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Arts & Literature

Aleksander Wat

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Who

Aleksander Wat · Arts & Literature

What

Poet and co-founder of Polish futurism, witness of the century in My Century

When

1er mai 1900, Varsovie, Pologne — 29 juillet 1967, Antony (près de Paris), France

Where

Varsovie, Kazakhstan, Paris

Biography

Aleksander Wat is recognized among Jewish contributors to Arts & Literature — Poet and co-founder of Polish futurism, witness of the century in My Century

How & why

Origins and early life

Aleksander Wat was born on 1 May 1900 in Warsaw, into an old and prosperous Jewish family — one whose own tradition, reported by the reference works without independent proof, counted the sixteenth-century kabbalist Isaac Luria among its ancestors, and this fiche passes the claim on as the family tradition it is.

Work and career

As a very young man he became one of the founders of Polish futurism, the enfant terrible of the Warsaw avant-garde, and later edited the communist Literary Monthly. The century he had flirted with then devoured him: fleeing the Germans in 1939, he was arrested by the NKVD, dragged through Soviet prisons, and exiled with his wife Ola to Kazakhstan. He returned to Poland in 1946, left it for good in 1959, and in France recorded with Czesław Miłosz the spoken memoir that became his monument, My Century — one of the great testimonies of a European intellectual passing through the age of totalitarianisms. Tortured for decades by an incurable pain syndrome, he took his own life at Antony, near Paris, on 29 July 1967.

Sources & external links

Verify and go deeper with these external references.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksander_Wat

This page is published in seven languages from an English source. The translations are reviewed, but a mistake can still slip through. If you spot one on this profile — a wrong word, a lost date, a sentence that says something the English does not — please tell us.

Contributions & Sources

Poet and co-founder of Polish futurism, witness of the century in My Century

1900

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksander_Wat