Zakopanine: A Distinctly Polish Drug
‘Zakopane has been dubbed the “spiritual capital of Poland”, but we would give it a different name: the chief production plant of a unique, purely Polish drug – zakopanine’, wrote Witkacy. What were the consequences of overdosing on this substance?
Zakopane is commonly said to have been discovered by Polish physician and co-founder of the Polish Tatra Society, Tytus Chałubiński. Although he was no Columbus, he did excel at promotion and popularised the place among the intelligentsia, particularly from Warsaw. But what was it like before him? In Pępek Świata, Wspomnienie z Zakopanego (The Centre of the Universe, Zakopane Memories), the painter Rafał Malczewski spun an idyllic yarn:
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The residents of the Podtatrze region were a handsome, free people who had never been oppressed by serfdom or bowed down before any lord. Podhale was a crown land, and Zakopane was a godforsaken village that the head of Nowy Targ district was reluctant to visit, as he had to cross marshlands and forests just to see a few impudent mugs on the plain below Mount Giewont. Moreover, in those days there had been no mention of Zakopane in the royal records for decades.
Outside of Podhale, one heard fantastic tales of the mountains, the fabulous creatures that inhabited them, and immense treasures hidden amid the rocks. The first to describe the Tatras in detail was Stanisław Staszic in O Ziemiorództwie Karpatów i Innych Gór i Równin Polski (On the Terrogenesis of the Carpathians and Other Polish Mountains and Plains). During a pioneering expedition in 1805, he climbed all the peaks he judged to be the highest. He intermingled scientific observations on the geology and nature of the Tatras with travel reports that combined a fear of nothingness with an odd delight (odd, since his enlightened rationalism hinted that, essentially, human civilisation had no need of such mountains). He also commissioned an illustration of a Tatran panorama from Zygmunt Vogel, court painter to the last king of Poland.
Following in Staszic’s footsteps were the Romantics Seweryn Goszczyński, who compiled his reports in Dziennik Podróży do Tatrów (Diary of a Journey to the Tatras), and Wincenty Pol. The mysterious, primordial mountains so inspired the Romantic imagination that poets wrote about the Tatras even if they had never been there: Adam Mickiewicz in Konfederaci Barscy (The Bar Confederates) and Juliusz Słowacki in Król-Duch (The Ghost King). In the Polish consciousness, the Tatras represented a symbolic enclave of freedom, but this had not yet translated into a large influx of tourists. The turning point came in the latter half of the 19th century.
A more select company & the benefits of tuberculosis
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photo: the Tatra Museum in Zakopane
Stanisław Witkiewicz affirmed that ‘Poles owe a lot to tuberculosis’. Patients were attracted by Zakopane’s climate, which was beneficial for their lungs and recommended by Dr Chałubiński. However, regardless of their health, most summer visitors were drawn by the atmosphere of a Polish oasis where one could forget all about the partitions. As the painter Wojciech Kossak recalled:
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At the time, Zakopane and the Tatras were so advantageous that, despite various hardships and shortcomings, the Polish cultural elite would go there every year. Fiery Polish hearts would flock to that wonderful backwater, untouched by any of the epidemics that had swept other parts of Poland. The place had never even seen Muscovites or Prussians, and Austrian rule ended in Nowy Targ.
A rail link only appeared in 1899. Previously, people were forced to judder along in highlanders’ wagons for 36 hours from Kleparz in Kraków (or from Chabówka after 1884). Tourist infrastructure in the village was still in its infancy and incomparable to the Western resorts that its illustrious guests were accustomed to. However, the inconvenience was rewarded with a carnival of freedom. Walery Eljasz Radzikowski, who authored an illustrated Tatra guide in 1874, wrote:
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At the height of summer, a rather small but more select company than in other places gathers in Zakopane. People mainly come here to visit the mountains or for peace of mind. Those who seek amusement or business, or wish to show off, strut around like lords, or fritter away their fortunes prefer to take the waters; for them, the Tatras are a wilderness. Here, people meet purely on first-name terms, ignoring the borders partitioning Poland, and spend their time in agreeable conversation.
As the years went by, that ‘more select company’ kept on growing. Simply everyone would visit. Chałubiński’s house became an artistic salon, and others soon followed. Helena Modrzejewska, Henryk Sienkiewicz, and others took up residence in Zakopane. The latter was so fascinated by the lively Podhale dialect that he incorporated it into the language of his characters in Krzyżacy (The Teutonic Knights).
