 | Wydawnictwo Czarne
Wołowiec 2005
147×171
96 pages
hardcover
ISBN 83-89755-21-1
Translation rights: Wydawnictwo Czarne
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Andrzej StasiukNight – A Slavonic-German medical tragi-farce
About the author
The plot of Andrzej Stasiuk’s play, Night, is not hard to summarise. A young thief from Poland is killed during a raid in Germany, when he is shot by the owner of a jewellery shop. The boy’s heart is illegally removed during the post mortem and transplanted into the jeweller. And that’s it. It may not seem much, but the appeal of Stasiuk’s text does not depend on an eventful plot at all. As Stasiuk himself suggests in an interview issued with the play, he has written “something like a spiritualist séance combined with a therapy session”. The events in the play hardly provide the impetus for such an event. What sort of therapy is involved in this instance? In a bitter tone, though not devoid of humour – at the end of the day, it is a farce – Stasiuk makes short shrift of the stereotypes and batty mythologies that are all too abundant in endlessly complicated Polish-German relations. He tries, both literally and metaphorically, to unite “the Slavonic heart and the German mind”, investigates whether it is possible to find an open space where Poles and Germans will drop their fears and prejudices, past and present, and relate to each other as rightful inhabitants of a single European family.
However, Night is not solely and exclusively about Polish-German traumas. Stasiuk offers a broader perspective. He writes about the clash between East and West, about the disappointed hopes of Easterners and the superiority of Westerners, “about the fact that the desires of the East will not find solace in the wealth of the West; and that the fears of the West will not find solace in the moderation of the East”. And about the despair that affects everyone, though its sources are very varied. In spite of such a “heavy” subject, Stasiuk does not slip into newspaper-style commentaty. Night vibrates with images, and inspires fear – just like the night.
Robert Ostaszewski
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