Insatiability

Nienasycenie

First edition front cover of Nienasycenie Part one: "Przebudzenie"
Author	Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz
Translator	Louis Iribarne
Country	Poland
Genre	Novel
Publisher	Dom Książki Polskiej
Publication date	1930
Published in English	1977
Media type	Print (Hardcover)

Insatiability (Polish: Nienasycenie) is a novel by the Polish writer, dramatist, philosopher, painter and photographer, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy). Nienasycenie was written in 1927 and first published in 1930. It is his third novel, considered by many to be his best. It consists of two parts: Przebudzenie (Awakening) and Obłęd (The madness).

The utopian story takes place in the future, around 2000. After a battle, Poland is overrun by the army of the last and final Mongol conquests modelled on the Bolshevik revolution. The nation becomes enslaved to a fictional Chinese leader Murti Bing. His emissaries give everyone a special pill called DAVAMESK B 2 which takes away their ability to think and their will to resist. East and West become one, in faceless misery fuelled by sexual instincts.

Witkiewicz's Insatiability combines chaotic action with deep philosophical and political discussion, and predicts many of the events and political outcomes of the subsequent years, specifically, the invasion of Poland, the postwar foreign domination as well as the totalitarian mind control exerted, first by the Germans, and then by the Soviet Union on Polish life and art.

Life was rocking back and forth on a crest like a seesaw. On one side one could see sunny valleys of normality and great numbers of delightful little nooks to curl up in; on the other, there loomed the murky gorges and chasms of madness, smoking with thick gases and glowing with molten lava—a valle inferno, a kingdom of eternal tortures and insufferable pangs of conscience. — Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz

The book opens with Zip contemplating the previous nights events, starting with his visit to the residence of Princess di Ticonderoga.

Czesław Miłosz frames the first chapter of his book, "The Captive Mind", around a discussion of Insatiability, specifically the "Murti-Bing" pill, which allows artists to contentedly conform to the demands of the equivalent of Socialist Realism.