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Henryk Sienkiewicz and the highlander Wojciech Gandra in Zakopane, circa 1896, photo: the Tatra Musem in Zakopane
Bolesław Prus also fell for the Tatras, although his love was complicated by agoraphobia and a fear of heights. The local highland guides did their best to take him out along lesser-known trails. He seems to have overstayed in Zakopane, however, as the editors of Kurier disciplined him publicly in 1899:
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Mister Prus, we have sent you several telegrams, but why have you not returned? Indeed, we have no one to write the Weekly Chronicle here, as Mister Prus seems to have settled in Zakopane for good. (…) I hear he has become a great Tatran mountaineer, who just rambles around the peaks and mountaintops, regaling the gazdas [hill farmers] with his finest Sunday chronicles. There’s no accounting for tastes…
The list of pioneering Tatra enthusiasts goes on and on. Zakopane’s first social activists were positivistic in practice and inwardly romantic. The Tatras Association was set up in 1874, and its statutory aims included researching and promoting the mountains, conserving their nature, and handling the development of tourist facilities – all veiled in an aura of patriotism. They came up with ideas such as renaming the Tatras to Mickiewicz Park and building a tomb for Juliusz Słowacki in the mountains. For the Polish activists, the territorial dispute between Galicia and Hungary over Lake Morskie Oko stood in for disputes over the future borders of the independent Polish Republic. The association decided to create Dworzec Tatrzański (Tatra Station), the first cultural centre in Zakopane: a reading room by day, and a concert, recital, and theatre venue in the evening. Charity events were also popular, often involving distinguished artists whose fees were donated to social causes.
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A group trip, circa 1900, photo: the Tatra Museum in Zakopane
One upshot of the Romantic era was the ‘unplanned trips’ promoted by Chałubiński – several-day-long group excursions with local guides. Decisions on which way to go next were taken according to the general mood and weather conditions. In Sześć Dni w Tatrach (Six Days in the Tatras), Chałubiński wrote:
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It is of little concern if night should fall. (…) If the worst comes to the worst, in darkness or foul weather, we will spend the night anywhere, even among the dwarf mountain pines. We have a tent, provisions, a band and singers, and the very air of the peaks exerts a magical influence.
Stanisław Witkiewicz’s bestselling novel Na Przełęczy (On the Pass, 1889) also sang the praises of mountain hiking and was second in popularity only to Sienkiewicz’s Trilogy at the time.
However, the true heyday of literature about the Tatras and climbing came with the arrival of Young Poland. As climbing grew more competitive, the Tatra Volunteer Search and Rescue unit was created, precipitated by the composer Mieczysław Karłowicz’s death in an avalanche.
To cover Poland with a highland roof
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Sabała among the Witkiewicz family (first from the left: young S. I. Witkiewicz, Sabała’s godson), circa 1893, photo: the Tatra Museum in Zakopane
The creative intelligentsia were as inspired by the mountains as by the locals themselves, influenced by an idea from climber and environmental protection pioneer Jan Gwalbert Pawlikowski: ‘Anyone wishing to discover the soul of the Tatras must behold them through the eyes of their inhabitants’.
Relations between the visiting intellectuals and the locals were unusual for a post-feudal society. Highlanders were treated with respect and even idealised in works of literature. The best mountain guides were portrayed as heroes; the storyteller and songster Sabała was hailed as the Homer of the Highlands. A good example of this attitude is Adam Asnyk’s poem Maciejowi Sieczce, Przewodnikowi w Zakopanem (To Maciej Sieczka, a Guide in Zakopane).
Ethnographic interest in Podhale folklore gave rise to the Zakopane style. Its initiator, Stanisław Witkiewicz, felt that highland architecture and ornamentation retained ancient Polish traditions forgotten in other regions. Its exponents and imitators wished ‘to cover Poland with a highland roof’ and revive that reputedly characteristic Polish style. It was a crucial argument in debates on Polish national style, and many ‘Zakopane-style’ buildings appeared in the Russian partition, where they were also a political statement. The Kilim Association, set up in 1910, reintroduced folk motifs into weaving.
