Witkacy Is Still Not Taken Seriously: An Interview with Przemysław Pawlak

przemyslaw_pawlak_img_8638a.jpg, default, Przemysław Pawlak, photo: Izabela Glubiak

A new biography of Witkacy offers an opportunity to discuss the turbulent life of this artist – a man of his time and a lover of Pure Form – whose meaning is explained to us by Przemysław Pawlak.

Jan Czempiński: Does writing Witkacy’s biography mean that Przemysław Pawlak has given up his artistic aspirations?

Przemysław Pawlak: Have I ever had artistic aspirations? I wrote poetry at school and university, but that was a quarter of a century ago. Maybe I’ll take up painting someday; you can earn a lot considering the current prices of young art at auctions. I should point out that I’m serious about what I’ve just said.

JC: Will they be Witkacy-style paintings?

PP: No, I’m incapable of that; I don’t have the technique or the talent. I’d choose conceptual and abstract art so that I can create and sell quickly. But where did you get my artistic aspirations from in the first place?

JC: Let me explain. In his treatise ‘O czystej formie’ (On Pure Form), Witkacy writes: ‘The reproduction of the past and the re-creation of reality are the work of people who are incapable of artistic creation but who have a strange, inexplicable desire, even a compulsion, to paint and write. “I see the world, I know something about life, why shouldn’t I paint the world and describe life?” they think to themselves and cover thousands of canvases and sheets of paper.’ You’ve covered a lot of pages; the book is almost 600 pages long.

PP: I enjoy detective investigations, both literary and historical. Researching libraries, archives and the press excites me and gives me a sense of fulfilment. Writing itself is torment, and I had no intention of writing Witkacy’s biography. However, when I was commissioned by Wiesław Uchański, the head of Iskry Publishing House, I completed it. As for Pure Form, I share Witkacy’s view that a novel, and even more so a biography, like any large work of prose, is not a work of art.

JC: What must a work of art have to be considered a work of art?

PP: I agree with Witkiewicz that it must meet the conditions set out in the theory of Pure Form. Everyone says it’s difficult to define, but he explained it very clearly in his 1932 work O czystej formie. By analogy, it’s like liturgy in religion, geometry in mathematics or grammar in language – in other words, some kind of order. The work is not meant to be referential; it does not tell a story about another, external reality. It exists for its own sake. It may, as he wrote, contain elements associated with the real world: words that have meaning in Polish, parts of the human body – although he claimed that Botticelli could have painted a bottle in place of Venus’s calf, as long as it fit the composition. Order should be internal, meaning that the rules according to which a given creation is constructed should be the rules of that creation. Just as in liturgy, an outside observer who’s unfamiliar with it perceives a religious service as something incomprehensible and nonsensical. Liturgy does not tell a story; it organises what’s happening inside. In geometry, a regular polyhedron is an exceptionally interesting shape, even though it tells us nothing about customs, emotions or human relationships.

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‘Walka’ (Combat) by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, ca 1920, National Museum in Kielce, photo: MNW

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JC: But where does the word ‘pure’ and the claim to wholeness that it implies come from? Your explanation is consistent with the words of the author, who claimed that a work of art begins where ‘the form itself begins to prevail over the content’. And further: ‘The self-sufficient form that evokes aesthetic satisfaction I call Pure Form. It’s not, therefore, a form devoid of content, for no living creature can create such a thing, but one in which the elements of life are secondary’. So, it’s not a ‘pure’ form but a ‘predominant’ one.

PP: I think the problem is the poverty and inadequacy of language. This is where the misunderstandings and incomprehension of Witkacy’s aesthetic postulates came from, starting with his dispute with Karol Irzykowski. By form, we usually mean some kind of vessel, shape or shell for content. Here, however, the content is identical to the form; the most important thing is the ordo, the structure, the order.

JC: So perhaps that’s the term he should use? ‘Pure’ is unambiguous. ‘Pure’ is not dirty or even smudged.

PP: He indeed could have coined a word that would not have disrupted the reception of his theory. Because this was not about any gradation; it was an idea, an attempt by Witkacy to reach the level of metaphysics in his definition of art, as is the case of ‘pure’ liturgy. It is never the case that all the gestures, acts and expressions of the participants during a service exactly follow the liturgy and derive from it, yet it is an attempt to touch the Absolute, the Mystery of Existence. Pure Form is about the same thing in the field of art.

