Zakopane, a town in the Polish Tatra Mountains, is the supposed burial place of Poland's most eccentric literary figure, Stanislav Ignacy Witkiewicz, (1885-1939) known as Witkacy. Son of Stanislav Witkiewicz, eminent literary critic and painter, Witkacy was himself to become a painter of some renown before he devoted himself to writing.
His "Portrait Painting Factory" (founded in 1925 in Zakopane), was the apotheosis of his painting career. Each painting was categorised (by him) according to which narcotics he consumed to fuel the creative process. Witkacy was painting psychedelic images 70 years before the term was invented.
Zakopane, surrounded by Tatran peaks, was the backdrop to Witkacy's greatest creative projects. It was a haven for the Polish Intelligentsia before the second World War. This Intelligentsia was renowned for narcotic experimentation and its antidote, psychoanalysis. Many psychoanalysts (like Karl Beaurain from Germany) visited Zakopane to rescue fragile intellectuals and artists from the miry depths of narcosis. In Drugs: Unwashed Souls, Witkacy wrote about how peyote, cocaine, opium and hashish could work in conjunction with psychoanalysis. Jawiga Janczewska, Witkacy's first fiancee, was unable to bear the combination of drugs, psychoanalysis and Witkacy, so she killed herself in 1914. Suicide would become a theme in Witkacy's life.
Zakopane is no longer the territory of artists and writers. It is Poland's most popular mountain resort, full of "regional restaurants" and fast food joints. It has become what Witkacy would have loathed. His ghost lingers on however, in the theatre he founded in 1925 off Chromcowki Street. Witkacy had abandoned painting, and from that time he went on to literally reinvent the Polish language. Just as we cannot believe Joyce to be translatable, so the Poles cannot believe it possible to translate Witkacy. Witkacy was an unrelenting performer who never lowered his mask.
Drama was his territory. The Shoemakers and The Madman and the Nun, are two of his most popular plays, performed regularly in the Witkacy Theatre. Witkacy also wrote fiction and philosophy.
It is the story of Witkacy's burial that leaves us wondering whether Witkacy had it all planned as his final performance. The Russian betrayal of Poland in September 1939 was the final straw for Witkacy, the catastrophist. (Witkacy wrote in his philosophical treatises that the individual was doomed to death by mechanisation and communism was the most violent catalyst of this destructive process). He took his life that September in a suicide pact with his girlfriend Czeslawa Okninska and was buried in Jierzory, now part of the Ukraine.
In 1988 his remains were moved to the cemetery in Zakopane, where his parents are buried - but his bones, "a gift" from Russia to Poland, turned out to be the bones of a young Ukrainian woman. Nobody knows where his body lies, yet his name is engraved on the headstone. So Witkacy never returned to Zakopane.
What he did leave - thousands of paintings and decades of books, were salvaged after 1989 when at last Witkacy could be established as the great writer that he was.
`it is not enough to exist simply, non-reflectively, passively, negatively, it is necessary to manifest one's existence more clearly, against the background of possible death and surrounding nothingness.' Stanislav Ignacy Witkiewicz
Regular trains and buses leave from Krakow and Warsaw to Zakopane. The Witkacy Theatre is open seasonally and the cemetery is open all year round.