90
PARTISAN REVIEW
1957::'·58, but not without s'ome profoundly bizarre twists, affecting
pirticularly the
Diary .
The
chief of these is that soon after 1958, and
especially after the political attacks on Gombrowicz in the official
media in the mid-1960s, his books were to all practical purposes
panned in Poland. After the writer's death, the ban was partly lifted,
bu't at the same time Gombrowicz's last will
~ent
into effect, a provi–
s12m of which specified that his work not be published in Poland
tihless reprinted in its entirety. Since the authorities had objections
to
a couple of passages in the
Diary
dealing with the Soviet Union
and communism, and Rita Gombrowicz was steadfast in abiding by
her husband's will, an insane situation resulted and lasted for seven–
teen years: Gombrowicz's work was widely read in its smuggled-in
Paris editions or underground reprints, critical books on him were
published, and his plays were even staged in Polish .theaters, but
none of his books could be officially reprinted or bought in a book–
store. In 1986 the regime finally yielded, and a state-owned publish–
ing house repri:nted Gombrowicz's works but, as a breach of the
agreemen.t r'eache<:l. earlier witli the writer's
widow~
the
Diary
ap–
peared in expurg'ated form.
.
The lunacy of
Polaria~s
'c'ensors aside, this was, in fact, a fitting
development in the posthumous career of the work that no orthodox
and rigid mind could have ever accepted
in
toto.
Not that the
Diary
is
an anticommunist manifesto: Gombrowicz's thought was too all–
encompassing to be preoccupied solely with politics, and his critique
of Marxism on the pages of
Volume One,
though devastating, is just
one particular application of his more general method. Regardless of
what domain of existence he deals with, the same System with the
same fundamental notions and antinomies underlies his vision of the
human world.
The basic premise of Gombrowicz's thought is his obsessive
awareness of man's solitude and helplessness in confrontation with
the powerful pressure of culture - if we are to understand "culture"
in a Freudian sense, as a collective superego that stifles the authentic
impUlses of the human self. Accordingly, th@ thief antinomy that
underpins Gombrowicz's philosophical and literary system is the in–
effaceable, ubiquitous conflict between the solitary individual and
the others, the rest ofthe human world, in particular-all of society's
petrified rituals, customs, stereotypes, or institutionalized relation–
ships. The individual's natural need is to remain free , independent,
spontaneous , unique , whereas the very presence of others crams him
