Introduction

by
Daniel Gerould

Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz

 Witkacy is by birth, by race, to the very marrow of his bones an
artist. He lives exclusively by and for art. And his relationship
to art is profoundly dramatic; he is one of those tormented
spirits who in art seek the solution not to problems of success,
but to the problem of their own being.

Tadeusz Boy Żeleński (1921)

Polish theatre has a long history going back to late medieval mystery plays and Renaissance court spectacles. During Poland’s prolonged domination by foreign powers, drama has played a special role in the cultural life of the country by serving to maintain a sense of national identity. But, although Polish dramatic literature is one of the most original in all of Europe, its very Polishness, closely tied to the vicissitudes of history, has made it largely inaccessible to audiences abroad, and only in the second half of the twentieth century have Polish plays become part of the international repertory.

Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, seven of whose dramas are presented in this volume, is one of the first Polish dramatists to surmount the cultural barrier and become known to general readers and theatre-goers worldwide. The story of how this breakthrough happened is all the more noteworthy because Witkiewicz was an outsider within his own culture, existing on the margins of the theatrical life of his era and seemingly doomed to lasting failure. An account of the playwright’s confrontation with the Polish theatre in his own lifetime, his defeat at the hands of an uncomprehending public and hostile critical establishment, and his posthumous triumph is the subject of my prefatory essay which serves as a general introduction to his work and provides the context for the plays, each of which has a separate foreword.

Painter, playwright, novelist, aesthetician, philosopher, photographer, and expert on narcotics, Witkiewicz—or Witkacy, his artistic persona and the pen name by which he was known—is now recognized as a major avant-gardist of the twentieth century. A rebel who could not be assimilated to any school or movement, the multitalented Witkacy brought to playwriting an extraordinary breadth of interests and depth of vision, as well as an abiding hostility to the commercial theatre of his own age. The distinctive qualities of Witkacy’s work are a powerful visual imagination evoking dream states by means of hallucinatory images, colors, and shapes, a deeply felt philosophy of man’s tragic isolation in an alien universe, and an acute sense of the grotesque and absurd that generates subversive self-mockery and parody.

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