For Maria, their father's death was a kind of liberation. They left their hometown of Grabów and moved to Warsaw. They developed their creative side. Together with Wacław Nałkowski and Cezary Jellenta, much older and eminent leaders of the anti-philistine movement, Komornicka (Włast) published the literary manifesto Forpoczty [Forefronts] in 1895. It was an elaboration of the thesis about the special place occupied in society by ‘neurotics’, individuals more sensitive and subtle than others. Komornicka named the three co-authors the ‘Laokoon’s Group’.
In Komornicka's works, from the very first stories from ‘Sketches’, there is a typical issue of decadence – the opposition of neurotic individuals, prone to self-analysis and pessimism, dissatisfied with the prevailing social and moral relations – and philistines. At the same time, Komornicka spoke out against the social isolation of writers, against the slogan ‘art for art's sake’. She adhered to Nietzschean vitalism, devoid of hedonistic accents, approaching existentialism (man's solitude in a world without God and moral sanctions, the absurdity of life whose destiny is death). Certain features of Komornicka's writing allow her to be included in the expressionist current in Polish poetry.
'Literatura polska. Przewodnik encyklopedyczny', volume I, Warsaw 1984
In Przegląd Pedagogiczny, they published the text Raj Młodzieży: Wspomnienia z Cambridge [Paradise of Youth; Memories from Cambridge] (1896), in which they wrote about the pipe dream of emancipation, showing the difficulties of educating women in England.
Breaking with convention, they moved in with Wacław and Anna Nałkowskis, which earned them the title of a scandalist. Researchers of Komornicka's works speculate that they might have had an affair with Nałkowski – just like with Jellenta, who was known for his magnetic influence on women. In his company, they went on a trip abroad, which her family added to the list of her reprehensible outbursts.
Negative emotions significantly accumulated during the struggle of the Komornicki siblings for the inheritance of their late father. The eldest brother Jan, known for his dislike of Maria Komornicka’s (Piotr Odmieniec Włast) literary career, accused them of character distortion and distancing themselves from the family. This was the pretext for the brothers’ endeavours to incapacitate Maria and take control of their share of the estate.
Goodbye to the Weaker Sex
The feeling of injustice they felt coincided with their break-up with Bolesław Lutomski, which plunged Komornicka into suicidal thoughts. During one sleepless night, Komornicka decided to drown themselves in the Wisła River. Wearing a servant's kerchief on her head, they ran out of the house.
On the way there, they came across a tsarist patrol who believed her to be a prostitute. At the guardhouse, they were subjected to a humiliating medical examination. Although Maria never mentioned that it ended in rape, the trauma of these examinations left its mark. Traces of it can be found in their work entitled Intermezzo. Researchers of Komornicka's life generally agree that it was on that night that the writer said goodbye to themselves as a woman for the first time. The insults suffered led them to reject their own sex, and to adopt the masculine one, strong and commanding.
In 1898, Komornicka (Włast) proposed to the 10 years older, promising poet and satirist, Jan Lemański. Their marriage was considered to be unsuitable from the very beginning.
Komornicka had a very complicated nature; incredible fires and lusts burned within her despite her rationalistic mind. Lemański, despite his satirical talent, was a lyricist of exceptional softness and sweetness; his disposition was almost childlike, his kindness extraordinary. As an introvert, he hid the torment he was going through from the people closest to him. And the ordeal was terrible. From the first moments after his marriage, he was consumed by jealousy.
Jan Lorentowicz, 'Spojrzenie wstecz', Warsaw 1935
During their honeymoon, on 15th September 1898, at night at the monument Jadwiga and Jagiełło monument in Kraków's Planty, Lemański, in a frenzy of jealousy, turned his gun on his newly-wed wife and their cousin Juliusz Oszacki. After firing six shots, he put the barrel of the revolver to his own temple, but then ran out of ammunition.
Mrs Lemańska suffered two light wounds in both arms. The state of her health today is completely favourable.
