Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz

This novel, the author's masterpiece, is one of the greatest expressions ever of the tortured intersection of political and personal destinies in Eastern Europe. Futuristic, experimental, and remarkably prophetic, the book traces the adventures of a young Pole whose own fate parallels the collapse of Western civilization following a Chinese communist invasion from the East. Written in 1927, Witkiewicz's novel presages the horrifying anti-utopian society that would become a reality for millions of Eastern Europeans in the late 1930s. Insatiability succeeds in conveying the catastrophic mood of that time - its malaise, its desires, its terrifying glimpse of the future.

This album presents the principal works of Witkacy (Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz), one of the most innovative and singular Polish painters. The book is divided into chapters describing successive periods in his work. Anna Zakiewicz, a Witkacy specialist, guides us through the artist's biography and introduces us to the world of his artistic imagination. We observe his diverse portrait types and his numerous self-portraits, along with his occasional landscapes, fantasies, and sketches.

The Polish playwright and artist Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, known as Witkacy, is now recognized as Poland's leading theatrical innovator of the interwar years and one of the outstanding creative personalities of the European avant-garde. This volume contains two of Witkacy's "tropical" plays inspired by the playwright's trip to Ceylon and Australia in 1914 with his close friend, the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. Mr. Price, or Tropical Madness is a drama of heightened passion and greed among British colonists in Rangoon who seem to have stepped out of Joseph Conrad's tales of the South Seas. Metaphysics of a Two headed Calf, set in New Guinea and Australia, pits savage European imperialists against a native tribal Australia and pits savage European imperialists against a native tribal chieftain whose fetish of a great golden frog offers greater insight into the mystery of existence than the Westerners' shallow rationalism. Both plays puncture the white rulers' poses of superiority and parody their images of the tropical Other. Also included in the volume are Witkacy's Foreword to Metaphysics of a Two-Headed Calf in which the playwright defends his concept of theatre as an autonomous art with a scenic language of its own and an appendix containing a documentary itinerary of Witkacy's journey to Ceylon.