Insatiability

by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, Louis Iribarne (Translator)

Overview

Witkiewicz's 1927 masterpiece, made famous in Polish dissident and Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz's The Captive Mind, is one of the most unforgettable depictions of the tensions and trade-offs between ideological loyalty and individual conscience in world literature. Futuristic, experimental, and remarkably prophetic, Insatiability traces the choices of a young Pole as his divided nation both opposes and welcomes a communitarian invasion from the east offering a narcotic that both removes anxieties and induces obedience. An anti-Utopian classic, it foretold the irresoluble and sometimes deadly choices that faced Eastern European thinkers, writers, and politicians during the years of Soviet domination.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780810111349
Publisher:	Northwestern University Press
Publication date:	09/30/2012
Edition description:	1
Pages:	534
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

STANISLAW IGNACY WITKIEWICZ (1885-1939) was a Polish novelist, poet, and playwright. An ardent nationalist, Witkiewicz killed himself in 1939 upon hearing that the Soviet Army had invaded Poland.

LOUIS IRIBARNE is a professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto. He has translated several works by Polish writers such as Gombrowicz, Milosz, and Schulz.

Table of Contents

Part One: The Awakening
The Awakening
Soirée at the Princess di Ticonderoga's 
A Visit with Tenzer
A Visit to Prince Basil's Retreat
Sexphyxiation
The Return, or Life and Death
Demonism
Domestic Affairs and Destiny

Part Two: Insanity
School
A Meeting and Its Consequences
A Repeat Performance
A Commander's Thoughts and the Little Theater of Quintofron Crepuscolo
Torchures and the Debut of the "Gent from Below"
A Battle and Its Consequences
The Final Metamorphosis
The Wedding Night
The Last Convulsion

Notes

Editorial Reviews

"Magnificent." —Susan Sontag


"One of the key works of European literary modernism . . . an exhilarating amalgam of Swiftian satire, Dostoyevskian intensity, and (an acknowledged influence) Rabelaisian digressiveness. And one of the most exciting novels of its time." —Kirkus Reviews 

"The translation is brilliant, smoothly finding perfect phrases and puns." —Publishers Weekly
 

"There were three of us; Witkiewicz, Bruno Schulz, and myself—he three muskateers of the Polish avant-garde between the wars. Only Witkiewicz remains to be discovered." —Witold Gombrowicz

From the Publisher

It seems like the punch line to a joke: a 500-page futurist novel written in 1927 by a Polish borderline schizophrenic. And for long stretches, Insatiability reads like some kind of joke. ("Fat was a seedy gent wearing a jockey's cap and a crimson scarf barely covering a bland and sinewy Adam's apple with huge welts along the throat glands.") Sometime in the late 20th century, while neo-Bolshevist Western Europe and "fascist-Fordian" America decay, a "yellow wall" of Communist Chinese threatens to overrun Europe. Only Poland-lone bastion of syndicalism and aristocracy-stands in their way. Baron Genezip Kapen de Vahaz, or "Zip," comes of age in this tremulous, dangerous time. Those around him-a deformed musical genius; a coldhearted logician; a devout recluse; a politicized writer; the enigmatic commander-in-chief of Poland and his jejune mistress; and the sexually rapacious Princess di Ticonderoga-try to impress their own philosophies on him. He joins the Army, and his military indoctrination along with the not-so-subtle ministrations of the women in his life help shatter Zip's self-identity. By the time the Chinese begin preparations to invade Poland, he displays various different personalities, each more terrifying than the previous. Witkiewicz was a photographer, artist and playwright, as well as a novelist; in each field, his work was greeted by unflagging disinterest. In the case of his writing, this was by no means because he lacked talent-Insatiability is filled with clever (often multilingual) wordplay, febrile humor and rollicking sex scenes. (The translation is brilliant, smoothly finding perfect phrases and puns.) But Witkiewicz has a deadly tendency to refine his metaphors within an inch of their lives. Insatiability is an extreme novel, coupling a thorough knowledge of philosophy with a monumental lack of perspective (the principal character stands in for no less than all of Western Civilization). For any but the staunchest of readers, it will prove tough slogging, indeed. (May) FYI: An ardent nationalist, Witkiewicz killed himself in 1939 upon hearing that the Soviet Army had invaded Poland. In a twist sure to have appealed to his bizarre sense of humor, in 1994 it was discovered that a woman's body occupied his coffin.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A complete revision of Iribarne's lively 1977 translation of one of the key works of European literary modernism. Witkiewicz (18851939) was a gifted painter, poet, philosopher, dramatist, novelist, and iconoclastic wit—a kind of latter-day Polish William Blake or Wyndham Lewis. In this, his greatest—and weirdest—novel (first published in 1927), Witkiewicz created a unique and fascinating hybrid: a novel of education grafted onto a stinging sociopolitical satire that mushrooms into nightmarish dystopian prophecy. The inchoate protagonist, Genezip Kapen, moves from youthful innocence and promise through the formative and transformative crucibles of sexual initiation (and confusion), drug addiction, madness, and murder. His own psychic and moral fragmentation evinces what his author perceived as the larger decline of his country (summed up in its surrender to an invading Chinese communist army) and a culture too effete to survive the pressures of the new century.

Witkiewicz's surpassingly strange book is an exhilarating amalgam of Swiftian satire, Dostoyevskian intensity, and (an acknowledged influence) Rabelaisian digressiveness. And one of the most exciting novels of its time.

Kirkus Reviews