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ABSTRACT
This article looks at the solitude and despair in the literary oeuvre of Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, drawing on three stories constituting a ‘metaphysical direction’ rooted in Italian historiscapes, and which the writer published in a 1960 collection entitled Skrzydła ołtarza (Polyptych). It marked a new departure from his heavily political work grounded on personal experience of the war and totalitarianism. The article engages with this literature from the author’s personal circumstances, and looks at the sentiments he confronts us with from a long overview of writing upon solitude and on the subject of ‘the island’. It concludes that this ‘new’ direction was nevertheless grounded on sentiments touched upon in his early masterpiece of the Soviet labour camps, Inny Świat (1951), and that for Herling, who renewed his adherence to the Roman Catholic faith in 1943 whilst in hospital, religion constituted the solution to despair for all thinkers with a moral voice; specifically, the solace of compassion.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 This article is dedicated to my mother, Teresa Halikowska-Smith, who died on 26.xi.2020 and who first gave me examples of Herling’s work although herself choosing to omit him from the sixteen authors constituting her edited anthology of Polish short stories, The Eagle and the Crow (London, 1996).
2 among which Kultura (1958), Jurzykowski (1964), Kościelski (1966), The News (1981), the Italian Premio Viareggio prize, the international Prix Gutenberg, and French Pen-Club. In 1998, he was awarded the Order of the White Eagle (Order Orła Białego).
3 Cited by Jerzy Święch, ‘Conversations with Herling-Grudziński’, The Polish Review 47, no. 2 (2002): 346.
4 An abridged English translation came out as Volcano and Miracle. A Selection of Fiction and Non-fiction from the Journal Written at Night, ed. Ronald Strom (London, 1998).
5 Three of his most successful collections of racconti include: Pale di Altare, (Milan, 1960); Ritratto Veneziano e altri racconti, trans. M. Martini (Milani, 1995) and Don Ildebrando e altri racconti (Milan, 1999).
6 Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, Caravaggio. Światło i cień, (Warsaw, 2019); https://instytutksiazki.pl/aktualnosci,2,fragment-eseju-caravaggio-swiatlo-i-cien-herlinga-grudzinskiego,3627.html (accessed February 4 2022).
7 Gustaw Herling-Grudziński (with the assistance of Zdzisław Kudelski), Opowiadania zebrane (Warsaw, 1999), vol. 2; Katarzyna Bzowska, `Herlingowy Pamiętnik’, in Tydzień Polski, April 10 2020: 18.
8 Włodzimierz Bolecki ed., Herling-Grudziński. Opowiadania wszystkie (Kraków, 2017), vol. 2, 481–501.
9 G. Herling-Grudziński, Wiek biblijny i śmierć (Kraków: 2010), 120. The story was translated into Italian as `L’età biblica e la morte’ by Herling’s daughter Marta and published in https://plitonline.it/2008, pp. 235–247 (accessed 4 Feb. 2022).
10 Krystyna Jaworska & Gustaw Herling eds., Etica e letteratura. Testimonianze, diario, racconti, (Milan, 2019).
11 Joanna Borysiak, Katalog Archiwum Gustawa Herlinga-Grudzińskiego w Fundacji ‘Biblioteca Benedetto Croce’, (Warsaw, 2019). The Archivum’s contents are summarized here: http://www.fondazionebenedettocroce.it/it/53/archivio-di-gustaw-herling-grudzinski. For the rok Herlinga-Grudzińskiego, see https://www.bn.org.pl/projekty/rok-gustawa-herlinga-grudzinskiego-2019 (accessed February 4 2022).
12 Herling-Grudzinski-konferencja.jpg (568 × 796) (britishpoles.uk) (accessed September 27 2023). The placards were entitled: ‘Lata nauki – okres młodości w Polsce’; ‘Konspiracja I łagier: Inny Świat’; ‘Armia byłych więżniów’; ‘Wojna we Włoszech i Order Virtuti Militari’; ‘Być I pisać’; ‘Emigracja – Londyn i Monachium, miasta rozpaczy’; ‘Neapol: rodzina i podwójna emigracja’; ‘Powrót do pisarstwa: opowiadania’; ‘Włoska publicystka’; ‘Paryż i ‘Kultura’; ‘Dziennik pisany nocą’; ‘U schyłku emigracji i pierwszy podróz do Polski’; ‘Proza narracyjna jako poszukiwanie istoty bytu’; ‘Koniec cenzury w Polsce: rozgłos i sukces’.
