August 04, 2013 <Back to Index>
PAGE SPONSOR |
Witold Marian Gombrowicz (August 4, 1904 in Małoszyce, Świętokrzyskie Voivodeship, Congress Poland, Russian Empire – July 24, 1969 in Vence, near Nice, France) was a Polish novelist and dramatist. His works are characterized by deep psychological analysis, a certain sense of paradox and an absurd, anti-nationalist flavor. In 1937 he published his first novel, Ferdydurke, which presented many of his usual themes: the problems of immaturity and youth, the creation of identity in interactions with others, and an ironic, critical examination of class roles in Polish society and culture. He gained fame only during the last years of his life, but is now considered one of the foremost figures of Polish literature. Gombrowicz was born in Małoszyce, in Congress Poland, Russian Empire to a wealthy gentry family. He was the youngest of four children of Jan and Antonina (née Kotkowska.) In 1911 his family moved to Warsaw. After completing his education at Saint Stanislaus Kostka's Gymnasium in 1922, he studied law at Warsaw University (in 1927 he obtained a master’s degree in law.) Gombrowicz spent a year in Paris where he studied at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Internationales; although he was less than diligent in his studies his time in France brought him in constant contact with other young intellectuals. He also visited the Mediterranean. When
he returned to Poland he began applying for legal positions with little
success. In the 1920s he started writing, but soon rejected the
legendary novel, whose form and subject matter were supposed to
manifest his 'worse' and darker side of nature. Similarly, his attempt
to write a popular novel in collaboration with Tadeusz Kępiński turned
out to be a failure. At the turn of the 20's and 30's he started to
write short stories, which were later printed under the title Memoirs Of A Time Of Immaturity. From the moment of this literary debut, his reviews and columns started appearing in the press, mainly in the Kurier Poranny (Morning Courier). He met with other young writers and intellectuals forming an artistic café society in Zodiak and Ziemiańska, both in Warsaw. The publication of Ferdydurke, his first novel, brought him acclaim in literary circles. Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Gombrowicz took part in the maiden voyage of the Polish cruise liner, Chrobry, to South America. When he found out about the outbreak of war in
Europe, he decided to wait in Buenos Aires till the war was over,
although he reported to the Polish legation in 1941 but was considered
unfit for military duties. Gombrowicz was actually to stay in Argentina
until 1963 — often, especially during the war, in great poverty. At
the end of the 1940s Gombrowicz was trying to gain a position among
Argentine literary circles by publishing articles, giving lectures in
Fray Mocho café, and finally, by publishing in 1947 a Spanish
translation of Ferdydurke written with the help of his friends, among them Virgilio Piñera.
Today, this version of the novel is considered to be a significant
literary event in the history of Argentine literature; however, when
published it did not bring any great renown to the author, nor did the
publication of Gombrowicz’s drama Ślub in Spanish (The Wedding, El Casamiento) in 1948. From December 1947 to May 1955 Gombrowicz worked as a bank clerk in Banco Polaco, the Argentine branch of PeKaO SA Bank. In 1950 he started exchanging letters with Jerzy Giedroyc and from 1951 he started having works published in the Parisian journal Culture, where, in 1953, fragments of Dziennik (Diaries) appeared. In the same year he published a volume of work which included the drama Ślub (The Wedding) and the novel Trans - Atlantyk,
where the subject of national identity on emigration was
controversially raised. After October 1956 four books written by
Gombrowicz appeared in Poland and they brought him great renown despite
the fact that the authorities did not allow the publication of Dziennik (Diary). In his serialized Diary (1953 – 68) Gombrowicz alluded to his homosexual experiences with 'lower class' young men; a theme which he picked up again in when interviewed by Dominique de Roux in A Kind of Testament (1973). In the 1960s Gombrowicz became recognized globally and many of his works were translated, including Pornografia (Pornography) and Kosmos (Cosmos). His dramas were staged in many theatres all around the world, especially in France, Germany and Sweden. Having
received a scholarship from the Ford Foundation, Gombrowicz returned to
Europe in 1963. He stayed for a year in West Berlin, where he endured a
slanderous campaign organized by the Polish authorities. His health had
deteriorated during this stay and he was not able to go back to
Argentina. Gombrowicz came back to France in 1964. He spent three
months in Royaumont abbey near Paris, where he met Rita Labrosse, a
Canadian from Montreal who studied contemporary literature. In 1964 he
moved to the Côte d'Azur in the south of France with Rita
Labrosse, whom he employed as his secretary. He spent the rest of his
life in Vence, near Nice. There he enjoyed the fame which culminated in May 1967 with
the International Publishers Prize (Prix Formentor). However,
Gombrowicz's health condition prevented him from thoroughly benefiting
from this late renown. On December 28, 1968, Gombrowicz married Rita
Labrosse. Gombrowicz
wrote in Polish, however, in view of his decision not to allow his
works to be published in his native country until the ban on the
unabridged version of Dziennik,
in which he described the Polish authorities' slanderous attacks on
him, was lifted he remained a largely unknown figure to the general
reading public until the first half of the 1970s. Despite this, his
works were printed in Polish by the Paris Literary Institute of Jerzy
Giedroyc and translated into more than 30 languages. Moreover, his
dramas were repeatedly staged in the most important theatres in the
world by prominent directors such as Jorge Lavelli, Alf Sjöberg, Ingmar Bergman along with Jerzy Jarocki and Jerzy Grzegorzewski in Poland. The
salient characteristics of Gombrowicz’s writing include incisive
descriptions of characters' psychological entanglement with others, an
acute awareness of conflicts that arise when traditional cultural
values clash with contemporary values, and an exasperated yet comedic
sense of the absurd. Aesthetically, Gombrowicz's clear and precise
descriptions criticise Polish Romanticism, and he once claimed he wrote
in defiance of Adam Mickiewicz (especially in “Trans - Atlantic”). The writing of Gombrowicz contains links with existentialism and with structuralism.
