Three Versions of Modernity: Witkacy, Schulz, Gombrowicz

Abstract

Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, known as Witkacy (1885–1939), Bruno Schulz (1892 –1942), and Witold Gombrowicz (1904–1969) were all born during the time of the Partition of Poland: Witkacy and Gombrowicz in the Russian Partition, and Schulz in the Austro-Hungarian one. The Polish literature with which they came in contact in childhood and youth still had as its chief function to provide Poles with uplift and to waken hope that independence would be returned to the fatherland. In truth, no one knew how this was supposed to happen (Poland was divided among the three greatest military powers in Europe), but a belief in the recovery of self-determination was somehow maintained in Polish lands. But in 1918, when those dreams came true, Polish literature was not prepared. It was necessary to invent it anew, to find new subjects that would be suitable for a society entering into independence (a short-lived one, unfortunately, only lasting twenty years), but also to face up to problems that modernity had brought to the whole world. The three writers mentioned above, at first less appreciated than those who were engaged in social matters and who were nationalist writers, such as Andrzej Strug, Juliusz Kaden-Bandrowski, Zofi a Nałkowska, and Maria Dąbrowska, won recognition after the Second World War and became Polish “classics of modernity”. This does not alter the fact that each of them saw modernity differently, and, as a result, solved the problems of literary form differently from his colleagues. At the start of the 1960s, Gombrowicz defi ned the difference among them – the “three musketeers” of modern Polish literature.