Jan Kott

Jan Kott, writer and critic: born Warsaw 27 October 1914; Professor of the History of Polish Literature, Warsaw 1953-66; Professor of Comparative Drama, State University of New York at Stony Brook 1969-74, Professor of English and Comparative Literature 1974-85 (Emeritus); married 1939 Lidia Steinhaus (died 2000; one son, one daughter); died Santa Monica, California 22 December 2001.

Arguably the world's most influential theatre critic, Jan Kott was a man of glittering contradictions – Don Juan and globetrotter, atheist and Jew, anarchist and Communist – and a controversially brilliant polemicist. Fascinated by the dark side of the psyche, he adhered consistently to his own brand of enlightened rationalism, studying Jacques Maritain and the Thomists, and empathising with André Breton and Surrealism.

Kott was born in 1914 into an assimilated Jewish family, his forebears including Józef Nusbaum Hilarowicz, one of the first Polish Darwinists, and Hilary Nusbaum, who wrote a history of the Jews and translated the Pentateuch into Polish. Whilst still at school he joined the Union of Polish Democratic Youth, and co-founded the " 'S' Artistic Club". During his law studies at Warsaw University he wrote Surrealist poetry, was active in Polish literature and Positive Sociology circles, declared strong leftist convictions, and published literary reviews in the Catholic press. In 1938, he spent a year in Paris on a French government scholarship, working on his doctorate. Then came a period of monastic retreat in the Massif Central, where the Dominican monks apparently hoped to groom him for ecclesiastical office. In June 1939 he married Lidia, the daughter of the eminent Lwów mathematician Hugo Steinhaus and niece of Leon Chwistek, the mathematical logician and painter.

Mobilised in September 1939, he fought with the 21st Infantry Regiment in defence of Warsaw and, after two years in Soviet-occupied Lwów, survived till the end of the Second World War in the Nazi-occupied capital on false documents. Deeply involved in the Communist underground, he joined the Club of Progressive Intelligentsia, the Polish Workers' Party and the People's (i.e. Communist) Army.

Kott's post-war career was meteoric: Leopold Tyrmand once called him the "archpriest of transfigurational virtues". A founder of the Institute of Literary Research in the Polish Academy of Sciences, he collected professorhips (the Chair of Romance Literature and Polish Philology at the University of Wroclaw, 1949; the Chair of Polish Literature at Warsaw University, 1953), directed academic institutions and edited scholarly publications. On the editorial board of Kunica, a literary periodical that aimed to mould national attitudes in the spirit of Marxist dogma and socialist realism, he became the most authoritative critic of the Stalinist era, formulating, or reiterating, the slogans of government propaganda, and slating nonconformist writers in fiery ideological diatribes. He adapted Candide for the puppet theatre, co-wrote a five-act comedy with Stanislaw Dygat and translated the dramas of Jean-Paul Sartre.

When, after the thaw, in 1957, the authorities banned the launch of the magazine Europa, Kott resigned from the Communist Party. In the event, it was Shakespeare who enabled him to exorcise the demons of Stalinism. Henceforth, he would contest tendentiousness and schematism in every form. He translated Montherlant and Ionesco, and was literary director of the Jaracz Theatre in Lódz (1958-60). But disenchantment with the regime grew apace, and in March 1964 he was among the signatories of the "Letter of 34" writers and scholars in defence of freedom of speech.

Meanwhile his two books of essays on Shakespeare (Szkice o Szekspirze, 1961, and Szekspir Wspólczesny, 1965 – translated in due course into some 30 languages) paved the way to world-wide recognition: several months' research at St Antony's College, Oxford (1963), and a Ford Foundation Scholarship (1965), were followed by visiting professorships at Yale (1966), Berkeley (1967) and Louvain (1968).

In view of the political troubles in Poland and the anti-Semitic campaign there, Kott decided not to return. This time the authorities stripped him of his professorial title, and deleted his entry from the encyclopaedia. (The space was obligingly filled by the Domestic Cat – in Polish kot.) The following year, he was granted political asylum in the United States and appointed to a full professorship at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. American citizenship came 10 years later.

Over the ensuing years, he lectured at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and again at Yale, was drama adviser at the Burgtheater in Vienna (1976-77), contributed to all the major drama periodicals, and advised or directed student theatre productions. Ever since the removal of a pulmonary lobe in 1962, he was wont to consider his own death and became past master at handling a succession of heart attacks, and some seven bypasses. Fending off cardiac arrest became a way of life and for health reasons he lived mainly in Santa Monica, where he had first come as a Getty Foundation Visiting Scholar in 1986.

Yet Kott never liked America or its culture. As a scholar, he felt most affinity with Shakespeare, the world of Greek tragedy, and the modernists: the plays of S.I. Witkiewicz and Slawomir Mrozek, and the theatre of Tadeusz Kantor and Jerzy Grotowski. On all of these he wrote provocative and seminal texts that address issues of essence, existence, and contemporary relevance. He dramatically altered the way we look at Shakespeare, and his vision became common currency from London to Tokyo and Tbilisi. It was ever a two-way process. Peter Brook's King Lear was inspired by Kott's interpretations; yet his Titus Andronicus of 1957 had formed a milestone in Kott's perception of Shakespeare.

According to internet sources, Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964), The Eating of the Gods: an interpretation of Greek tragedy (1973), The Theater of Essence (1984), The Memory of the Body: essays on theater and death (1992) and Kott's 1994 autobiography, Still Alive, are all currently available.

Nina Taylor-Terlecka