Ferdydurke

Ferdydurke is a novel by the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz, published in 1937.

Considered a masterpiece of European modernism, Ferdydurke was published at an inopportune moment. World War II, Russia's imposition of a communist regime in Poland and the author's decades of exile in Argentina nearly erased public awareness of a novel that remains a singularly strange exploration of identity and cultural and political mores. In this darkly humourous story, Joey Kowalski describes his transformation from a 30-year-old man into a teenage boy. Kowalski's exploits are comic and erotic — for this is a modernism closer to dada and the Marx brothers than to the elevated tones of T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound — but also carry a subtle undertone of philosophical seriousness.

Gombrowicz is interested in identity and the way time and circumstance, history and place impose form on people's lives. Unsentimental, mocking and sometimes brutal, Kowalski's youthfulness is callow and immature, but it is also free to revel in desire. Gombrowicz weaves into the book his theme that immaturity is the force behind our creative endeavors.

Gombrowicz himself wrote of his novel that it is not "... a satire on some social class, nor a nihilistic attack on culture... We live in an era of violent changes, of accelerated development, in which settled forms are breaking under life's pressure... The need to find a form for what is yet immature, uncrystalized and underdeveloped, as well as the groan at the impossibility of such a postulate — this is the chief excitement of my book."

Danuta Borchardt made a fresh translation of the novel, published in 2000, that deftly captures Gombrowicz's idiosyncratic style, allowing English speakers to fully experience the text.

External Links

• The Exquisite Corpse on Danuta Borchardt's recent translation.