JC: I think we’ll come back to that, but for now, let’s talk a little more about Przemysław Pawlak. Would you tell us how today’s theatre scholar, president of the Witkacy Institute and vice-editor-in-chief of ‘Witkacy!’ came up with his subject?

PP: I had a copy of Sonata Belzebuba (Beelzebub’s Sonata) in my family library, with a dedication to Fr Henryk Kazimierowicz; it was a full-page dedication written in purple ink. I read this drama when I was about ten years old, probably without fully understanding it. Later, I became curious about who Witkacjusz, the author of the inscription, was, and who the priest was. I admired Witkacy’s portraits and wanted to own one. However, the prices were always too high… and still are. As a budding student, I would go to auctions, even at the Bristol Hotel, and dream of having a painting of my own. Many years later, I sent a scan of the dedication from Sonata to Professor Lech Sokół. The reaction was instantaneous. Kazimierowicz was a legend and the only chance to access Witkacy’s lost dramas. He was the only person who had all of Witkacy’s plays rewritten by hand. The disclosure of the book from the priest’s library became a sensation for Witkacy scholars and revived hopes of finding the Master’s unknown texts. And they would hold me tight from then on. A few years ago, I compiled and published Kazimierowicz’s anthropological and ethnological theses at PIW Publishing House, and then I wrote his biography as my doctoral dissertation: Ksiądz z nienapisanej sztuki Witkacego (The Priest of Witkacy’s Unwritten Play).

JC: So, the Witkacy bite is older in you than the experience of activism in ‘Miasto Jest Nasze’ (The City Is Ours). And is it possible to find the soul of an activist in Witkacy?

PP: One could say that Narkotyki (Narcotics) and Niemyte dusze (Unwashed Souls) were some sort of attempt to educate the nation, in which he resembled his father (in my opinion, however, only ostensibly). Witkacy fulminated about the lack of hygiene among Poles; he explained how to wash, shave, heal and do gymnastics. He also freed backyard dogs from chains when hardly anyone cared about animal rights. He advocated for their protection and dignified treatment and didn’t even kill flies. But you probably won’t find the urban activist in him. He was not at all an urban stroller type or flâneur.

JC: You’re not easy to classify either. Reading the book, I had the impression that a ‘tamed’ Witkacy was writing about Witkacy, which has both positive and negative aspects. You keep pace with the protagonist; you don’t lag behind in thought or language, and the queries you make are clearly in Witkacy’s style. However, I would say that you temper yourself and deal with reality better than he does, which allows you to convey dense details in lively yet understandable language. On the other hand, you seem to remain under Stanisław’s spell. Even when you ‘scold’ him, you forgive him in advance because he’s a genius.

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Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, self-portrait, photo: courtesy of the author

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PP: It was neither my task nor my intention to write a panegyric. I tried to understand the premises of his actions, hence the choice of formula in which I accompany Witkiewicz, which may give the impression that I’m under his influence. I adopted the principle of not quoting the opinions or discussions of Witkacy scholars. I wrote a popular biography, following the protagonist. And when, for example, I heard in an interview for Polish Radio Dwójka [Polish Radio Station 2] that I was glossing over the subject of Jadwiga Janczewska’s suicide in 1914, I replied, ‘He wasn’t there’. They had an argument; he went to the mountains and returned a few days later, at which point she was already dead. All we know is that he fell into despair. I described in detail the extent of the guilt that tormented him afterwards. However, he also wanted a note in which he blamed Karol Szymanowski for his fiancée’s death to be preserved. He believed that Jadwiga was pregnant with Szymanowski’s child and had taken her own life because she saw no honourable way out of the situation.

JC: For someone who didn’t want to live in a monogamous relationship, that’s not a very convincing complaint.

PP: It was typical for a person of that era and social class – let’s call it what it was. The vast majority of men of his generation, and not only then, did not live in monogamous relationships, while most forced their wives to be faithful.

JC: In that case, if we’re talking about a relationship based on partnership, Janczewska did have the right to behave this way, right?

