Dlaczego Gustaw Herling-Grudziński bał się spotkać z Witoldem Gombrowiczem?
Why was Gustaw Herling-Grudziński Afraid of Meeting Witold Gombrowicz?

Summary/Abstract: This article explores the specific biographical and literary/intertextual relationship between Gustaw Herling-Grudziński and Witold Gombrowicz. Their biographic relations are unclear: Herling-Grudziński first met Gombrowicz between the two world wars but did not renew the acquaintance with Witold when WW2 was over, although both authors were contributing at that time to Paris-based Kultura monthly. The reason might have been that Gombrowicz’s ideological and philosophical stance was unacceptable to him. Hence, Herling-Grudziński’s continual engagement in polemics with Gombrowicz, which actually started in 1938 with his highly critical review of the novel Ferdydurke, and was subsequently continued in his multivolume diary Dziennik pisany nocą. The dispute was formally expressed in the area of the poetics of diary but concerned issues more fundamental than that: the way literature is (to be) understood, the writer’s duty with respect to (a) community and, first and foremost, the concept of reality and a model of subjectivity (human being).

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