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.
 

Forgotten during the Stalin years, Stanislaw Witkiewicz (1885-1939) was rediscovered in his native Poland only after the liberalization of 1956, when his works came to play a major role in freeing the arts from socialist realism. This collection, the first anthology in English, presents Witkiewicz in the full range of his creative and intellectual activities. The Witkiewicz Reader includes excerpts from three novels; four complete plays; letters to Malinowski; and selections from aesthetic, social, and philosophical essays detailing Witkiewicz's theory of Pure Form, his metaphysical system, and his apocalyptic view of the fate of civilization.