ZAPOLSKA, GABRIELA

born March 30, 1857, Podhajce, Galicia, Hungary died Dec. 17, 1921, Lww, Pol. pseudonym of Maria Gabriela Korwin-piotrowska Polish novelist and playwright of the naturalist school. Having tried unsuccessfully to pursue an acting career in Paris, Zapolska started writing cheap, sensationalist novels, full of bitterness toward middle-class values, morality, and hypocrisy. Of her several novels written over a period of 20 years, only two have survived in terms of modern readability. Zaszumi las (1899; The Forest Will Murmur) is a roman clef about Polish revolutionaries in Paris. Sezonowa milosc (1905; Love in the Season) is a novel about fashionable life among the middle class in the resort town of Zapotane. She also wrote plays, mostly melodramas, which had the same ephemeral quality as most of her novels, but one is remembered: Moralnosc pani Dulskiej (1906; Mrs. Dulska's Morality), a comedy-farce about a dominating matriarch of a bourgeois family.