13 Ryszard Nycz, `A Closed Sliver of the World: on the Writing of Gustaw Herling-Grudziński’, trans. Jolanta Dutkiewicz, in ‘Sacrum in Polish Literature’, ed. Halina Filipowicz. Special Issue of Renascence: essays on values in literature, no. 47, (1995): 221–9.
14 Magdalena Śniedziewska, Osobiste sprawy i tematy. Gustaw Herling-Grudziński wobec dwudziestowiecznej literatury włoskiej (Warszawa, 2019); Alessandro Ajres, `Gustaw Herling-Grudziński e la letteratura italiana del XX secolo’, in Poznańskie Studia Polonistyczne Seria Literacka 39, no. 59, (2020): 183–193; Andrzej Karcz, Refleksja nad literaturą w polskim piśmiennictwie emigracyjnym. Tymon Terlecki. Czesław Miłosz. Gustaw Herling-Grudziński (Warsaw, 2017). The book has been reviewed by Marcin Lutomierski, in Pamiętnik Literacki, t. LVI (2018): 195–197, and Gerard Kapolka in Polish Review, vol. 66, no. 3 (Sept. 2021): 133–5.
15 Kris Van Heuckelom, `Poolse Kampliteratur’, in De Leeswolf, 11, nr 5. (2005), nr. 5: 368–9; https://www.iiss.it/festival-letterario-napoli-di-herling-24–26-ottobre-2019/ (accessed February 4 2022); J. Tokarska-Bakir, J. ‘Gustaw Herling-Grudziński and the Blood Libel Legend: From Overvisibility to Oversight’. East European Politics and Societies, 28, n. 4 (2014): 739–757. Polish critics like Bolecki were much quicker to assess, via comments from Herling’s Diary, his relationship to Herling’s original homeland, near Suchedniów, in central Poland. Włodzimierz Bolecki, Ciemna miłość. Szkice do portretu Gustawa Herlinga-Grudzińskiego (Kraków, 2005), 141–165. Maria Delaperrière, Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski, témoin de son époque et au-delà (Paris, 2019) explores Herling’s reception in France whilst he was alive and posthumously, Partie IV; see also idem, ‘A World Apart in France’, in Magdalena Popiel, Stanley Bill, Tomasz Bilczewski eds., The Routledge World Companion to Polish Literature (Abingdon-on-Thames, 2021).
16 Marta Herling, `Między Włochami a Polską – Dialog z moim ojcem’, in Pamiętnik Literacki (December 2019), vol. LVIII, 13–25, which follows on from the conversational style of the Breve racconto di me stesso (Odisseo) which she edited following her father’s death (Rome, 2001). Some of her conferenze are available in MP3 format: https://archivio.festivaletteratura.it/oggetti/3904-marta-herling-con-silvio-perrella-testimoni-darchivio-n-2015-09-12-180 (accessed February 4 2022).
17 Sylwetki i portrety. Roberto Salvadori, trans. Halina Kralowa & Jarosław Mikołajewski, (Warsaw, 2010), 83–90; J. Pilch, `Siorbanie’, where he wrote ‘Herling-Grudziński, napomadowawszy się swym mrocznym egotyzmem’.
18 Zdzisław Kudelski, Studia o Herlingu-Grudzińskim : twórczość, recepcja, biografia (Lublin, 1998).
19 Herling describes his London life in Volcano and Miracle, 265–6; in the story ‘Portret Wenecki’, first published in Kultura (1994, nr. 1/556–2/557), 30–53; and expresses his aversion again in Noonday Cemetery, (New York, 2003), 23 and even ‘hatred’ (nienawiść) in the essay ‘Zima w Zaświatach. Opowieść londyńska’, in Pamiętnik Literacki, vol. LVIII (December 2019): 141–67.
