Kazimierz Przerwa-Tetmajer

Kazimierz Przerwa-Tetmajer was a Polish poet, novelist, playwright, journalist and writer, who was a member of the Young Poland movement. He was half-brother of the painter Włodzimierz Tetmajer (1861-1923) and cousin of the writer Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński (1874-1941) and Professor Ludwig von Tetmajer (1850-1905), a materials researcher at the Eidgenössische Polytechnikum in Zürich. Przerwa-Tetmajer studied classics and philosophy at the Jagiellonian University from 1884-89. He then became a journalist at Kurier Polski.

Przerwa-Tetmajer combined all the most important topics of modernism philosophy, destructive love, women, fate creation, and art threatened by civilization. Additionally, he largely appointed a canon of Young Poland topics and expressed new poetic lyricism. In short stories he described his homeland, the Tatra Mountains, and the life of the Gorals ethnic group. In 1940, he died homeless in a Warszawa hospital, mentally ill, two weeks after being evicted by the Nazis out of a Hotel Europejski in Warzsawa, where he lived as a resident.

His poems submitted in 1928 were already written at the turn of the century. The short poem Dyskobol (The Discus) was published in 1897 in the anthology Wybór poezji (Selected Poetry) and the ballad O Janosikowym turnieju (Janosik’s tournament) in Poezye V (Poetry V) in 1905. The latter was one of several works about the bandit Janosik. Here, the author sends the bold robber to Buda for a knightly tournament at the court of King Charles VI of Hungary (1685-1740), where the title character single-handedly takes bloody revenge on 12 Hungarian noblemen who had violated the honor of the Tatra people.