The Ultimate Prank – the Exhumation of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz "I could kill myself, but to think that I could not exist at all sends chills down my spine." Farewell to Autumn, 1927 The artist's final gesture in negating contemporary reality was his suicide, which occurred the day after the Soviet Union invaded Poland in September 1939. In the post-war communist period, Poland's Ministry of Culture decided to exhume Witkacy's body from a village cemetery in Ukraine, move it to Zakopane and give it a solemn state funeral. This was carried out according to plan – though no one was allowed to open the coffin that had been delivered by Soviet authorities. On 26 November 1994, the Ministry of Culture and Art in newly democratic Poland ordered the exhumation of the new grave in Zakopane. Genetic tests on the remaining bones proved that the body had been an unknown young woman. It is hard not read the event as a final absurdist joke, 50 years after the publication of Witkacy's last novel. Author: Paulina Schlosser, 1/09/2013 [http://culture.pl/en/article/an-alternative-biography-of-witkacy]