Polish culture: Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy)

Polish culture: Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy)

Witkiewicz's plays, unappreciated and largely misunderstood before World War II, were rediscovered in Poland in the 1960s and 70s. Largely characterized by a tone of parody, Witkacy reveals his derisive abilities in them with great force. All the literary references in the plays seem to reflect these abilities. What we have here is both mockery of the rhetoric of the Romantic and Young Poland movements, as well as a parody of motifs drawn from Ibsen and Strindberg, Shakespeare and Wyspianski, Rittner and Conrad. In Witkacy's works, humor almost always becomes macabre, a burlesque tone - an invariable ingredient of Witkiewicz's plays - combines with fantasy. Bitter irony and sarcasm strongly color the represented world, in which seriousness and "elevated" philosophical discourse are mixed perfectly with, and complement, the comedic tone. Konstanty Puzyna, in his classic introduction to the first full edition of Witkiewicz's plays, classified the writer as an exponent of the avant-garde current in European playwriting. Puzyna highlighted certain similarities with Expressionism, wrote about the parallels between Witkacy's plays and Alfred Jarry's UBU ROI, referred to the writer's poetic as Surrealist.