Gabriela Zapolska
1857–1921
Biography
Gabriela Zapolska was the name under which Maria Gabriela Stefania Korwin-Piotrowska wrote. She was a Polish novelist, playwright, theatre critic and newspaper columnist who lived from 1857 to 1921. She also acted on the stage, appearing in more than two hundred plays in a range of cities stretching from Warsaw and Kraków to Paris and the Russian capital. That mix of performing, criticism and writing gave her a close view of the theatre and of the middle-class audiences it played to.
Her best-known work is the dark farce The Morality of Mrs. Dulska (Moralność pani Dulskiej), which satirises the self-regarding respectability of the bourgeoisie. The play is usually counted among the early landmarks of modernist drama in Polish. Zapolska wrote in the naturalist manner, looking unsparingly at ordinary lives, and her plays were performed across Europe and later adapted for radio and film. Her output was very large, running to dozens of plays, many novels, numerous short stories and a great deal of journalism.
The site holds her book Menazerya ludzka, which lets readers meet her as a writer of books as well as a dramatist of the stage. Her career shows how closely late nineteenth-century Polish literature was bound up with the theatre, the press and the public arguments of its day.
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Books
Menazerya ludzka
by Gabriela Zapolska
Twelve sharp sketches by Gabriela Zapolska, each named for the pet animal its subject is likened to: the little frog, the kitten, the scapegoat, the mongrel, the cuckoo, the parrot, the doves and others. Behind the endearments she shows the vanity, hypocrisy and quiet cruelty of…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.