Osa
Wasp

Summary/Abstract: The significance of the works by the French entomologist J. H. Fabre for the formation of the world outlook of S. I. Witkiewicz – Witkacy had been noticed quite some time ago. This particular study accentuates the characteristic role played in the latter’s imagination by one of the insects described by Fabre – the digger wasp sphex, due to the fact that H. Bergson recognised its behaviour as a key example of instinctive knowledge. Against the background of a psychomachy with the detested Bergson, Witkacy developed a mythology of the wasp, whose message is close to that of the mythology of the praying mantis in the essay by R. Caillois.

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