Dobitny głos Donny Querpii. Listy Zofii Dembowskiej do Bronisława Malinowskiego
A Forcible Voice of Donna Querpia. Zofia Dembowska’s Letters to Bronisław Malinowski

Summary/Abstract: The letters of a young painter Zofia Dembowska to the later famous anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski refers also to their common friend Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz and documment their complicated, though short-lived emotional triangle. They were written during a few summer months in 1906, when Dembowska returned to Vilnius after a year spent studying art in Cracow. Introduction to this correspondnce points at a number of important issues illustrated in the letters, e.g. Dembowska’s intellectual development, the shaping of her artistic world view, and also a lengthy process of cultural change caused by women education. Dembowska’s correspondence offers an excellent occasion to comparisons with the artistic version of the events presented in Witkiewicz’s novel “622 Falls of Bungo”. Much attention was paid to the problem of Witkiewicz’s misoginism and object-like treatment of women in his dandyish world. In the young painter’s letters we can also see an interesting image of their addressee – his treatment of women based on partnership and an “intellectual” way of seduction.

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