Gombrowicz - Looking back on the young writers of Inter-War Poland

They may have had other good qualities of which I was unaware, and which incidentally could not have manifested themselves in that lifestyle of theirs, which took place between the Adria and the Zodiak.  In a social sense too they constituted a rather disgraceful phenomenon.  It's well known that the measure of a nation's culture is not its highest art, which is the creation of exceptional individuals, but precisely its second-rank literature, in which good manners, both on the part of the author and of the reader, can be more important than talent.  None of this set was an artist on a larger scale and none of them could harbor any pretentions to excellence, but despite this their writings could have carried the marks of decency that distinguish an educated, well-read person with some discernment and a disciplined imagination from an ordinary producer of trash.  Unfortunately, the popular novels of Dolega-Mostowicz and Jurkowski, with the possible exception of The Career of Nikodem Dyzma, were written for the gutter, and for the factory workers.  Karpinski's epigrams and articles, and Minkiewicz's epigrams and songs, had the appearance of solid workmanship - those two cultivated their metier and like a respectable business they didn't sell shoddy merchandise.  And yet this too was an unkempt, disordered world, anarchic in the Russian way - they weren't bad people, but they lacked that reflex of a cultured person which is a matter of heredity, upbringing, and tradition, and often successfully substitutes for a lack of an outlook on life, or morality and faith.  From year to year they wallowed deeper in licentiousness and all the mean tricks that go with it; from year to year they were more broken, drunker, and more desperate.  Right until the war came along.


trns. by Bill Johnston


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