Gabriela Zapolska (b. 1857) was an actor and prolific playwright whose Miss Maliczewska enjoyed its premier while she was living in Lwów in 1910. Drawn in part on her itinerant life as an aspiring actor after breaking from her gentry family, the play was a conventional moral tale about an impoverished and beautiful young woman named Stefka Maliczewska seeking an acting career, but falling under the malign influence of the lecherous old lawyer Daum, who becomes her patron. After various betrayals, ethical compromises, and debt-ridden dilemmas, the play ends with Stefka stymied and cursing her lot in life. (Her term of choice was “psia krew!” intimating dog’s blood but meaning “damn!”) Though not exactly scandalous in 1910, with one reviewer welcoming the “merciless truth” of her Zolaesque naturalism, such unrefined language from the mouth of a young female character did invite disapproval in some circles, which in turn drew the attention of the satirist.
The caption: “I will write a play for the [female] director so that she lets Maliczewska abscond!”
“Quite the contrary, my dear, I am afraid that you will do something completely different?”
“Let the director be at ease, my play will end not on ‘damn’ but on ‘cholera!'”
In keeping with its old-fashioned “choleric” association with anger, “cholera” is sometimes employed as a curse (roughly, “damn”). At a time when the last cholera pandemic was gradually coming to an end, this trivial pun would have been especially resonant.
(Kolce, Warsaw, 1911)
Sic Transit Pestilentia 