Stanislaw Przybyszewski. Do pronounce it correctly, that you may hear the sound of rain swishing through tall grass. Przybyszewski has come to know himself so thoroughly and unreservedly, and, in himself, to know the modern man of the widest intellectual and artistic horizons, through a long excruciating internal purgatory. From the study of architecture and general aesthetics his restless, ever-searching spirit hurled him into natural sciences in the hope of finding positive answers to his burning questions. He came out loaded with an enormous baggage of facts and information; yet he had not quenched his everlasting dissatisfaction, but had acquired a sceptical “heh-heh” towards life and knowledge. He plunged into psychology, and found Nietzsche—to him the deepest searcher, possessor of the keen eye of a degenerate, which like a wintersun sheds its light with morbid intensity upon snowfields, clearly illuminating each crystal. With a “heh-heh” he dismissed the Loneliest One. For was not Nietzsche driven to create for himself a superman, as a consolation, as a hope, as “a soft pillow upon which could rest his weary inflamed head”? Did he for one moment believe in that ghost which he erected in the heavy hours of despair? Nonsense. Heh-heh. Had not his Falk, his homo sapiens, been crushed in his struggle to attain liberation and supermanship? Recall Falk’s self-rending meditations: “Conscience! Heh-heh-heh! Conscience! How ridiculously silly is your superman! Herr Professor Nietzsche left out of account tradition and culture which created conscience in the course of hundreds of centuries.... Oh, how ridiculous is your superman sans conscience!” Thus, step after step, killing god after god, burning his ships behind him, the all-knowing, the all-denying degenerate-nobleman Slav-cosmopolite has ascended the loftiest summit, or, as he would rather say, has descended into deepest hell—Art. An equipment hardly appropriate for an artist who sees “Life Itself” in color and fragrance and petals and varicolored mornings and varicolored nights and Japanese prints and ... but you may find the catalogue in the Editor’s rhapsody of last month. Przybyszewski’s background served him as an Archimedean lever to gauge and fathom the soul of modernity.
Let me attempt to present the quintessence of Przybyszewski’s modern Individuum, as he prefers to call an exceptional personality.
He considers himself a superman, aloof from the market-interests of the crowd. He is conscious of the fetters of his instincts and of the gradual sapping of his strength—hence the history of the Individuum turns into a sad monography of suppressed will and distorted instincts, a history of a mountain torrent which cannot find an outlet, and rushes into depth, dissolving obstructing strata, destroying and washing them away, and ruining the structure of the rocks in their very bowels.
Hence the longing for liberation and the yearning for expanse, a perilous “palpitating Sehnsucht and craving of the heights, of the beyond.” But this longing has another distinctive symptom: the consciousness of its hopelessness, the clear conviction that the passionately-desired goal is but an idée fixe. In this longing is expressed a spirit that ruins everything in itself with the corrosive acid of reason, a spirit that had long lost faith in itself, that considers its own activity diffidently and critically, a spirit that spies and searches itself, that has lost the faculty of taking itself seriously, that has become accustomed to mock itself and to play with its own manifestations as with a ball; a spirit not satisfied with the highest and finest human perceptions, that has come at last, after many searchings, to the gloomy decision that all is in vain, that it is incapable of surpassing itself.
Hence the pursuit of enjoyment. But this morbid seeking of enjoyment lacks that direct, self-sufficient bliss that results from the accumulated surplus of productive strength. The modern Individuum is deprived of that healthy instinct, therefore in place of naive joy experienced from the liberation of surcharged power he plunges into self-forgetfulness. All his life is reduced to pure self-narcotization. In the morbid straining of his abnormally-functioning nerves the Individuum-decadent rises to those mysterious borders where the joy and the pain of human existence pass into one another and intermingle, where the two are brought in their extreme manifestations to a peculiar feeling of destructive rapture, to an ecstatic being outside and above himself. All his thoughts and acts acquire a character of something devastating, maniacal, and over all of them reigns a heavy, depressing, wearying atmosphere, like the one before the outbreak of a storm, something akin to the passionate tremor of delirious impotence, something similar to the consumptive flush of spiritual hysteria.
In such clinical terms Przybyszewski sees the modern homo sapiens. Through this prism I perceive his Falk, doomed to utter failure and futility.
Falk an erotomaniac? Nonsense. His sexual relations are as pathological as the functions of his other faculties, not more. In his incessant search for an outlet, for discharge, for some quantity that might fill up his hollowed heart, Falk grasps woman as a potentional complement to his emptiness. He fails, naturally. To the artist woman is a narcotizer and wing-clipper; more often a Dalila or Xantippe than a Cosima Wagner or a Clara Schumann. Neither the exoticism of Ysa, nor the pillow-serviceability of Yanina, nor the medieval fanaticism of Marit, nor Olga’s revolutionary resignedness, have the power of checking the hurricane of his questing spirit for more than a moment, such moments when the tormented man erects for his consolation a phantom, be it a superman or a Christ. Falk’s quest for self-forgetfulness is futile. He lacks the healthy capacity of us, normal beings, for finding salvation in befogging our vision. No matter how we may indulge in self-analization, we usually stop at the perilous point and brake our searching demon with the same happy instinct that closes our eyes automatically at the approach of danger. Falk’s mental motor has no brakes; it hurls him into the precipice.
“I have never suffered on account of a woman,” boasts the old rake, Iltis.