Apollo Nałęcz-Korzeniowski as a playwright

This article shows that Apollo Korzeniowski practised what he preached by writing plays of a mixed emotional tonality that ranged from lyricism to bitter sarcasm. Unfortunately his poetry and plays were soon forgotten after his death and for almost a century he was remembered chiefly as Conrad’s father and as yet another victim of tsarist repression (in 1861 he and his wife were sentenced to a term of exile in northern Russia for their involvement in Polish patriotic activities). Apollo Nałęcz-Korzeniowski wrote several highly distinctive comedies of manners which are a scathing critique of the vices of a large section of the Polish nobility of his day – in particular their failure to live up to the ethos of chivalry, their selfi shness, their hypocrisy and their greed. His plays (some of which were never fi nished) display elements of tragicomedy, satire, realism and naturalism and some of them were conceived as pièces à thèse.