Jan Kott, 87; Shakespeare Scholar Influenced Theater

Jan Kott, Polish critic known for his interpretations of Shakespearean drama in the light of war-torn Europe of the 20th century, has died. He was 87.

Polish media reported Sunday that Kott had died in the United States, where he made his home for the last three decades and had become a naturalized citizen. Kott, a dramaturge for leading theater directors as well as an intellectual Broadway critic, had taught comparative literature and English at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and lived in that city.

Although no cause of death was stated, Kott had retired from active teaching in 1983 after suffering the first of at least five heart attacks.

Kott’s most influential book was considered to be his 1964 “Shakespeare Our Contemporary,” in which he linked the writings of William Shakespeare and the more modern Samuel Beckett, inspiring British director Peter Brook’s innovative production of Shakespeare’s “King Lear” as a contemporary tragedy.

The book influenced other theater directors, including Giorgio Strehler and Ariane Mnouchkine, and set the stage for presenting Shakespearean plays with modern sets.

Kott’s last major book was his autobiography published in 1994. After considering such titles as “A History of a Generation” and “A Fool Against the Establishment,” he settled on “Still Alive” in humorous homage to becoming an octogenarian.

For Kott, who lived through Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin and adjusted his idealism to reality, the central event in his life was World War II. At the heart of his autobiography, noted a Chicago Tribune review, are the three chapters covering his wartime years.

“Kott’s acute sense of theater is at its best in these pages, which combine intellectual history with the action of a suspense novel,” the reviewer wrote. “Occupied Poland was a dangerous place for Kott. He participated in the resistance movement of the Polish People’s Army from 1942-45 and joined the underground Communist Party in 1943, when the penalty for membership was death.”

Although Kott was baptized a Christian, his parents were descended from Jewish families, and his wife was Jewish. Survival kept them constantly on the move during the war, often barely escaping capture. Kott, as he related, even posed as a doctor and delivered a baby at a Polish train station--a skill he learned from reading a novel--which got him assigned as an obstetrician when he was briefly imprisoned.

Among his harrowing experiences were two death sentences--by his own side. The first occurred when he fell asleep on watch for the Polish People’s Army and the second when Russian troops almost hanged him because he was wearing a German railway man’s coat he had stolen to keep warm. A combination of malaria and typhus spared him the first time, and his last-minute broken Russian explanation saved him the second.

“The first political choice of my generation,” Kott once said in an interview, “was between fascism and communism. Our drama, as it turns out after many years, was that this dilemma was a false one.”

Born in Warsaw, Kott received a master’s degree in law from the University of Warsaw and studied aesthetics, philosophy, theology, anthropology, linguistics and other subjects at the universities of Warsaw, Paris and Lodz. He spoke at least eight languages and excelled in informal studies at Europe’s cafes.

“The most difficult thing for me in America,” he once said, “is the nonexistence of the literary cafe. In London you have the pub, in Paris the bistro, in Central Europe we have the cafes. What have you here--the singles bar?”

Kott published his first book, “Mythology and Realism,” in 1946. Among those that followed were “School of Classics” in 1949, “As You Like It” in 1955, “Progress and Folly” in 1956, “Theater Notebook 1947-1967” in 1968 and “The Eating of the Gods: An Interpretation of Greek Tragedy” in 1973. His “Theater of Essence,” a collection of critical essays published in 1985, won the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism in New York the following year.

Active in the communist resistance during World War II, Kott was positioned to become a prominent professor at the University of Warsaw from 1953 to 1966. But the once-devoted Marxist had a falling out with changing communist ideology and resigned from the party in 1957.

He first came to America as a guest professor of Polish literature at Yale in the 1966-67 school year. The following year he taught drama at UC Berkeley, and then returned to Yale for one more academic year.

In 1969 he was granted political asylum by the U.S. and began his long association with State University of New York at Stony Brook as professor and critic-in-residence. He became a naturalized citizen in 1979.

Among other awards, Kott was a Guggenheim fellow and a Getty scholar and received the Alfred Jurzykowski award in New York in 1976 and the Robert Lewis medal in 1993.

Kott, and his wife, the former Lidia Steinhaus, whom he married in 1939, had two children, Lidia and Michal. No specific information on survivors was immediately available.

Ever the philosophical and analytical intellectual who never believed in automatic happy endings, Kott in his autobiography elegantly commented on his inevitable death:

“Every man, and thus I, too, must die. Deeply religious and deeply areligious people have less anxiety and no doubts about the afterlife. Strong faith and unflagging skepticism are similar.”