts of Akropolis share the same arbitrariness. They are not connected either by their common time and place, common theme, or common feeling.