‘Life Makes Most Sense at the Height of Nonsense’: Interwar Polish Absurdism
Inspired by contemporary social and political events, and influenced by pan-European avant-garde trends, artistic experimentation was a large part of Polish art in the Interwar period.
Artists, writers and cultural figures sought to challenge traditional styles, and react against political upheaval – and, in doing so, they came face-to-face with questions of meaning and value in art, the role of art in wider society, and the aims of life itself… All concepts which are key to absurdism.
The origins of new forms of art
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Programme for Alfred Jarry's 'Ubu Roi', 1896, photo: Minneapolis Institute of Art
Artistic experimentation took Europe by storm in the late 19th and early 20th century. In literature, art and theatre, artists embraced new and provocative styles, with age-old artistic traditions descending into childishness and play. One of the first revolutionary moments in European culture came with Alfred Jarry’s bizarre play Ubu Roi, which premiered in 1896 to a shocked audience.
In fact, it was also set ‘in Poland, which is to say nowhere’.
But what about the real Poland? The country didn’t exist in 1896, due to the Partitions, but some of these new forms of art were nevertheless present in Polish culture – with developments in literature, painting, and in the birth of mass cultural institutions, like cabaret.
However, artistic innovation only really erupted across Poland after the country regained its independence in 1918. Lecturer in media studies Dr Michael Goddard writes about Polish modernism as follows:
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While the artistic developments that took place in Poland from the nineteenth century often bear strong resemblances to their Western European counterparts, there are also singular elements due at least partially to the subjugation of Poland by other nations from the eighteenth century up until 1918. This occupation had the effect of both delaying and intensifying the experience of modernity and modernism and also of ensuring that aesthetic and especially literary aspirations were inseparable from revolutionary dreams of emancipation.
Goddard goes on to add that artistic innovation took on a ‘unique intensity’ in Interwar Poland, when the country faced a brief yet ‘paradoxical [period] of freedom and anxiety, experimentation and conformity, cosmopolitanism, and increasing nationalism of a fascist and anti-Semitic nature’.
The socio-political scene was certainly chaotic – and artists responded to this in their works, often focusing on topics like the meaning of life and the aim of art. One major debate in the period was whether Polish Interwar culture should break away from the past. Many cultural works from that tumultuous period were also inspired by pan-European developments which inspired creative experimentation and the subversion of norms in art – including surrealism, existentialism, futurism, and Expressionism.
As a result, Polish culture sometimes reached radical extremes. The Polish futurists embraced new literary styles and even anarchy – Polish literary critic Marek Zaleski describes their work as ‘sensation, entertainment or better yet – pornography’. Meanwhile, Expressionists and avant-gardists rejected tradition and Realism for a Polish national style, based on folk and local traditions. The Skamander group of experimental poets also sought a new language of poetry for an independent, modern Poland.
But, with their questioning of the meaning and value in life, many of the provocative artists of Interwar Poland also embraced absurdist thought…
Poland’s eccentric: Stanisław I Witkiewicz
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'Self-portrait with Mrs. Maryla Grosmanowa' by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, 1927, photo: National Museum in Warsaw
Absurdism was present in many different forms in Polish art of the interwar period – but where else to start than with maverick writer, painter and philosopher, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, or Witkacy.
Describing the Polish tradition of the absurd, literary critic Barbara Kejna Sharratt says that:
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The tradition of the absurd in Polish drama goes back to Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz – Witkacy (1885-1939), one of the boldest and most original dramatists of his time. Rebelling against what he considered vulgar naturalism, Witkacy created the theatre without deception, ‘beyond the notions of laughter and tears, comedy and tragedy’. He rejected verisimilitude and suspended the laws of psychological motivation: in Witkiewicz’s dramas corpses and live people enjoy equal status and accident reigns supreme, while the dramatist constantly ‘bares the device’ revealing the mechanism of his craft.
Witkacy’s works were packed with eccentricity, appearing both frivolous and disturbing in equal measure. As Witkacy himself wrote to his wife, Jadwiga:
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Life makes most sense at the height of nonsense.
Another prominent cultural and literary figure of the time, writer Tadeusz Boy-Żelenski, described the artist as:
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One of those tormented spirits who in art seek the solution, not to the problem of success, but to the problem of their own being.
Witkacy began his career as a painter with the Expressionists – this artistic group often distorted reality in their representations, a style which influenced Witkacy’s later writing.
Writing on Witkacy’s art, literary scholar and translator Daniel Gerould notes that he came to the world of theatre ‘as a complete outsider’, with limited knowledge and experience – and with limited interest in the contemporary stage. Witkacy’s works were part of his mission ‘to attack and transform’ the theatre and other cultural spheres; although this found little support from other Polish artists or the general public.
Witkacy thought that drama should be seen in the same way as a modern artwork. Part of this was rejecting mimesis (realistic representation) for experimentation, and focusing on form. His writing therefore embraced erratic and illogical styles.
His plays feature a cosmopolitan array of characters, with space and time made unsettling, and with a prominent focus on social upheaval or self-conscious awareness. Witkacy’s world, as Geroud puts it, is one which ‘has lost its bearings’.
