Witkacy's ‘Madness’: The Lost Manuscript of a Total Artist

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Witkacy's ‘Madness’:
The Lost Manuscript
of a Total Artist

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Self-portrait by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, 1912, photo: Wikimedia Commons

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A philosopher, connoisseur of psychedelic drugs, painter, novelist, theorist, photographer, dramatist… who possibly also suffered from bipolar disorder. Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, known as Witkacy, was one of the most colourful characters in Polish culture. Born in Warsaw in 1885, he spent most of his life in the Tatra Mountains, where he moved with his family at barely the age of two. He didn’t go to school – his father, also an artist, wanted to develop his son’s individuality and ensured him a private education away from his peers.

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Станислав Игнаций Виткевич, серия портретов, 1931, фото: Юзеф Глоговский, из коллекции Эвы Франчак и Стефана Околовича — Series of self-portraits by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, photo: Józef Głogowski, from the collection of Ewa Franczak and Stanisław Okołowicz

Witkacy’s lost play is Tak Zwana Ludzkość w Obłędzie (So-Called Humanity in Madness) – a drama in three acts with no epilogue. We don’t know whether Witkacy finished it before he committed suicide. From a surviving page penned in the author’s hand, we know he began writing it in the spring of 1938. He had not written for the stage in several years, so the drama represented a return to dramatic work for him. Years later, the authentic title page would also be irretrievably lost. Today, all we have to work with is a faithful reproduction of it.

Composition begun 6-7 May 1938. Writing 1st June of the same year,

reads Witkacy’s note (trans. SGB).

A cast list for the play also survives, one typical of the author’s aesthetics, featuring distinctive characters with bizarre names. This three-act play with no epilogue was to present four characters: Father Bymbylak – a Jesuit in a lace mask, the mason Chlodwig de Scierva, a 28-year-old fascist in a ball gown named Ida Volpone and ‘the rather fat and bearded’ Emissary of the Carbonari. Yet, we would never learn the play’s true content. Almost a half-century after Witkacy’s death, Tak Zwana Ludzkość w Obłędzie would appear on theatre posters – though not because the priceless manuscript had been miraculously rediscovered years later.

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Witkiewicz’s aesthetics were among the most distinctive styles in 20th-century Polish culture. If we were to describe them in a few words, we might use such expressions as: oneiric, troubling, absurd and breaking free of everyday realism. This was also his vision of theatre.

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Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz's 'Tworzenia Swiata' (Creation of the World), 1921-1922; photo: Google Art Project

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The concept of Pure Form, which he declared in the early 1920s, was to his mind the model for the ideal work of art: not resembling anything known from reality and – as a result – giving rise to an emotion in the viewer that he called a ‘metaphysical shudder’.

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'Kompozycja Fantastyczna (Wizja z Maskami)' (Fantastical Composition [Vision with Masks]) by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, 1920; photo: Wikimedia Commons

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A sociable death

Witkacy was a total artist – to him, art was not so much a way of life as life itself.

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Self-portrait by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, 1914, photo: Wikimedia Commons

Death is within me wherever I am.

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From a letter from Witkacy to his wife (trans. SGB)

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Hallucinations & reality

Witkacy never admitted being addicted to drugs, but he certainly didn’t keep them at arm’s length. He experimented, incorporating them into his creative process. Cocaine, nicotine, peyote, morphine, ether and alcohol accompanied him while painting or writing. These were memorialised by distinctive, abbreviated notes on the canvass stating under which substances’ influence the paintings had been created. But other experiences also had an undeniable and equally extreme influence on his work: rather than narcotic visions, something unfortunately, terrifyingly real. This was Witkacy’s stay in Russia from 1916 to 1918, when – having joined the Tsarist army – he was an eyewitness to the February and October Revolutions.

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Little is known about this period; Witkacy hardly spoke a word about it, and it will remain an almost unknown moment in his biography, enveloped in a halo of mystery.

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Street protests in Petersburg, 1917; photo: Wikimedia Commons

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Yet one thing is certain: there, Witkacy saw horrifying visions, the worst a person could possibly see. He must have experienced extreme hunger and seen decomposing bodies, smelling their stench. He must have also had his own brushes with death.

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Armed soldiers carrying a banner with slogan 'KOMUNIZM' (Communism), Moscow, 1917; photo: Wikimedia Commons

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A voyage to Australia

Witkacy’s time in the Tsarist regiment was, crucially, part of a longer ‘series of unfortunate events’. In a dramatic gesture in 1914, Witkacy’s first fiancée, the young Jadwiga Janczewska, committed suicide. Overcome with guilt, Witkacy resolved to set off for Australia and then Papua New Guinea, joining the expedition of an outstanding ethnographer – his friend Bronisław Malinowski, known affectionately as Broń. This exotic journey brought Witkacy no relief, however. The monotonous ocean crossings turned out to be the ideal circumstances for him to wallow in dark thoughts and unrelenting despair:

for me, a journey by ship is the most awful thing one could think up,

Witkacy wrote (trans. SGB).