20 Andrzej Krzeczunowicz writes about the Munich chapter, `Gustaw Herling-Grudziński w Monachium’, in Pamiętnik Literacki, vol. LVIII, (December 2019): 73–81. Ewa Bieńkowska refers to Herling’s ‘bardzo złe lata w Monachium’ in Pisarz i los. O twórczości Gustawa Herlinga-Grudzińskiego (Warsaw, 2002). His radio broadcasts at Radio Free Europe are covered in volume 3 of Herling’s Dzieła zebrane. Recenzje, szkice, rozprawy literackie 1957-1998 Felietony i komentarze z Radia Wolna Europa 1955–1967, (Kraków, 2021).
21 We can see similar caesuras in the lives and work of other contemporary Polish writers like Wisława Szymborska who, after her first two volumes of political poems, moved in an entirely more humanistic and ironic direction: critic Felicity Rosslyn applauds her ’courage’ for moving towards writing poetry ‘without any political subtext’, ‘No end of fun on the back of the tapestry’, in Times Literary Supplement, (December 6, 1996): 14. See Introduction to Wisława Szymborska, People on a Bridge, trans. from Ludzie na moście by Adam Czerniawski (Chester Springs, 1990); Teresa Halikowska-Smith, ``The Poetry of Wonderment’. A Review of Wisława Szymborska: Poems New and Collected 1957–1997 (London: Faber, 1998–9)’, in Thumbscrew, No 15 ;(Winter/Spring 2000): 46–50. An online variant was published in Poetry Magazines at http://poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record8fce.html?id=11981&fbclid=IwAR1dRjmVxCEL5_yUlbf609qwmOow7q9BkAg4kk9xyMQ3yZawzXa6_vWFkmc (accessed February 4 2022).
22 Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, Skrzydła ołtarza (Paris, 1960). The book came out simultaneously in an Italian edition entitled Pale di Altare.
23 ‘I odemknąwszy jak księge skrzydła starego ołtarza, ujrzał, iż są od wewnątrz dłutem misternie wyrobione w drzewie: jedno przedstawiało Złożenie do Grobu, drugie Zmartwychwstanie’. An anonymous reviewer has pointed out that Herling enjoyed a 45-year friendship with the translator Strom, whose death constituted the last entry in his diary, and that it is therefore unlikely that Herling, being so acutely aware of language and translation, had no influence on the English rendering of the title ‘Pietà dell’Isola’. In an interesting echo, eight years later Jan Józef Szczepański also published a book entitled Wyspa (Island), and which, together with his story Ikar (Icarus), also formed a ‘dilogia’, although interested less in loneliness than madness and the ‘childish’ response of a rebel unable to respond to the challenges of the world in any other way that with the reflexes of feelings, Krzysztof Dybciak, Jan Józef Szczepański (Warsaw, 1982).
24 ‘Wieża narodziła się z gestu głębokiego pochylenia się nad najtrudniejszymi sprawami życia i śmierci’, Szkice o literaturze emigracyjnej, (Wrocław, 1992). It is illuminating to read the different readers’ opinions in the following comments thread: https://lubimyczytac.pl/ksiazka/261159/skrzydla-oltarza (accessed February 4 2022). Some readers (Rafał) are impressed with the `Niesamowicie metafizyczna proza, bez krzyczącego na całe gardło naturalizmu (.) Poruszająca do głębi. Niektóre z opowiadań napisane są w bardzo oryginalnej konwencji literackiej’ while others (Justyna) are worn down by ‘nuda i katorga’.
25 Patrycja Spytek, Gustaw Herling-Grudziński jako krytyk literatury rosyjskiej (‘Dziennik pisany nocą’), Uniwersytet Warszawski Ph.D. thesis (2013), https://depotuw.ceon.pl/handle/item/274; Jarosław Anders, `Gustaw Herling-Grudziński: Sleepless in Naples’, in idem, Between Fire and Sleep. Essays on Modern Polish Poetry and Prose, (Yale University Press, 2009), 126–138.
26 Fay Bound Alberti, A Biography of Loneliness (Oxford, 2019); David Vincent, A History of Solitude, (Cambridge, 2019); Anthony Storr, Solitude. A Return to the Self (New York, 1988, 1997); Heinz Kohut, How does Analysis Cure?, eds. Arnold Goldberg & Paul E. Stepansky (Chicago, 1984).