PP: We’re familiar with Witkacy’s views on monogamy from the 1920s. Before marrying Jadwiga Unrużanka, they both agreed that they would not live in monogamy and would not have children. They married in 1923 under these terms, and Witkacy adhered to the agreement with painful consistency. However, we don’t know what his views were in his youth, when he was engaged to Jadwiga Janczewska. Besides, judging a man about whom we know a great deal only because we’re familiar with his exhibitionist correspondence, against the backdrop of his contemporaries, who carefully concealed their private lives, is at the very least a methodological error. Stach asked Nina (his wife Jadwiga) to burn the letters, and she probably destroyed some of them while carefully collecting and storing the rest for future researchers. Did Anna and Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz live differently? Tadeusz and Zofia Żeleńscy? Irena and Jerzy Krzywiccy? Practically all of Witkacy’s friends had similar lifestyles, living in open relationships.

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Jadwiga & Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, 1920s, photo: NN, courtesy of the author

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JC: A good point. But what did ‘adhering to the agreement with painful consistency’ mean in the 1920s?

PP: He compelled his wife to remain consistent. They agreed on this once, and Witkacy clung to it. Today, we might say that he was on the autism spectrum because he had a black-and-white mindset about all kinds of issues. People often say one thing and change their minds later; they don’t attach any importance to it and forget. But he constantly held himself and others accountable for everything as if he didn’t know there was another way.

JC: That’s an interesting theme, which I understand you also want to challenge: Witkacy the madman. Or pseudo-madman, as Gombrowicz called him. If madness is construed as a deviation from social norms and nothing more, then, despite the typicalness you pointed out, I would venture to say that Witkacy was indeed ‘mad.’

PP: In what sense, then, was he deviating from the social norm of the time?

JC: Beginning with the need for scandal…

PP: Witkacy avoided the scandal that could have ruined the good name of his deceased fiancée until the end of his life. Scandal was something that destroyed lives. Let’s call a spade a spade. In Witkacy’s case, we can talk about jokes and games.

JC: He didn’t make jokes or play games at other people’s expense?

PP: Nothing extraordinary if you read what other artists did. I’m sorry, but I don’t see anything scandalous in Witkacy’s putting a cutlet in his wallet and giving it to a waiter instead of cash. Please let’s begin discussing him with the seriousness he deserves. A man who fought in World War I and clearly suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and then enlisted in the army after the outbreak of subsequent wars out of a sense of civic duty is normally described in terms of patriotism and martyrdom. Witkacy, however, is not taken seriously at all.

JC: I take him seriously. For now, I’ve only accepted that a ‘madman’ is someone who deviates from social norms; I don’t believe that a ‘madman’ must be a bad person. A ‘madman’ can earn justified praise for participating in wars if they’re defensive wars. What I’m most concerned about is how he wrote and how he treated critics and the public. About the drugs he tried, which were many. About forcing his wife to have an abortion, caused, as you write, by his fear of the loss of freedom that a child would mean for him. This is a departure from the norm, also understood historically.

PP: Let’s start with abortion. I tried not to apply today’s standards to it. At that time, it was far more common than it is today. It was performed both in homes and in private doctors’ surgeries, under conditions of cruelty unimaginable to us. The same was true of childbirth. Henryk Jasieński, whom I quote in the biography, wrote that with the level of medical knowledge at the time, the greatest cruelty was to expect a wife to give birth to a child. Because it was a gamble: ‘will or won’t survive’. That’s why the Jasieński couple decided not to have children.

The fact that Witkacy urged Jadwiga to have an abortion was primarily because they had agreed on this matter before their marriage. Additionally, he considered himself unsuitable for fatherhood both genetically and psychologically; he also believed that his wife’s poor health and physical constitution did not make her fit to be a mother. Today, there are relatively few children; they are the apple of our eye, and there’s legal protection for children’s rights. A hundred years ago, this was in its infancy; women gave birth to a dozen or more children. My grandmother couldn’t even remember the names of some of her brothers and sisters who died shortly after birth! And how many mothers, including my two great-grandmothers, died as a result of childbirth exhaustion! This is what people at that time should have considered when thinking about procreation. He indeed could have been thinking about saving his sickly wife’s life.

JC: But did he genuinely think that way? That was not the impression I got when reading your book.

PP: I tried not to reveal all my beliefs, because it would have seemed that I was defending him too vigorously, being familiar with only a partly preserved correspondence. That’s why I also accepted Jadwiga’s point of view; she had her reasons. Research work consists of verifying all available sources and not believing any of them completely.

