Jan Kott
| Jan Kott | |
|---|---|
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| Born |
October 27, 1914 Warsaw |
| Died | December 23, 2001 (aged 87) Santa Monica, California |
| Notable works | Shakespeare, Our Contemporary |
| Notable awards | Herder Prize (1964) |
Jan Kott (October 27, 1914 – December 23, 2001) was a Polish political activist, critic and theoretician of the theatre. A leading proponent of Stalinism in Poland for nearly a decade after the Soviet takeover, Kott renounced his Communist Party membership in 1957 following the anti-Stalinist Polish October of 1956. He defected to the United States in 1965. He is regarded as having considerable influence upon Western productions of Shakespeare in the second half of the 20th century.
Born in Warsaw in 1914 to a Jewish family, Kott was baptized into the Catholic Church at the age of five. He became a communist in the 1930s, and took part in the defense of Warsaw. In June 1939 he married Lydia Steinhaus, the daughter of Hugo Steinhaus.
He spent the war years in the Soviet Union where he joined the communist partisans People's Army (Armia Ludowa). After World War II he became known initially as the editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Kuźnica and as Poland's leading theorist of Socialist realism. In 1949, as the communist authorities tightened their control over all aspects of life, Kott obtained a position as a professor in Wrocław and moved away from political life. He praised Joseph Stalin, but mostly concentrated on theater. In 1951, during the darkest period of Soviet terror, Kott published an ideological manifesto about the role of theater, entitled "O teatr godny naszej epoki" (For theater worthy of our times), in which he demanded a "new" theater subservient to the Party and its ideology. Historian Teresa Wilniewczyc noted, that his zeal for totalitarian control over the world of Polish culture was "far more than was required". Only after the Stalin era came to an end, did he become its ardent critic (March 1956). He renounced his membership of the communist party in 1957.
Kott traveled to the United States in 1965 on a scholarship from the Ford Foundation. He lectured at Yale and Berkeley, but spent the years 1969 to 1983 teaching at Stony Brook University until he retired. The Polish authorities refused to extend his passport after three years, at which point he decided to defect. As a result, he was stripped of his professorship at Warsaw University. A poet, translator, and literary critic, he became one of the more prolific essayists of the Polish school in America. He died in Santa Monica, California after a heart attack in 2001.
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