Before him, there was no such figure in Polish literature.” Or indeed in any literature, it might be added. It was in a bookshop on Solec that I stumbled upon a 1980 edition of Grabiński’s collected stories in Polish, bound in a sinister blood red, and read the first lines of Artur Hutnikiewicz’s introduction: “A strange writer. These writers could all be situated, for better or worse, within schools and movements of the period, while Grabiński remained stubbornly inexplicable in the Polish literary landscape. Looking a little closer, their concerns seemed somewhat divorced from Grabiński’s.
Throughout any number of halting conversations with kindly booksellers, somewhat bemused by this Englishman asking strange questions, a handful of names had arisen: the mystical poet, Tadeusz Miciński the German- and Polish-language writer of decadence and Satanism, Stanisław Przybyszewski the erudite fantasist, Antoni Lange.
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