If I were a man, I’d tell you that I also had a certain temptation… on The Booke of Idyllic Poetry”
Maria Komornicka[1], born 1876, was a talented, tragic and elusive author of Polish modernism who, at the age of 31, invented a male identity to define herself. A groundbreaker in her ”feminine” phase, she became a recluse when the ”masculine” identity took over. Under the name of Piotr Włast, she wrote a volume of poetry which few people read and which remains unpublished. The Booke of Idyllic Poetry,completed in the years 1917-1927, is a literary testament of an eccentric subject, injured and exhausted, a true poet who was divested of his heritage (and his inheritance), and who was finally blessed with unexpected riches. The 465 pages long volume was composed to ensure its author a place alongside Charles Baudelaire and Jules Laforgue, under the patronage of Théophile Gautier, in the heaven of poets. It was also the poet’s statement of sovereignty: no longer dispossessed, he appeared to reign over a kingdom inhabited by wandering knights, vestal virgins, three-hundred year old wizards and a throng of his fairy grandmothers. The middle part of its author’s penname (while all of it read: Piotr Odmieniec Włast) called up several connotations, most importantly two overlapping ones: an outcast and a convert. But what links a convert with a person of undefined gender? A convert, according to some cautionary tales, is bound to find himself in limbo, unable to complete a transition.[2] No longer Jew, not yet a Christian, lapsed Catholic, a failed Muslim. Such people inhabited the outskirts of society divided (and ruled) according to its subjects’ creeds.
But converts could also be dangerous: notorious for their disloyalty and trying their luck at stirring up a revolution.[3] By bringing Odmieniec into being as her alter ego Komornicka added a new tone to the commonly accepted range of exclusion: gender irregularity as a cultural dissent.[4] Odmieniec comes out in the process of striving in vain but not passing; approximating the behavior of a desired gender but falling short of becoming either a man or a woman. Something intermediate.[5] As she refuses to partake in a social arrangement that adapts the division of genders as its creed, she may either become an agnostic or proceed to draft her own religion; The Booke of Idyllic Poetry seems at least partly intended to be read as a hagiographical text. [6] Odmieniec may find herself wary of pronouns; however, because Polish is a gendered language, one cannot embark on an inner transformation that implies divesting of one’s assigned gender in order to embrace another without letting it be known through the grammar. In numerous letters sent from a small mental clinic in Opawa, the hapless patient set to applying male suffixes to his pleas for release. These letters were preserved by her family as the undeniable corpus delicti: the quizzical syntax, consequently applied, proved beyond doubt the stubborn patient deserved her fate. Anna Komornicka’s letters, on the other hand, have not survived, but we can find some of her pronouncements mirrored in her daughter’s responses. Had Maria been willing to yield and reverse to the proper use of female suffixes and pronouns, she would have been, in all likelihood, set free.
Maria Komornicka was born into a family of Polish landed gentry in Grabów (now central Poland, then the Russian partition) but for most of her life, due to the estate litigations after her father’s death, she was an heiress with a sparing access to her inheritance. She was also the second child in a family of six siblings that wasn’t short of strong personalities. Privately educated, inquisitive and rebellious, Komornicka developed an independent mind and began to write at an early age. She made her press debut at the age of 16 and two years later, in 1894, a volume of short stories Sketches (Szkice) appeared. At the same time the modernist art (or decadent art, these two terms were used interchangeably) was receiving a cold reception in Berlin and further East. Due to its dark moods foretelling the end of the world, as it was known, its excessive social ideals and its quest for unconventional sexuality, Central-European modernism was quickly branded as the art of deviants. In the public discourse of the end of 19th century Warsaw such art stood for sexual perversity, social pathology, and mental illness. Along with other modernist writers, Maria Komornicka was accused of pessimism, promiscuity and hedonism, as well as atrophy of patriotic principle. Her presence among the modernist pioneers was noticed not only because of her gender, young age and revolutionary spirit, or a sense of artistic independence and a feminist awareness; moreover, she was incredibly prolific.
