Novel
Ferdydurke
Witold Gombrowicz · 1938
Synopsis
Józio Kowalski, a thirty-year-old writer whose first book was poorly received, wakes one morning full of anguish. Professor Pimko, a pedant, comes to fetch him and takes him back by force to his old school classroom, where everyone treats him as a schoolboy. Two clans of pupils clash there, that of the idealist Syfon and that of Miętus, who wants to be a regular guy, and their quarrel turns into a duel of grimaces. Pimko then places Józio as a boarder with the Młodziaks, a modern family devoted to sport and hygiene, where he falls in love with their daughter Zuta, a fashionable schoolgirl who looks down on him.
Context
The novel was born of the wound that the critics of his first book, who had judged it immature, caused its author; he first wanted to answer them with a pamphlet. It appeared in October 1937 from the Rój publishing house in Warsaw, with a cover and two drawings by Bruno Schulz, his defender. Reissued in Poland twenty years later, thanks to a thaw, it sold more than ten thousand copies there and was banned again the following year, until 1986. The first translation, into Spanish, was made in 1947 at the Café Rex in Buenos Aires, with the author and chess-playing friends, under the direction of the Cuban Virgilio Piñera; the French version of 1958 drew on it.
Who it is for
A novel of about three hundred pages; two earlier stories are inserted in it as interludes, and the language coins its own words, which the French translation renders as “gueule” and “cucul”.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as a twentieth-century classic, compulsory reading in Polish schools since the 1990s and translated into more than twenty languages.
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