Przybyszewski, Stanisław

▪ Polish author

born May 7, 1868 , Łojewo, Poland, Russian Empire [now in Poland]

died November 23, 1927, Jaronty, Poland

      Polish essayist, playwright, and poet notable for espousing art as the creator of human values.

      Having completed his secondary education at a German Hochschule in Toruń, Przybyszewski went in 1889 to Berlin to study first architecture and then psychiatry. There he became closely associated with the Berlin German-Scandinavian artistic circle that included August Strindberg (Strindberg, August). The Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (Munch, Edvard) introduced Przybyszewski to a Norwegian pianist, Dagny Juel, whom he married in 1893. Five years later they settled in Kraków, where he took over the editorship of Życie (“Life”) and became a leader of the Polish Modernists (Modernism).

      Przybyszewski's poetry displays a passionate, sensual mysticism, while his prose works describe unusual psychological types and the ambivalence of eroticism. His unconventional philosophical writings and plays enjoyed a meteoric but ephemeral success. His autobiography, Moi współcześni, 2 vol. (1926–30; “My Contemporaries”), is an interesting, if not factually very reliable, account of the central European cultural scene at the turn of the century.

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