Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz Collected Plays, Volume 4
Past Mastery and Self-Destructive Form (1922-1925) and Jettisoning Pure Form (1925-1934)
The four volumes contain all 23 of Witkiewicz’s plays in English translation, including The Madman and the Nun, The Crazy Locomotive, The Water Hen, The Shoemaker, They, The Pragmatists, Tumor Brainiowicz, Gyubal Wahazar, The Anonymous Work, The Cuttlefish, The Beelzebub Sonata, as well as essays and introductions by translator Daniel Gerould.
Volume 4 contents:
Past Mastery And Self-Desctructive Form (1922-1925): The Triumph Of Nothingness
- Jan Maciej Karol Hellcat
- The Madman and the Nun
- The Crazy Locomotive
- Janulka, Daughter of Fizdejko
- The Mother
- The Beelzebub Sonata
Jettisoning Pure Form (1925-1934): Demythification and Theatricalism
- The Shoemakers
- Epilogue
- Appendix
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgments & Credits (Sources)
- Bibliography
- Selected Critical Studies (In English)
Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy), a writer, playwright, poet, painter, photographer, philosopher and an art theoretician. Witkacy was a visionary ahead of his times, and yet a concretely pungent prankster, whose cutting-egde judgement and catastrophic prophesies allow new generations to rediscover his work time and again. One of the few Polish artists whose significance for world art history endures the test of time.
Jadwiga Kosicka was born and educated in Poland. She has translated numerous works from Polish which have appeared in many scholarly journals such as Theatre Quarterly, TheatreThree, Formations, The Polish Review, yale/theatre, New York Review of Books, Performing Arts Journal,SEEP (formerly called Soviet and East European Performance), among others. She has also translated and edited To Steal a March on God by Hanna Krall and A Dream by Felicja Kruszewska published by Routledge Harwood's Polish and East European Theatre Archive; and Jan Kott's autobiography, StillAlive (Yale University Press); and Zygmunt Hübner's TheaterandPolitics (Northwestern University Press), among others. With her late husband, Daniel Gerould—a professor of theatre at the Graduate Center CUNY (www.danielgerouldarchives.org)—she has done a number of translations of works by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, and also co-authored A Life of Solitude, a biographical study of Stanisława Przybyszewska, among others.
