Miron Białoszewski, Lech Emfazy Stefański, and the Paranormal: Toward a History of a Peculiar Relationship

Abstract

ABSTRACT Miron Białoszewski, an acclaimed Polish poet and playwriter, and Lech Emfazy Stefański, a poet, dramatist, director, and since the early 1970s a key parapsychologist in Poland, met first shortly after World War II. They shared a passion for avant-garde theatre, literature, and music, and were also interested in psychic phenomena which, though, manifested itself in their lives and writings with quite different intensities. This article seeks to provide an introduction to the role of the esoteric elements in their biographies, while at the same time situating their relationship against the background of political and cultural changes in communist Poland. The first part of the paper outlines Białoszewski’s and Stefański’s youth experiences and their collaboration in the Theatre at Tarczyńska Street. The second part of the article addresses Stefański’s contribution to the propagation of psychotronics in Poland; it also touches upon his literary texts; while the last section examines the encounters of the former collaborators in the 1970s, placing emphasis on the role of the blind poetess Jadwiga Stańczakowa in bringing the two men back together.