Komornicka was also fluent in French, capable of conversing and writing in German and English, and she was well read in both Slavic and Western literatures. The later could be attributed to her private tutor, the renowned professor, Piotr Chmielowski, author of the comprehensive volume Polish Women Writers of 19th Century (1885), among many other historical works. One of the finest minds of the end of the 19th century, Chmielowski would not be available for tutoring a prankish teenager had the Russian government not prevented him from lecturing at the Warsaw University. Such a turn of events came to the help of countless young women who, themselves forbidden to enter the academia, received their professional knowledge from the best scholars their culture had to offer, either by taking individual classes, or by attending the underground Flying University.[7] Zofia Villaume, Komornicka’s friend, in all likelihood also a lover, and a memoirist, had found a mentor in another man of letters, Wacław Nałkowski who supported his family (and his habit of producing a significant book every couple of years) from his salary of a teacher at the girls’ boarding school. His daughter, Zofia Nałkowska, completed her first novel at 14, and looked up to Komornicka, 8 years her senior, as her role model (until, in an act of differentiation, she snapped up Villaume for herself). Was the respectful treatment these girls received from their teachers the chief reason for their precocious development? Could this also be the ultimate cause of Komoricka’s bitter disappointment and her later failure at Cambridge? Her expectations were set much higher than those of British girls embracing Newham College as their safe haven [8] without obsessing over the Newham’s marginal position or the absurdity of begirding the women’s college with a brick wall. If Komornicka expected to encounter more entrancing mentors than Chmielowski, or to blossom in an academic setting which promised to embrace the ideal of gender equality, it must have been a bitter disappointment to discover that Cambridge professors were rarely if ever drawn into serious conversations with their female students. [9]
The terms of the debate over the women’s access to higher education affected Komornicka from an early age. Aniela Komornicka recalls in her memoir how her sister, busy at 8 years of age with “publishing” a family gazette, caused a rollicking laughter among her siblings by repeatedly claiming: Quand j’aurai fini mon education, quand j’aurai un corset… (When I will have completed my education, when I’ll have a corset…) [10]But this quotation, if taken seriously, seems to be implying that Komornicka wasn’t interested in embracing features of the opposite sex at an early age. If a corset stood for the gender appropriate maturity, she insisted on marrying her desired education with it. Some ten years later, in Sketches, Komornicka presented young women wearing down their suitors with their illimitable expressions of disillusionment and negativity. Her female characters, who insisted on treating their dilettante wooers as their sparing conversation partners, were not in the least romantically inclined; instead, they appeared to crave even a resemblance of some intellectual exchange. Alongside with Sketches, a full-length drama The Injured (Skrzywdzeni) by Komornicka was published in the liberal Poznań newspaper in sequels. [11] In its opening scene Wanda, a woman composer leaves her husband upon learning he doesn’t object to benefiting from her compositions being attributed to him, a pianist and a mere performer of her works. When the husband commits suicide, apparently to spite her, Wanda, suddenly burdened with guilt, abandons her art, too. At last she consents to other people’s expectations of her: she becomes a teacher to destitute children in a clandestine school and a handmaiden to a leader of the Polish patriotic underground. But she does not know how to love, and this cannot be helped. In the minds of men who cannot own her, it makes her monstrous. Her late husband’s and her suitor’s lurid accusations are but an exact rendition of the “female invert” diagnosis: it is a longing for freedom that perverts a woman’s mind.[12] Wanda is finally detained in a police roundup and exiled to the ice fields of Siberia: a purely Baudelairean narrative in the harsh, East European setting.[13]
It was when Komornicka entered the milieu of socialist art critics (and befriended belligerent and brilliant Cezary Jellenta, a Jew who embraced Polish culture and lawyer who became an art critic) that her father stepped in and sent his precocious daughter to Cambridge to cool off. But the monumental and colonial English patriarchy exhausted and repelled her, and she voiced her disappointment in her memoir, The Youth’s Paradise. Reflected in her often-sardonic account, her English colleagues weren’t born revolutionaries; they respected hierarchy and could be appeased with gaining better access to male students’ privileges. They didn’t wish to question the value of at least some of these birthrights. Class and race distinctions appeared undisputed to them. But then, Newnham students were mostly down-to-earth young women whose aim was to become much needed country teachers, not post-romantic poets. Their support system was impeccable, and it consisted of much more than young women flocking down the Newnham alleys in pairs, which prompted Emma Donoghue to praise it as “homosocial”.[14] It will then remain much regretted that Komornicka didn’t make her way into their ranks. Could it be that she was still just auditing courses, not yet matriculated, not living in the dormitory but in town, and because of that not likely to be included into the company of likeminded spirits relentlessly practicing their strength and reliance on one another? Or was it that a homosocial structure holding out in a patriarchal context must protect itself against being found culpable of more than caught the eye?[15] In any case, to the majority of Newnham students, a self-proclaimed poet-traveler who disdained the necessity to attend the Sunday mass must have appeared simply too exotic.[16]
What Komornicka resented the most was the law that allowed for every woman walking alone after dusk on the campus to be arrested. The law was apparently rooted in the olden times, when the only women walking about the campus had been prostitutes, but by the end of the 19th century when Komornicka arrived to Cambridge, it was used mainly to harass female students. As it happened, Komornicka had been already detained by the police – at the age of 16, in Warsaw – and forced to undergo a procedure euphemistically called a “medical examination”, so the Cambridge ban was bound to reopen old wounds. After just one semester, Komornicka left the famous university against her father’s will. When Komornicka’s memoir appeared in print in the Warsaw’s leading pedagogical magazine, it was placed in the context of the debate over the higher education of women. Both sides argued about the usefulness of women’s education for the society; its supporters argued that society needed its women educated; its opponents reasoned it will do without women doctors and lawyers. Komornicka’s memoir went misunderstood by both the reformers and the obstructionists, as it served neither cause. She was the only one who dared to wonder what kind of education women desired.
