Juliusz Machulski, Machia

Limited edition of 88 individually numbered copies
Original Polish text with a complete Italian translation in a separate appendix
Printed on fine art paper
Hand-bound in velvet
Movable conceptual illustrations by Marysia Machulska
Machia is a stage play by Juliusz Machulski, one of Poland’s most distinguished filmmakers
and dramatists. Its central figure is Niccolò Machiavelli — Renaissance diplomat, political
thinker and author of The Prince, one of the most influential and controversial works in the
history of European political thought.
Written for the Stary Theatre in Lublin and first staged there in 2014 under Machulski’s own
direction, the play approaches Machiavelli not merely as an emblem of political cynicism, but
as a man caught between intelligence, ambition, humiliation and devotion to his native
Florence. He understood the mechanisms of power with unsettling clarity and attempted to
instruct those who exercised it. His reward was neither gratitude nor rehabilitation. Instead,
his name became inseparable from one of the darkest terms in the political vocabulary of
Europe, while the practices he described continued to serve successive rulers, parties and
states.
In Machulski’s hands, this historical paradox becomes a drama of striking contemporary
resonance. Machia asks whether truth about power can ever remain morally innocent, and
whether service to one’s country may become an alibi for cruelty, deception and hypocrisy.
The play offers no easy judgement. With characteristic irony, it leaves these questions in the
company of the reader.
This Fine Press edition gives the work a permanence that the stage, by its nature, cannot
preserve. A drama conceived for performance assumes the form of a collector’s book and
enters the quieter, more enduring life of the private library.
The edition comprises 88 individually numbered copies, printed on fine art paper and bound
entirely by hand in velvet. The original Polish text is accompanied by a separate appendix
containing its complete translation into Italian. This arrangement preserves the integrity and
dramatic rhythm of the Polish work while opening it to the language and cultural world of
Machiavelli himself.
The conceptual illustrations were created by Marysia Machulska. Her hand-assembled,
movable collages bring fragments of sixteenth-century painting into deliberate contrast with
bold planes of contemporary colour. Built in layers and intended to be handled, they
introduce movement, surprise and theatrical transformation into the structure of the book.
The page becomes a small stage; the image changes beneath the reader’s hand.
The volume is also a discreet artistic collaboration between father and daughter. Juliusz
Machulski’s dramatic interpretation of Machiavelli is answered by Marysia Machulska’s visual
language. Conceived, printed and hand-bound in the Kurtiak & Ley atelier, Machia brings
together theatre, literature, illustration and the traditional craft of the handmade book as a
single, enduring work..