Helena Modjeska Biography

(continued)

 

After the death of her daughter, Helena left Sinnmayer and returned to

Krakow with her four-year-old son and joined the resident company of the

Krakow municipal theater. Here her beauty, talent, and dedication to her art

soon led to critical recognition of her genius. In 1868, three years after returning

to Krakow, Helena married Karol Bozenta Chlapowski, son of a land-owning

gentry family. Chlapowski, known later in the United States as Count Bozenta,

had been educated in Jesuit schools and colleges in France and Belgium. For

the rest of his life, Chlapowski would devote his energies to helping Helena

achieve her artistic ambitions. Their marriage was a happy one, lasting until

Helena's death more than forty years later. As newlyweds the couple moved to

Warsaw where Helena Modjeska reigned for seven years as the leading Polish

actress of the czarist-controlled Imperial Theatre.

Audiences adored Modjeska, but she longed to escape from Russian

censorship of her plays and from backstage intrigues and jealousies. Life under

Russian domination was also frustrating for Karol Chlapowski who had spent

much of his youth in the relatively free political atmosphere of France. He and

some of his friends, including the young journalist Henryk Sienkiewicz, began to

talk of traveling to California where the climate was balmy and healthful, fertile

land was cheap, and one might live without police surveillance or the fear of

arrest. Their California dream was of an ideal existence as farmers in the land of

freedom and plenty.

 

 

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