| Witold Gombrowicz would probably describe his life as chaotic, then immediately accuse the word “chaotic” of being bourgeois and challenge it to a duel at noon behind a Polish mailbox. In his novel Ferdydurke, he complains that “against the background of general freakishness the case of my own freakishness was lost,” which is basically the literary way of saying, “I tried to be weird, but everyone else turned up dressed as a collapsing civilization.” He was born in Poland a decade before the First World War, died after the Second, and in between seems to have been personally menaced by every -ism Europe could think of.
While nations were collapsing like badly assembled Ikea wardrobes, he quietly became obsessed with Polish society, the Polish soul, and eventually the Polish diaspora, all while living in exile in Argentina, a country he treated like a long, confusing layover.
Milan Kundera called him “one of the great novelists of our century,” which is the literary equivalent of being verified on X, except you don’t have to pay for it and no one tries to sell you crypto. Freak School: Ferdydurke Much of Gombrowicz’s work is about Polish culture, history, and the horror of being forced to behave like an adult. In Ferdydurke, his main character, Józio Kowalski, a 30-year-old man, is mysteriously transported back to school, which is every millennial’s recurring anxiety dream with more philosophy and fewer student loans.
Once there, Józio is tormented by “established wisdom,” classmates, teachers, and the general feeling that reality is being run by people who never emotionally graduated from Year 7. Early critics allegedly described Ferdydurke as “the ravings of a madman,” which is unfair because it is clearly the ravings of a madman who has done the reading...
Eventually, readers came around, possibly after realizing that everyone else’s novels were about fields, marriages, and occasionally tasteful duels, while Gombrowicz was out here inventing whole new categories of humiliation. Operetta From Hell: Operetka Gombrowicz’s final play, Operetka, is about totalitarianism and youth, so naturally he chose to write it as an operetta, the genre traditionally reserved for lighthearted nonsense and people in wigs singing about misunderstandings.
Operetta is like opera, but shorter, less serious, and designed for people who secretly wish the tenor would just fall into the orchestra pit so everyone could go home. “Operetka” is basically the Polish word for “operetta,” which makes the title feel like a multilingual game of telephone where everyone ends up naming a dog “Dog” in four languages.
Gombrowicz reportedly wasn’t very precious about titles and said he named his works the way people name their dogs—just to tell them apart—proving that somewhere out there, in a better universe, there is a dachshund called Cosmos and a poodle named Pornografia.
He wrestled with Operetka for 15 years before it finally made it on stage in the late 1960s, at which point the world had already invented new, shinier horrors, but the theme “totalitarianism is bad” was still testing well with audiences. Pornografia: Do Not Google At Work! One of Gombrowicz’s best-known works is Pornografia, a novel that sounds like it should not be mentioned near your browser history, HR department, or grandmother.
Jan Jakub Kolski adapted it into a film in 2003, it won an award at the Gent Film Fest, and yet the bravest thing anyone has done with this story is type the title into a search engine without adding “+Gombrowicz +novel” afterward. The plot is not, in fact, especially sexual...
Instead, Gombrowicz uses it to obsess over morality, perversion, and the kind of psychological nastiness that makes you put the book down and stare at the wall for several minutes.
It follows an elderly Polish couple who manipulate two young people into murdering the leader of the Polish Nazi resistance, which is either the most intense dinner party drama ever written or a very niche team-building exercise.
Michael Dirda of The Washington Post called it “pathologically creepy,” which in Gombrowicz’s world is practically a blurb of honor. Lost In Translation, Found In Chaos People argue a lot about which of Gombrowicz’s works is his true masterpiece, because nothing says “serious literature” like fans fighting in several languages simultaneously.
Part of the confusion comes from translation issues; part comes from the fact that his specialty was capturing a mood that is equal parts horrifying, comic, and “did he really just write that?”. His 1965 novel Cosmos won the International Prize for Literature (Prix Formentor), which is the sort of thing that sounds extremely impressive until you remember it was translated into French and German, and the English version was based on those translations instead of the Polish original.
This means the English Cosmos is basically a photocopy of a photocopy of a fever dream, and we are all just politely pretending this is fine.
In 2015, Cosmos became a French-Polish film, and at this point the English-speaking world is simply sitting in the corner, asking, “Is that what the book was about? Be honest...” The Argentina Side Quest Right before the Second World War, Gombrowicz boarded a ship to Argentina as a cultural ambassador, presumably thinking, “What’s the worst that could happen?" What happened was: war. He stayed in Argentina for about 20 years, which is quite a long time to commit to what was originally a networking trip.  Salta, Argentina He tried to enlist in the Polish army via the embassy and was deemed unfit, which is one way to end up writing experimental novels instead of being shot at.