And his phantasmagorical paintings were no less unruly than his writing. Some seem ominous and apocalyptic – inspired by dictatorships, cults and fears of modernity – whilst others are more sadistic, or erotic.
Witkacy was also known for his reliance on narcotics, giving his paintings a mystical, deformed and nightmarish look.
All of this certainly seems absurd. But Witkacy was also a meticulous artist – his work on artistic theory, for example, focused on finding ideals in art. As Goddard writes, Witkacy’s cultural output and teaching was ‘not an anything goes aesthetics of pure absurdity, but a rigorous attempt to construct works of pure form, however deranged and perverse they may appear’.
Other literary absurdists: Bruno Schulz
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Doctor Jan Kochanowski, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy), Roman Jasiński & Bruno Schulz in Jan Kochanowski's apartment on Wiejska Street in Warsaw, circa 1934, photo: Jan Kochanowski / archive of Elżbieta Jasińska / Fotonova / East News
According to Kejna Sharratt, Witkacy also had an influence on other Polish literary figures, including Bruno Schulz, Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński and Witold Gombrowicz. All of these writers were – in one way or another – are also seen as part of the absurdist tradition.
Witkacy was close friends with Schulz, and they regularly corresponded on different artistic issues, including the use of psychology, emotion and artistic aims.
In one letter, Witkacy said he felt Schulz had a ‘speciality’ in ‘female sadism with its counterpart in male masochism’. He concludes Schulz ‘has brought the expression of both these psychic combinations to the extreme limits of tension and almost monstrous emotional frenzy’.
Sharratt sees Schulz as part of Polish absurdist history. She aligns him with the post-war ‘cabaret’-style poet Gałczyński, and claims they both focused on:
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The so-called ‘fantastic’ grotesque where imagination is the primary faculty.
Schulz’s work can be seen as absurd because it questions authority, leaving familiar experiences in doubt. In his fiction, divine and mystical topics become grotesque, and normal life descends into fantasy and chaos.
However, critic Shlomit Gorin sees Schulz’s use of absurdity differently.
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Underlying the works of Bruno Schulz is a unique framework for a sophisticated understanding of and reconciliation with the nature of absurdity, which paradoxically may lead to its annihilation as a source of anguish and provide an alternative to a view of life as meaningless.
Gorin notes that Schulz also evokes Albert Camus and Franz Kafka in his work – particularly in his unsettling descriptions, questions around freedom, and the conflict between fantasy and reality. But she suggests Schulz instead had a more optimistic view of absurdity, embracing the ripe world of the imagination, which creates a ‘vibrancy’ even from ‘the depths of chaos’. Time, in Schulz’s work, is full of possibility and taken as a joke, rather than as a pattern or object of human knowledge. The absurdist confrontation with meaninglessness can, in Schulz, still create meaning.
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Schulz does not interpret lack of intrinsic meaning and purpose as a challenge […] Schulz sees no dichotomy between perception and the world. The world is what we are capable of perceiving it to be […] Human demands for certainty are problematic in Schulz’s narratives, rather than the world’s indifference to such expectations (as Camus suggests). Absurdity, then, in Schulz’s world, is no cause for despair, but is instead an essential characteristic of life that ought to be assumed and accepted […] If human thought and behaviour accord with absence of objective meaning and work on the assumption that our world is fundamentally messy, then absence as such no longer presents itself as problematic.
Schulz, Gombrowicz & Witkacy
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Terrain map of the Second Polish Republic, photo: Mariusz Paździora / Wikimedia.org
In discussions of Polish absurdism, Schulz is often considered in trio with Witkacy and Gombrowicz – and this raises more questions about the nature of Polish interwar absurdism.
Gombrowicz, says Sharrat, dealt in the ‘logical’ grotesque, as opposed to Schulz’s ‘fantastic’ grotesque.
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He dissects with logical precision the complex psychology of human behaviour, simultaneously presenting the ‘games people play’ and the motivation that lies behind them, the technique applied by Witkacy in his plays. Gombrowicz ridicules the social stereotype and unmasks human relationships.
But these three writers also wrote about similar themes, as Goddard suggests:
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One single factor that unites these writers and distinguishes them from their contemporaries, it is the affirmation of the creative powers of art to invent new ways of existing, rather than merely repeating in their artworks previous aesthetic styles or artistic procedures borrowed from elsewhere; an affirmation all the more extraordinary for taking place in the singularly unfavourable situation of independent Poland […] this is not to say that these writers did not succumb to historical despair in their personal lives .
Schulz, Witkacy and Gombrowicz do use absurdist literary techniques, including confusing plot progression, fantastical settings, and repulsive and nightmarish imagery. This might be influenced by the periods of fear and isolation all three authors experienced during their lives – as well as their own personal psychological torments, such as madness, sexual deviance and childhood regression.
And, as literary historian Żaneta Nalewajk notes, all three were also ‘mercilessly treated by major criticism of [the 1930s]’.
Gombrowicz himself noted similarities between his, Schulz’s and Witkacy’s works, stressing the tragedy, darkness and madness in their writing, although they all approached these topics differently.