The young writer clearly suffered from this impasse in communication with her public but, back in Warsaw, she found solace in her alliance with two men twice her age. While her father soon died of a weak heart, Maria, wasting no time on mourning, engaged in writing the modernist manifesto Forpoczty. Her socialist friends didn’t wish to keep her cloistered or censored; to the contrary, they seemed to be feeding on her staunch spirit. This was an unusual triumvirate: one young woman (Komornicka), one assimilated Jew (Jellenta) and one disgruntled patriot (Nalkowski). They presented themselves as the representatives of the ‘future race”, the Sensitives. The men wrote a quasi-scholarly introduction to substantiate their claim, and a true-life account of the recent events which turned Jellenta into a victim of a racially-charged press scandal followed; she penned ferocious poems and her one-act play titled The Return of Ideals was written in defense of her injured friend. There, she described the mechanics of exclusion and revealed the nuts and bolts of the anti-Semitic language in a manner that brings her closer to Elfriede Jelinek than to any of the 19th century writers. The publication of Forpoczty precluded the further development of Maria Komornicka’s literary career.
Jellenta’s detractors needn’t worry; the manifesto generated a limited response (the book was banned by the Russian censorship and copies needed to be smuggled into the Warsaw Province; as it couldn’t be displayed in bookstores, the writers had to do without profit); while Nałkowski and Komornicka remained Jellenta’s sole defenders, the paper war eventually died down. With time, both Nałkowski and Jellenta were invited back into the papers and they seemed to be expanding their professional connections from then on; at the same time Komornicka’s professional world appeared to be shrinking. Owing to her youth and relative inexperience (and her unyielding belief in revolution to come) she found herself the sole casualty of the dispute that also involved the Warsaw’s only self-sustaining publishing house, Gebethner and Wolf – accused by Jellenta of professional dishonesty en passant. She could probably do much better with Gebethner and Wolf than with Jellenta – but it is still sad that her relationship with the later didn’t stand the test of time. Soon after their estrangement, a gossip hinting at her presumed “manliness” and “unrestrained passion” began to circulate in the Warsaw’s literary community. Komornicka’s fragmented correspondence with Zofia Villaume confirms their romance was blossoming about the time when Forpoczty came out in print. The forbidden edition was, in fact, kept safe in Villaume’s house. If Komornicka came out to her friends, it would explain her further estrangement, and there was no reason why she would keep this part of her carefully crafted dandy persona secret from them. After all, didn’t they promise to sustain each other against the biased world? While Komornicka supported her liberal friends and made their cause hers, she must have hoped for the favor to be returned.
In the following years 1896-1900 the previously prodigious writer grew silent. The second volume of Sketches announced in her letters to Zofia Villaume[17] had never seen the light of day. Her former mentor Nałkowski mocked her in one caustic review, and the ultra-conservative press branded her a “Jew’s lover”. Ambushed in a no-win situation, she was prompted to betroth. In 1898 Komornicka married defiantly below her class, a penniless poet, Jan Lemanski; of all her family, only her mother elected to attend the wedding (if a bottle party in the leading Warsaw artists’ café could be considered as such). Still, Komornicka must have envisioned a partnership of writers and hoped both she and her husband would start earning their living by their pen. But her marital choice proved to be unwise; instead of distancing her from her family, it made her depend on the final distribution of her late father’s estate. In addition, Lemański turned out to be possessively jealous and fired several shots at her and her male cousin while on their honeymoon trip. She was injured in both arms and later wore one of the bullets as a pendant to her watch. On the whole, Lemański appeared more passionate about men allegedly paying court to his wife than about her. Apparently, his jealousy was giving him free reign to speculate on their amorous behavior with his boyish, emaciated wife. (Some time after her estrangement from her Jellenta and perhaps also from Villaume, Komornicka cropped her abundant auburn hair short.) And yet husband and wife had a lot in common – they enjoyed turning their life into a mockery of heterosexual exchange. Maria relished the scandal while standing in the witness box at a trial to testify in favor of her husband. When they agreed to divorce two years later, she was both free from marital obligation and labeled a social failure. Conservatives would never forget her shrewd and satirical portrayal of them in The Return of Ideals, while her former friends, patriotically minded liberals considered her useless as soon as she became notorious as a femme fatale.