To survive, he took on jobs like lecturer and bank clerk while publishing in Spanish, which is a heroic level of multitasking for someone at war with the concept of form.
He often lived in poverty, because apparently “future cult genius” does not translate into “solid pension plan.”
In the early 1960s he finally left Argentina but could not return to Poland due to censorship and controversy, so he settled in France with his secretary, achieving the dream of many writers: escape, scandal, and someone else handling the admin. Trans-Atlantyk and Other Autobiographical Headaches Plenty of Gombrowicz’s writing is a sneaky autobiography in costume.
His diaries, published as Kronos, are the obvious example, but the novel Trans-Atlantyk is an even stranger mirror of his experience as a Polish émigré in Argentina. The book explores loneliness, patriotism, and the uneasy gap between memory and reality, all filtered through a style Ruth Franklin called “hybridized, deliberately antiquated and rich with puns and double-entendres,” which sounds less like a prose description and more like a polite warning label.
George Hyde described the Polish émigrés in the book as having “hypertrophied social manners” and being “marionette-like,” which is a fancy way of saying, “Everyone acts like a puppet whose strings are pulled by national trauma and bad etiquette.”
Translators have struggled; the original Polish is still considered much funnier, leaving English readers with the unsettling sense that the joke is there, just hiding behind three layers of grammar. When A Man Invents New Polish Words Shakespeare allegedly gave English words like “upstairs” and “rant,” plus phrases like “it’s all Greek to me” and “star-crossed,” which is annoying for everyone trying to write anything after him.
Gombrowicz, never one to be outdone, contributed at least two delightfully peculiar terms to Polish: “upupienie” and “gęba.” “Upupienie” means imposing an immature role on someone—basically treating adults like permanent children in a cosmic kindergarten.
“Gęba” means imposing an allegedly authentic role onto someone, like stapling a personality to their face and insisting, “No, this is who you really are.”
“Gęba” may be connected to the word for “mouth,” and “upupienie” to class snobbery and downward projection, proving that if you stare at social hierarchy for long enough, it starts inventing its own vocabulary out of pure embarrassment. Queer Buenos Aires and Quiet Disasters Gombrowicz wrote a lot about violence, cruelty, and ideology, and not a great deal about romance, which probably says something about the century he lived in and his reading habits.
He was openly bisexual in Argentina and wrote candidly about the queer underworld of Buenos Aires in his diaries, which were serialized in the Polish magazine Kultura—a publication that, admirably, treated “controversial” as a genre, not a problem. He described “discrete” gay clubs and even wrote short fictional(ish) stories about men falling in love, like the one where a man becomes obsessed with another man at the opera and sends him flowers relentlessly, unaware that he is detonating the man’s life like a floral grenade.
Despite all this, his only public long-term relationship was with his secretary, Rita Lambross, thus proving that even the most experimental writers may eventually succumb to the classic “writer-and-secretary” trope. Terribly Polish, Terribly Against Poland Like many 20th-century writers, Gombrowicz possessed enormous talent and the misfortune of being alive when history was doing cartwheels through a minefield. He once described himself as “terribly Polish and terribly rebellious against Poland,” which is what happens when you love your homeland but also want to fight it in the car park behind the library. His style is a mix of humour and horror, high philosophy and low slapstick, political panic and weird jokes about faces, schools, and badly behaving adults.
The world he inhabited was chaotic; his inner world, even more so.
Whether you meet him through strange diaries, disturbing operettas, or novels that sound like your browser should block them, Gombrowicz offers a cocktail of disillusionment, comedy, and tragedy that feels disturbingly familiar to anyone living in, say, absolutely any year lately... Don't you think? Want to learn more about the author? Why not try his book - Diary by Witold Gombrowicz | Would you like to be the first brave soul to receive my completely unqualified “How NOT To Live” advice here (anonymity guarantees)? Send your life story/health question to: noclueadvice@proton.me | | | | | | Only 8 chapters left. Full of quirky characters, fantastic settings, irrational actions and endless sexual encounters (adult humor 16+). Free to read. | | | | | Are you new here? Do you have a friend who could use more fun in their life? :) Feel free to share this (or any) post with anyone interested in absurdity, surreal humor, crime (Eyebrow Killer) or health. | 
No comments:
Post a Comment