Anna Stanisławska

Anna Stanislawska

Portrait of Anna of the Stanislawski Family Artist unknown. Housed in The National Museum of Warsaw.
Born 1651
Died 2 June 1701 (aged 51)
Literary movement Polish Baroque, Sarmatism
Notable works Transakcja albo opisanie całego życia jednej sieroty przez żałosne treny od tejże samej pisane roku 1685

Anna Stanisławska (1651 – 1701) was a seventeenth century Polish author and poet known for her sole work Transakcja albo opisanie całego życia jednej sieroty przez żałosne treny od tejże samej pisane roku 1685, most commonly translated as “Transaction, or an Account of the Life of an Orphan Girl told through Mournful Laments in the Year 1685”.[1]

Biography

Early life

Stanislawska was born in 1651 to Michal Stanislawski, a military commander and at one time the voivode of Kiev province, and Krystyna Borkowa Szyszkowska (née Niszczycka).[2] Stanislawska was a member of the szlachta, or noble class, and her family bore the Piława coat of arms, connecting them to the powerful Potocki and Zebrzydowski families.[3] Following the death of her mother when she was three, Stanislawska was sent to a cloister near Kraków to be educated by Dominican nuns.[4] Her maternal great aunt, Gryzelda Dominika Zebrzydowska, was the prioress there until she died of the bubonic plague, at which point Stanislawka was placed in the guardianship of her maternal grandfather.[5]

The Aesop Episode

Stanislawska's young brother Piotr died in 1667, prompting her father to bring her back home. He had remarried in 1663, to Anna Potocka Kazanowska-Sluszka, and under pressure from her he arranged his daughter's marriage to Jan Kazimierz Warszycki. Warszycki had powerful connections, being the son of Stanislaw Warszycki, a senator and Castellan of Kraków, but he was also mentally disabled, physically abusive, and completely disinterested in Stanislawska sexually.[6] In Transaction Stanislawska refers to him almost exclusively as "Aesop", for his ugly appearance,[7] but ultimately she takes pity on him as the "slave" of his conniving and "tyrannical" father.[8] Much of the piece recounts her misery in her marriage to Warszycki and her attempts to secure a divorce from him. Shortly before their wedding she became deathly ill, and it was conducted in her home rather than in the church, as was traditional.[9] After her father's death in 1669 she gained ownership of their family's estate. Her great uncle John III Sobieski, who would become king of Poland in 1674, became her new guardian.[10] With his assistance Stanislawska repaired her relationship with her stepmother and fled to a convent, claiming sanctuary from her husband and his family.[11] She sought an annulment in court, which was finally granted around 1670.[12] Her stepmother's testimony, in which she claimed that she and Stanislawska's father had forced the girl into marriage against her will, was crucial in securing the annulment.[13]

Later life and marriages

Once divorced, Stanislawska swiftly married a distant relative, Jan Zbigniev Oleśnicki.[14] According to Transaction, they were happily married until Oleśnicki's death from cholera in 1675 while on a military expedition during the Second Polish–Ottoman War. In 1677 she married again, to Jan Boguslaw Zbąski. In 1683, Zbąski died from an injury he sustained at the Battle of Vienna during the Third Polish–Ottoman War.[15] It was at this point that she began writing Transaction. Little is known of Stanislawska's life after 1685. At some point in the 1690s, she was taken to court after she led a group of servants and villagers against the new owners of a neighboring estate, which had been seized due to unpaid debts. She donated much of her wealth to various missionary groups and to the Piarist monks at Dunajgrod, leaving her estate to the latter in her will. She died on June 2, 1701, in Kurów.[16]

Transaction (1685)

Transaction, or an Account of the Life of an Orphan Girl told through Mournful Laments in the Year 1685 is an autobiographical (according to the author) epic poem describing Stanislawska’s life from her birth until approximately 1683. It consists of seventy-seven "threnodies", or laments, each containing a varying number of eight-line stanzas. It also contains a twenty-two-line introduction, entitled “To the Reader”, a twelve-line conclusion, “Conclusion – To the Reader of This Book”, and numerous marginal notes.[17] It is a Polish Baroque piece, characterized by dramatism, swells of emotion, and strict form. It also reflects Stanislawska’s intense Catholicism, typical to the Sarmatism movement of the period and evidence of her convent education. Stanislawska's rhymes follow an aabb format, called Chestochovian rhymes, which were very unpopular among Polish poets and thus an unusual choice.[18] Her primary inspiration was most likely Jan Kochanowski's "Threnodies" (also translated as "Laments"), written in 1580 about the death of his two-year-old daughter.[19] Like Kochanowski, Stanislawska personifies and addresses Fortune in her work, in addition to referencing a Christian god.[20] She may also have drawn upon the traditions of "courty theatre" for her narrative.[21]