JC: And what about other areas of ‘madness’, such as his attitude towards polemicists and drugs? He was very sensitive about criticism, treated his opponents with contempt and used violent and disorderly language. This led me to suspect that he deviated from the norm.

PP: I don’t see him deviating in any way from the level of aggression and emotion present in literary, political, theatrical and philosophical criticism in the first four decades of the 20th century. What a level of mockery it was! Irzykowski was a master of scathing retorts. In parliament or the pages of politically or ideologically radical newspapers (that is, all of them), people with different views were essentially denied the right to exist. The polemics were much more aggressive and disorderly than Witkacy’s journalism. He was the one who demanded that criticism be put in order!

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‘Seria sześciu portretów’ (Series of Six Portraits) by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, 1931, photo: Józef Głogowski, from Ewa Franczak & Stefan Okołowicz’s collection

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JC: I agree that today it’s difficult to imagine the language that dominated the press a hundred years ago, which partly explains Witkacy’s approach. However, demanding order doesn’t mean that he wrote in an orderly manner. Coming back to the issue of being consistent, it’s puzzling that he wrote a very socially responsible text against drugs (‘Narkotyki’), while at the same time searching for the Mystery of Existence in peyote trances. One Witkacy argued that smoking cigarettes was senseless, while the other ran away from reality like a child.

PP: He wrote that book for money.

JC: So, he was making it up?

PP: No, but we can’t take this content one-to-one as the alleged views of its author. The same applies to Niemyte dusze, novels, plays or letters. That would be idiotic. Do you really think that Sienkiewicz had the same views as Kmicic? At what stage of his life?

JC: The trilogy is a cycle of novels. ‘Narkotyki’ and ‘Niemyte dusze’ aren’t novels.

PP: But these are texts written for money. He wanted to impress his readers and attract their attention. We do the same thing when we sell something, don’t we? No one in their right mind would believe that a woman advertising washing powder is expressing her own views. Why do we expect this from a man who was, among other things, a writer? He wanted to earn money, and self-help books were becoming fashionable. He wrote the best he could, in his own style, with a great deal of humour and sensationalist content (such as peyote visions). He hoped to earn the income that his novel had previously brought him – he used the royalties for Nienasycenie (Insatiability), which were equivalent to two years’ salary of a civil servant, to pay off his mother’s debts. Maria Witkiewiczowa had the whole household to manage; her husband was away. She ran guesthouses and struggled with all the problems faced by female entrepreneurs. Judging her son’s views based on a commercial literary venture is evidence of the intellectual decline of today’s researchers.

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‘Portret Marii Witkiewiczowej’ (Portrait of Maria Witkiewiczowa) by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, 25 August 1918, photo: courtesy of the author

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JC: It isn’t. If Witkacy writes in the preface that he finally wants to do something ‘useful’, then he can logically be trusted.

PP: It means only that that’s what he wrote. I’ve been helping people obtain mortgages for twenty years, and there hasn’t been a single client whose verbal declarations confirmed the data in their documents 100%.

JC: A bank customer or a lady advertising a washing powder are different from the image of Witkacy that emerges from your book. A person who takes life and metaphysics seriously.

PP: In his philosophical treatises, yes. When it comes to them, I would argue with conviction that these were his philosophical views when he published them in his Główniak [main work] or his Błędne koło Koła Wiedeńskiego (The Vicious Circle of the Vienna Circle). I’m confident that he indeed detested Rudolf Carnap and that he would most willingly have forbidden the publication of the views of the entire Vienna Circle. However, compiling the author’s views from quotations from his literary texts is a methodological error.

JC: That’s a pity. In ‘Narkotyki’ and ‘Niemyte dusze’, he presented observations not about abstract things but about social life. For example, the comparison between the frivolous attitude characteristic of smokers who believe that ‘things will work out somehow’ and the mentality of Poles who were also thought to lack discipline is an interesting insight.

PP: These compilations come from such different orders that I find them rather amusing. I also don’t think that generalisations about Polish men and women make sense. Besides, there’s a statement in Niemyte dusze that the author had utilised Freudian psychoanalysis when he knew very well that he had not, because Karol de Beaurain did not implement Freud’s recommendations. Why should we arbitrarily consider one sentence to strictly represent Witkacy’s view and reject others when we feel that he’s making things up or manipulating? You can’t treat a literary text that way, selecting fragments that suit your thesis. It’s not fair to readers.

