Where Is Poland?

Chapter 8

Kraków

At the turn of the twentieth century, Kraków emanated fresh artistic and literary ideas throughout Poland. It was cradle of the YoungPoland movement. Its cafés bustled with artists and local bohemians, and cabaret performances were growing in popularity.

Wawel rebuilt in the art nouveau style, satyric postcard. Source: Polona.pl

Forever young

During the last decades of the nineteenth century, smallish Kraków became the main centre for a new artistic style dubbed ‘Young Poland’. This style corresponded to current events in European art not only in terms of its name (cf. Young Germany, Young Scandinavia) – it also brought in a plethora of new tendencies and trendy buzz words: from decadence, catastrophism and symbolism to impressionism and modernism.

In literature, Young Poland left its mark in a turn towards lyricism. Stirring poetry, full of Nietzschean inspirations and fascination with the East (nirvana!), was written by Kazimierz Przerwa-Tetmajer and Jan Kasprowicz. Both also shared a deep love for the Tatra Mountains.

‘Young Poland’ painters painting blended various tendencies and trends. Symbolism was represented by Jacek Malczewski and Józef Mehoffer and impressionism was most evident in the work of Wyczółkowski. But a fascination with Eastern aesthetics also made itself felt, with Japanese motifs becoming the most fashionable.

Stanisław Wyspiański could rightly be considered the most representative artist of the entire movement – he was a painter of versatile talent, a poet and a playwright whose plays such as Wesele [The Wedding] and Wyzwolenie [Liberation] revolutionised Polish theatre at the turn of the twentieth century.

At the same time, the period also saw a surge in the quality and importance of applied art, interior decorating, artistic weaving, furniture-making and ceramics. Graphic design was also a part of this trend. Polish architects became enamored with art deco.

Overall, the Polish art world, perhaps like never before, was closely in synch with what was happening at the same time in Vienna, Munich and Paris.

Bohemian Kraków

The Kraków of my youth had been different. As though by magic, the walls started sprouting new shoots. Life spilled out from the salons and vestries, out onto the streets and started buzzing in cafés. Young people, barely visible in Kraków until then, were out in throngs, dressed up in their finest coats. A brand-new phenomenon sprung up on the left bank of the Vistula: the bohemia.

This was the Kraków of the last decade of the nineteenth century, as remembered by the critic and translator Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński. That’s also when its streets started to swarm with shady figures wearing capes and hats. These melancholy thinkers spent many hours in cafés, discussing the social and moral norms of their times and expressing their disagreement. They believed in art for art's sake, and apart from that they believed in nothing.

The affliction of the age, growing ever more widespread, was called ‘decadence’ -- and those infected were known as the bohemia. The true European bohemia first arrived in Kraków in 1898, when Stanisław Przybyszewski came to the city from Berlin.

Przybyszewski was then already a legendary author of blasphemous works, like the prose-poem Totenmesse, written in German. The 'Ingenious Pole' brought with him the latest, previously unknown philosophical and esthetic trends, among them esoterism and satanism – he was even suspected of being a satanist himself. Przybyszewski soon gathered a group of followers, fascinated by their 'Master'. The members of this bizarre 'cult' would meet in the Paon Café or in an apartment in Siemiradzkiego Street, where, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee, they jotted down poems on napkins, discussed the new literature and deliberated the naked soul of the artist. They found the atmospheric, artsy coffee house Jama Michalika too bourgeois for their tastes.

At first, bohemia and decadence played an important role in stirring creative ferment, but as social and national trends increased within the literature of the Young Poland movement, it came to be rejected by the leading critics of the period, such as Stanisław Brzozowski. The most remarkable depiction of the bohemia – their dilemmas and their ultimate bankruptcy – was presented in Władysław Berent's novel Próchno [The Rot, 1903].

'The Green Baloon' show, 1908. Source: Polona.pl

Green Balloon over Kraków

It was the city of Kraków, up to then a dead-serious town, that gave birth to the Green Balloon (Zielony Balonik) – the first literary cabaret in Poland. It touched off a real boom, with new cabaret venues cropping up throughout the country. As Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński, one of the authors of satirical texts, recalled:

The Green Balloon was the first collective burst of laughter that could be heard in Poland since times immemorial, so it is no wonder such laughter became epidemic (...).The Green Balloon gospel spread all over the country and cabarets appeared everywhere: from workers’ associations to artistic salons, from capital cities to remote provinces.

The skits ridiculed the conservative establishment of Kraków – middle-class Philistines and pompous, modernist bohemians, completely detached from reality. The Green Balloon was a somewhat elitist locale – to enter, one had to be invited by one of the people involved. The shows had no fixed programme, as improvisation was a priority. There was also no clear division between audience and performers – each of the guests could (or was obliged to) play, sing or recite something. The Green Balloon milieu embraced visual artists as well, and so literary content here was mixed with a dose of graphic art: from originally designed invitations and frescoes on the café's walls, to other decorations and specially designed dolls.