For reasons unknown, Transaction was never published, and was not discovered until 1890, when it was found in a St. Petersburg public library by Polish linguist and historian Aleksander Brückner. Brückner wrote on it in his 1893 study "The First Polish Woman Writer and Her Rhymed Autobiography".[22] Transaction was only able to be published afters years of negotiations with St. Petersburg, which were complicated by the Russian Revolution in 1917. It was finally sent to Poland as part of a larger exchange in 1935, and published by Ida Kotowa.[23] Though Stanislawska's identity as the author was in question for a time, Kotowa included in her edition a 1699 letter written by Stanislawska, which matched the handwriting in Transaction.[24] Stanislawska's original manuscript was either destroyed or lost during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944.

Criticism

The discovery of Transaction in 1890 made Stanislawska the earliest known Polish woman author. While there is evidence of Polish women writing before her, their work either has not survived or their authorship cannot be proven.[25] Even after Transaction was published in 1935, Stanislawska has been surpassed in fame by her contemporaries Elżbieta Drużbacka and Antonina Niemiryczowa, both historically and in the Polish literary canon.[26]

In her introduction to Transaction, Ida Kotowa heavily critiqued Stanislawska’s clarity and imagination, writing that the marginal notes often had to be relied upon for the “true sense of a stanza” and that her rhymes were “usually… strained, and sometimes simply forced”.[27] Brückner agreed, repeatedly calling the poetry "poor" or even "terrible", but going on to praise Stanislawska's “feminine wit”.[28] Though later scholars with more forgiving, calling Transaction "a sincere and artistically valuable confession" as well as "detailed and lifelike", ultimately the work has been celebrated more for its social implications than for its style.[29] It was the “first strictly personal woman’s memoir for the readers’ enlightenment and admonition” in the region,[30] and one of many recently discovered "'other' and certainly 'forgotten' voices of the Baroque era".[31]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Miłosz, Czesław (1983). The History of Polish Literature. University of California Press. p. 140. ISBN 9780520044777.
  2. ↑ Peretz, Maya (1993). "In Search of the First Polish Woman Author". The Polish Review. 38 (4): 472.
  3. ↑ Stanislawska, Anna (2016). Keane, Barry, ed. Orphan Girl: A Transaction, or an Account of the Entire Life of an Orphan Girl by way of Plaintful Threnodies in the Year 1685. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series. 45. Toronto, Ontario: Iter Academic Press. p. 6. ISBN 9780866985475.
  4. ↑ Stanislawska, "Orphan Girl: A Transaction", p. 22
  5. ↑ Peretz, "In Search of the First Polish Woman Author", p. 473.
  6. ↑ Keane, "Orphan Girl: A Transaction", p. 6-7, 37-38.
  7. ↑ Stanislawska, p. 25.
  8. ↑ Stanislawska, p. 53, 91-92.
  9. ↑ Stanislawska, p. 30.
  10. ↑ Stanislawska, p. 68.
  11. ↑ Stanislawska, p. 78, 83.
  12. ↑ Stanislawska, p. 91, 97.
  13. ↑ Keane, p. 9.
  14. ↑ Peretz, p. 476.
  15. ↑ Keane, p. 10-11.
  16. ↑ Keane, p. 12.
  17. ↑ Peretz, p. 470.
  18. ↑ Keane, p. 14.
  19. ↑ King, Margaret L., "Orphan Girl: A Transaction", p. xi.
  20. ↑ Keane, p. 13.
  21. ↑ Keane, p. 15.
  22. ↑ Peretz, p. 469.
  23. ↑ Peretz, p. 469.
  24. ↑ Keane, p. 2.
  25. ↑ Peretz, p. 481.
  26. ↑ Magdalena Ozarska, “Combining a Lament with a Verse Memoir: Anna Stanisławska’s Transaction (1685),” Slavia - Časopis pro Slovanskou Filologii 81, no. 4 (2012): 389–404.
  27. ↑ Peretz, p. 471.
  28. ↑ Keane, p. 2.
  29. ↑ Wilczek, Piotr and Chuilleanáin, Eiléan Ní, "Orphan Girl: A Transaction", back cover.
  30. ↑ Peretz, p. 472.
  31. ↑ Keane, p. 1.

Bibliography

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