Sport in theatre! An unknown source for the history of the inter-war Academic Sports Association (Gustaw Bolesław Baumfeld’s Sports Vows)

Gustav Baumfeld's „Sports Vows” (published in Lviv under the pseudonym Gustav Drzewopolski) has so far attracted no attention from experts in literature, theatre or sports historians. This minor humoresque has probably never been staged even on amateur stage. However, this does not deprive it of the value of a historical source, just like other, few stage works from the period 1918-1939 dealing with sports. „Vows” deserves attention mainly because it is set in an academic environment, and although it is difficult to decide whether it is about an AZS club (if it is, it is probably about the Poznań club from the period after 1926 and until 1929), this humoresque does stand out against the background of official and reporting sources of usually archival provenance dominating research on the AZS. It is one of those rare testimonies that capture the climate and atmosphere of academic sport, including its organisation, at a time when it began to play a leading role in Polish sport. The aim of this article is therefore not to assess Baumfeld's play from the perspective of literary history or theatre history. The aim is to extract from oblivion an original source which, if interpreted prudently, supplements the knowledge about the poorly understood aspects of the functioning of academic sport in Poland (and probably not only in this environment) in the late 1920s. One can also tentatively formulate a thesis that this minor work was, after all, a form of ennoblement of sport at a time when its role was often depreciated as trivial entertainment for the masses.