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‘Zofiówka’ Mansion in the Zakopane style on Chałubiński Street in Zakopane, 1900, published by Salon Malarstwa Polskiego, photo: the Tatra Museum in Zakopane
Highland influences embraced every field of art. When Paderewski went to visit Chałubiński in 1883, he discovered the highland music of Podhale’s most famous performer of the time, Bartuś Obrochta, which inspired his Tatra Album. As Ferdynand Hoesick wrote, the pianist’s works premiered at the Tatra Station auditorium…
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…with such thrilling energy, but above all such feeling for the spirit of highland music, that I can still hear those wild brigand tunes ringing in my ears, and even now – a good dozen years later – I recall the veritable hurricane of applause and encores that seemed to make the hall’s wooden walls quake.
The 1623rd Sonnet about Mount Giewont
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Boat Syrena on Morskie Oko, author unknown, photo: from Tatra National Park’s collection
At the turn of the century, Zakopane expanded in true American style and, proportional to the resort’s development, ever more works praising the beauty of the mountains appeared. As Boy-Żeleński summed it up:
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The Tatras, extolled by Goszczyński, discovered by Chałubiński, brought closer by Witkiewicz in his charming Na Przełęczy, and embodied in Asnyk’s impeccable verse only reached their full poetic potential during the Young Poland era.
Young Poland made the Tatras fashionable, but also bled them dry in literary terms. Besides the successful poetry of Kazimierz Przerwa-Tetmajer and Jan Kasprowicz, many hacks penned a multitude of horrors. Unsurprisingly, one issue of the satirical magazine Liberum Veto dedicated to the Tatras contained a poem titled Tysiąc Sześćset Dwudziesty Trzeci Sonet o Giewoncie (The 1623rd Sonnet about Mount Giewont).
The post-Romantic myth of the Tatras as a land that would liberate the entire country was still being perpetuated. In his book Młodopolskie Tatry Literackie (The Literary Young-Polish Tatras), Jan Majda wrote:
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Writers created a separate world of their own there, an arcadia, and erected tribunes on the mountaintops, onto which they climbed in the role of prophets and teachers, interpreters of things earthly and cosmic (…) and from which they called for Polish life to be reorganised and enriched with meaning.
The peak of this trend for Tatran mysticism was the 1910 novel Nietota: Tajemna Księga Tatr (Nietota: The Secret Book of the Tatras) by Tadeusz Miciński. Interweaving Oriental philosophy with Messianism, it links the Tatras with the Himalayas, and Polish historical heroes both living and dead appear alongside characters from folk demonology:
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The Tatras came onto our horizon, having been adjoined to Poland by King Włast. That land resembled a Paradise Regained. (…) Turów Róg began to unite wanderers who came from all over Poland, like dying animals to a watering hole.
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Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, ‘Stanisław Witkiewicz z synem w Lovranie’ (Stanisław Witkiewicz and His Son in Lovrana), circa 1913, photo: Polish Scientific Publishers PWN
Turów Róg was ‘a fraternity with its own magic word: Poland’ (i.e., the patriotic circles of Zakopane), and King Włast was Tytus Chałubiński. Other figures from Miciński’s Zakopane entourage also showed up in his book under fanciful pseudonyms – Stanisław Witkiewicz as Duskdawn the Sage, his son as Prince Hubert, while Miciński’s own alter ego was Arjaman. Prince Hubert, aka Witkacy, was strongly inspired by Nietota when writing his first novel, 622 Upadki Bunga czyli Demoniczna Kobieta (The 622 Falls of Bung, or The Demonic Woman). Like Miciński, he enciphered close friends into it and even paraphrased entire excerpts from Nietota.
Much was written about the Tatras, and they were also the subject of many paintings. A few of the landscape painters still remembered today are Wojciech Gerson, Aleksandr Kotsis, Leon Wyczółkowski, Władysław Ślewiński, and Jan Stanisławski. Thanks to the latter, a lecturer at Kraków Academy of Fine Arts, students would set off to Podhale in droves for their compulsory outdoor painting practice. Marcin Samlicki recalled:
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Young painters would scatter like a flock of sheep, with easel after easel poking up beside the stream. They would paint from breakfast until lunchtime, then all afternoon until twilight.
