Dissidents of Modernism: Witkacy, Gombrowicz, Schulz

Abstract

The author of the article is interested in the story of three dissidents from Poland who wanted the center to read their struggle with time, to listen to their regressive, rebellious, prophetic narrations unanchored in time, distrustful towards the present, belated and yet ahead of the phantasmagorical temporalities of the center. It is a story about three artists who understood and described the regression of the language of fathers. Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Bruno Schulz and Witold Gombrowicz did not surrender to the fear that commands peripheries to seek refuge in the narrations of fathers against the dangers of modernity. In their respective works these authors had to address some problems of Polish modernism (1880–1918), that hasty attempt to make up for philosophical backwardness. In parodies of the exalted manner of Polish modernity, they found a grotesque, humorous aspect of the modern, almost non-existent in Polish literature from before 1918. A modern avant-garde form allowed them to express the horrors of civilisational progress that always annihilates both poverty and art.