Planet Kott: Opening up the Archives of the 20th-Century Shakespeare Critic
The panel intends to offer a new take on the legacy of Jan Kott (1914–2001), one of the most important Central and East European Shakespeare critics, whose work strongly impacted both Shakespeare scholarship and theatrical practice of the post-WWII decades and beyond.
The main objective of the panel is to reassess Kott’s international stature and influence, based on newly accessible documents donated to the Emigration Archive at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland. This largely unexplored collection is rich in documents, diaries and letters, mapping Kott’s ideological and spatial trajectories, his shifts of allegiances and intellectual agility. The resources testify to Kott’s progress through times and regions, his gradual absorbing new cultural affinities and agendas and yet rebounding to his strongly political and presentist stance. Kott’s international approach and reputation, his encounters with widened cultural domains and uprooted identities as well as his theater-centered resistance to historicist philology paved the way for globalism. By reassessing some of the old political East-West polarities now reactivated, the panel intends to throw new light on the mediation of East European politics to Western audiences and the instrumentality of Shakespearean criticism in the process.
The panel addresses the following specific issues:
– Kott’s complex relation with his native land/continent, explored from within and then reconfigured from an American perspective;
– Kott’s embracement of new cultural contexts and attempts to nuance the paradigm of “Shakespeare Our Contemporary”;
– the uses of self-narrative(s) in the construction of Kott’s critical discourse;
– Kott’s ties with fellow Shakespeare scholars, theater practitioners and literati involved in the dissemination of his work;
– the incongruent perception of Kott’s Shakespeare criticism in the East and in the West, before and after the fall of the Iron Curtain;
– the relevance of the concept of Kott’s “Grand Mechanism” in current stage practice.
So far, the most complete picture of Jan Kott as a Shakespeare scholar as well as the origin and dissemination of his criticism can be found in chapters written by Madalina Nicolaescu (“Jan Kott in the East”, Great Shakespeareans. Ed. Hugh Grady London: Continuum, vol. xiii, 2012. 130–153) and Zoltán Márkus (“Kott in the West”, ibidem, 53–174). Neither of these studies draws on the resources available in Kott’s archive. These have been first explored by Anna Cetera-Włodarczyk (2021), “Shakespeare in purgatory: (re)writing the history of the post-war reception”, Theatralia, vol. 24, special issue, 17-32, https://doi.org/10.5817/TY2021-S-2. By reassessing Jan Kott’s work and legacy in light of the newly available documents, this panel opens new perspectives on the origins of presentism and globalism in the study and performance of Shakespeare.
Anna Cetera-Włodarczyk, University of Warsaw, Poland
‘In his own land’: Eastern Europe and the Birth of Kottian Criticism
With recourse to the (un)published diaries of Jan Kott, this contribution sets out to reconstruct the key geographical spaces, with their tensions and ideologies, which shaped Kott’s understanding of man and history and were gradually incorporated into his Shakespearean discourse. With the main emphasis falling on the immediate pre- and post-WWII period, the paper juxtaposes Kott’s repeated failures to see through the hazards of his own time with the sharpness of his critical insights. Thus Kott’s presentism is seen as dependent on the immediate shaping pressures, but also on his processing of memories, including radical changes of optics, lapses and disclosures.
Zoltán Márkus, Vassar College, USA
Shakespeare East and West: Kott’s Academic Reception in the USA
In 1969, Alfred Harbage posed the question regarding Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary, “…whether the kind of ‘contemporary’ that Shakespeare proves to be depends less on when one lives than on where one lives. Or putting it another way: is there now a ‘Shakespeare West’ and a ‘Shakespeare East’?” Harbage emphasized Kott’s geographical alterity: his Polish-American colleague represented “Shakespeare East” to him. Based on materials newly available in the Kott Archive, this paper explores this East-West divide in Shakespeare studies as a harbinger of a disciplinary shift towards the study of non-English-speaking, postcolonial, and glo/calized Shakespeares.
Nicoleta Cinpoeş, University of Worcester, UK
When ‘the unbearable and the absurd are constantly in tandem’: Re-visiting the Kott – Ionesco Connection
East of Berlin, the reception of Jan Kott’s works and ideas is more diverse than what a general(ised) “Bloc” approach might claim. Re-reading Kott’s published remarks and views on Eugène Ionesco in tandem with the rich collection of notes and letters discovered in the Jan Kott Archives, held at the University of Torun, this paper brings to bear the constancy of their lifetime friendship as strengthened by surviving similar terrors, ‘obliteration by decree’ in their homelands (Marowitz: 1994) and living diasporic existences. In doing so, the paper aims to re-visit this intellectual fellowship in its potential relevance to understanding Kott-ean Shakespeare criticism, before and after 1989.