Czas, Kraków, 20th September 1898
Maria often visited their husband in jail and strolled in front of the barred window, through which they threw chestnuts into his cell. Komornicka defended him in court and had the bullet extracted from his arm framed, wearing it as a pendant on her watch.
This morning at 9 o’clock, before the ordinary tribunal, a hearing was held against Mr Jan Lemański from Warsaw, who on the 15th day of the last month fired six times from a revolver at his wife Maria and Mr Oszacki on Planty. [...] The course of the trial proved that Mr Lemański's jealousy towards his wife had no basis whatsoever and he acted at a critical moment under the influence of excessive use of liquor, enraged and almost unconscious. After the end of the trial, Mr Counsellor Ferens announced the sentence releasing Mr Lemański.
Czas, Kraków, 14th October 1898
The reconciled spouses went on a further journey across Europe. They did not avoid gambling, so their resources quickly dwindled to zero. Maria telegraphed home, aggressively asking for financial support, which significantly deepened the rift with her family. However, the couple returned to their home country squabbling. Their relationship ended after two years with a formal separation. However, jealous Lemański continued to stalk and follow Maria.
Off-the-rails Ambition
In 1900, Komornicka published Baśnie. Psalmodie [Fables. Psalmodies], stylised in biblical language, depicting a tyrant father figure. From 1901, they began working with Chimera, edited by Zenon 'Miriam' Przesmycki, whom Maria called ‘the mage’. In Chimera, they published poetry – amongst others, the series Czarne Płomienie (Black Flames) (1901) and translations.
In ‘Chimera’ [...] Maria Komornicka, the wife of Jan Lemański, regarded by the editorial staff as an excellent representative of the neo-romantic movement, worked intensively as a poet and reviewer of the novel section. Her poems, not published separately, and a few volumes of poetic prose (‘Baśnie. Psalmodie’ 1900, ‘Biesy’ 1903), similar to her attempts at drama, did not go beyond the template of Przybyszewski, the difference being that when the author of ‘Na Drogach Duszy’ focused his attention on the male half of androgyny and painted its fate in the world. Komornicka did the same with the female half, finding sometimes eloquent but hardly original means of expression for her ideas (series Na Szlakach Duszy [On the Trail of the Soul], Na Szlaku Ducha [On the Trail of the Spirit]). It was only in the subtle and volatile seascapes that she gained an amazing melodiousness and true charm, but these were quite exceptional cases.
Julian Krzyżanowski, "Neoromantyzm polski 1890–1918", Warsaw 1980
In 1902 their Biesy [Devils] was written, extraordinary self-analytical prose that begins with the words: ‘It was in the days of my manic syndrome’.
All I had left was a mirror. I spent whole hours with my eyes on my physical reflection. But even here it was impossible to establish a single definite impression. – Sometimes a playful joy of life would come to me from the mirror, sometimes a wretched woman would stretch out her mute face and beg for death. – Sometimes I saw the bitterly twisted face of a derailed ambition, – or again the pure, fiery face of an indefatigable genius; the lean, maliciously shining faces of a predatory temptation settled on the innocent features of a disembodied angel; – the lifelessness of an unfinished marble head was transformed in my eyes into a kobold larva – the painfulness of a madonna gave way to the cynical mockery of withering harlot... But there was one reflection that filled me with mystical fear, and it appeared whenever I looked into the mirror suddenly or when I kept my eyes fixed on it for a long time: – it was the appearance of a cloud of faces with fading contours, in which, with devouring persistence, the receptive, long-lashed abysses of the eye sockets expanded to monstrous proportions. – There was in it an incorporeality and a demonic horror, – as if the indecipherable and sinister face of my Spirit were appearing to me, freezing the blood in my veins. – My earthly sight, my brain could not bear the dark power of those ghastly abysses. – With a shiver of animal fear I fled from them, certain that a moment more of looking - and I would hit the ground dead or go mad, or... Even more terrible premonitions of unspeakable horror, of terrifying apparitions, of irretrievable vertigo, shook my miserable human pulp at the sight of this satanic nightmare.
