Indie w „Pożegnaniu jesieni”
India in “Pożegnanie jesieni” (“Farewell to Autumn”):

a Promise of Liberation or Witkacy’s Intelligent Derision?

Summary/Abstract: The article seeks to analyse the importance of Indian motifs in S. I. Witkiewicz’s “Pożegnanie Jesieni” (“Farewell to Autumn”). It starts with claiming that while India and its aspects are depicted in a very general and sometimes erratic way in the novel, Witkacy’s “Farewell to Autumn” cannot simply be summed up using Edward W. Said’s (and Erazm Kuźma’s) method. India, and the East as such, is described here neither as a simple mirror image of the West nor any myth of it being construed. The author's conclusion is that rather with treating the vision of the East, the novel deals much more with the image of certain Europeans fascinated with the East. In his opinion, Hela’s conversion to Buddhism, a crucial point in novel’s plot, is indicative of it. However, following Jan Tuczyński, the author finds it possible that the final moment of the book, Atanazy’s death, may point out to setting a common ground between elements of Witkacy’s philosophy and a certain concept from Indian classical schools of thought. If that be the case, Witkacy might have meant that a true dialogue between the West and the East should be based not on a superficial, ‘spiritual’ journey to the East, but on a meaningful philosophical search to find shared elements in Western and Eastern schools of thought.

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