Short stories
The Wilko Girls
Panny z Wilka
Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz · 1932
Synopsis
At the end of the twenties, Wiktor Ruben, thirty-seven, a veteran of the Great War who has become the manager of an estate, shaken by the death of a friend, goes to the countryside to rest, near the Wilko manor where he spent the summer of his twentieth year among six sisters. He finds Julcia, Jola, Kazia, Zosia and Tunia married, aged or changed; Fela is dead. Each visit sets the memory he kept of them against what time has made of them, and each gives him a different account of what he was to her.
Context
Written from memories of the manors of Byszewy and Skoszewy, where the author had been a tutor, the story appeared in Warsaw from Gebethner i Wolff with Brzezina, in a volume that came out in 1933 but is dated 1932. The friend's premature death refers to the poet Jerzy Liebert. It was translated into Czech in 1937, into French in 1938 and into English in 2002. Andrzej Wajda brought it to the screen in 1979.
Who it is for
A short narrative, made of visits and conversations, in which almost nothing happens and everything rests on memory.
Prizes and reception
Hailed from its publication as a masterly short story and regarded as one of the successes of interwar psychological prose.
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