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'Pejzaż Australijski' (Australian Landscape) by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, 1923; photo: Wikimedia Commons

This is precisely when news of the outbreak of the Great War caught up with the artist. Witkacy decided to return to Europe and join the military. As the only child of a noble family, he was exempt from the draft, yet he enlisted as a volunteer – despite his lack of any military training. In one battle in mid-1916, he was wounded, which excluded him from participation in combat. The events to follow, amid all the stormy revolutions, he observed as an inactive soldier.

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In recent times, I have been given much to think about by the sight (I cannot put it otherwise, for unfortunately, I watched it as if from a box seat, unable to take any part in it due to schizoid blocks) of the Russian Revolution from February 1917 to June 1918. I observed this incredible event very much from up close,

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– Witkacy wrote in ‘Niemyte Duszy’ (Unwashed Souls) (trans SGB).

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The artist didn’t twiddle his thumbs, however, as demonstrated by the copious baggage with which he returned to Zakopane: his suitcases were filled with painted canvasses. He also brought from Russia an outline of theoretical writings on aesthetics and philosophy. After returning to Poland, Witkacy wrote his first play – clearly marked by deep trauma. In the drama Maciej Korbowa and Bellatrix, the stage would be thick with corpses.

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This is the period from which Witkacy’s most famous photograph comes: Multiple Portrait, made in Petrograd around 1916, shows the artist in uniform, standing with his back to the lens, his image reflected in mirrors at right angles. Interestingly, Witkacy was also the creator of the most expensive photograph ever auctioned in Poland (not this famous portrait, but The Monster of Düsseldorf, which was bought for the impressive sum of 200,000 zł – around 50,000 USD).

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Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz's 'Portret wielokrotny' (Multiple Portrait), 1917; photo: Google Art Project

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Today, we would say Witkacy suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

This concept entered the psychiatric dictionary in the 1970s, after the Vietnam War, when American doctors and therapists endeavoured to care for veterans burdened by trauma. Our aim is not to retroactively diagnose Witkacy, but rather to attempt to understand his mental condition, which doubtless pushed him towards the apocalyptic, terror- and distress-filled visions of the future he portrayed in his work.

The symptoms of PTSD include flashbacks to past painful events, anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts. More than one-third of war veterans do not speak of their experiences after returning from service. We don’t know exactly what Witkacy went through – but we can be sure that after his experience in Russia, he could only look at the world with aversion and a sense of helplessness.

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There must have been some tragedy over there, a tragedy of conscience [...]. There must have been some massacre of his friends over there, his officer friends. He didn’t like talking about Russia. He was exceptionally averse to talking about it.

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The poet Aleksander Wat, in his volume of reminiscences titled My Century (taking the form of a conversation with Czesław Miłosz) wrote this about Witkacy in Russia. (Trans. SGB)

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On the brink of disaster

While many perceive prophecies in his works, Witkacy was instead a forecaster – seeing the danger of war from so close, mad with hunger and smelling the stench of rotting bodies, he didn’t foresee (or was even incapabl

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Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy), 'Kolaps przy Lampie' (Collapse by a lamp), 1913, photo: Tatra Museum in Zakopane

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One of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz's drawings. It is most likely a self-portrait of the artist with a characteristically difficult to decipher signature reading, ‘Zadość Uczyni Tylko Zupełny Pokój i Samounicestwienie’ (Only Complete Peace and Self-Conquest Will Bring Satisfaction).

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Photo: Digital Library POLONA

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Witkacy was an expressive artist, yet his statements were not fantasies, but rather diagnoses grounded in real events.

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'Przerażenie Wariata' (A Lunatic's Fear) by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, self-portrait, 1931; photo: sothebys.com

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Doppelgänger

How do you perform a play that doesn’t exist? The renowned theatre director Jerzy Grzegorzewski (1939-2005) found a way: he simply... wrote it. He didn’t depend exclusively on his own imagination, however, instead presenting a unique reconstruction based on the playwright’s remaining, already-known works. Out of 16 texts, Grzegorzewski composed a remarkable mosaic: one bereft of plot and logic as commonly understood.

Janusz Macherek, the author of the introduction to the published script of Tak Zwana Ludzkość w Obłędzie, compared building the text to the cult classic Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar. He also suspected the director of giving into the urge to impersonate the late artist:

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Grzegorzewski, in essence, has written an unknown play by Witkacy. [...] We can imagine how enticing the idea might have seemed to fill in an empty space, perhaps even in some respect to impersonate the author or take on the role of Doppelgänger.