In literary circles, Komornicka (Włast) gained the opinion of a liberated woman, with progressive views, broad-minded, boldly breaking conventions, not shying away from moral provocation. They wrote accurate and bold critical works, including reviews of Stefan Żeromski’s Popioły [Ashes], Wacław Berent’s Próchno [Rotten Wood] and Karol Irzykowski’s Pałuba. Reviews, which they did not regard as original work, were signed as Piotr Włast – a pseudonym suggested by her mother.
[Maria Komornicka] broke away from nature to lead a tempestuous life between intellect and emotions. Unlike other women writers, often very talented but faceless, she shows more individuality than strictly artistic talent. It is an individuality of a transitional time, tempestuous, searching, rebellious – unsettled. Too strong to be a cedar, too weak to be an oak. An impatient intellectual, in her youthful volume she bode death to realism and proclaimed ‘prose lyricism’ to be the future; all her subsequent works are a ferment that was never to mature into harmony. How much pain in these cries, what flashes of brilliance, what a gift for analysis in some of the dissections, printed under another name in ‘Chimera’ (the one on Żeromski's ‘Ashes’!). A living man at the turn of a cultural period gives here a confession of the struggles and impulses of a woman who wants to unleash pure humanity in herself.
Wilhelm Feldmann, 'Współczesna literatura polska 1864–1918', part 2, Kraków 1985
The Ceiling Collapsed...
In 1905, the poet went alone to Paris, where they drew attention to themselves through unusual behaviour: kneeling in the middle of the reading room of the Polish Library, tthey would say loud prayers, and then have attacks of hysteria, feeling cold streams of water flowing over their body.
The grey-bearded, long-haired son of the bard, always prowling amongst books and readers, Władyslaw Mickiewicz began to multiply in her eyes, then somewhere deeper. Her imagination suggested unusual images to her, which crept into her real vision of the world. An attack of rage. There, in the silence of the library, she suddenly splashed a glass of water in the custodian's face. Władysław Mickiewicz informed the novelist Wacław Berent of the incident; the author of ‘Próchno’, together with Antoni Potocki, a cultural activist in exile, having sent a telegram to Warsaw, to Miriam-Przesmycki, set off with a doctor and an orderly to Maria Komornicka’s studio. She was taken to hospital in a state of catalepsy.
Marek Sołtysik, 'Jan w cieniu Marii, Maria jako Piotr w mroku', "Palestra", 5-6/2006
Their mother and Maria's youngest sister rushed to Paris. Doctors diagnosed the poet with ‘depression caused by overwork’. Komornicka spent a month in a sanatorium for neurotics, after which they returned to Paris, from where they sent further works to Przesmycki.
On their return to Poland, Maria read in Kurier Warszawski that the ceiling of the State Duma building in St Petersburg had collapsed. Although no one was killed, they – as they confided to a brother – ‘felt that something had happened to her head and that her mind would not return to normal’. The family considered this moment in 1907 as the beginning of Maria's mental illness. A fictionalised account by one of the writer's relatives, Maria Dernałowicz, contains a description of another important event from the same year, 1907. Thirty-one-year-old Komornicka, travelling with their mother to a sanatorium in Kołobrzeg, burned women's dresses in the fireplace of Poznań's Bazar Hotel. The poet recognised herself as a man, dressed exclusively in men's clothes from then on and used the name Piotr Odmieniec Włast.
Maria Komornicka, with her passion for the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche which border on fanaticism, was an extraordinary phenomenon. [...] Her poetry [...] is [...] the expression of a violent defence of the unlimited freedom of the individual, in this case, a kind of super-woman. It is fascinating to note that her personal life also mirrored Nietzsche’s: in 1907 she began to suffer from a mental disorder and had to give up literature. She did not manage to develop her literary talents any further, and if we mention her here, perhaps wrongly, whilst omitting many other names, we do so because her personality was very characteristic, at least against the background of the social mores of the time.
