This novel, the author's masterpiece, is one of the greatest expressions ever of the tortured intersection of political and personal destinies in Eastern Europe. Futuristic, experimental, and remarkably prophetic, Insatiability traces the adventures of a young Pole whose fate parallels the collapse of Western civilization following a Chinese communist invasion from the east. Written in 1927, Witkiewicz's anti-Utopian novel proved to be a horribly prescient vision of what would become reality for Eastern Europe in the late 1930s.

Insatiability: A novel in two parts

Witkiewicz, Stanisław Ignacy

Literature & Fiction

University of Illinois Press

The Polish playwright and artist Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, known as Witkacy, is now recognized as Poland's leading theatrical innovator of the interwar years and one of the outstanding creative personalities of the European avant-garde. This volume contains two of Witkacy's "tropical" plays inspired by the playwright's trip to Ceylon and Australia in 1914 with his close friend, the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. Mr. Price, or Tropical Madness is a drama of heightened passion and greed among British colonists in Rangoon who seem to have stepped out of Joseph Conrad's tales of the South Seas. Metaphysics of a Two headed Calf, set in New Guinea and Australia, pits savage European imperialists against a native tribal Australia and pits savage European imperialists against a native tribal chieftain whose fetish of a great golden frog offers greater insight into the mystery of existence than the Westerners' shallow rationalism. Both plays puncture the white rulers' poses of superiority and parody their images of the tropical Other. Also included in the volume are Witkacy's Foreword to Metaphysics of a Two-Headed Calf in which the playwright defends his concept of theatre as an autonomous art with a scenic language of its own and an appendix containing a documentary itinerary of Witkacy's journey to Ceylon.

Mr Price, or Tropical Madness and Metaphysics of a Two- Headed Calf (Routledge Harwood Polish and Eastern European Theatre Archive, 12)

Dramas & Plays

Routledge

"Witkiewicz takes up and continues the vein of dream and grotesque fantasy exemplified by the late Strindberg or by Wedekind; his ideas are closely paralleled by those of the surrealists and Antonin Artaud which culminated in the masterpieces of the dramatists of the absurd-Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Arrabal-of the late nineteen forties and the nineteen fifties." -Martin EsslinStanis&#x142;aw Ignacy Witkiewicz (pen name: Witkacy) was desperate to get out of revolutionary St. Petersburg after the Bolsheviks seized power. Back in Poland, eager to make money and a name for himself, Witkacy began to write plays in a style that he called "Pure Form," which foreshadowed the Theatre of the Absurd. By the time that he wrote VAHAZAR (1921), Witkacy had achieved a dreamlike dramaturgy: centered on the paranoid and crazed despot, Vahazar, and spiraling outwards through an anthill society of automatons, religious cults, and quack scientific and social theories, this play is about being trapped in nothingness.This translation of the play by Celina Wieniewska was commissioned by Stefan Themerson in 1967, and later announced as a forthcoming title by the legendary Gaberbocchus Press. Somehow the project was sidetracked and has never appeared until this Black Scat Books publication. Paul Rosheim, publisher of Obscure Publications and scholar of Themersonia, provides an introduction with biographical information about Witkacy and the story of this translation. The book also includes an appendix featuring Franciszka Themerson's "Vahazar: A Few Suggestions for Design."

Vahazar: or On the Uplands of Absurdity

Fetherston, Patrick

BLACK SCAT BOOKS

In a decadent future Polish society, artists face a choice between death and the mind-altering Murti-Bing pills offered by the invading Chinese army

Insatiability: A Novel in Two Parts

Quartet Books Ltd.

Forgotten during the Stalin years, Stanislaw Witkiewicz (1885-1939) was rediscovered in his native Poland only after the liberalization of 1956, when his works came to play a major role in freeing the arts from socialist realism. This collection, the first anthology in English, presents Witkiewicz in the full range of his creative and intellectual activities. The Witkiewicz Reader includes excerpts from three novels; four complete plays; letters to Malinowski; and selections from aesthetic, social, and philosophical essays detailing Witkiewicz's theory of Pure Form, his metaphysical system, and his apocalyptic view of the fate of civilization.

The Witkiewicz Reader

Northwestern Univ Pr

Forgotten during the Stalin years, Stanislaw Witkiewicz (1885-1939) was rediscovered in his native Poland only after the liberalization of 1956, when his works came to play a major role in freeing the arts from socialist realism. This collection, the first anthology in English, presents Witkiewicz in the full range of his creative and intellectual activities. The Witkiewicz Reader includes excerpts from three novels; four complete plays; letters to Malinowski; and selections from aesthetic, social, and philosophical essays detailing Witkiewicz's theory of Pure Form, his metaphysical system, and his apocalyptic view of the fate of civilization.

Northwestern University Press

In the future a degenerate Western society becomes obssessed with an hallucinogenic drug, allowing the Chinese to take over Europe without any resistance

Insatiability

Literary

This novel, the author's masterpiece, is one of the greatest expressions ever of the tortured intersection of political and personal destinies in Eastern Europe. Futuristic, experimental, and remarkably prophetic, Insatiability traces the adventures of a young Pole whose fate parallels the collapse of Western civilization following a Chinese communist invasion from the east. Written in 1927, Witkiewicz's anti-Utopian novel proved to be a horribly prescient vision of what would become reality for Eastern Europe in the late 1930s.

Contemporary

Startling discontinuities and surprises erupt throughout these avant-garde landscapes by Poland's outstanding modern dramatist where duchesses and policemen, gangsters and surrealist painters, psychiatrists and locomotive engineers wander in and out, kill one another, and carry on philosophical conversations at the same time.

The Madman and the Nun and the Crazy Locomotive

Humor & Entertainment

Applause

This is a Witkiewicz play translated and introduced by Daniel Gerould.

Maciej Korbowa and Bellatrix

InkerMen Press

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Books by Witkiewicz, Stanisław Ignacy

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Insatiability: A novel in two parts

Mr Price, or Tropical Madness and Metaphysics of a Two- Headed Calf (Routledge Harwood Polish and Eastern European Theatre Archive, 12)

Vahazar: or On the Uplands of Absurdity

Insatiability: A Novel in Two Parts

The Witkiewicz Reader

The Witkiewicz Reader

Insatiability

Insatiability

The Madman and the Nun and the Crazy Locomotive

Maciej Korbowa and Bellatrix