Contents
Title
Introduction
Fumes
The Motion Demon
The Area
A Tale of the Gravedigger
Szamota’s Mistress
The Wandering Train
Strabismus
Vengeance of the Elementals
In the Compartment
Saturnin Sektor
The Glance
Afterword
The Area – A Contemporary Horror Story?
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
Though he wrote a vast quantity of some of the most original and interesting fantastic and bizarre fiction of the 20th Century, Stefan Grabinski remained during his life-time a generally neglected figure in Poland and, except for two insignificant appearances in Italy, untranslated. His greatest successes occurred between the years 1918 and 1922, when five collections of his stories were published. This impressive output did little, however, to make Grabinski’s work accepted in a country that didn’t take supernatural fiction seriously. Grabinski did not court critics and the public, and quickly developed a combative stance in regard to criticism of his writings. It is not surprising – and it is most revealing – that in one of his earliest stories, ‘The Area,’ he formulated his fictional counterpart: the dedicated artist who disdains the normal and separates himself from the public while advancing toward a realization of powerful, supernatural forces born of his own imagination. Like the character in this story, Grabinski was an idealistic loner who strove for an understanding of the hidden forces of both the world and the human mind, and whose creative integrity depended upon representing those forces in the most potent framework available – in Grabinski’s case, supernatural fiction.
Grabinski was born in Kamionka Strumilowa, a town near Lwow, on February 26, 1887. The son of a district judge, he suffered from ill-health and developed tuberculosis of the bone at an early age. His sickly nature, coupled with a dreamy, introspective disposition, undoubtedly led to his involvement with fantastic fiction. In 1909 he self-published a small volume of macabre writings that disappeared as most self-published efforts do. Forced by necessity, he became a teacher in secondary school, but his literary aspirations did not abate. He continued writing and, after the disruption of the First World War, made his ‘official debut’ in 1918 with the six-story collection On the Hill of Roses. This volume – which included the Grabinski classic, ‘Strabismus’ – drew some fine reviews. Most impressed was Karol Irzykowski, an important critic and an author of innovative avant-garde fiction. Irzykowski, already familiar with a couple of Grabinski’s stories that had appeared in the respected journal Maski, proclaimed the author as strikingly original, someone who exhibited a keen intelligence and a masterful style – an extraordinary phenomenon in a country whose writers generally remained, because of the country’s tragic history, concerned with ‘Polish issues.’
Indeed, nowhere in Polish literature, before or since, has there been an author who excelled in supernatural fiction as Grabinski did and who devoted himself so singularly to that one genre.
While Grabinski proved he could write a straightforward chiller like ‘A Tale of the Gravedigger,’ most of his best work is open to multi-layered interpretation and involves a compendium of influences, both old and new, as it presents a coherent Grabinski-esque world view. A vigorous opponent of mechanism and determinism, he integrated the concepts of such ancient philosophers as Heraclitus and Plato with the contemporary philosophies of Henri Bergson and Maurice Maeterlinck in his battle against a modern world where man’s primordial sense of self and nature was being erased by machine, restrictive systems and people of little vision.
Bergson was a particularly important influence. Grabinski used his theory of durational time to splendid effect in ‘Saturnin Sektor.’ But it was Bergson’s concept of élan vital - that spiritual force, or energy, that underlies reality and influences matter – which struck the deepest cord in Grabinski. He merged this ‘vital force’ with theories of motion, advanced by scientists like Newton and Einstein, in a group of train stories, collected under the title The Motion Demon in 1919.
Undoubtedly because of the importance of train travel, The Motion Demon collection found the warmest reception of all of Grabinski’s books in Poland. It is easy to picture a train traveller reading with fascination and unease these tales of maverick railwaymen, insane passengers and mysterious trains. But Grabinski was not merely interested in entertaining the populace. The train world provided Grabinski with a perfect symbol for Bergson’s élan vital. Here was a forward-moving force, powerful, direct, one that could be felt under one’s feet and in the motions of the car, a force that could easily represent the hidden force of life; here was a milieu that every person of those times could understand. The train world was a direct conduit to the primary issues of Grabinski’s own anti-authoritarian, anti-materialistic world view.
