In this talk, I introduce the discovery of The Foreign Minister, an unpublished play by the celebrated Latin American novelist María Luisa Bombal. Written in English around 1954, during Bombal’s self-imposed exile in New York, this lost work reimagines for Broadway audiences one of the defining tragedies of the early Cold War: the mysterious death of Jan Masaryk, Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia and son of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the nation’s founding father. Just weeks after the bloodless coup of February 1948 that brought a Communist dictatorship to power, Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk fell from a third-story window of the Czernin Palace in Prague - an unsolved event shrouded in political intrigue to this day. The Foreign Minister stands at the crossroads of Bombal’s earlier avant-garde experimentation in Spanish, American postwar theatre, and Central European history. In exploring this play, I show how Bombal unleashes theatre’s restorative potential, where history can repeat itself not as tragedy but as a rehearsal space for second chances. Here, both Central Europe’s history and Bombal’s own literary past are rewritten and reimagined - performed anew. 

Dr Felipe Esteban Toro Franco

I hold a PhD in Spanish and Cultural Studies from Georgetown University and a Master’s degree in Literature from the Universidad de Chile. After graduation, I taught for two years at Uniwersytet Sląski in Katowice, and I currently work as an Assistant Professor at the Spanish Department of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. My research focuses on Latin American writers and the subjective dimensions of globalization. I am the author of the book Atlas: A Literary Map of Latin American Sports from 1888 to 1940, which explores the relationship between modernismo and the emergence of the modern Olympic Games. For the last five years, I have studied Chilean writer María Luisa Bombal’s unknown works written in English for Hollywood and Broadway’s entertainment industries. I am the translator and editor of the bilingual critical edition of Bombal’s The Foreing Minister/El canciller to be published in 2026.

Wydarzenie można zaliczyć w ramach programu OSA:

• Opiekun: Dr Magdalena Modrzejewska
• Liczba godzin OSA: 2 godziny
• Forma zaliczenia: sporządzenie krótkiej notatki w języku polskim lub angielskim (max. 500-600 znaków), dotyczącej tematyki wykładu i przesłanie jej dr Magdalenie Modrzejewskiej do 31.1.26. Notatki wysłane po tym terminie nie będą przyjmowane. Podpisy na Kartach będą składane wyłącznie w czasie dyżurów dr Magdaleny Modrzejewskiej.