On 1 September 1939 Germany invaded Poland. It’s hardly an event which needs its significance re-stating, but there was one outcome which has received rather less attention than the impending crisis in Europe. After the first instalments – serialised in newspapers in the summer of that year – a bizarre, flamboyant, mock-gothic novel by an unknown writer, ‘Z. Niewieski’, was forced to cease publication on 3 September.
Witold Gombrowicz, the author of The Possessed and master of Polish modernism, had penned the work under a pseudonym, and, he claimed, only for money. If that distance from the book weren’t enough, he then put an ocean between himself and the manuscript. At the end of July, just as tensions were mounting in Europe, he made the journey from Poland to Buenos Aires. He remained in Argentina until 1963 and never returned home. It wasn’t until a few days before his death in 1969, lying on his sickbed in the south of France, that he admitted to writing The Possessed – his third book, after his 1933 stories Memoirs from the Time of Immaturity and his more famous 1937 novel Ferdydurke.
The publication history of The Possessed already has all the mystery of an underground cult classic, with its fate bound up with 20th-century history and an author who attempted to disown it until the moment of his death.
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