JC: I don’t know if they suit a thesis or whose thesis it would be. I got the impression from your book that Witkacy was hard-working and imposed discipline on himself, which allowed him to create a huge number of commercial works and, alongside them, works he considered art. I don’t find it implausible that he would accuse Poles – individuals do have an idea of the society they live in – of lacking these qualities.

PP: Maybe he wanted to cause a scandal to sell more copies and provoke a discussion, as he did at various times. All I know is that he wrote what he wrote. Was he hard-working? I think so. But maybe he wasn’t, and I’m the one who’s creating the image of a workaholic in the book?

JC: You wouldn’t create it if you didn’t think it was the truest possible image.

PP: And how do you know?

JC: You can admit that you wrote in jest.

PP: No, not in jest.

JC: So, I suspect that you tried to find the image that was closest to the so-called truth.

PP: I tried. Although I sometimes realised how absurd the whole project was, I felt that I was losing control over the text of the book. There were moments when I decided that it was impossible to describe certain periods in Witkacy’s life in a chronological manner and in a way that anyone would still want to read this. That’s why I realise that it’s largely my own creation. I was certainly also writing out of frustration, after reading all sorts of studies and gossipy articles brimming with the bravado of authors who openly fabricated stories without attempting to establish the facts. I was acting in defiance of them. But whether I arrived at any truth, I don’t know.

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Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, 1938, photo: courtesy of Tatra Museum Library, Zakopane

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Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy), fot. dzięki uprzejmości Biblioteki Muzeum Tatrzańskiego w Zakopanem

JC: Hypotheses are sufficient.

PP: Therefore, if I were to reconstruct Witkacy’s attitude towards Poland, I’d try to evaluate his deeds. I don’t know whether he was motivated by patriotism or humanity, but he enlisted in the Russian army during World War I when he learned about the brutality of the Germans in Greater Poland, especially in Kalisz. He enlisted in the Polish Army in 1920 during the Polish-Soviet War, and in 1939, at the age of 54, he also appeared before the recruitment commission. However, in the interwar period, like others, he had to develop a new version of patriotism. I don’t envy him. Poland was politically repulsive, occasionally embarrassingly divided, and later oppressive. His mother could not endure it and turned against Piłsudski, signing a letter against the persecution of the opposition and the Brest trials in the last months of her life. We don’t know his opinion on the matter.

JC: We know one, but it comes from ‘Niemyte dusze’, which you consider to be a creation. We see a lot of respect for Piłsudski there. Comments such as ‘the only great man in Poland since the 16th century’.

PP: Because the marshal chose to become a dictator. Piłsudski indeed achieved a level of state power and influence on what society did that no one had had since the last Jagiellonian kings.

JC: Yet this is admiration, something positive; here it’s extended to include the events of May. Was this a consequence of being raised in a family that supported Piłsudski or of his own disturbing need for greatness?

PP: He did not grow up in such a family; his father only declared his support for Piłsudski on his deathbed during World War I. If his son believed that Piłsudski had agency, he judged him by his deeds, as that was indeed the case. Piłsudski dissolved parliament in Poland and seized power, and Witkacy took note of this. However, I’m convinced that it did not bother him too much – if we’re to believe his known letters. I want to remind you that many of them were lost during World War II; some were destroyed by Jadwiga Witkiewiczowa, and Witkacy destroyed almost all he received from her. In those that have survived, which date from the days of the May Coup, we find no outrage or mention of the victims. I don’t know whether censorship was in force or if he feared the consequences of his words, but ultimately, I believe he had nothing against the coup. Later, he did not oppose the Sanacja movement; he painted portraits of politicians from that camp and visited the Belweder. And his respect for strong individuals was consistent with his views on metaphysics and art history – he claimed, after all, that the decline of humanity began in the Renaissance.

JC: And only great individuals can lift up humanity?

PP: Looking at the parliamentary democracy of the 1920s, he likely reached such conclusions. He also had an idea, shaped by his own experiences, of what occurs when the masses seize power – what happened in Russia. We judge this a hundred years later and fail to realise that for someone raised in a gentry family, the rule of the people meant that tomorrow you could be nailed to the door of the manor house.