Gombrowicz's work is also well known for its playful allusions and
satire, as when in "Trans - Atlantic", a section of the text takes the
form of a stylized 19th century diary, followed by a parody of a
traditional fable. For
many critics and theorists, the most engaging aspects of Gombrowicz’s
work are the connections with European thought in the second half of
the 20th century, which links him with the intellectual heritage of Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, and Jean - Paul Sartre. As Gombrowicz stated, "Ferdydurke was published in 1937 before Sartre formulated his theory of the regard d'autrui.
But it is owing to the popularization of Sartrean concepts that this
aspect of my book has been better understood and assimilated." Gombrowicz uses first person narrative in his novels, with the exception of Opętani.
The language of the writer includes frequent neologisms. Moreover, he
created 'keywords' which shed their symbolic light on the sense covered
under the ironic form (e.g. "gęba", "pupa" in Ferdydurke.) In
the story "Pamiętnik z okresu dojrzewania" the author above all engages
in paradoxes which control the entrance of the individual into the
social world and also the repressed passions which rule human
behaviour. In Ferdydurke (his
first novel, published in autumn 1937, the date on the cover 1938)
discusses form as a universal category which was understood both in the
philosophical, sociological, and aesthetic sense. Furthermore, this
form is a means of enslavement of the individual by other people and
society as a whole. Famous phrases of Gombrowicz are found in the novel
and became common usage in Polish, for instance the words such as
"upupienie" — imposing on the individual the role of somebody inferior
and immature, and "gęba" — a personality or an authentic role imposed
on somebody). Ferdydurke can
be read as a satire on various Polish communities: progressive
bourgeoisie, rustic, conservative. Therefore, the satire of Gombrowicz
presents the human being either as a member of a society or an
individual who struggles with himself and the world. Stage adaptations
of Ferdydurke and
other works of Gombrowicz were presented by many theatres, especially
prior to 1986, before the first 9 volumes of his works were published.
It was the only official way of gaining access to the works of the
writer. The first dramatic text written by Gombrowicz was Iwona, księżniczka Burgunda (1938),
tragicomedy — a play that describes what the enslavement of form,
custom, and ceremony brings. In 1939 he published in installments in
two daily newspapers the popular novel Opętani, where he interlaced the form of the 'gothic novel' with that of sensational modern romance. In the text entitled Ślub, which was written just after the war, Gombrowicz used the form of Shakespeare’s and Calderon’s theatre. He also critically undertook the theme of the romantic theatre (Z. Krasiński, J. Słowacki) and portrayed a new concept of power and a human being created by other people. In the novel Trans - Atlantyk Gombrowicz
juxtaposes the traditional vision of a human that serves the values of
the new vision, according to which an individual frees oneself of this
service and basically fulfills oneself. The representative of such a
model of humanity is the eccentric millionaire - homosexual Gonzalo. The novel Pornografia shows
Poland in times of war when the eternal order and the whole system of
traditional culture, based on the faith in God, collapsed. In its place
a new drastic reality appears, where the elderly and the young
cooperate with each other in order to realize their cruel fascinations
streaked with eroticism. Kosmos is
the most complex and ambiguous work of Gombrowicz. In this text the
author portrayed how human beings create a vision of the world sense,
what forces, symbolic order and passion take part in this process and
how the novel form organizes itself in the process of creating sense. Operetka is
the last play of Gombrowicz and it uses an operetta form in order to
present the changes of the world in the 20th century in a grotesque
way, that is the transition to totalitarianism. At the same time, the
author expresses a tentative faith in rebirth through youth. According
to many scholars the most outstanding work of Gombrowicz is Dziennik (Diaries), which was published in serial form in Kultura in 1953 – 1969. Dziennik is
not only the author’s record of life but also a philosophical essay,
polemics, collection of auto - reflection on folk poetry, views on
politics, national culture, religion, world of tradition, present time,
and many other important issues. At the same time, the author is able
to write about the most important topics in the form of an ostensibly
casual anecdote and to use the whole range of literary devices. Two novels by Gombrowicz were filmed: Pornografia directed by Jan Jakub Kolski (the film was completed in 2003) and Ferdydurke directed by Jerzy Skolimowski. The year 2004, the centenary of his birth, was declared the Year of Gombrowicz. |