27 Anders, ‘Zbigniew Herbert: the darkness of Mr. Cogito’, in Between Fire and Sleep, p. 111.
28 Aleksandra Melbechowska-Luty, `Wrocławska wystawa Stanisława Dębickiego’, in Biuletyn historii sztuki, 29, no. 1 (1967): 72–9. Piotr Łukaszewicz’s edited catalogue from the exhibition ‘Stanisław Dębicki (1866–1924)’ held at the Muzeum Śląskie in Wrocław in 1966 is sadly unavailable in the West. Dębicki’s work is otherwise presented to a western audience in a couple of pages in the catalogue for the exhibition Voorlente, Polen 1880—1920, held at the Paleis voor Schone Kunsten in Brussels, 3 October 2001–6 January 2002; there is an even slighter appearance in Mieczysław Wallis, Secesja (Warsaw, 1967) and Hans H. Hofstätter (with contributions by W. Jaworska), Art nouveau : prints, illustrations and posters (New York, 1984). Dębicki’s painting ‘Rozpacz’, sold by the Polish art auctioneer Desa Unicum in 2013 into private hands, is reproduced at http://www.artnet.com/artists/stanislaw-debicki/rozpacz-l6eSNy9dRy-jRwpDuVIE6g2.
29 Cesare Ripa (1560?−1625), Iconologia del Cavaliere Cesare Ripa. Perugino Notabilmente Accresciuta d’Immagini, di Annotazioni, e di Fatti dall’Abate Cesare Orlandi, (Perugia, 1764–67), vol. 2 (of 5), p. 244.
30 Le Lépreux de la cité d’Aoste was first published anonymously, with a preface by Joseph de Maistre (St.Petersburg, 1812).
31 Herling-Grudziński, Opowiadania zebrane (Warsaw, 1999). A selection of these essays came out in English care of Bill Johnson’s translation in 2003 as Noonday Cemetery..
32 Andrzej Szczypiorski, Msza za miasto Arras (Warsaw, 1971). Szczypiorski’s is a political allegory of life, an emergent totalitarian state focusing on the dilemmas faced by Jan, a young member of the intelligentsia arrogantly pious and full of revolutionary zeal. Initially complicit in the torments inflicted on outsiders in the name of political and moral righteousness, when faced with escalating violence, he must choose between sincere commitment to the isolated village that adopted him and horror at a society gone mad. Elisabeth Erdmann-Pandžić, ‘Eine Messe für die Stadt Arras von Andrzej Szczypiorski’, in Wiener Slavistisches Jahrbuch, 1992, 38, p. 246. For the Polish literary currents of the 1970s, see Maja Kijowska, ‘Polen das heist nirgendwo’: ein Streifzug durch Polens Literarische Landschaften (Munich, 2007), 152–170.
33 Entry for April 20, 1984, in Volcano and Miracle, 149.
34 George Gömöri, `The Island, Three Tales by Gustaw Herling and Ronald Strom’ in The Polish Review, t. 39, nr. 1, (1994): 91–92. Actually, as Cristina Campo points out in her review `Due racconti : La torre, Il miracolo’ in Il Punto, 1961, `The Tower/Wieża’ operates on a split three-way timescale, in that there is a parallel story relating to the previous ‘misterioso inquilino’ who died mysteriously, Campo thinks from shame (vergogna), after a Nazi round-up in the last days of the war in which the young village priest is murdered for failing to summon the men of the village for a handover.
35 The original German insertions are my own from the English translation provided by Ronald Strom.
36 Louis Begley, ‘”A World of Plagues and Heresies”. A review of The Island’, New York Times, December 27, 1992, online at https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/06/specials/herling-island.html (accessed February 4 2022)
37 Marta Herling, `Między Włochami a Polską – Dialog z moim ojcem’.
38 Jarosław Anders, `Czesław Miłosz: A Testament of Exile’, in Between Fire and Sleep, 67–83. It is also worth reading Milosz’s `Noble Lecture, 1980’ published in New York Review of Books, vol. 28, nr. 3 (March 5, 1981), 11–15 which begins (§1) with his incredulity at the rewards gained from his decision to choose solitude and the ‘strange occupation’ of writing poems in Polish, whilst living in France or America.