Grabinski certainly did not shy away from another of life’s integral ‘forces’ – sex. While matters sexual were being investigated in the psychoanalytic debates of the day, Grabinski used his fiction to reveal, with frank boldness, the dark forces of the libido in such tales as ‘Fumes,’ ‘Szamota’s Mistress’ and ‘In the Compartment.’ In a couple of these tales Grabinski anticipated the issue of gender identity, so topical nowadays. Several of his train stories end with obvious orgiastic explosions, and ‘Szamota’s Mistress’ may be, on one level, a unique tale of masturbation-induced frenzy.
Atypically for one raised in a non-Western culture, Grabinski tended to stay away from using the rich Polish folklore tradition available to him. In this sense, his eyes were turned toward the West rather than the East; he took a modern approach to fantastic literature. When he did borrow supernatural entities for his fiction, they were known to the folklore of all European cultures. Yet even these entities became distinctly Grabinski-esque. In ‘Vengeance of the Elementals’ he used those malicious beings that influence and hover around the elements (in this case, fire elementals), and made them combatants in his own philosophical fight – besides giving them some amusing, and highly original, names. (Fire, of course, represented another basic ‘force’ that modern man was naively becoming less aware of and, hence, concerned about; which is why Grabinski also wrote of series of ‘fire stories,’ collected in The Book of Fire in 1922.)
All of Grabinski’s innovative tales were examples of a particular type of fantasy, which he proposed calling ‘psychofantasy’ or ‘metafantasy.’ As opposed to straightforward, conventional fantasy that displayed the outward and the ornamental, this type of fantasy employed as its basis psychological, philosophical or metaphysical concerns. The author, in effect, was a studious magus who would uncover the hidden, and maybe not explain ‘the dark domain,’ for that was something the mind could never do, but acknowledge its presence and treat it with psychic respect.
When Grabinski began to abandon, for the most part, the short story format around 1922 and turn to novel writing, his self-motivated calling as a serious investigator of the unknown flowered into mysticism, a circumstance that doomed his work in the eyes of the critics. Grabinski began taking far less of an intellectual stance in his writings, and his wicked humour, evident in many of his short stories, lessened and ultimately disappeared.
Not unexpectedly, his novels were not well received by the public. Grabinski, however, stayed his course and did not abandon the literature he felt could convey life as he saw it.
Yet his body would not let him wage his literary battle with full physical strength. In 1929 his tuberculosis spread to his lungs, with resultant hemorrhaging, making teaching an impossibility. For health reasons he was forced to move to the country. His situation quickly became despe
rate. Medicines and proper care were costly, as was his new secluded residence. Aware of his pitiful situation, Karol Irzykowski and another critic, Jerzy Plomienski, succeeded in getting the city of Lwow to acknowledge its native son. Grabinski was given the Lwow Literary Award in 1931, but the money he received was soon dissipated, impelling him to give up the country retreat and move back to Lwow.
Grabinski’s last years were torturous. Restricted mostly to his bed, barely able to write yet never giving up, he withered away, his mother by his side. Jerzy Plomienski visited the author at the end of 1935, when Grabinski was completely bedridden. Plomienski found the author transformed beyond all recognition by his illness, the once noble features gone, the face ashen and bearded, the eyes glassy, the lips swollen and chapped and allowing the escape of blood-tinged saliva. Plomienski tried his best to bolster the dying author’s spirits, telling him that his works were destined to be read and acknowledged in future generations, that he would find acclaim abroad. Grabinski refused to be swayed and bitterly complained that writers who wanted to be individuals and not followers of literary fashion had no place in Poland.
On November 12, 1936 Grabinski finally died. There were a few notices and a couple of touching tributes in newspapers and journals by those, like Irzykowski, who knew him and recognized the value of his work. Then the Second World War clothed everything in its dark pall, and it seemed that Grabinski would never be heard of again.