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Witkacy, Schulz, and myself [are] three people attempting to direct literature to the new tracks.
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Witold Gombrowicz, trans. Ewa Ziarek.
Sławomir Mrożek & the post-war absurd
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Sławomir Mrożek, 1987, photo: Wojciech Plewiński / Forum
Although this article is mainly focusing on pre-World War II absurdist experimentation, the legacy of the three authors above – particularly on the work of post-war Polish absurdist, Sławomir Mrożek – is also worth a mention. Sharratt describes Mrożek’s works as emphasising absurdity and parodying the contemporary Polish scene.
Quoting literary scholar Marta Piwińska, she concludes Mrożek was influenced by older Polish literary traditions:
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Mrożek’s literary subconscious is romantic […] But there is another element in Mrożek's subconscious: dialecticism. Dialectic is another of the unavoidable lessons of everyone who has finished high school since 1945 in Poland. Indeed, dialectical thinking is more than subconscious in the minds of recent generations. It is positively conscious as a hazy myth which has little relation to the pure Marxist dialectic, but which governs the imagination nevertheless. The absurd in Mrożek’s thought stems not only from his lessons in the culture of Poland’s romantic past but also from his lessons in the culture of contemporary Poland under whatever titles they bore- from History to Economics.
Comparative literature expert Regina Grol-Prokopczyk also says that Mrożek was influenced by:
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Witkiewicz, Gombrowicz, […] the Polish archive of the absurd (Antoni Słonimski, Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński, Julian Tuwim) points to his close adherence to Polish literary tradition. It is there, first of all, that his tendency to blend the grotesque and the schoolboyish humor à la Jarry takes its root.
His works – as those of the Interwar artists and writers – were inspired by socio-political events of the time. Historian and literary critic Jan Błoński adds that:
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Stalinism often broke or at least derailed artists. Mrożek, paradoxically, was strengthened by it, because it revealed to him de visu the power of the stereotype, the imposed code and the interpersonal mould, which, by escalating and swelling, destroys itself in the end. (…) In doing so, however, it often litters the society with bodies.
Absurdism on the stage & screen
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'Europa' by Franciszka & Stefan Themerson, 1931/32, 1931-2, film still, © Themerson Estate, photo: courtesy the Artists' Estate and LUX, London
Whilst Polish literary depictions of absurdism are some of the most prominent, other examples of absurdist thought in culture were also developing during the Interwar years.
There were Witkacy’s plays, which have already been mentioned, but other prominent absurdist experimentation was also taking place on the pre-war stage – including the work of the Cricot Theatre in Kraków.
The Cricot was an avant-garde theatre established by Józef Jarema to push boundaries in art. Inspired by European artistic trends, including expressionism, as well as the spectacle of the circus, and the growing popularity of the cabaret, the new theatre put on a host of surreal and riotous performances, using new plays from contemporary authors – including Witkacy – as well as works from the Polish canon. Costumes were extravagant and eccentric, with the stage set up to emphasise artistic freedom and provoke audiences. According to theatre critic Stanisław Marczak-Oborski:
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The events had a unique atmosphere of carefree, almost social fun, which was fostered not only by the principle of improvisation, but also the conscious destruction of the barrier between the stage and the audience.
And the absurdist tendencies of Cricot were revived post-war in the Cricot 2 theatre, founded by Tadeusz Kantor – which again put on plays by Witkacy.
Absurdism was also an element of Polish pre-war photography and film, particularly in the work of one Polish couple – Franciszka and Stefan Themerson. In the 1930s, the Themersons created short experimental films, which included Dadaist, constructivist and surrealist imagery. One film, Europa, was a visual rendition of Anatol Stern’s 1925 poem of the same name, which depicted the tragedy and chaos of contemporary Europe, including tumultuous politics, and the struggle of the working class. In the Themersons’ film, Europa is portrayed using montage, animation, time-lapse, and other experimental cinematic techniques.
The legacy of Interwar Polish absurdism
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Franciszka & Stefan Themerson, photo: Wikimedia.org
With its blend of the bizarre, the provocative, the existential, and the experimental, some examples of Polish interwar art can be seen to heavily rely on absurdist approaches – particularly responding to the struggles of modernity and contemporary life.
As mentioned before, absurdism thought took on more popularity post-war, with the contemporary political scene evoked more clearly in absurdist drama and literature.
But though the interwar artists and writers who employed absurdist thought in their works are sometimes seen as mere precursors to post-war absurdism, their visionary take on art should also be remembered and valued within the context of newly independent Poland, when adventurous and absurdist forms of culture were also embraced – and needed.
Written by Juliette Bretan, Oct 2020
Sources: Żaneta Nalewajk, Witkacy - Schulz - Gombrowicz; Michael Goddard, Gombrowicz, Polish Modernism, and the Subversion of Form; Barbara Kejna Sharratt, Sławomir Mrożek and the Polish Tradition of the Absurd; Daniel Gerould, witkacy: theater outside the theater; Ewa Płonowska Ziarek, Gombrowicz's Grimaces