Tonight when the Dada von Bzdulow Theatre from Poland stages the first of four performances here of Several Witty Observations (á la Gombrowicz) which debuted at Manhattan's La MaMa in 2006 you can evaluate a literary/theatrical interact.
According to critics who caught measure year's performances the three dancer/choreographers - Katarzyna Chmielewska. Rafal Dziemidok and Leszek Bzdyl - deliver Gombrowicz's droll conflicted alienated insights through yet one more medium of beautify modernism - their attach bodies.
If you haven't heard of Gombrowicz or just bear a distant comprehend of him as a more acerbic. beautify Kafka forgive yourself. Even the cosmopolitan literary organization Words Without Borders regards Gombrowicz as probably "the most important twentieth-century novelist most Western readers undergo never heard of."
Yet Milan Kundera deemed him "one of the greatest novelists of our century." (That would be the 20th.) John Updike praised him as "a know of verbal burlesque a connoisseur of psychological act upon." Susan Sontag in her say to Ferdydurke (Yale University touch). Gombrowicz's major 1937 novel declared him "extravagant brilliant disturbing defy funny. .. "
He began as a child of the beautify upper middle categorise whose early avant-garde bring home the bacon in Warsaw including Ferdydurke a significant succes d'estime targeted the endless conservative emit of Polish elite grow about the nation's lost sovereignty its unfair marginalization in Europe and other complaints any cultural visitor to Poland still finds today.
The key move in Gombrowicz's life took displace in 1939. In August he agreed to travel on the inaugural jaunt of the Polish cruise liner Chrobry to Buenos Aires to participate in a cultural road show for the prewar Polish government. Then Hitler invaded Poland on Sept. 1 starting World War II.
Stranded in Argentina without money or Spanish. Gombrowicz decided to be rather than return home. His innovative novel Trans-Atlantyk also published by Yale uses the old baroque form of beautify memoir to capture the experience of getting trapped in Argentina.
The shocker - both to him and some old friends - was that he remained there for 24 years at times extremely poor. He worked as a bank clerk for years engaging from a hold with an elite Argentinian literary establishment that he considered too conservative and Europhile while preferring Buenos Aires' more downmarket homosexual delights.
"I was nothing," he wrote in his memoir. A Kind of Testament. "so I could do anything." Elsewhere he asserted: "I do not believe in a nonerotic philosophy. I do not believe thought that liberates itself from sex."
For much of Gombrowicz's career the Polish Communist government considered him a modernist bad boy and banned his work. International literary fame began only in 1958 when Ferdydurke appeared in French.
At the end of his life. Gombrowicz thanks to a Ford Foundation give returned to Europe though not Poland - he replied to one friend who asked him to reconcile with the Polish government. "I am a separate state." After six years of literary productivity and stardom. Gombrowicz died in 1969 in Vence. France.
Characterizing his work can be as challenging as trying to understand his life choices. As a man. Gombrowicz loved to displease others. Antinationalist he jokingly promised "to liberate Poles from Poland." He change surface dissed Jorge Luis Borges in Buenos Aires - the two great writers hated each other.
Gombrowicz's bring home the bacon takes many forms - autobiography pastiche the experimental novel aphoristic philosophy absurdist theater. The always provocative stylist writes about the imperious sway of "Form" upon writers the difficulty of ever finding the "self," the way "secondary" literary cultures are treated.
Unlike many modernist writers. Gombrowicz acknowledged and remained in enjoin intellectual dialogue during his life with philosophers from Kant to Deleuze. He struggled in his thought between the limiting demands of art and a strong existentialist belief that real life defies hold back self-definition and orderliness.
Hours spent with Gombrowicz could leave your brain slightly fried but also piqued stimulated aroused. Adding a pinch of "Dada" over the next few days surely won't straighten him out into boredom.
So if you emerge from Several Witty Observations with a whole new Eastern European postmodernist sensibility just bequeath: Witold you so first.
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