Troublesome (?) Beginnings: Władysław Stanisław Reymont in Warsaw (1894–1895)

Abstract

The years 1894–1895, after he had left the railway and begun working with Warsaw magazines, were considered by Reymont to be the most difficult, even a period of hardship and suffering. He wrote about it in his autobiographies and spoke about it during interviews. These “bitter regrets” mentioned by the writer are the source of his biography functioning in literary studies as a reservoir of facts. However, an analysis of this period through the exploration and comparison of ego-documents (letters to and from Reymont, his diary notes) as well as the memories of other people shows its different shape, not as drastic as the writer assessed. This article undertakes such an analysis as well as an attempt to indicate a group of people that the writer met in Warsaw during these years, on whom he depended and with whom he entered into social arrangements. The example of Reymont’s relationship with the artist Józef Holewiński, and especially with one of his daughters, Cecylia later Zawistowska, reveals the writer’s constant behaviour, usually triggered by emotionality, which influenced social faux pas. This is another verification article, the result of renewed biographical research, exposing the enormous neglect and falsifications in the area of Reymontology in terms of both factual information and the interpretation of Reymont’s auto-narratives. This problem is significant not only in biography studies, but also in the study of Reymont’s work, so strongly and en masse connected with his experiences. Without distilling authentic biographical content, separating fantasies from confirmed events, the interpretation of Reymont’s work will be – if not wrong – at least incomplete.