Yet, beginning in 1949, Grabinski’s work saw a revival in Poland. That year an important collection of Polish fantasy, edited by the poet Julian Tuwim, contained two Grabinski stories. Later on, in the 1950s, a collection of Grabinski’s best work was published, as well as a mammoth thesis by Professor Artur Hutnikiewicz devoted to Grabinski’s oeuvre. It is possible that some of Poland’s young, rebellious filmmakers became familiar with the misanthropic author, notably Roman Polanski, whose films Repulsion and The Tenant share certain Grabinski trademarks. (The Tenant, though based on a French novel by Roland Topor, is disconcertingly filled with many Grabinski-isms.) Gradually more of Grabinski’s work was published, including a collection in 1975 edited by the famous SF writer Stanislaw Lem, one of Grabinski’s strongest admirers. The 1980s saw Grabinski’s work translated into German, including two volumes published under the ‘Library of the House of Usher’ imprint, and Grabinski’s name appeared alongside those of Blackwood, Lovecraft and Machen.
And now this maverick of the macabre who wrote in spiritual seclusion and in physical pain, who wrote consumed with the essence of the dark domain, is before a new audience.
It is impossible to know what Grabinski felt in the final moments of his life. Surely there must have been despair, anger, bitterness, and perhaps even resignation. But if he reflected on a central tenet in his tales – that no thought disappears, that one day it will be made flesh – then maybe he would have, as he breathed his last, hoped for a genuine revival and validation of his work in the future. It is this thought, this hope, that has been indeed made flesh. One of the great voices of supernatural fiction lives again.
Miroslaw Lipinski
FUMES
A new herd of gusts advanced from the ravines, and set loose over snow-covered fields, they ploughed their enraged heads through the snowbanks. Raised from its soft bedding, the snow whirled in huge cyclones, bottomless funnels, slender whips, and, wrapping itself up in a hundredfold repeated whirlpool, sprayed out white, granular powder.
An early winter evening was coming on.
The blindingly white blizzard gradually changed to a bluish hue, the pearl-grey horizon turned a morose black. The snow fell continuously. Large, shaggy strands silently glided from somewhere above and layered the ground. Hay-like stacks rose up; a hundred white caps piled on top of each other. Snowy anthills, light like down, moved rhythmically with the wind, creating a pattern of slanting ridges. Where it blew stronger, precipitous snowdrifts swelled to a height of three peasants. Where the wind’s caustic tongue scraped everything up, an open, clod-frozen earth appeared.
Slowly the wind alleviated, and furling its tired wings, it warbled softly somewhere in the valley. The landscape settled and solidified in the night frost … .
Ozarski worked his way tirelessly down the middle of the road. Covered in a hooded greatcoat, wearing thick, knee-high boots, loaded down with surveying equipment, the young engineer moved with difficulty through the piles of snow blocking his way. Two hours ago, blinded by the snowstorm, he had become separated from his colleagues and lost in a vast field, and after wandering without success in every direction, he had set off along this road. Now, seeing the rapidly descending evening, he exerted all his strength so that he could arrive at a village and put in somewhere for the night before complete darkness set in. But the road dragged on endlessly, empty and barren, its sides unrelieved by even a poor hut or a wayside smithy. An uncomfortable feeling of isolation gripped him. He momentarily removed his sweat-moistened fur cap and, while wiping its inside with a handkerchief, drew breath into his weary chest.
He went on. The road gradually changed its course and, bending widely, fell to the west. After rounding a prominent crag, the engineer started to descend into the valley with a quickened step. Suddenly, as he was rapidly scanning the area before him with his grey, sharp-sighted eyes, he let out an involuntary cry of joy. Down at the bottom of the road, on the right-hand side, flickered a dim little light: he was within reach of a human habitation. He hastened his step and, after a fifteen-minute vigorous hike, stood before a shoddy, snow-covered structure. It was a type of roadside inn without outbuildings, without a stable – part house, part hut – erected in complete seclusion. All about, as far as the eye could see, there was no sign of any village, farmsteads or settlements; just a couple of unleashed snow flurries kept on barking in furious yelps, like guard dogs, over the lonely habitation … .
