Przybyszewski, Stanisław

Stanisław Przybyszewski, (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. The Norwegian painter Edvard Munch 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.

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 factually not very reliable, account of the central European cultural scene at the turn of the century.