Czesław Miłosz, "The History of Polish Literature", New York 1969
Considered insane by their family, they began seven years of wandering around mental institutions. Komornicka returned to their hometown of Grabów in 1914, living alone on the margins of their family in an abandoned floor of the annex to her brother's house. It was there that they wrote Xięga Poezji Idyllicznej [A Book of Idyllic Poetry], their final work dedicated to her mother. Komornicka also devoted themselves to complicated gymnastic exercises to make their body fit for flying. Wearing a frock coat and carrying a cigar, they would visit the village shop to buy tea and coffee, which they drank in large quantities. Relatives pampered them, calling Komornicka (Włast) ‘Grandpa Peter’; the village children persecuted Maria.
To Perpetuate the Absence
Komornicka's sensational biography is the main reason why, the writer, for decades absent from the historical-literary canon, has in recent years begun a dizzying career, becoming the subject of research and studies conducted primarily from a feminist perspective, though not exclusively. Her mysterious transformation into a man, as well as the incomprehensible metamorphosis of a vivacious, vigorous and powerful, exceptionally talented, a leftist fighter for women's equality into a deeply religious, gruff, tirelessly recalcitrant old patriarch, encourage speculation and is fodder for unbridled scholar activity. For a long time, however, the stigma of mental illness reflected negatively on the reception of Komornicka's work.
Brigitta Helbig-Mischewski, 'Strącona bogini. Rzecz o Marii Komornickiej', Kraków 2010
In 1944, the war drove the Komornicki family out of the ruined Grabów. Aniela, Maria’s sister who was taking care of her, placed them in an old people's home. Despite repeated appeals to their sisterly feelings, Maria spent the rest of their life in a nunnery.
The Casimir Pulaski Museum in Warka-Winiary organised in 1979 a modest exhibition devoted to life and work of Maria Komornicka. In the exhibition, there is a photograph – probably from 1943. Maria Komornicka – Piotr Odmieniec Włast is seen on the fourth plan. This is what you call ‘recording absence’! The figure is absent, turned away (you can recognise it only by raising its head), you cannot see its face, just the outline of a person... Other figures remain in the foreground, she remains far from them, blended into the greenery of the park in Grabów. She is the spirit of the greenery, the spirit of the place, the spirit of poetry. This is one of the strangest photographs I have ever seen in my life, precisely because here – in a paradoxical way – a photograph has recorded absence.
Maria Janion, "Gdzie jest Lemańska?", w: "Odmieńcy. Transgresje", t. 2, Gdańsk 1982
Maria Komornicka (Piotr Odmieniec Włast) died on 8th March 1949, on Women's Day, in a medical institution in Izabelin. The nuns taking care of them dressed them in a black dress for the funeral. On a frosty March day, the modest funeral procession was followed by two nuns and Maria's sister, Aniela.
As an exceptional creator, especially of poetry and poetic prose, Komornicka was first appreciated in several historical and literary sketches by the outstanding scholar of the Young Poland period, Maria Podraza-Kwiatkowska. A decisive turn in the reception of her work came with Maria Janion's legendary sketch Gdzie jest Lemańska? [Where is Lemańska] (in: ‘Odmieńcy. Transgresje’, vol. 2, Gdańsk 1982). The charismatic professor spoke out unequivocally against pathologising the poet and in favour of restoring her literary authority and her due position as a creative subject. At the same time, she elevated her madness, interpreting it as an expression of protest against the patterns of femininity limiting the development of personality and as the result of an authentic search for identity.
Brigitta Helbig-Mischewski, "Strącona bogini. Rzecz o Marii Komornickiej", Kraków 2010
The 21st century has seen a renaissance of interest in Komornicka. Feminist critics, LGBT scholars, journalists, film and theatre makers are now interested in her life and work.
Originally written in Polish, translated into English by P. Grabowski, March 2021