In 1903 her voice cleared and an original poetic fiction The Devils (Biesy) unfolded. Described by feminine pronouns, the subject of the story is called Odmieniec [18] (which translates into an oddity, an outlaw, and an outsider – in some folklore tales this was also the devil’s nickname) who makes several vain efforts to fit into society’s standards. The narrative of exclusion unfolds as soon as the landscape changes from an open field into the claustrophobic municipality. The Devils appeared in print under the auspices of the sophisticated literary magazine Chimera. There, Komornicka had an influential book review column which she kept signing with a male penname Piotr Włast. The true authorship of these unparalleled book reviews was kept secret until 1960s, when it was revealed by Aniela Komornicka. Aniela refuted the assumption that several authors helped themselves to her sister’s penname.[19] Piotr Włast was Komornicka’s infamous ancestor, a medieval palatine who – when ordained to build 7 churches as a penance – acting out of amour-propre presented the church with 70 of them. In his reincarnation as a book reviewer, Piotr Włast was brilliant and ironic, passionate and witty. He held the authority Maria could only wish for. She gave up trying to publish fiction and seemed to wither, locked in the elitist cage of Chimera, writing perfectly measured, cold and enervated poems. She traveled to Paris, for the first time on her own, and was struck by the high number of lectures and exhibitions. There, she wrote to her mother, talented people were valued. Strangely, the trip ended with a nervous breakdown. She returned to Warsaw by the end of 1905, right when the city was besieged due to a preamble to the socialist revolution. No one could say anything convincing about what she did in the following year.
In July 1907 Maria traveled with her mother to the seaside. At their stop in Poznań, she purportedly announced her gender was male and demanded a man’s attire in the morning. In response, her mother had her confined to a string of private clinics located abroad. The medical documentation vanished during the First and Second World Wars. Yet some information about Maria’s psychiatric treatment could be learned from her letters to Anna Komornicka. Daily intake of purgatives had been administered, as well as long baths. A follower of Sigmund Freud interviewed her, implying that she had fallen in love with her father. Some of her doctors, perhaps inspired by Richard von Krafft-Ebing, assumed her strive for artistic perfection had its roots in her personality, weakened by narcissism and transsexual fantasies. None of these methods would lead to a successful convalescence. Nor were her Austrian doctors in a position to grasp the true value of her creative work – or her place among the Warsaw modernists, uncontested even by her most ardent detractors. Letters to Anna Komornicka, preserved by her family as an irrefutable proof of her delusions, are the sole and painful testimony of confinement. The patient begged to be released, received false promises, accused his family and his generation of turning him into an invalid, tried to smooth the disagreements, but never ceased to perceive his seclusion as banishment.[20] Was she already insane upon entering her first mental clinic or simply exhausted? One serious psychotic breakdown took place in the second year of confinement; in the afternoon of June 27 1909 the fury and helplessness were replaced with a baroque structure of hallucinations. Released with the outbreak of the First World War, after seven years spent in a string of small private clinics, Maria Komornicka, placid and subdued, was allowed to return to the family mansion in Grabów. There, the spooky inhabitant of her beaten up body, Piotr Odmieniec Włast, a poet and a recluse, spent the following 30 years in a strict, self-applied daily regime of strolls and meditations, keeping to his room in a remote wing of the house where no guests were allowed. In 1927, with The Booke of Idyllic Poetry completed and signed with both names (the former feminine name was sealed off in quotation marks and parentheses), the author expected to be vindicated through his writing. But in the 1920s and 1930s Komornicka was seldom remembered and often believed to be dead. At the end of the Second World War the mansion in Grabów was destroyed down by mortar fire, as the front line passed through the estate. One copy of The Booke of Idyllic Poetry survived at Aniela Komornicka’s apartment in Warsaw but all family pictures disappeared in the conflagration. The poet spent his last years in the paupers’ shelter tended by nuns. There Zofia Villaume discovered him and, as letters began pouring from both sides, Villaume was offered to read The Booke. The poet’s letters were often signed Maria, but the two never met again; he refused to be seen. Villaume, impressed by The Booke which she considered “visionary”[21], convinced the poet’s sister Aniela of its value. Their joint attempts to publish it proved unsuccessful; the communism of the 1950s allowed no gender sophistication within its scope. Komornicka died in 1949. Villaume died, sightless, in 1961. Aniela lived to see her own memoir, commemorating her unique sister, published in 1964.[22]
Her contemporaries rarely mentioned Komornicka while she was still alive. Jellenta referred to her favorably in two concise reminiscences published shortly before his death but didn’t reveal the nature of their earlier estrangement.[23] In the early communist times both Zofia Villaume and Aniela Komornicka failed to rally enough supporters willing to risk their prestige in endorsing the publication of The Booke. Three poems finally appeared in the anthology Odmieńcy (the plural from Odmieniec)[24] brought out by Maria Janion, now an acclaimed literary historian, then a non-conformist scholar notably banished from the Warsaw University to the intellectual desert of the North of the country.[25] Together with Janion’s essay summarizing Komornicka’s achievements from the hermeneutical position, this stunningly innovative publication brought the forgotten poet back into the focus of literary criticism. Unfortunately, the anthology went out of print soon after the imposition of the martial law, and a shaky political situation did not exactly encourage any extensive research on a risky subject. Fifteen years later, Janion returned to the theme of Komornicka and her unmentionable oeuvre with another essay, Maria Komornicka, in memoriam, written from the feminist perspective. Both appeared in her book on revolution and women writers.[26] This publication awakened the interest in Komornicka; several more publications followed. Their authors took a cautious stance and almost unanimously argued that no external circumstances contributed to Komornicka’s isolation and her subsequent madness. In view of these interpretations, Komornicka showed signs of mental disturbance from an early age; socially withdrawn, obstinate and unyielding, she neither knew how to handle her talent nor wished to make any of the concessions necessary if she wished to be socially accepted. As far as her conservative interpreters could tell, Komornicka’s unusual transition into a man was prompted exclusively by her eclectic strand of personal philosophy (Nietzscheanizm cum Buddhism) or some other spiritual factors. In effect, these writers believed that Komornicka either persuaded herself that in order to access her creative potential she needed to become a man[27] or she made herself believe that “men were better”.[28] Some authors also argued that Komornicka was a transsexual, possibly even endowed with an undiagnosed physical irregularity that negatively impacted her mental constitution.[29]
