This talk examines Witkacy’s final play, The Shoemakers (1934). Polish playwright, novelist, artist, and theoretician Witkacy (1885-1939) exploded with artistic creativity in the years after the First World War but gave up on his artistic project of “pure form” a few years later. His final play follows a series of revolutions that hollow out humanity of depth; more pessimistic, longer, and more prolix than his former plays, it maximizes the author’s vision of dehumanization. But taken to its full conclusion, the play also finds solutions to the contradictions of his earlier work and opens up for a paradoxical futurity through boredom and language games.
Sasha Lindskog is Assistant Instructional Professor of Polish at the University of Chicago and Doctoral Candidate of Polish at the University of Illinois, Chicago.