Stanisława Przybyszewska

Stanisława Przybyszewska (Polish pronunciation: [staɲiˈswava pʂɨbɨˈʂɛfska]; 1 October 1901 – 15 August 1935) was a Polish dramatist who wrote almost exclusively about the French Revolution. Her 1929 play The Danton Case, which examines the conflict between Maximilien Robespierre and Georges Danton, is considered to be one of the most exemplary works about the Revolution, and was adapted (albeit with significant ideological edits) by Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda for his 1983 film Danton.

Przybyszewska was born Stanisława Pająkówna on 1 October 1901, in Kraków. She was the illegitimate child of the artist Aniela Pająkówna and the writer Stanisław Przybyszewski, the latter a famous and notoriously dissolute modernist who was one of the founding members of the Young Poland movement. As a child, Przybyszewska traveled across Europe with her mother, living in Lwów, Paris, Zurich, and Vienna. Following the death of her mother in 1912, Przybyszewska lived with an aunt before reuniting with her father in 1919. It was her father who introduced Przybyszewska, during her brief stint as a philosophy student at Poznan University, to morphine, which she began to use heavily.

In 1921, Przybyszewska married Jan Panienski, an artist and fellow morphine addict whom she met in Kraków. Following his death from an overdose in 1924, Przybyszewska drifted into a solitary and fanatical obsession with the French Revolution, dating her letters (which she wrote to recipients as diverse as her father and Thomas Mann) by the French Republican Calendar. Desperately poor and, increasingly, mentally unstable, she spent the last years of her life living in a tiny, unheated garret in Danzig, painting her food with Lysol to preserve it and devoting herself to dramatizing the Revolution.

...
Wikipedia