Ilene and Paul Kreshka (Vienna, Austria): “The Belle of Amherst: The Life and Writings of Emily Dickinson”

Tuesday, December 9, 2025, 4:15-5:45 PM, U7/01.05 (An der Universität 7)

Emily Dickinson is considered to be one of the most famous poets of America, although she rarely published during her lifetime and remained relatively unknown. Her work presents recurrent themes – a mystic experience of the natural world, considerations of the poetic occupation, fame, death and immortality – and is expressed in her own, often dramatic, often mysterious language. She lived withdrawn in her father’s house in New England – tending her garden, baking the family’s bread and watching the passing show of small-town life from her window. To her friends she sent gifts of flowers and cakes with mysterious notes and poems which puzzled them extremely. Long before her death she had become a local legend in her town of Amherst – the eccentric daughter of the State Senator Squire Dickinson. Her romantic attachments were mysterious.

Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1830, where old-style church thinking was about to change, and literature was just coming to life. Here she lived a life, outwardly uneventful, inwardly dedicated to a secret task – the task of expressing in her poems her absolute truth, her ideas of life and death, of love and nature – the „landscape of her soul.“ 

In this one-person-show, based on the play by William Luce, guests spend an afternoon with the mysterious woman in white as she speaks about her life, her recipes, her loves and her poems.

ILENE KRESHKA studied ballet at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and performed with ballet companies and on Broadway. She was for many years associated with the American writer and choreographer Agnes De Mille and has worked in films, television and commercials. PAUL KRESHKA is an Austrian-American singer, actor and musician, who studied acting at the Juilliard School in New York, toured nationally playing Shakespeare, and was a member of the Berkeley Shakespeare Festival. Together, they tour American-themed historical cultural shows, most recently “Cowboy Days” which features music from the Smithsonian Institute’s John Lomax folk music collection, with authentic spoken text from the post-Civil War cattle drives, as well as a section on the development of black music from its rhythmic beginnings.