A photograph of Boleslaw Lesmian taken around 1925 shows the poet standing small, thin, fragile, almost lifeless, supported by two imposing women dressed in furs and helmet-like hats. His right hand hangs limp; his feet, in polished shoes, do not appear to belong to the rest of the body wrapped in a formal dark coat, above which a lean, pallid, somewhat spectral face peers from under a dark homburg with a vacant and impassive look into an undefined distance. Perhaps there is a touch of a smirk under his tiny moustache. But there is nothing ambiguous about the two provincial society matrons who have taken charge of and seem to be holding upright the unreal poet.

This diminutive, seemingly powerless figure--in ordinary life a notary public in the provincial town of Zamosc--was the owner of a prodigious imagination and passionate vitality. While his work embodied all the typical motifs...