While each of these interpretations may contain a grain of truth, historical sources don’t entirely support them; essentially, Komornicka’s contemporaries didn’t shy away from mentioning her acute isolation or her numerous attempts – generous at first, desperate in the end – to connect with her contemporaries.[30] Undeniably, Komornicka’s letters to her mother yarn a poignant tale of a daring young woman endowed with a brilliant mind, an unbeatable spirit and a captivating personality seeking to replenish her resources and gradually exhausting them over the years. There is also not enough proof to support the flaky thesis that Komornicka’s transformation into Piotr Włast was an act equivalent to humbling herself before the ideal of male superiority that lead, as one of her contemporaries wished it, to her “personal Canossa”.[31] Yet each of the aforementioned interpretations dismissed beforehand any claim that Komornicka’s decision could be linked to her search for an appropriate expression of her psycho-sexual identity. Thus, by the end of 1990s Polish literary historians appeared to arrive at a consensus: Maria Komornicka’s transformation into Piotr Włast was a symbolic equivalent of her wish to relinquish her sexuality and, in effect, it prompted her to regress into a childlike state of mind [32] for the purpose of become a sexless recluse.[33]
In these view my decision to examine the contents of both The Booke of Idyllic Poetry and Komornicka’s letters to her mother, as well those to Zofia Villaume for the purpose of reconstructing her gender identity could be seen as nothing less than an act of reckless bravura and, despite substantiating each of my claims in a well-founded research, was eventually received as such. However, it seemed to me necessary to uncover how her contemporaries could apprehend Komornicka’s notorious declaration that she had a soul and a nature of a man.[34] As Lillian Faderman points out, both the budding psychiatry about to establish its credentials through its discourse on homosexuality (Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Karl Friedrich Otto von Westphal, Richard von Krafft-Ebing) and the affirmative homosexual movement (Magnus Hirschfeld and his Jahrbuch fur Sexuelle Zwischenstufen) relied on the romantic ideal of the “third sex”.[35] In the discourse of the epoch, a female homosexual was expected to have a “soul of a man”. In effect, as it was assumed that one’s soul would manifest itself through external expressions of the body and mind (such as garments worn or a manner of speaking), flaunting one’s “male characteristics” could be seen– at least by Polish public subscribing to international journals – as a homosexual coming out already in 1840s, [36] that is, half a century before Komornicka was born. In several instances additional corrections to these analyses were needed, as a woman desiring to pursue higher education was not necessarily a homosexual. All the same, both defenders and defamers of homosexuality came to a consensus that a homosexual woman needed to put some “male attributes” on display if she wanted to be perceived as such. Thus a female homosexual or an invert was expected to be ruled by her mind rather than emotions (consequently, she wouldn’t suffer from hysteria, a classic female disease of the fin de siècle). In the emancipative homosexual discourse of the first decade of the 20th century she was also expected to be bright, outgoing and creative, as she would hope to be free to pursue a career in arts and letters, and not to marry.[37] The distinction between homosexuality and transsexuality appeared purposefully blurred, or rather there was no distinction. As a result of such cultural theorizing, a woman writer who wished to come out as a lesbian (in the modern sense of the word) and desired to be spared any further attempts at reconciling her with heteronormativity, would most likely accomplish her goal by claiming she had a soul of a man. Plain and simple.
This conclusion doesn’t entirely confirm that Komornicka was a lesbian in a modern sense of the word. Life as a female invert could be considered an attractive form of existence for an artist who wished to be exempted from all typically female obligations, so it can be expected that a creative woman could wish to use such a coming-out as an assurance of her artistic sovereignty. However well planned it all appears, too many factors conspired against Maria Komornicka: her unyielding desire to surrender her life to the transforming power of art clashed with the grim realities of her unequal status as a woman; the depressing moods of the Northern modernism represented by artists such August Stringberg, Edward Munk, and Stanisław Przybyszewski (who were also blatantly sexist in their statements) overlapped with a Polish lack of political autonomy and the trickling out of hope after one hundred years of political subjugation. Putting the patriotic causes before the women’s rights and their access to jobs and education didn’t particularly help, as any woman searching for alternative modes of expression risked being branded selfish and a traitor – and Komornicka’s early writings testify to this trend. Additionally, linking homosexuality with mental illness by the debuting sexologists didn’t stop Russian, Prussian and Austrian courts of law operating on Polish territories from considering it a criminal offence. Komornicka, as vulnerable as she was gifted, made several attempts at finding a safe heaven for herself. Her travel to Cambridge, her support of Jellenta, her marriage to Lemański, and finally her collaboration with Chimera, were undertaken to provide her with a lasting support. If expected to relinquish some valid part of herself in return, she was willing to comply, at least some of the time.
