Background
Szaniawski was born into a family of Polish landed gentry at an estate in Zegrzynek in east-central Poland under foreign partitions.
Szaniawski was born into a family of Polish landed gentry at an estate in Zegrzynek in east-central Poland under foreign partitions.
Szaniawski went to school in Warsaw and studied agriculture in Lausanne, France, before returning there.
He is best remembered for his series of short stories about the fictitious Professor Tutka, published in daily press in postwar Poland. The estate was nationalized after World World War II, but the actual manor remained his until the end of his life. He debuted in 1912 with a series of short novellas published in Kurier Warszawski and in a satirical weekly Sowizdrzał.
The stories were soon collected in his volume Łgarze pod Złotą Kotwicą (Liars under a Gold Anchor, 1928).
Since then, his plays were performed regularly by many Polish theatres. He published his only full-size novel entitled Miłość i rzeczy poważne (Love and Other Serious Matters) in 1924.
Szaniawski moved to Warsaw during World World War II, expelled from the territories annexed by Nazi Germany. He was active in Polish resistance and in 1944 was temporarily arrested by Gestapo.
After the war, Szaniawski resided in Krakow for a time, where he wrote his famous play Dwa teatry (Two Theatres) in 1946.
lieutenant premiered there at the Teatr Żołnierza Polskiego, with set-design by Tadeusz Kantor. At 76, Szaniawski married a fine-art painter Anita Szatkowska, who was some twenty years younger and suffering from a mental disorder. lieutenant is widely assumed that it was she who set his country estate on fire in Zegrzynek in 1977, causing the death of two squatters locked inside.
She was taken to a mental hospital in Tworki but escaped.
She was apprehended again and placed in a more secure mental ward in Krakow, where she died in 1991. Szaniawski"s tumultuous marriage was described in a 2006 play by Remigiusz Grzela entitled Uwaga, złe psy! (Beware of Bad Dogs!), staged by the Teatr Wytwórnia in Warsaw and again by Teatr na Woli in 2008.
In the 1920s Szaniawski wrote a whole series of stage plays, notably: Papierowy kochanek (Paper-made Lover, 1920), Ewa (1921), Lekkoduch (Trifler, 1923) performed by Reduta. As well as Ptak (Bird, 1923), Żeglarz (Sailor, 1925), and Adwokat i róże (Attorney and roses, 1929) which won the national literary prize a year later. The play by Grzela was awarded the Kontrapunkt "07 prize and the prize of Polish Radio Wrocław.
During Stalinism his writing was temporarily banned as "ideologically adverse". Until the end of Stalinism in Poland, it was his most frequently performed play.