On the eve of the twentieth century, Zakopane boasted one socio-cultural association per hundred residents. Other visitors included Polish party campaigners from all three partitions, mystics, and idealists. Brother Albert propagated Franciscan ideas, and the anarchist and theorist Edward Abramowski organised cooperative conventions. In the Tatras, Wincenty Lutosławski studied the effects of yoga on ‘the development of willpower’. The crème de la crème of Zakopane would gather at fashionable spiritualist séances, including Władysław Reymont, who was alleged to have outstanding clairvoyant abilities. Witkiewicz noted:
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Everything happening anywhere in Poland is reflected in Zakopane. (…) It is all refracted through the animated swarms of people who descend on the Tatras for a couple of months.
Andrzej Strug tackled the affectations of Young Poland, Zakopane spleen, and absurd ideas of various Tatromaniacs in his serialised novel Zakopanoptikon, czyli Kronika Czterdziestu Dziewięciu Deszczowych Dni w Zakopanem (Zakopanopticon, or a Chronicle of 49 Rainy Days in Zakopane), published between 1913 and 1914. This roman à clef was a satire targeting the social life of the resort, Tatran mysticism, and the activities of Zakopane associations (for example, the novel features a Tatra Zealots’ Group, a Tatra Fanatics’ Group, a Tatra Rewilding Division, a Committee for Mountain Grandeur, an esoteric Brotherhood of the Sudden Demise and a Ghost Troop).
Żeromski the dictator
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Skiers in Kuźnice, circa 1912, photo: J. Oppenheim / the Tatra Museum in Zakopane
The First World War broke out at the height of the summer season. Fortunately, the town was bypassed by warfare, so artistic life did not grind to a halt. Avant-garde Formist painters led by the Pronaszko brothers brought liveliness and a touch of scandal, while Stefan Żeromski directed plays by Słowacki and Wyspiański. With the Austro-Hungarian Empire on the verge of collapse, a rally of residents proclaimed an ephemeral Republic of Zakopane and designated Żeromski president of that first patch of independent Poland. In his own words:
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I acquired almost a ‘dictatorship’ over Zakopane and its adjacent valleys. I held that forgotten, ridiculous, lofty position for eleven days, as Mother Austria was crumbling into rubble. I had the army, police, informers, local council, post office, and telegraph solemnly swear their loyalty to the new State, and I even waged a war to reclaim the villages of Głodówka and Sucha Góra from a Czech invasion. I fondly recall my military and dictatorial powers, as they were a barrel of fun.
The Republic of Podhale was eventually joined to Poland but, at first, the state-building fantasies persisted. Rafał Malczewski wrote:
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In Zakopane, the cafés were buzzing with life. Assorted plans were born out of vodka. [Władysław] Orkan and yours truly weighed up the possibility of founding a separate little country, protected by the future League of Nations, comprising the Podtatrze area, Nowy Targ, and Poprad and Ružomberok in the Slovakian Tatras – a sort of Tatran Republic. It would have been something like a cross between Monte Carlo, St Moritz, Montmartre, and Czerniaków, plus Canadian forests. Horse racing in Tatrzańska Łomnica, roulette and baccarat in the casinos, cabarets, dance halls, music halls, taverns, the gamut of highland culture, hunting […], skiing and hiking […]. We discussed it endlessly.
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Rafał Malczewski, ‘Auto na tle pejzażu zimowego’ (A Car Against a Winter Landscape), photo replica: Dagmara Smolna
As skiing grew in popularity after 1918, Zakopane became a summer and a winter capital, but much less of a spiritual haven. The director of the Tatras Museum, Juliusz Zborowski, wrote:
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Once independence had been regained, Zakopane lost its former halo of being the only place in the whole tattered country where one could freely breathe the air of the three partitions. Now that breathing freely was commonplace, Zakopane acquired significance in other ways.
The myth of the Tatras started to lose its sacred status. Just as Young Poland was beginning to resemble a museum exhibit from a bygone era, the avant-garde came to the fore. To them, lyrical raptures about Lake Morskie Oko typified the passéism they scorned. At the foot of the Tatras, a new generation was at large – children of the first ‘settlers’, and newcomers: Witkacy, of course (the self-proclaimed ‘demon of Zakopane’), the Formist painter Leon Chwistek, the sculptor August Zamoyski and his wife, the dancer Rita Sacchetto, Rafał Malczewski, Karol Szymanowski, and Karol and Zofia Stryjeński.