JC: However, in ‘Niemyte dusze’, whether fictional or not, he writes several times about how good it would be for the Polish nation if we had experienced a revolution like the one in France or Russia. Commenting on contemporary times (1936), he stated that great things were happening in Russia, and that wasn’t fear but admiration.

PP: I can’t see any admiration. Revolutions were great events – terrible but great. You forget how much he wanted to escape from there in 1918 and how he presents revolutions in other works. Where is the admiration for revolution in Szewcy (The Shoemakers)? On the contrary, I see in Witkacy a ‘longing’ for the old, orderly world. In the kitschy, smelly and overpopulated end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, after seeing the worst effects of massification and that all social unrest only led to further senseless slaughter, he could think that some forms used to exist in the past: chivalrous, ritualistic and religious, thanks to which everything seemed to be more in its place. This may have appealed to him because, as I mentioned, he was probably neurodiverse, and the world around him was falling apart with a bang. Day by day, political systems, legal systems, the foundations of physics, ancient geometry, forms of transport and even elements of clothing, such as corsets, were becoming things of the past.

The impossible was happening. The characters in his plays face similar challenges, which is why in Gyubal Wahazar or in Mątwa (The Cuttlefish, or, The Hyrcanian Worldview) they discuss space-time and the possibility of transcending it. Witkacy, meanwhile, believed that it was possible to understand the structures of the universe and even touch the Mystery of Existence. He applied a similar approach in his everyday life. When someone broke a promise or failed to observe etiquette, his world collapsed. He was stubbornly consistent, constantly reproaching himself for not doing something the way he had planned. He kept track of every penny his wife spent because years earlier he had promised her 200zł in ‘pocket money’.

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Self-portrait by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, 1912, photo: courtesy of the author

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JC: And in the chapter on nicotine, he advised readers to ‘develop a sense of duty to strive for perfection: being in a bad mood should be considered a luxury we cannot afford, and that’s that.’

PP: Except that – I repeat – this wasn’t entirely serious. There are cracks in this chapter – the author lets us know that he’s joking, winking at the reader. He never actually quit smoking.

JC: However, I associate this tone with what you’re saying. It suggests, if not a disorder, then perfectionism – a need for perfection.

PP: His father told him to strive for perfection. He was supposed to be handsome, kind, wise and stand ‘at the top’. For years, Staś received letters with such commands. Perhaps he decided to respond to this simplistic approach and his father’s hypocrisy by writing a self-help book à rebours? Besides, Witkacy had a fabulous sense of humour. By treating his writing without distance, we’re stepping onto a slippery slope.

JC: If I hadn’t stepped onto it, you wouldn’t have said many interesting things.

PP: Congratulations. That’s precisely what many commentators do: use his figure to discuss other topics. I’ve never been interested in Witkacy’s life as such, or even his political views. Not at all. I was interested in his plays as autonomous literary works, or perhaps as some kind of keyholes through which I could peek into entire fields of knowledge as into separate universes and learn a great deal.

JC: What, for example?

PP: About the beginnings of biocybernetics, synaesthesia, breeding purebred animals, non-Euclidean geometry, the history of medieval orders and disputes between their founders; about Bernard of Clairvaux, Einstein’s theory, but also about the course of the Great French Revolution. I adore examining Witkacy’s texts like intertextual charades, word by word. Reconstructing a private life is something I do reluctantly. I received an offer from Iskry Publishing House, was persuaded – perhaps even flattered – by Wiesław Uchański and received my first decent payment for doing what I love. I agreed and later regretted it many times.

JC: But, like Witkacy, you kept your word.

PP: I completed the task to the best of my ability.

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‘Witkacy. Biografia’ (Witkacy: A Biography) by Przemysław Pawlak, dust jacket, designed by Andrzej Barecki, photo: Iskry Publishing House promotional materials

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JC: Would you prefer interpretations of dramatic, artistic or philosophical works that you couldn’t include in a biography?

PP: That’s what I did before. I wrote treatises such as Przywrócić godność Szewcom! (Restore Dignity to the Shoemakers!), mainly about tragedies.

JC: And among them, mainly about ‘Szewcy’?

PP: I think that, of the ones we know, it’s the apogee of Witkiewicz’s oeuvre, a wonderful and most rich amalgam of the most diverse elements. In it, we have a dense network of literary motifs, historical events are personified and the characters represent so many things!

