Witkiewicz, Stanislaw Ignacy: - Painter, photographer, novelist, and playwright, Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (known as Witkacy) was born on February 24, 1885, in Warsaw, but grew up and lived most of his life in Zakopane. After witnessing firsthand the Russian Revolution, he returned to Poland in 1918 and joined the Formists, a group of artists pursuing a program of Pure Form. Over the next two decades Witkacy penned a number of plays and his two great dystopian novels. Sandwiched between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invading Poland in early September 1939, he committed suicide on September 18 in the village of Jeziory.