39 Volcano and Miracle, p. 71. A sentiment which reoccurs upon solitary trips to the summer house Casa Rossa at Dragonea near Salerno, providing the lesson ‘that I find solitude increasingly hard to bear’, entry for December 26, 1972 in Volcano and Miracle, p. 40.
40 Marta Herling, `Między Włochami a Polską – Dialog z moim ojcem’: `On, były więzień gułagu, cudzoziemiec bez ojczyzny, z dala od swojej rodziny, żołnierz wojska polskiego, świadomy już, że wybierze wygnanie, czyli życie bez pracy, bez zawodu, bez przyszłości’.
41 Reuel K. Wilson insists mistakenly that the decision to settle definitively in Italy was taken in 1952, World Literature Today, Vol. 78, No. 3/4 (September - December 2004), p. 134.
42 Włodzimierz Bolecki, Rozmowy w Dragonei, (Warsaw, 1997). In contrast to Rozmowy w Neapolu (Warsaw, 2000), where Bolecki’s initiated dialogues touched the author’s work in his final years between 1994–99.
43 Included in the collection Opowiadania wszystkie, vol 2, pp. 117–156; trans. in Noonday Cemetery and Other Stories, pp. 107–146. Herling has explained that the story was modelled (although stripped of the fanciful Gothick ambience) on Edgar Allan Poe’s `The Fall of the House of Usher’, first published in 1839 in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine.
44 Herbert, Wiersze zebrane, (Warsaw, 1982), 175.
45 ‘człowiek rodzi się do nieszczęścia, jak orły rodzą się do lotu’, citing the Book of Job, Dziennik pisany nocą, 3 October 1980.
46 Stormy Isles: An Azorean Tale, ed. & trans. Francisco Cota Fagundes (Dartmouth M.A., 2019), xxxi ff.
47 Raymond Havens, `Solitude and the Neoclassicists’, in ELH. A Journal of English Literary History, vol. 21, no. 4, (December 1954), pp. 251–273. Hume takes his ideas further in his ‘On Essay-Writing’, where he purposefully decries reclusion as a death-sentence for the belles-lettres, leading to their becoming ‘barbarous and enslaved’ in Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene Miller (Indianapolis, 1985), 534. Consider also the personal doctor of King George III, Johann Georg Zimmerman’s treatise (originally in German) Solitude Considered with Respect to its Dangerous Influences Upon the Mind and Heart (1791), repr. New York, 1982.
48 Herbert G. Wright, `The Theme of Solitude and Retirement in Seventeenth Century Literature’, in Études Anglaises, VII (Jan. 1954): 22–35. For a classic critique of courtly life, see André de Resende, On Court Life (De vita aulica ad speratum Martianum Ferrariam Lusitanum) (Bern/New York, 1990), pp. 109–112.
49 Frieda S. Brown, ``De la solitude’: A Re-examination of Montaigne’s Retreat from Public Life’, in Kentucky Romance Quarterly, vol. 19, supp. 1, (1972): 137–146; Paula Marvelly, ‘Michel de Montaigne: On Solitude’ (October 2016). Available at: https://www.theculturium.com/michel-de-montaigne-on-solitude/(URL accessed February 4 2022).
50 Hugh J. Luke, Mary Shelley, The Last Man (Lincoln Nebraska, 1965), xvii.
51 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (London, 1818, 3 vols.); cf. illuminating discussion on Radio 4 programme ‘In Our Time’ with Melvyn Bragg, podcast at https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00051n6 (accessed February 4 2022).
52 Anne Applebaum, Gulag Voices. An Anthology (New Haven CT, 2011).
53 Joanna Olczak-Ronikier, In the Garden of Memory: a Family Memoir (W Ogrodzie Pamięci), (London, 2004), pp. 231 ff.
54 See Anne Applebaum’s ‘Glossary’ in Gulag. A History (London, 2004), p. 592, which defines the word as ‘a concentration camp: literally, the area within the barbed wire’.