In comparison to these failed attempts at fitting in, the gender transition promised wholeness; it was a healing act and a merging between the self and the world, intimacy and art. Similarly, the subject and narrator of The Booke of Idyllic Poetry doesn’t fail to present himself as a magician able to generate fantastic worlds and to posit them against the cultural desert of his daily existence. His narratives end up in places later mentioned by Susan Sontag in her “camp” list; the stanzas of The Book of Idyllic Poetry are extravagant and passionate, artificial and innocent, excessive, theatrical, and frivolous when approaching the most serious matters.[38] The poet, male and exhausted, takes his hat off to his former feminine self in several of The Booke long poems. He is no longer a cynical agnostic (the way she was) but someone willing to embrace all creeds. He is partly a Buddhist and partly an early Christian sympathetic towards the remnants of pagan faith. His kingdom is ruled by the principle of non-violence. In addition, The Book of Idyllic Poetry was also rather soberly written by a disciplined author conscious of his own literary tradition: Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal, among others. A close comparison allows a literary historian to lay out similarities: both Włast and Baudelaire were raised Catholic; both never stopped being moralists; they both wanted to break free from the Spleen and embrace the Ideal, yet their best poems are those that document the fall or their divergence from the Ideal.[39] Conversely, where Baudelaire lists grievances against his mother, God, his lovers, and his own existence, Włast multiplies “benevolent narratives”; he forgives himself and absolves his wrongdoers. He performs what he could never do in his correspondence. And if the poet is really mad, what of it? We have no choice but to assimilate his madness together with his brilliance. In the meantime, Komornicka remains an inspiration to yet another generation of her fans, although The Booke of Idyllic Poetry will not appear in print any time soon. And to the Western reader, a successor of the pioneer Newnham College students – what is Komornicka to her?
Notes
[1] Pronounce: Ko-mor-neetz’-ka.
[2] The Russian penal code of 1866 for the Polish Kingdom found a conversion to Judaism a punishable offence. One could convert into Christian faith in accord with the law, but a convert risked losing support of her former Jewish community without being immediately admitted into a Christian one, and finding herself in existential limbo. Cf. Bożena Umińska, Postać z cieniem: Portrety Żydówek w polskiej literaturze (A figure with a shadow: Portraits of Jewish women in Polish literature) (Warsaw: Sic!, 2001), 167.
[3] The figure of a convert plotting to bring down Holy See was epitomized in the true story of Jakub Frank, a maverick rabbi, who made his sect convert to Christian faith by the end of the 18th century. M. Janion, Do Europy tak, ale razem z naszymi umarłymi (To Europe – yes, but together with our departed) (Warsaw: Sick!, 2000), 54.
[4] Kate Bornstein similarly equals a modern gender economy with a sectarian thinking. Kate Bornstein, Gender outlaw: on men, women, and the rest of us (New York: Routledge, 1994), 102-106.
[5] Maria Komornicka to Anna Komornicka, Zakopane, 29 September 1902, Letters of Maria Komornicka to her mother, Anna Komornicka, Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Literature, Warsaw. Instead of calling herself a “person” (which would connote a female gender in Polish) or a “human being” (which would indicate a male), Komornicka applies the neuter in reference to herself. A pronoun coś (something) is used in Polish in reference to children, certain animals, some objects.
[6] Komornicka was indeed an adamant atheist in her youth, and embraced her own inherently eclectic religion only after claiming the identity of Piotr Włast. Maria Dernałowicz, „Piotr Odmieniec Włast,” Twórczość (Warsaw), no. 3 (1977): 79–95.
[7] Private classes for women were organized in Warsaw since 1882. Due to their clandestine nature, their hosts risked police raids and imprisonment, so the locations of classes were sporadically changed. In 1885 these were transformed, while maintaining their “flying” aspect, into the informal higher education institution by the alumna, Jadwiga Szczawinska. Students chose between four majors: social studies, philological-historical studies, math-science and pedagogy. It took 5 to 6 years to complete the course of studies. About 5000 women graduated from Flying University during its 20 years of existence, Maria Skłodowska-Curie, the future recipient of the Nobel Price, among them. Cf. Jadwiga Mackiewicz-Wojciechowska, Uniwersytet „Latający”: Karta z dziejów tajnej pracy oświatowej (Flying University: A chapter from the history of the clandestine educational work) (Warszawa: Drukarnia L. Bogusławskiego, 1933).