JC: That’s something high school students may not learn about in an extended profile when they read it as supplementary material. What interpretation would you suggest?

PP: They’re told that this is a drama about three revolutions. That’s simply idiotic. It’s more than just flattening, it’s spitting in the author’s face.

JC: And what would be one argument against the thesis that this is a drama about three revolutions?

PP: Szewcy is a work in Pure Form, a cosmos in itself. It’s full of hilarious games with the reader, such as references to the Great Improvisation [Konrad’s monologue in Forefathers’ Eve, Part III, by Adam Mickiewicz, ed.], Balladyna [play by Juliusz Słowacki, ed.], Scandinavian mythology, or the motif of Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, who is Sajetan [character in Szewcy, ed.]. When we imagine the space of Szewcy on stage, we see images that refer to various works of art. Usually, by the way, we have to imagine, because nobody stages Witkacy’s dramas according to his stage directions. Witkacy himself, after seeing the staging of Metafizyka dwugłowego cielęcia (Metaphysics of the Two-Headed Calf), drank for four days because he couldn’t come to terms with what he’d seen in the theatre.

JC: So you believe that in the microcosm of ‘Szewcy’ we’ll find the inner order of Pure Form rather than a chaotic collage of motifs that the author wanted to accommodate in one work?

PP: I believe that this is order. However, to prove it, you’d have to conduct a similar analysis to the one performed in the context of Jackson Pollock’s paintings or musical compositions of different eras to see if a fractal dimension can be calculated for individual works. Such a study of dramas has not yet been done.

JC: What’s a fractal dimension?

PP: It determines whether a work of art is self-similar – whether it’s made up of transformed copies of parts of itself, whether its construction is consistent, regardless of the scale at which we look at a piece. It can be calculated. A methodology has yet to be devised for dramas; it was easier for paintings and music. It’s been calculated that Pollock’s blotch structures are mathematically similar to fractals. In music, it’s been proven that works for which a fractal number can be determined appeal more to the audience. The brain, probably like all of nature, has a fractal structure; when perceiving such a work, it simultaneously learns and rests in the right proportions. I dream of subjecting Witkacy’s plays to such an analysis. For now, we’re only at the stage of stylometric studies.

JC: Frankly, it’s hard to imagine how to subject a written work to such examination.

PP: I have some ideas. However, we must begin by treating these works as the author wrote them. To date, Witkacy hasn’t been taken seriously. Literary scholars who study him often hit a wall, the limits of understanding, and conclude that the author either got it wrong, was joking or deliberately created a meaningless message. And yet we’re dealing with the texts of a philosopher and artist who could talk for hours with Alfred Tarski or Jan Łukasiewicz and wrote treatises on logic himself! So, we need to enter the mathematics level of at least a few semesters of higher education. Theoretical physics is, unfortunately, also necessary. The subtitles of some dramas clearly state that they are non-Euclidean. If this is too difficult for a humanist, they should seek help from scholars in the field and analyse the texts together with them. Really start examining them thoroughly.

Translated from Polish by Agnieszka Mistur

Przemysław Pawlak, a doctor of theatre studies at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences, is co-founder and president of the Witkacy Institute; initiator and deputy editor-in-chief of Witkacy!, a semi-annual journal; a member of the Council of the Museum of Middle Pomerania in Słupsk (2018–22); deputy head of the literary department at the National Theatre in Warsaw; author of the first popular biography of Witkacy, published by Iskry Publishing House in March 2025; co-editor of the Bibliography of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Dzieła zebrane, vol. 25, 2020); co-editor of collections of essays Witkacy. Plėšrūniškas protas (2018) and Witkacy. Drapieżny umysł (2021; 2nd rev. ed. 2023; translation into Ukrainian, 2024); co-author of Mieczysław Choynowski’s biography (Demon aktywizmu. Mieczysław Choynowski prekursor polskiej psychometrii, 2022); biographer and editor of Henryk Kazimierowicz’s writings (Powiernik Witkacego. Pisma rozproszone ks. Henryka Kazimierowicza, 2017, and Henryk Kazimierowicz. Ksiądz z nienapisanej sztuki Witkacego, 2021); recipient of the Roman Dmowski and Ignacy Jan Paderewski Institute for the Legacy of Polish National Thought Award and the Mayor of Kalisz Award; organiser of the #RatujPIW campaign.

Language English

witkacy

polish painters