Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885-1939), known as "Witkacy," may have been Europe's most radical novelist, dramatist, painter, and philosopher in an era when artists competed fiercely to be the most unlike anything that had come before. Writing in Polish and banned in Communist Poland, he did not attain the international reputation of the Surrealists, Dadaists, or other Absurdists, but his work remains strikingly modern.
Soviet censorship was not imposed in Eastern Europe until the late 1940s, and interwar Poland had been a hotbed of avantgardism, but Witkacy was in St. Petersburg during the 1917 Revolution, was interested in Futurism and Mayakovsky, and followed events in Russia before Communism came to Poland.
Speaker David A. Goldfarb has served as Curator of Literature and Humanities at the Polish Cultural Institute New York, and taught at Barnard College (Columbia University). He has published on Polish and Russian literature in a range of academic journals and anthologies.
New York City, NY; NYC