Witkiewicz Reader

by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz

Forgotten during the Stalin years, Stanislaw Witkiewicz (1885-1939) was rediscovered in his native Poland only after the liberalization of 1956, when his works came to play a major role in freeing the arts from socialist realism.

Genres: Philosophy, Polish Literature

Paperback

First published December 22, 1992

About the author

Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (24 February 1885 – 18 September 1939), commonly known as Witkacy, was a Polish writer, painter, philosopher, playwright, novelist, and photographer active in the interwar period.
Born in Warsaw, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz was a son of the painter, architect and an art critic Stanisław Witkiewicz. His mother was Maria Pietrzkiewicz Witkiewiczowa. Both of his parents were born in the Samogitian region of Lithuania. His godmother was the internationally famous actress Helena Modrzejewska.
Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz – a writer, playwright, poet, painter, photographer, philosopher and an art theoretician. Witkacy was a visionary ahead of his times, and yet a concretely pungent prankster, whose cutting-egde judgement and catastrophic prophesies allow new generations to rediscover his work time and again. One of the few Polish artists whose significance for world art history endures the test of time.
He died by commiting suicide upon learning of the Red Army’s attack on Poland, on the 18th of September, 1939 in the village of Jeziory, Polesie region (present-day Ukraine).

Reviews

[Tosh · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is the joy of going to a used bookstore, for instance, Alias East, on Glendale Blvd. and picking up a totally unknown author and his book. Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewiez, or better known in his home country of Poland, as Witkacy. "The Witkiewicz Reader" is an anthology of his various writings from 1914 to the date of his death (by suicide) in 1939. He lived through tough times in his country or part of that world, and his writings reflect, not realistically, but at least spiritually or aesthetically, the period that he lived in. Which, looking back, was not so good.

He was not only a writer, but also painter, commercial portrait painter, philosopher, playwright, photographer and a huge experimenter in narcotics. In that sense of structure he sort of resembles Artaud, but without the madness, but clearly with the emotional attachment to his life and the things that went wrong in that life as well. Personally I don't find his fiction that interesting, but on the other hand, his essay on drugs is very interesting, as well as his letters to a friend. He is probably one of the first 'aesthetic' writer to focus on the effects of peyote and cocaine. Almost scientifically minded, but.... well, he's an artist, so that aspect totally rears its head in. In that specific sense, he resembles William S. Burroughs - in fact, if he lived just a tad longer, I think he would be a Beat.

Reading a best of, which is basically selections of that author's writings, one gets a pretty good snapshot of one's work. I'm curious to actually read an entire novel by him. If that's possible, and in English. Daniel Gerald, did a good job in choosing the material and he also places his life in chronicle time - so it's very much of a biography as well.

[Anastasia Walker]

As I read this book, I found myself fishing for analogues for this troubled but intriguing figure from my prior reading, and settled on two, neither more than partial likenesses: Wyndham Lewis and Alfred Jarry. Witkiewicz shared with Lewis a privileged background, and his body of work as a painter, playwright, novelist, photographer, philosopher, and polemicist present him as a similarly oppositional polymath. He was psychologically more fragile than Lewis, though, and to his credit he never flirted with fascism, as Lewis did in the 1930s. (Indeed, the Nazi advance into Poland in 1939 precipitated his suicide.) It is in his fragility, and his exploration through much of his adult life of eccentric, even deranged forms of consciousness and expression, often chemically enhanced, that I see a resemblance to his slightly older contemporary Jarry. Both Witkiewicz and Jarry were also locked in a sort of death spiral, though the latter was was more single minded in this respect, and died much younger.

This "reader" is organized chronologically into the different phases of Witkiewicz's life--divisions that are facilitated by his periodic shifts in media throughout his life--headed by brief essays summarizing his work and other doings during each period. These essays are helpful, and to a degree necessary, since most of his works are presented as excerpts. The few longer works given in their entirety, notably the plays "The 622 Downfalls of Bungo; or, The Demonic Woman" (1910-11) and "Janulka, Daughter of Fizdejko: A Tragedy in Four Acts" (1923), help flesh out his innovative ideas about artistic form. Among the excerpts, I found most provocative the final chapter of his 1926 novel "Farewell to Autumn," parts of his early 1930s work on narcotics, and his late politico-cultural critique "Unwashed Souls" (written in 1936, but like much of his writing, unpublished--a few excerpts excepted--during his lifetime). The few paintings, sketches, and photos reproduced were an effective tease--I would love to see more. Interspersed letters to his boyhood friend, the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, with whom he corresponded throughout his life, provide a less formal glimpse of "Witkacy" or "Staś" as needy, generous, infuriating, and loving by turns, but always intensely alive.

In sum, Witkiewicz is a figure well worth acquainting yourself with if you're interested in the momentous artistic, cultural, and political developments of the first half of the 20th century.

[Patryk Denisiuk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Please visit my facebook site where I post translations of Witkiewicz’ works https://m.facebook.com/Stanislav-Igna...