Returning the Other

Maiia Harbuziuk

Abstract

The author reviews Nataliya Yakubova’s monograph Irena Solska: The Burden of Unusualness (Moscow 2019) which is the result of more than ten years of work. Yakubova emphasizes that for her the past remains an “open project” to which one can (and should) return many times and her book can be seen as such “portal to the past”. The creative and life path of Irena Solska was chosen as the object of research, and its subject was defined as the “burden of unusualness” of the actress’s personality. Yakubova sees the main analytical problem in the conservation of social stereotypes about Irena Solska and diagnoses the fundamental bias, spread in Polish culture, of the myth of Irena Solska as a “demonic woman”. Therefore, the purpose of the study was the interpretation of sources, the destruction of stereotypes, and overcoming patterns of representations. The principle of interdisciplinary research allows her to consider the fate of the star actress as a phenomenon of her time, in the dynamics of complex socio-political, socio-cultural, aesthetic-technological and ideological-emancipatory changes from the late nineteenth century to the late 1930s. (Transl. S. Harbuziuk)