Janina Ludawska in memoriam (1921–2019)

The author presents his personal recollections of Janina Ludawska, a Polish theatre scholar of Jewish origins who passed away in 2019 in Stockholm. Ludawska spent a significant part of her life in Sweden, where she found refuge during the war when she studied chemistry. She returned to Warsaw after the war and she started taking an interest in the theatre. In the late 1940s and early 1950s she studied in Moscow in The Russian Institute of Theatre Arts (GITIS). Back in Poland, she devoted her energy to the establishment of a new Polish theatre. When the anti-Semitic policy of the communist government caused her to leave Poland again in 1968, she found a new home for herself and her son in Stockholm. In 1970 she was employed at the library of the Department of Theatre Studies at Stockholm University, and she pursued her scholarly work. Interested in Polish Romantic drama, she published an anthology in Swedish: Poetic Political Theatre: On Polish Romantic Drama and Its Scenic Traditions.  She also defended her doctoral dissertation on three Swedish productions of Gombrowicz’s The Marriage. Ludawska saw theatre, with its aesthetics, its history, and its social functions, as one of the pillars of democratic institutions.