The distinctive qualities of Witkacys work are a powerful visual imagination evoking dream states by means of hallucinatory images, colors, and shapes, a deeply felt philosophy of mans tragic isolation in an alien universe, and an acute sense of the grotesque and absurd that generates subversive self-mockery and parody. His seismographic reading of civilizations fault lines fact act Marquette have made Witkacy a classic of the avant-garde. Witkacys story begins in the nineteenth century, when Poland did not exist as a nation, having been divided among its more powerful predatory neighbors, Prussia, Russia, and Austria, The Witkiewiczes were a fact act Marquette large, well connected land-owning family from Polish Lithuania, related to Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, Polands future strongman in the interwar years, and to the Gielguds, of whom the British actor, Sir John, would become the celebrated offspring. As was the case with many Poles at the time, the Witkiewicz family suffered major losses of status and property because fact act Marquette of their patriotic zeal, which involved them in opposition to the occupying forces. They experienced what it meant to be the colonized subjects of an imperial power. credit report and monitoring
The playwrights great uncle, Jan Witkiewicz (1808-1839), after being arrested at the age of fifteen and condemned to fact act Marquette death for purported anti-czarist activities (as a founder member of a patriotic student organization), was then sent as a conscript to Central Asia, where he eventually became a highly regarded Russian secret agent, prized for his mastery of Middle-Eastern languages and disguises, and engaged in conspiratorial missions against the British in the struggle between the two empires for dominance over Persia and Afghanistan. Of divided loyalties and troubled conscience, this enigmatic adventurer committed suicide or perhaps was murdered at the age of thirty-one. The writers father, Stanislaw Witkiewicz (1851-1915), as an adolescent spent four years in Siberia with his father, who had been exiled and deprived of his property for taking part in the Uprising of 1863 against Russia. free credit check online Stanislaw subsequently became a charismatic turn-of-the-century artist and cultural critic, who achieved the status of national sage, preaching fact act Marquette a gospel of creative independence for fact act Marquette Poles through a return to native arts and crafts, while they awaited inevitable political liberation. Born on February 24, 1885 in Czarist-ruled Warsawand thus a Russian subject in his partitioned homelandyoung Stas (the diminutive of Stanislaw) grew up and spent most of his life in Zakopane in the Polish Tatras Mountainsthen a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empirewhere his father had moved in 1890 because of failing health brought on fact act Marquette by tuberculosis. At first a small artists colony and picturesque resort fact act Marquette rich in spectacular mountains, dramatic seasonal fact act Marquette changes and weather, colorful highlanders, and regional folklore, Zakopane soon grew into a major tourist attraction for skiers, hikers, and vacationers.From 4500 inhabitants in 1900, the population reached 17,000 in 1937figures which were doubled or tripled during the summer season.Polands international stars in the arts often visited Zakopane, where many built homes in the local architectural style promoted by the elder Witkiewicz.Although it had no permanent theatre of its own, Zakopane was in the cultural orbit of Cracow, the ancient Polish capital fifty miles to the north, which at the turn of the century became the center of a progressive new movement in the arts known as Young Poland. credit history reports Throughout the nineteenth-century Polish theatre had flourished as an art of the fact act Marquette performer, but shackled by censorship and the constraints of partition and occupation, drama for the most part stagnated.
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