Jan Kott

Who was Jan Kott?

Jan Kott was a Polish political activist, critic and theoretician of the theatre; a leading proponent of Stalinism in Poland after the Soviet takeover of the country. Kott emigrated to the United States in 1965.

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. He spent the war years in the Soviet Union where he joined the communist partisan People's Army. 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 in Poland, Kott obtained a position of a professor in Wrocław and moved away from political life. He wrote high praise panegyrics about Joseph Stalin, but mostly concentrated on theater. In 1951, during the darkest period of terror, Kott published an ideological manifesto about the role of theater, entitled "O teatr godny naszej epoki", in which he demanded a "new" theater subservient to the Party and its ideology.