Kantorfaust jako poeta ………. 613

KANTORFAUST AS A POET

The author’s intention was to point to a new way of interpreting Kantor’s work – understood as the totality of his artistic achievements – an interpretation that invites the reader and viewer to engage with Goethe’s “Faust”: the drama, created over a span of sixty years, has become both a witness to and a record of the changes in styles, techniques, and the creative philosophy of the German poet – his confidant and betrayer at the same time. A similar perspective on Kantor’s theatrical work transforms it into a consistent creative biography, systematically reshaped into a new kind of “museum of memory.” Goethe performed entirely similar gestures toward his own drama, shaping and refining the structure of his masterpiece until his last breath. He opened and closed it, wishing to conclude his life by bringing the text to a close. I read Kantor’s texts – lectures, speeches, scripts, and manifestos – as poetic texts. This allows me to view them through the same lens as both parts of “Faust.” Its central point is the play on metaphysical concepts: Streben-Sterben, which, beyond the meaning of “to strive – to die,” is poetically rendered by the pun: “to strive – to live out,” based on a mistaken etymology as the foundation of wordplay.