Customer Reviews

The Witkiewicz Reader

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The Witkiewicz Reader is an indispensable collection of plays, personal letters, critical writings, fragments, and biographical information from the life of Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz. It contains his darkly surreal plays; his touching letters to his friend Bronislaw Malinowski, the anthropologist; and his innovative critical writing regarding his Pure Form theory of art. This is a well-deserved tribute to a criminally under-appreciated genius whose tragic suicide as the Nazis invaded Poland took from the world a truly gifted playwright, painter, and philosopher.

This is a treasure house, containing one of Witkacy's best short plays (The New Deliverance), one of his best long ones (Janulka, Daughter of Fizdejko), plus extracts from the novels, from critical and theoretical documents (notably on Pure Form, Bruno Schulz and the various drugs with which the author experimented); letters to his friend Malinowski; and the hilarious Rules of the S I Witkiewicz Portrait-Painting Firm, which constitute an object lesson for any artist wracked by the horrors of commercial compromise. The book is conveniently divided into segments according to the progress of Witkacy's career, and each segment has a good biographical chapter by the excellent Daniel Gerould, who seems to have done more to get Witkiewicz known and appreciated in the English-speaking world than most writers can manage to do for themselves. The Witkiewicz reader is both an ideal introduction and a great addition to this reviewer's still-too-small library of Witkacy-in-English. More, please...