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Trans. SGB

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Nearly half a century after Witkacy’s death, the world looked different. The 1980s in Poland meant a time of totalitarian communist regime and profound economic crisis. It was also the era of the rise of Solidarity.

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Jerzy Grzegorzewski, National Theatre in Warsaw; photo: Wojciech Plewiński

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Fragment of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz's handwritten drama 'Janulka, Córka Fizdejki' (Janulka, Daughter of Fizdejko), one of the dramas used by Jerzy Grzegorzewski

Grzegorzewski came to Tak Zwana Ludzkość w Obłędzie, his personal blend of Witkacy’s pieces, twice: once in 1987 at the Studio Theatre in Warsaw (an institution named for none other than Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz) and again five years later, after the end of censorship that came with the systemic change in Poland. This version, at the Stary Theatre in Kraków, though based on the same script, had a different flavour: less sombre, somewhat livelier. It was not in the slightest a transfer of the same production to different conditions, but instead a reconstruction of the piece. The second phase of this performance was also made into a TV version.

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Fragment of a VHS recording of 'Tak Zwana Ludzkość w Obłędzie' (So-Called Humanity in Madness), dir. Jerzy Grzegorzewski at the Studio Theatre, 1987

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The 1987 recording is a raw, working version on VHS tape. The recording is very dark, occasionally out of focus, and the whole stage is drowning in murkiness. This is a singular recording – on the one hand, barely legible, on the other, reflecting, in a peculiar way, the decadent, anxiety-filled moods Witkacy manifested in his own works.

Grzegorzewski’s piece features five Witkacys. In the opening scene, they sit at a table playing cards, creating a tableau vivant on the model of the Multiple Portrait. The whole piece develops as a performance-patchwork, combining excerpts from more than a dozen of the late author’s texts.

An atmosphere of decline reigns, often articulated directly onstage – using Witkacy’s words, which keep returning like malicious obsessions. Other recurring themes are the role of art and the place of the artist. Everything that was important for Witkacy came together in Grzegorzewski’s performance. The hour-long work resembled a bleak procession of characters, crowned by a sentence shouted from the stage: ‘Well, let’s just run straight ahead at breakneck speed and see what comes of it’ (trans. SGB).

It seems Witkacy himself knew – or certainly had an inkling of – what would come of it… and that it would be nothing good. Meanwhile, Grzegorzewski had an inkling of the possible character of Witkacy’s lost drama. In the program for the Kraków iteration of the performance, the theatre scholar Grzegorz Niziołek wrote:

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all of his plays could have had this title, but meanwhile, it fills in the empty space of this lost play. [...] [T]his gap, concealing itself behind this derisive and venomous title, is like a hidden vortex, capable of sucking in all forms of madness.

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Trans. SGB

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This is why Grzegorzewski could also indulge in speculation; fill the empty space with, as it were, yet another ‘episode’ of Witkacy’s catastrophic oeuvre, written across many texts. Witkacy’s recurring motifs were something more than evidence of his style – along with his correspondence, they built up his consistent credo. It’s as though Grzegorzewski became a posthumous messenger for the worldview Witkacy so obsessively expressed.

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Champagne as an act of protest

For a long time, Grzegorzewski’s stagings remained the only attempts to perform Witkacy’s non-existent play. That changed in early 2017, when Tak Zwana Ludzkość w Obłędzie returned to Polish theatre in an exceptional capacity: as a performance piece directed by Krzysztof Garbaczewski that inaugurated the activities of the Polski Theatre in the Underground.

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It was a spontaneous, half-improvised production. The Underground’s determined actors proved it was possible to create an engaging show with only a few hours’ rehearsal, a budget of several hundred złotys and set pieces borrowed, for instance, from... the local police.

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'Tak Zwana Ludzkość w Obłędzie' (So-Called Humanity in Madness), directed by Krzysztof Garbaczewski; Polski Theatre in the Underground; photo: Natalia Kabanow

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Apart from the already-friendly actors and actresses, Garbaczewski was aided in getting the show on its feet by the arrival of nearly 40 students from Wrocław’s drama school.

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'Tak Zwana Ludzkość w Obłędzie' (So-Called Humanity in Madness), directed by Krzysztof Garbaczewski; Polski Theatre in the Underground; photo: Natalia Kabanow

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What happened in the courtyard of the concert hall where the performance piece took place? It was conceived as a lavish banquet; the actors attended in their own formal outfits. ‘It’s more of an event than a show’, said Garbaczewski, who filled the tables with cheap champagne and cocktail hors d’oeuvres at his own expense.

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That night, Witkacy’s non-existent text became part of an important story – a story of staging active, creative political opposition to personnel changes detrimental to art.

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'Tak Zwana Ludzkość w Obłędzie' (So-Called Humanity in Madness), dir Krzysztof Garbaczewski; Polski Theatre in the Underground; photo: Natalia Kabanow

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Around 200 people watched the performance live in the theatre, and the online recording has more than 20,000 views.