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Zofia Stryjeńska, ‘Na góralską nutę’ (To a Highlander’s Tune), Warsaw, 1930, photo: Polish Scientific Publishers PWN
Zakopane ceased to be a uniquely artistic enclave and became an ultra-fashionable resort, with all the negative consequences of commercialisation and chaotic growth. In 1928, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz remarked:
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In my opinion, Zakopane is being defiled as the years go by, and I see no way to cope with the general mental degeneracy. Dancing, record-breaking sports, cinema and radio (…) are neutering people’s interest in anything more profound.
Edmund Bieder described the phenomenon in his satirical List z Zakopanego (Letter from Zakopane) in 1925:
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It’s Sodom and Gomorrah here in Zakopane! The crowds swirl and eddy in gaudy waves… Jazz bands bellow everywhere in the evening; you can tell it’s the height of the season… But if you peer at them more closely, you can see ‘Clerical Poverty’ written all over their faces.
In 1922, a journalist from Gazeta Zakopiańska lamented the town’s impoverished cultural life, with fewer concerts and recitals: ‘Yet we have an inordinate amount of dance halls – people dance morning, noon, and night… They dance at breakfast time, elevenses, lunch time, tea time, and dinner time’. The Second Polish Republic’s leading jazz bands played there: Karasiński, Kataszek, Ady Rosner, and the virtuoso saw player Fred Melodyst. Witold Gombrowicz recalled those crazy Zakopane nights:
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Daybreak. The couples have no desire to stop, still dancing even when the music falls silent […] Finally, the end comes and the jazzmen lay down their instruments, people go to dress by the exit, donning their coats and galoshes, but then dizzily whirl off again, once more the music goes insane, and the dancing crowd’s coats and scarves fly. Nowhere else have I seen the kind of revelry that would sometimes erupt anew in the clubs of Zakopane early in the morning.
Despite what you may conclude from the above quotes, there was more to inter-war Zakopane than dance halls, and interesting cultural events did not just vanish from the town. Witkacy created the Formist Theatre, Egon Petri gave concerts, and Rita Sacchetto performed the world premiere of her sketch Kokaina, based on Formist dance.
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Rita Sacchetto, 1920, photo: Binder Alexanderp
Zakopane style became an exportable commodity. Szymanowski staged his ballet Harnasie in Prague and Paris, and students from the Wood Industry School were also very successful (winning three awards at the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts in Paris, including a Grand Prix for Jan Szczepkowski).
Meanwhile, the bohemian café life carried on beneath Mount Giewont. Just as Warsaw’s Mała Ziemiańska Café was famous for its Skamander poets’ mezzanine, Zakopane’s U Trzaski Café had a so-called ‘sports table’ on its veranda. Writer Kornel Makuszyński, a regular who eventually became a real Zakopaner by naturalisation, described that table as…
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…the most animated, influential, treacherous, underhand, slyest, and most scheming of literary artistic fairs.
The Zakopane life would sometimes take its toll. In a letter to a friend, Szymanowski asked rhetorically: ‘Are we insane for being here all the time?’ Gombrowicz also appears to have had a zakopanin overdose in 1938:
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I’ve spent so long in the mountains… I’ve fallen into some kind of reverie, unkempt disarray, and sluggishness … and I can’t get out of here. Everything is hazy. […] People and boarding houses all merge into a vague whole, engulfing the resort. You wallow in it like a child in soup, then head back to your boarding house, or leave your boarding house, or sit inside your boarding house.
In the aforementioned article on the Demonism of Zakopane, Witkacy wrote in his inimitable style:
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Perhaps, by living in this enchanted land (…) we are tumbling into the abyss, but what a dreadfully agreeable torment it is (…).
Originally written in Polish, July 2017, translated by Mark Bence, Nov 2020
Sources: Adrianna Dominika Sznapik, ‘Tatrzańska Arkadia: Zakopane Jako Ośrodek Artystyczno-Intelektualny od Około 1880 do 1914 Roku’, Warsaw 2009; Jacek Kolbuszewski, ‘Tatry w Literaturze Polskiej’, Kraków 1982; Jan Majda, ‘Młodopolskie Tatry Literackie’, 1989; ‘Zakopane, Czterysta Lat Dziejów’, Kraków 1991; ‘Zakopane w Czasach Rafała Malczewskiego’, Olszanica 2006
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