I Burn Paris

About the Author

Poet, novelist, and playwright, Bruno Jasienski (1901–1939) was born in Klimontów, Poland. Having authored in 1921 “To the Polish Nation: A Manifesto on the Immediate Futurization of Life” and “Manifesto on Futurist Poetry” he became the unquestionable leader of Polish Futurism, writing poetry that was marked by dynamism and absurdity. In 1925, he emigrated to France but was deported after his novel I Burn Paris was published in 1928. He spent the last decade of his life in the USSR working for the Union of Soviet Writers and producing work in Russian, chief among which were the play The Mannequins’ Ball (1931) and the novel Man Sheds His Skin (1934). Arrested in 1937, Jasienski was expelled from the Party, put on trial, and sentenced to fifteen years in the gulag. Thought for many years to have died in transit some time in 1939, it is now known that he was executed on September 17, 1938, in Moscow’s Butyrka prison. The Brunonalia Festival is held annually in his honor in Klimontów.