[8] One needs to read Komornicka’s memoir and Newnham students’ reminiscences side by side to be stunned by a sheer disparity between her rather critical take on Newnham College and the laudatory spirit permeating memories of those female students for whom English was the first language. Cf. Ann Phillips, ed., A Newnham Anthology, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
[9] For details on Maria Komornicka’s discontenting trip to Cambridge see also Izabela Filipiak, “Malcontent in Cambridge” Institute of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (University of California, Berkeley) 20, no. 6 (Fall 2003): 13-22, http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~iseees/publications/2003_20-03.pdf
[10] Aniela Komornicka, „Maria Komornicka w swych listach i mojej pamięci” (Maria Komornicka in her letters and my memory), in Stanisław Pigon and Maria Dernałowicz, ed., Archiwum Literackie, vol. 8, Miscellanea (Wroclaw, 1964), 303.
[11] Maria Komornicka, ”Raj młodzieży. Wspomnienie z Cambridge” (Youth’s paradise: A memoir of Cambridge), parts 1-10, Przegląd Pedagogiczny (Pedagogical Review) (Warsaw), 1896, nos. 5–7, 10–16, 24.
[12] As Faderman points out in her close reading of Aimeé Duc’s novel Sind es Frauen? (Berlin, 1903), it is a longing for freedom that sets this group of ambitious and homosexual young women apart from the totality of female populace and furnishes their self-definitions as the representatives of the “third sex”. Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1981), 250.
[13] The first translation of Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire into Polish didn’t include several poems, such as Femmes damnés. Delphine et Hippolyte already banned by the French court of law in 1857. One could only expect the poems to be circulating among curious intellectuals of the era. The aforementioned poem by Baudelaire brings out an image of a lesbian as an exile, an outlaw. See Charles Baudelaire, Kwiaty grzechu, transl. Antoni Lange and Adam M-ski [Zofia Trzeszczkowska] (Warsaw, 1894). Trzeszczkowska translated Baudelaire and published her own poems under a male penname; she was discovered to be a man only after her death in 1911.
[14] Emma Donoghue, We are Michael Field (New York: Absolute Press, 1998), 22.
[15] “About the abnormal, we of course knew nothing whatever. Looking back, and applying the glass of contemporary outlook, certain pairs of friends loom up as attached by bonds so close that, nowadays, they would have roused suspicion; they were not in our group, and not regarded by us with great favour. Our distaste for them, however, was instinctive and wholly ignorant. Not only had we no suspicions; we should not have understood what anyone was talking about who expressed such. This was, of course, of its time; and intensely English. Guendalina, the Italian girl who came up in our second year and was admitted more or less fully to the intimacies of our group, did, later, supply certain illumination. I did not like or communicate it, however.” M. A. Hamilton, Remembering My Good Friends (London: Cape, 1944), 46.
[16] “Society at Newnham in my day was formed of small circles from the big public schools (one of which I myself had come from); they held together and were watchful of one another’s interests. There were a few students who had never been to school at all, but had been educated at home. We had only one American girl, whose slender education and immense self-reliance caused us to wonder. There were more students studying Natural Science than there were Arts students. A few odd individuals from the North seemed to have no scholastic connection. We also had a few aristocrats. They never stayed for long or took a Tripos but were ornamental.” G. M. L. Thomas, “An Endless Fountain” (1898), A Newnham anthology, 41.
[17] Maria Komornicka to Zofia Villaume, Warsaw, 8 January 1897, Letters of Maria Komornicka-Lemańska to Zofia Villaume-Zahrtowa, The Main Library of Marie Curie-Slodowska University, Lublin. The title quote of this essay (If I were a man, I’d tell you…) comes from the very same letter; the later part of which made it clear that Komornicka would be happy to talk about her temptations anyway.
[18] Pronounce: Od-mie-en’-nie-etz.
[19] Aniela Komornicka to Stanisław Pigoń, Warsaw, 23 December 1960, The Correspondence of Aniela Komornicka with Stanisław Pigoń, Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Literature, Warsaw.
[20] Maria Komornicka to Anna Komornicka, Opawa, 7 April 1909.
[21] Zofia Nalkowska to Jerzy Zawieyski, Krynica, 3 August 1947, ”Niesie mnie rzeka smutku…” Korespondencja Zofii Nałkowskiej i Jerzego Zawieyskiego 1943-1954 (‘A river of sadness carries me away…’ Correspondence of Zofia Nałkowska and Jerzy Zawieyski 1943-1954), Malina Kluźniak, ed., with a foreward by Hanna Kirchner (Warsaw: Biblioteka Narodowa, 2000).
[22] Aniela Komornicka was invited to write an essay on the subject of her sister’s life by Professor Stanisław Pigoń whom she had approached in 1960 in hope for his support in publishing The Booke of Idyllic Poetry. But Pigoń found no value in The Booke, and his interest in bringing out the testimonies by Aniela and Jan Komornicki was strictly personal. Cf. Stanisław Pigoń, „Trzy świadectwa o Marii Komornickiej” (Three testimonies about Maria Komornicka), Archiwum Literackie, vol. 8, Miscellanea, 341-342.
