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Witold
Gombrowicz
Recognized by international
theatre artists and scholars as one of the 20th century’s
greatest playwright/novelists, Witold Gombrowicz (= VEE-tawld
gawm-BRAW-veetch), was Catholic-born, anti-clerical, anti-establishment,
pro-Semitic, and openly bisexual.
Under the Communists much of his work
-- novels, plays, and diaries written mostly during self-imposed
exile in Argentina (which he happened to be visiting when the Germans
invaded Poland) and in France
-- could not be published in Poland for decades, nor his plays
performed until the mid-1970s.
With
biting humor Gombrowicz attacked the restrictions of social convention.
His
works rankled the establishment with their irreverent, dissident views
and homoerotic content, serving up a lively blend of religious satire,
class struggle, and scatological humor.
The works of
Witold Gombrowicz have been translated into more than 30 languages and
staged in over 30 countries, yet long remained little-known and
rarely-produced in English, despite Gombrowicz’s influence on
better-known Polish theatre artists such as Tadeusz Kantor.
Gombrowicz’s most famous play, Ivona, Princess of Burgundia,
was staged, among others, by Ingmar Bergman for Sweden’s National
Theatre and his play The Marriage, by the Comédie Française in
Paris.
In an interview in Time Out New York, Allen Kuharski, responsible
for a highly successful English version of an already classic theatrical
adaptation of Gombrowicz’s best-known novel, Ferdydurke,
described Gombrowicz as “Poland’s counterpart to Jean Genet, but
with Joe Orton’s sense of humor….
Gombrowicz’s most powerful political weapon is his humor.”
In his review of Ferdydurke, Village Voice critic Charles
McNulty called Gombrowicz’s works “unbeatable sources of absurdist
adrenaline.”
One can find in his writings the
harbingers of postmodernism, gender, queer, and post-colonial studies.
One is struck by the enduring relevance of his interest in rejection, a
problem faced not only by individuals but by whole societies. From the
viewpoint of philosophy, Gombrowicz is intriguing as a thinker whose
concepts show the beginnings of philosophical ideas and methodologies
popular during the second half of the twentieth century, from
existentialism to deconstruction.
Gombrowicz is not just a thinker:
he is one of few writers who have been able to put their ideas about the
individual and his/her dramatic relationships with others into a
literary form.
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