55 Primo Levi, Se questo è un uomo (Turin, 1947); Leonard Mars, `Anthropology of the Absurd: Primo Levi, the Ethnographer of Auschwitz’, in Passageways, ed. Gabor Vargyas (Budapest, 2009), pp. 176–192.
56 Volcano and Miracle, p. 90.
57 Volcano and Miracle, pp. 115–6; Maria Delaperrière, ‘A World Apart: historical and literary testimony’, in The Routledge World Companion to Polish Literature, ch. 21.
58 Tomasz Piesakowski & Robert Conquest, The Fate of Poles in the USSR, 1939–1989, (London, 1990); Józef Garliński, Poland in the Second World War (Polska w drugiej wojnie światowej) (London, 1985); Norman Davies, Trail of Hope. The Anders Army, an Odyssey Across Three Continents (Szlak nadziei), (Oxford, 2015), pp. 54–6. Unlike Herling, many Polish deportees remained trapped in the Soviet Union through the entire period of the war, like Halina Willetts in Irkutsk, see Norman Davies, Sam i o Sobie, (Kraków, 2019), p. 276. It may have been a calculated decision based on the security provided by an institutional or sedentary existence, and also the added uncertainties and complications arising from Jewishness, see Menachem Begin’s account, White Nights. The Story of a Prisoner in Russia (1957, in English since 1977), which historian Norman Davies in his book Trail of Hope nevertheless attacks for its prickly opportunism.
59 Tomasz Piesakowski , The Fate of Poles in the USSR 1939–1989 (London, 1990), p. 77.
60 A World Apart, trans. Andrzej Ciołkosz (London, 1951), p. 204.
61 A World Apart, p. 226. A very similar homecoming scene is imagined in Peter Weir’s 2010 film based on Sławomir Rawicz’s memoir The Long Walk, but does not figure in the text The Long Walk: a Gamble for Life, ed. Ronald Downing, (New York, 1956).
62 see Anne Applebaum’s interview with Zorin as summarized in Applebaum, Gulag. Historia de los campos de concentración soviéticos (Barcelona, 2004), ch.17, pp. 387–8.
63 Herling, A World Apart, p. 149. Attempts to ascertain the circumstances of death and whereabouts of the body of a great-uncle Ludwig Asler, who expired in the winter of 1940 some forty kilometres from the goldmining town of Bodaybo (Бодайбо) in Siberia, have not yielded results, despite the existence of a Polska Komisja Stowarzyszenia ‘Memorial’ in Moscow for that end: https://www.memo.ru/ru-ru/memorial/departments/irkutsk
64 Volcano and Miracle, p. 115. The original text is kept in AGHG 253, see Katalog Archivum Gustawa Herlinga-Grudzińskiego, ed. Joanna Borysiak (Warsaw, 2019). Also available at: https://bn.org.pl/download/document/1560851655.pdf.
65 Volcano and Miracle, p. 156.
66 Herling, A World Apart, p. 136.
67 Włodzimierz Bolecki & Herling, Rozmowy w Neapolu; Marta Herling, `Między Włochami a Polską – Dialog z moim ojcem’, p. 15; Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, Najkrótszy przewodnik po sobie samym (Kraków, 2000), pp. 38–42. The research project `Typhus in Naples, 1943–44: A Study in Vector Control’, currently undertaken at the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities at Oxford University, views Allied medical intervention as ‘one of the greatest medical successes of the Second World War’ through its innovative use of DDT as a disinfectant, https://www.weh.ox.ac.uk/research/typhus-in-naples-1943–44-a-study-in-vector-control.
68 Jacek Łopuszański, Wspomnienia z Kołymy, Chapter 3, 9. Unpublished 400 page manuscript written in English in the author’s family’s possession. There is a copy at the POSK (Polski Ośrodek Społeczno-Kulturalny) research library in London: http://www.posk.org/files/7914/2342/2002/Wiadomoci_POSK-u_numer_61_2013.pdf, see p. 53.
69 Richard Rees (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 137.
70 Volcano and Miracle, pp. 36–7 – diary extracts from September 3, 1972.
71 Noonday Cemetery, pp. 66–89. From Opowiadania zebrane, vol. 2, pp. 67–84.
72 ‘From the moment when I heard her half-sleeping ravings and saw her altered face, I liked her even more for the tangle of conflicting human emotions in her. I did not want her to be a “pure saint” from a lithograph; I wanted her to be a “real saint” – in other words, one who is profoundly tainted’, p. 82.
