Witkacy – nasz współczesny

Banned in 1949–1955, Witkacy was reclaimed for Polish culture in the process of political change in 1956. His work has the extraordinary capacity to renew meanings and to resonate with what is happening at a given moment, in changing political, social, and artistic contexts. There appears to be a pattern to the post-war reception of his oeuvre: there is a surge of interest in it whenever an important event followed by some major political shift occurs (December 1970, August 1980, December 1981, June 1989). The stage history of The Shoemakers, his most outstanding political play, confirms that assertion. One of the main characters of the play is Gnębon Puczymorda (Pugnatsy Jawbloatski in Daniel Gerould’s translation), an embodiment of the vices of Polish nobility which Witkacy thought to have caused the downfall of Poland in 1794 and whose remnants he still detected in the social and intellectual life of Poland. Witkacy described and attacked them fiercely in his 1936 study Niemyte dusze (Unwashed Souls), though no publishing house decided to publish it in his lifetime. His historiosophy turned on a vision of happiness enjoyed by the humanity that would be achieved in an egalitarian, perfectly well organized society resembling an anthill where there was prosperity, equality, and justice but no room for expression of individualism. Although Witkacy realized that the process was irreversible, he thought it was an artist’s duty to try to stop or at least slow it down.