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Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885–1939), known as Witkacy, was a playwright, novelist, painter, photographer and philosopher, and one of the most original figures of the European avant-garde. He was born in Warsaw on 24 February 1885, the son of the painter and critic Stanisław Witkiewicz, creator of the Zakopane style. From 1890 the family lived in Zakopane, where the boy was educated at home according to his father’s unorthodox principles and wrote his first plays as a child.

He studied painting at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts and travelled widely in Western Europe. In 1914, after the suicide of his fiancée, he joined the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski on an expedition that took him to Ceylon and Australia. When war broke out he went to St Petersburg, served as an officer in the Pavlovsk Regiment and witnessed the revolutions of 1917 at first hand.

Back in Poland in 1918, he settled in Zakopane, exhibited with the Formists and set out his theory of Pure Form in New Forms in Painting (1919) and Theatre (1923). In the space of a few years he wrote more than two dozen plays, among them The Madman and the Nun and The Mother, though very few reached the stage in his lifetime; Cobblers, his last great play, followed in 1934. His novels Farewell to Autumn and Insatiability are dark visions of a civilisation sliding into mechanised uniformity, and his philosophy culminated in Concepts and Theorems Implied by the Concept of Being (1935). He earned his living through the tongue-in-cheek Portrait Company, whose pastels are now prized by museums and collectors alike.

On 18 September 1939, the day after the Soviet army crossed Poland’s eastern border, Witkacy took his own life in the village of Jeziory. Largely forgotten after the war, he was rediscovered during the political thaw of the 1950s. Today he is regarded as a forerunner of the Theatre of the Absurd, and his plays are staged around the world.

The Slavic world and beyond

Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz

Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885–1939), known as Witkacy, was a playwright, novelist, painter, photographer and philosopher, and one of the most original figures of the European avant-garde. He was born in Warsaw on 24 February 1885, the son of the painter and critic Stanisław Witkiewicz, creator of the Zakopane style. From 1890 the family lived in Zakopane, where the boy was educated at home according to his father’s unorthodox principles and wrote his first plays as a child.

He studied painting at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts and travelled widely in Western Europe. In 1914, after the suicide of his fiancée, he joined the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski on an expedition that took him to Ceylon and Australia. When war broke out he went to St Petersburg, served as an officer in the Pavlovsk Regiment and witnessed the revolutions of 1917 at first hand.

Back in Poland in 1918, he settled in Zakopane, exhibited with the Formists and set out his theory of Pure Form in New Forms in Painting (1919) and Theatre (1923). In the space of a few years he wrote more than two dozen plays, among them The Madman and the Nun and The Mother, though very few reached the stage in his lifetime; Cobblers, his last great play, followed in 1934. His novels Farewell to Autumn and Insatiability are dark visions of a civilisation sliding into mechanised uniformity, and his philosophy culminated in Concepts and Theorems Implied by the Concept of Being (1935). He earned his living through the tongue-in-cheek Portrait Company, whose pastels are now prized by museums and collectors alike.

On 18 September 1939, the day after the Soviet army crossed Poland’s eastern border, Witkacy took his own life in the village of Jeziory. Largely forgotten after the war, he was rediscovered during the political thaw of the 1950s. Today he is regarded as a forerunner of the Theatre of the Absurd, and his plays are staged around the world.

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