He knocked on the rotting door. It immediately burst open, and at the entrance to a dimly-lit hallway he was greeted by an athletically-built, white-haired man with a peculiarly hopeful smile. Ozarski, closing the door behind himself, bowed slightly to the landlord and asked for a night’s lodging. The old man nodded his head amicably and, taking in with an exploratory glance the healthy, firm figure of the young man, said in a voice to which he tried to impart a possibly gentle, even tender, tone:
‘There will be a place – oh, yes; there will be a place to lay down your bright little head. And I won’t be stingy with food; I’ll feed you and give you something to drink; yes, yes; I’ll give you something to drink. Only why don’t you come closer, sir, here into the room; it’ll be nice and warm.’
And with a gentle, protective movement, he encircled him about the waist and led him to the open doorway of the room. This seemed too familiar to Ozarski, and he would have gladly freed himself. But the old man’s arm held him firmly about the middle, and whether he liked it or not he had to accept this peculiar cordiality from the innkeeper.
While crossing the high threshold with some hesitancy, Ozarski suddenly stumbled and lost his balance. He would have fallen had it not been for the willing help of his companion, who held onto him and, raising him like a child, carried him effortlessly into the room. Here, gently placing him on the ground, the old man said in a strangely altered voice:
‘Well, sir, how was it travelling through the air? You’re as light as a feather.’
Ozarski looked with amazement at the white-haired giant who had thought him, a man tall and well-built, as light as a feather. He was impressed by his strength, yet at the same time he couldn’t fight off a particular impression of distaste created by the innkeeper’s inappropriate familiarity and intrusive warmth. Now, in the glare of a simple kitchen lamp hanging on a rope from a filthy ceiling, Ozarski could get a thorough look at him. He was maybe seventy years old, but the healthy, vigorous posture and the recent display of strength, unusual for this age, disorientated the observer. The big face, covered with warts, was framed on both sides by long, silverly whi
te hair cut evenly near the shoulders. Most interesting of all were the old man’s eyes. Black, of demonic glitter, they burned with wild, lecherous fire. The same look was betrayed by a wide face with a strong, prominent jaw and fat, sensuous lips. For Ozarski the impression was, on the whole, unpleasant and instinctively repellent, though he couldn’t resist a certain magnetic effect exerted by the fascinating eyes.
Meanwhile, the old man busied himself with supper. He took down from a shelf some smoked bacon and a loaf of whole-wheat bread, he drew out from a green cupboard a demijohn of vodka, and placed everything on the table before his guest.
‘Eat, sir, eat. Don’t spare yourself anything. I’ll bring you some hot borsch right away.’
He then patted Ozarski familiarly on the knee and immediately disappeared behind the door to a neighbouring room.
As he ate, Ozarski glanced about the room. It was low, square, with a heavily smoke-stained ceiling. In one corner, near the window, stood a bed or a bed of boards, opposite it – a type of counter with barrels and a small cask of beer. The place was filthy. Cobwebs, uncleared for years, spread out their grey, monotonous threads over the ceiling and a stack of coal.
‘A dive,’ he muttered through his teeth.
Close to the entrance door, a fire blazed under a stove; higher up, coals were dying out in a baker’s oven, over which was a wide square hood. The softly smouldering embers merged with the bubbling food cooking on the stove into some mysterious, drowsy chat, into a muffled murmur of a humid interior set against the background of the riotous snowstorm outside.
The door to the other room squeaked, and, contrary to Ozarski’s expectation, a stocky girl hastened to the stove. She removed the large stone pot from the fire and, tilting it, poured its contents into a deep clay bowl. The borsch was hearty and thick. The girl silently placed the fragrant soup in front of Ozarski, while with the other hand she gave him a tin spoon from a cabinet. As she did this, she leaned over so close to him, that one of her breasts, hanging out freely from her blouse, brushed his cheek. The engineer trembled. The breast was firm and young.
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