[23] Cezary Jellenta, „Forpoczty,” Pion (Warsaw), no. 30 (1935): 3-4. See also Cezary Jellenta, „Zapomniana awangarda” (The forgotten avant-garde), Pion (Warsaw), no. 29 (1935): 2.
[24] Maria Janion, ” ’Gdzie jest Lemańska?!’ ” (‘Where is Lemańska?!’), in Maria Janion and Zbigniew Majchrowski, ed., Transgresje (Transgressions), vol. 2, Odmieńcy, (Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Morskie, 1982).
[25] Due to this otherwise regrettable development of events I had an honor to complete my master thesis under Professor Janion’s guidance in 1986.
[26] Maria Janion, „Maria Komornicka, in memoriam,” in Kobiety i duch inności (Women and the spirit of difference) (Warsaw: Sic!, 1996), 243-289.
[27] Edward Boniecki, Modernistyczny dramat ciała: Maria Komornicka (A modernist drama of the body) (Warsaw: IBL, 1998).
[28] Roman Zimand, „Klucze do Marii P.O.W” (Keys to Maria P.O.W.), in Wojna i spokój. Szkice trzecie (War and serendipity. Third sketches) (London: Polonia, 1984), 123–143.
[29] Maria Podraza-Kwiatkowska, „Tragiczna wolność: O Marii Komornickiej” (Tragic freedom: About Maria Komornicka) in Młodopolskie harmonie i dysonanse (Harmonies and dissonances of Polish modernism) (Warsaw: PIW, 1969), 137–168.
[30] Aleksander Oszacki, ”Spowiedź niedorodzonej: Kilka uwag lekarza o psychice Marii Komornickiej” (Confessions of the incompletely born: A few psychiatrist’s remarks about the psyche of Maria Komornicka), Archiwum Literackie, vol. 8, Miscellanea, 342–349.
[31] Waclaw Wolski, „Marya Komornicka,” Wzloty na Parnas. Profile duchowe poetów współczesnych (Flights to Parnassus. Spiritual profiles of contemporary poets) (Warsaw: Druk „Gazety Rolniczej”, 1902) 36–53.
[32] Jerzy Sosnowski, „Młoda Polska dzieckiem podszyta” (A child-like side of Polish modernism) in Śmierć czarownicy! Szkice o literaturze i wątpieniu (Down with the witch! Sketches of literature and doubt) (Warsaw: Semper, 1993) 73–111.
[33] Krystyna Kralkowska-Gątkowska, Cień twarzy: Szkice o twórczości Marii Komornickiej (A shadowy face: Sketches on the creative output of Maria Komornicka) (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 2002).
[34] Izabela Filipiak, Obszary odmiennosci: Rzecz o Marii Komornickiej (Uncharted territories: An inquiry into Maria Komornicka) (Gdansk: Slowo/Obraz Terytoria, 2006).
[35] As the concept of the third sex was a desirably beguiling cultural myth, there were several, both positive and negative effects of such unconditional reliance. Cf. Faderman, Surpassing the love of men, 244. See also Harry Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of nature: Krafft-Ebing, psychiatry, and the making of sexual identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 267.
[36] A proto-feminist writer Narcyza Żmichowska who defended love between women in her intelligent and daring novel White Rose (1861) had an ill-founded reputation of sporting cropped hair, breeches, a “watch on a chain” and a cigar. The image of a “masculine woman” was imposed on Żmichowska by her contemporaries and unsuccessfully disputed by her close female friends. Because Żmichowska valued the link between femininity and creativity, and considered it essential, she seemed alternatively resentful and amused by this phantomlike act of dressing her up as a man in the sphere of public imagination – the first draft of her novel confiscated by police in 1849 confirms it. On top of that, a writer who had to earn her living as a governess or rely on her benefactors had neither means nor desire to shed a conventional woman’s dress. Piotr Chmielowski, Autorki polskie wieku XIX (Polish authoresses of the 19th century) (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Spółki Nakładowej Warszawskiej, 1885), 258.
[37] Lillian Faderman, Brigitte Eriksson, introduction to Lesbians in Germany: 1890’s-1920’s, Lillian Faderman and Brigitte Eriksson, ed., (Tallahassee, Fla.: Naiad Press, 1990), ix-xxi.
[38] Cf. Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘camp’ ” Partisan Review no. 31 (1964), 515–530.
[39] D. J. Mossop, Baudelaire’s tragic hero: A study of the architecture of Les Fleurs du Mal (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 17-26.
“If I were a man, I’d tell you I had also a certain temptation”. On “The Booke of Idyllic Poetry” by Maria Komornicka, w: Tribades, Tommies and Transgressives, ed. by M. McAuliffe and S. Tiernan, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle 2008, s. 195-210.
morska 