Reymont’s personal and literary meetings with Lodz

Abstract

The article discusses Reymont’s relationship with Lodz. His attitude towards this city was initially ambivalent. The momentary fascination with the element of the city’s spectacular development quickly turned into undisguised reluctance demonstrated in self-documentaries and artistic works.

Through a thorough analysis of Reymont’s texts from Lodz: The Promised Land and later novellas, as well as diary entries and correspondence, we extract symptoms showing the writer’s revulsion towards urban and industrial spaces and try to demonstrate that this attitude was probably due to Reymont’s character and his attachment to nature.

Reymont’s first encounter with Lodz was a school failure and his subsequent encounter with secret meetings with his lover did not leave him with good memories. They were strengthened by the anti-aestheticism of the city and the social relations prevailing in Lodz, where Reymont lived in 1896, when he was preparing to write The Promised Land. In this novel, he showed Lodz as an “evil city”, marked with figures of a labyrinth, abyss, hell, and factories as monsters lurking in wait for people. When he recognized Lodz as a place unfriendly to man, a hotbed of demoralization and decay, he continued to criticize this space in subsequent works, escalating negative emotions (One Day, Cemetery).