first draft of his “conversations” and provide some new autobiographical material as well. Aimed at an unsophisticated audience, they have a primarily documentary value.

Witold Gombrowicz’s writing is indebted to and reflects his personal achievements. The greatest of these was his stubborn persistence in overcoming the formidable obstacles that relegated his provocative and unconventional books and personality to the periphery of various literary and cultural establishments. His three decades of literary activity produced a quantitatively moderate but qualitatively outstanding body of work, whose quite readable surface conceals a poetic density and compactness that a short critical survey can only begin to suggest.

Before World War II, Gombrowicz’s eccentric writings and literary café persona succeeded in attracting young and independent writers, and his first novel, Ferdydurke, was in contention for a major literary prize, but his moderate success was short-lived because Poland was soon under German occupation and he found himself in exile in Argentina. Remaining there after the war, he continued to attract successive generations of young writers and intellectuals. With their enthusiastic collaboration, Ferdydurke and his second play, The Marriage, were translated into Spanish and published in Buenos Aires. Slighted by the Argentine and Polish émigré literary establishments, Gombrowicz won a following among the Polish émigré cultural elite as a regular contributor to the Paris-based Polish journal, Kultura, whose publishing house, the Institut Littéraire, issued his books.

In the mid-1950’s, when culture was liberalized in Poland, his works, publicized by the critic Artur Sandauer, underwent a violent resurgence of popularity. Everything Gombrowicz had written, except his diary, was published, and his first play, Ivona, Princess of Burgundia, was staged with great success in Warsaw. A shift in cultural policy ended the vogue for Gombrowicz, however, and his works have not been reissued in Poland. At the same time, aided by the Polish-French critic K. A. Jeleski, Gombrowicz’s international career took off with the appearance of Ferdydurke in French in 1958, and his books began to be translated, eventually into all the major and nearly all the minor European languages, both Western and Eastern, as well as into Hebrew and Japanese. Decisive factors were Gombrowicz’s return to Europe in 1963 and his winning the prestigious International Publishers’ Prize in 1967. He was a Nobel Prize candidate in 1968 and was rumored to have been the frontrunner in 1969; he died, however, before the jury met. Following another liberalization of cultural policy in Poland after 1970, republication of his works was considered but suspended indefinitely, a result of political objections to certain passages in his diary (whose publication in full Gombrowicz required as a condition for reissuing any of his works). Nevertheless, Gombrowicz criticism in Polish flourished qualitatively and quantitatively with new insights and approaches that helped change the discipline of criticism itself. In addition, all his plays, as well as dramatic adaptations of his prose works, were staged with great popular success and entered the standard repertory of Polish theaters. Outside Poland, his collected works are available in Polish (published in Paris), German, and French, and his plays, regularly performed in France and Germany, have been staged almost as widely as his books have been published.

The list of writers and other artists whom Gombrowicz has influenced is impressive. Among Poles it includes Nobel Prize-winning poet Czesaw Miosz, novelist Jerzy Kosinski, science fiction writer Stanisaw Lem, playwrights Sawomir Mroek and Tadeusz Róewicz, and theater reformers Jerzy Grotowski and Tadeusz Kantor. Other than Poles, Gombrowicz has influenced novelists Horst Bienek, Milan Kundera, Philip Roth, Julio Cortázar, and Ernesto Sábato; theater directors Jorge Lavelli and Alf Sjöberg; and film and theater director Ingmar Bergman. Gombrowicz belongs at the summit of Polish literature, and outside Poland he is regarded as a major world author. The vitality of his works assures the enduring stature of his reputation.

In addition to his four principal novels, Witold Gombrowicz (gawm-BRAW-veech) wrote three equally important plays and the monumental three-volume Dziennik (1957-1967; diary), which represents a unique blend of intimate diary, fiction, and literary or philosophical essay. His literary debut was a 1933 collection of short stories (reedited in an enlarged version in 1957); the genre of the short story, however, appears as marginal in his output. The same is true of literary criticism, which he cultivated most intensely in the 1930’s, returning to it only occasionally in the later decades. Throughout his life, he was characteristically preoccupied with commenting upon and explaining his own work; in addition to Dziennik, such a self-explanatory purpose is served, more or less directly, by a book-length interview conducted by Dominique de Roux, Rozmowy z Gombrowiczem (conversations with Gombrowicz; actually, the writer’s own confession published in guise of an interview, 1969; translated as A Kind of Testament, 1973) and by an autobiographical book, Wspomnienia polskie: Wędrówki po Argentynie (1977; Polish Memories, 2004).

The story of Witold Gombrowicz’s literary career presents a striking contrast between his nearly lifelong isolation as a writer and the international fame enjoyed by his works after the 1960’s. He is universally considered one of the major European novelists and playwrights of the twentieth century, a towering figure in modern Polish literature; his works have been translated into many foreign languages and have occasioned numerous critical analyses. All of this, however, including the coveted Formentor Prize in 1967, came only toward the end of his life, after the sixty-year-old Gombrowicz moved back to Europe from his Argentinian retreat, where he had spent twenty-four years, known only to a handful of his Argentinian admirers and to his enthusiasts in Poland.

The Polish reception of Gombrowicz appears as another paradox. Although his work, as that of an émigré writer, was steadfastly banned by the Communist regime (with the exception of a brief interval in 1957-1958), it was always known in Poland’s intellectual circles thanks to the wide circulation of émigré editions. Oddly enough, after the writer’s death, it became possible in Poland to stage his plays and publish critical monographs on his work, although his books were still banned until the fall of the Communist regime. This bizarre situation came about because Polish authorities apparently had political objections to certain passages of Gombrowicz’s diary; the writer specified in his last will that his work not be reprinted in Poland unless in its entirety. In spite of the difficulties that Polish readers faced in obtaining copies of his books, Gombrowicz’s reputation in his homeland grew as steadily as it did abroad; his work has exerted a particularly strong influence on the development of recent Polish fiction, drama, and criticism.