«Mieszczanin szlachcicem», czyli estetyzacja frustracji społecznej i jej transhistoryczne aktualizacje (1670–2022)

Abstract

This article concerns Molière’s 1670 comedy Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (The Bourgeois Gentleman) and selected aspects of its scholarly and artistic reception. The argument is organised around two problems: the possibility of interpreting the social meanings of the work and the challenges that comédie-ballet poetics poses to translators and theater-makers. The author presents an overview of research on the image of impossible class advancement as thematized in The Bourgeois Gentleman and indicates a new interpretive direction, referring to categories drawn from the sociological theory of Pierre Bourdieu. He also discusses how the structural elements of comédie-ballet characteristic of Molière’s play have been approached in its Polish adaptations, translations, and stagings (18th-century court theater, Jerzy Gruza, Jerzy Stuhr, Benjamin Lazar). He argues that taken from a transhistorical perspective, both the interpretative work and stage practices concerning The Bourgeois Gentleman illustrate the same phenomenon: the play’s relevance is discovered not through modernization or revealing new meanings, but rather thanks to a reflection on the historical conditions of culture in Molière’s time.

Keywords

• molière
• «le bourgeois gentilhomme»
• habitus
• comédie-ballet
• grotesque
• pierre bourdieu
• court theater
• reception of molière