73 Bolecki, Rozmowy w Dragonei, p. 166.
74 Nycz, ‘A Closed Sliver of the World’.
75 Volcano and Miracle, pp. 47–8.
76 Jaworska & Herling, Etica e letteratura.
77 Borowski’s original, Polish title for the collection (written in 1948) was Pożegnanie z Marią i inne Opowiadania. The English translation by Barbara Vedder was published in London by Cape in 1967.
78 Entry for 3 February 1976, Dziennik pisany nocą ; (Warsaw 1995), p. 184-.
79 Zdzisław Kudelski, Studia o Herlingu-Grudzińskim, 36; Zofia Stefanowska,`Dziennik Herlinga-Grudzińskiego’, in Literatura, źle obecna (Rekonesans), (London, 1984).
80 The ‘Rawicz affair’ is explored by Tim Whewell in a 30-minute programme for BBC Radio 4 broadcast on 5 December 2010: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b00wdcts, and in a book by Linda Willis, Looking for Mr. Smith: The Quest for the Truth Behind The Long Walk, the Greatest Survival Story Ever Told, (New York City: 2010). In May 2009, Witold Gliński, a Polish World War II veteran living in the United Kingdom, came forward to claim that the basis of Rawicz’s story was true, but it was actually an account of what had happened to him, not Rawicz. Whewell’s programme discounts Gliński’s tale, suggesting the story has become a generalized, powerful, redemptive fantasy.
81 Rawicz, The Long Walk, (London, 2000), quotations on pages 38 & 240.
82 A subject admittedly better fleshed out in Dorota Prońko’s Postawy ludzkie w relacji do Boga w rzeczywistości sowieckich łagrów : studium przypadku osób: Gustawa Herlinga-Grudzińskiego, Waltera J. Ciszka, Barbary Skargi (Saarbrücken, 2014).
83 Dziennik pisany nocą, (Warsaw, k, 1995–2000), 7 vols.; the manuscript collections are indicated here: http://www.fondazionebenedettocroce.it/it/53/archivio-di-gustaw-herling-grudzinski (accessed February 4 2022)
84 Włodzimierz Bolecki, ‘Exile Diaries: Sándor Márai, Gustaw Herling-Grudziński and Others’, in The Exile and Return of Writers from East-Central Europe: A Compendium, ed. John Neubauer (Berlin 2009), pp. 422–32 (here p. 425). For Trzebiński, see Paweł Rodak, `Diaries – Poland’s Autobiographical Twentieth Century’, in Tamara Trojanowska, Being Poland. A New History of Polish Literature and Culture since 1918 (Toronto, 2018), 627.
85 Harold B. Segel, ‘Ryszard Kapuściński, 1932–2007’, in The Polish Review, vol. 52, n. 1 (2007): 137–40. Lapidarium was published in 7 volumes between 1990 and the author’s death in 2007 and has come out in abridged and partial translations, for example Lapidarium IV was trans. by Agata Orzeszek and published in Spanish (Barcelona, 2003) and Italian: Lapidarium. In viaggio tra i frammenti della storia (Milani, 1997). For analysis, see Ewa Chudoba, ‘Lapidarium Ryszarda Kapuścińskiego jako kolaż’, in Teksty drugie: Teoria Literatury, Krytyka, Interpretacja, 6, (2007): 185–97.
86 Comments on Gombrowicz in Jerzy Święch, `Conversations with Gustaw Herling-Grudziński’; Witold Gombrowicz, Diary, trans. Lillian Vallee (Yale University Press, 2012). Pamiętnik Literacki, vol. LVIII, (December, 2019). Special issue ‘Rok Gustawa Herlinga-Grudzińskiego’; Pilch, ‘Siorbanie’ & online: http://niniwa22.cba.pl/pilch_felietony_z_polityki.htm. Thomas Mann, Diaries, 1918–1939, ed. Robin Clark (New York, 1984), although omitting certain tendentious entries particularly relating to the author’s homosexual tendencies (October 17, 1920, for example).