World War II, the Paranormal, and Literature in Communist Poland: Unpublished Short Stories by Władysław Smólski

Abstract

Władysław Smólski began his writing career as an author of plays and humoresque works. Between 1939 and 1945, he was involved in helping Jews. Smólski described his war experiences in two autobiographical texts Losy dziecka: Opowieść wojenna wojenna [1961; A Child's Fate: A War Story] and Zaklęte lata [1964; Enchanted Years]. However, not all of his works have been published. The paper examines Smólski's unpublished volume of short stories, Magie [Magic], whose manuscript is stored at the National Library in Warsaw. In the first part of the paper, I introduce crucial facts of Władysław Smólski's biography, with reference to the atmosphere of the interwar period. The second part discusses the formal features of the stories comprising the volume Magic and possible reasons why the volume have not been published. The third part of the article examines selected short stories, focusing on the representation of war and functions of the paranormal.

KEYWORDS:

• esotericism
• parapsychology
• World War II
• communist Poland
• unpublished stories
• Władysław Smólski

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In this paper I use terms such as esotericism and parapsychology in their basic meaning. In Poland— like in other countries — in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, numerous attempts were made to define esotericism and related terms. The terms used were: ‘esotericism’, ‘occultism’, ‘secret knowledge’, ‘metapsychics’, ‘parapsychology’, ‘hermeticism’, and ‘spiritualism’. In parallel, there were terms referring to currents and phenomena with narrower meanings, such as: ‘spiritualism’, ‘mediumism’, ‘theosophy’, ‘anthroposophy’, ‘astrology’, ‘clairvoyance’ and ‘yoga’ (Rzeczycka and Trzcińska 2019b, p. 9).

2 For more information on Smólski’s activities in the Polish Council to Aid Jews, see the Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, sign. 349/24/160.

3 All of Smólski’s unpublished works, thirty-one archival units in total, can be found in the collection of the Polish National Library in Warsaw.

4 In the short story ‘The Scary Séance’, there is a reference to an incident ‘on 9 February 1969’ (Magic, p. 239).

5 The Hotel Polski housed Jews, who tried to leave Nazi-occupied Poland with promissory notes and passports obtained from the consulates of Latin American countries or Palestine. However, many of them were sent to death camps because their documents were issued for deceased individuals; only some successfully arrived at Vittel, France (Haska 2006).

6 Henryk Dobrzański (1897–1940), alias Hubal, a cavalry major in the Polish Army, was killed in the village of Anielin during battles with the 372nd Wehrmacht Division.

7 A symbol of remembrance after the time of terror is an urn kept at the Polish National Library, containing the ashes of manuscripts and old prints burnt by German soldiers in the autumn of 1944.

8 1969 was the 160th anniversary of Słowacki’s birth and 120th of his death.

9 The quoted passage is probably one of several clues contained in the work as to the time of its creation. In 1957, a two-volume edition of Don Quixote of La Mancha, translated by Anna Ludwika Czerny and Zygmunt Czerny, was published in Poland. The mention of the Year of Cervantes therefore seems meaningful.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Centre (Poland) with the grant ‘In Search of Another Knowledge: Western Esotericism in Communist Poland’, DEC-2020/37/B/HS2/00894.

Notes on contributors

Wiktor Gardocki

Assistant Professor at the Department of Comparative Research and Editing, Faculty of Philology, University of Bialystok. His research focuses on censorship of Polish literature (1945–1990) and the Holocaust.