11 March 1934, Sunday

Zakopane. Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz advises Teodor and Helena Białynicki-Birula to read The Street of Crocodiles.

In a letter to the Białynicki-Birula family, Witkiewicz writes about awarding Michał Choromański with the Youth Award of the Polish Academy of Literature for his novel Zazdrość i medycyna [Jealousy and Medicine]. He expresses his appreciation for Choromański and at the same time notices wasted potential: “There is a lot of pomposity, the peasant was colossally talented and intell[igent], but genius entered his life1, and only a talent in art, similarly to Wilde”2. For the author of The Shoemakers, Schulz’s prose is an opposite example in terms of an art genius: “Read Bruno Schulz’s Cinnamon Shops – a first-class thing”3. Thus, Witkiewicz puts Schulz’s prose above the works of Choromański and Wilde – works of “first class”, which Schulz surpassed4.

See also: 28 February – 1 March 1934, 3 March 1934, 9 March 1934. (ts) (transl. mw)

  • 1
    Interestingly, the idea of creating one’s own legend, about the genius manifested in life – which damages literary creativity – is also raised in relation to Witkacy himself: “The first of the legends indicated by Wyka is a personality legend, a biographical legend. It burdened the reading of Witkiewicz’s works in the strongest and most unfavourable way” (Małgorzata Szpakowska, Światopogląd Stanisława Ignacego Witkiewicza, Wrocław 1976, p. 5; Kazimierz Wyka, Trzy legendy tzw. Witkacy, “Twórczość” 1958, no. 10).
  • 2
    Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Listy II (vol. 1), edited and annotated by Tomasz Pawlak and Stefan Okołowicz, Janusz Degler, Warszawa 2014, p. 86–87.
  • 3
    Ibidem, p. 87.
  • 4
    According to an annotation on the list, Witkiewicz did not drink alcohol and did not smoke that day. He’d been in rehab for a long time. He hadn’t drunk alcohol for five months and hadn’t smoked for seventeen months.