Background
Kazimierz Przerwa-Tetmajer was born in Ludźmierz in Podhale near the Tatra Mountains, then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire now in Poland, and died in Warsaw.
Kazimierz Przerwa-Tetmajer was born in Ludźmierz in Podhale near the Tatra Mountains, then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire now in Poland, and died in Warsaw.
Przerwa-Tetmajer studied classics and philosophy at the Jagiellonian University in 1884-1889.
His older half-brother was the painter Włodzimierz Tetmajer. He then became a journalist at Kurier Polski, and lived both in the Tatras and in Krakow (Cracow). After World War I he moved to Warsaw to serve as president of the Society of Writers and Journalists.
Przerwa-Tetmajer suffered from a mental illness in the latter years of his life, which prevented him from writing.
He was living in a hospice in 1940 when the Nazis evicted all the occupants. He was left homeless and died shortly afterwards in a Warsaw hospital.
Przerwa Tetmajer was primarily a lyrical poet who articulated the birth pangs of modernism at the turn of the century, but he will be best remembered for his erotic verse and for poems evoking his beloved Tatra mountains. He broke with age-old subtleties and niceties common to amorous poetry and wrote on love in frank and provocative terms.
The poet simultaneously attracted huge praise from legions of readers and loud accusations of depravity from other quarters.. at the close of the 19th century.
He was a member of the Young Poland movement. In 1934 he was made honorary member of the Polish Academy of Literature.