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'Tak Zwana Ludzkość w Obłędzie' (So-Called Humanity in Madness), directed by Krzysztof Garbaczewski; Polski Theatre in the Underground; photo: Natalia Kabanow

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Four monstrous minutes

There is a widespread conviction that Tak Zwana Ludzkość w Obłędzie was Witkacy’s final play, which he was working on before his death. Researchers of the artist’s correspondence have worked out, however, that his last work was actually Miazmat (Miasma), a drama on which Witkacy was allegedly working in spring and summer of 1939. Apart from the title, however, little is known about it; here, we are setting off more into the realm of guesswork.

In one of his last letters to the philosopher Roman Ingarden, Witkacy mentioned ‘a 3-act play, very odd, titled Miazmat. But was this a different, newer play? Or did the author decide at a later stage of work to change the play’s title, as, after all, he had done before? (For instance, his novel Insatiability was initially known, meaningfully, as Obłęd [Madness].)

We will never know the answer. Yet, we have reason to believe that this was the case. Firstly, Wtikacy’s use of the phrase ‘tak zwany’ (‘so-called’) suggests a certain temporary quality to the title, as well as a distance on his part – as if he would be prepared to change it at any minute if infected by a new idea. Secondly, a ‘miasma,’ meaning an unhealthy odour, was once believed to be the cause of disease.

It is tempting to venture that the concept of pathogenic fumes – harmful air whose source is the decay of plant or animal organisms – could be a metaphor for the slow, stifling catastrophe Witkacy foresaw in his writings. The miasma metaphor might also be associated with moral decay and destruction. Is this not precisely how Witkacy viewed the society of his time and the reality in which he lived?

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Wesołowski’s Miazmat lasts four minutes, but he and his team of animators worked as many as 2,000 hours on it.

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Still from 'Miazmat', dir. Klaudiusz Wesołowski; photo courtesy of the artist

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Miazmat is also the title of an animated short film directed by Klaudiusz Wesołowski, who became fascinated with Witkacy’s oeuvre. While he did not attempt to reconstruct the lost play, he gave its title to a series of intense images inspired by Witkacy’s 1922 painting titled Composition. Wesołowski wished to recreate (and bring to life) Witkacy’s vision, to give shape to his terrifying two-dimensional characters, to put them in motion.

The resulting animation is remarkably precise, fluid and occasionally disgusting (which would surely please Witkacy) – reminiscent of a psychedelic ‘bad trip’ or a very strange dream. Another of Wesołowski’s inspirations was the micro-universe of a coral reef – with all its wealth of detail and unusual colours. His intended outcome was to provoke in the viewer Witkacy’s key concept of a ‘metaphysical experience’, meaning a feeling of the strangeness and incredibility of life.

Losing of the capacity for metaphysical experience was, to Witkacy’s mind, precisely the cause of the spiritual and social decline of the world he had known.

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Epilogue

It was 17th September 1939 – not quite three weeks earlier, the German attack on Poland had set off the Second World War.

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Self-portrait with Czesława Oknińska by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, 1930s, photo: from the exhibition ‘Witkacy i Inne’ (‘Witkacy and the Others’ at The Wilanów Palace Museum, 2011

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Ozera is a village in Rivne Oblast in Ukraine. It was there that, at the age of 54, Witkacy decided to bid life farewell. He persuaded his then-lover, Czesława Oknińska, to commit suicide with him. If we believe her recollections, at the time, he was calm and certain of his decision. Witkacy thought Oknińska wouldn’t manage without him.

He chose an oak tree, which they sat under – one they could both comfortably lean against. In a mug, he dissolved a large number of sleeping pills and a strong painkiller, cibalgina. This was meant to be Oknińska’s final drink; he himself took ephedrine in order to raise his blood pressure and ensure the razor cuts he made would be effective.

When his beloved lost consciousness, Witkacy tried to slit his wrists, but ultimately, he cut his carotid artery. Oknińska survived the attempt; after some time, she came to. Apparently, when the inhabitants of Ozera discovered the couple beneath the oak, they had the young woman down large amounts of kefir to induce vomiting. After a long time, she regained her senses. She did not attend Witkacy’s funeral.

It was the death of which he’d spoken so much; the death – we might say – he dreamt of, being the only proper solution in the face of an approaching, absolute catastrophe. It finally cut his agony short.

This radical gesture of ending his own life was consistent with his work: we could even say it was a continuation of it.

Originally written in Polish by Marcelina Obarska, translated by Sean G. Bye, Aug 2019

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Introduction

He decided they would die together. They sat down under an oak tree and took strong sleeping pills, and he sliced open his carotid artery. All that was left of his second-to-last play was the title page. Decades later, this drama was finally staged – although its contents have never been found.

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Part of the Poland 1939: Interrupted Country series

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