Should I talk about my life in connection with my work? I know neither my life nor my work. I trail the past behind me like the misty tail of a comet, so, as far as my work is concerned, there is not much I can say.

 Darkness and magic.

 You see, I have to apologize in advance. In these somewhat hasty communications I shall be unable to avoid some rather powerful words—like magic. Or darkness. I once read the memoirs of a mountaineer. He described climbing a very high and difficult mountain. Well, this description was completely distorted by the fact that the author, feeling obliged to sacrifice himself to the modesty of a sportsman, wrote: ‘My left foot slipped and for ten seconds I was suspended over the chasm, until my right foot encountered a spur of rock.’ Professional modesty prevented him from conveying the immensity of the chasm, the immensity of his efforts and of his fear.

 In order to reassure you I shall add that in my life and work, drama and anti-drama intermingle until they are indistinguishable, just as big words are counterblanced by little ones.

 Let me start with my family. It is by no means unimportant. I come from a noble family which, for some four hundred years, owned estates in Lithuania, not far from Wilno and Kovno. On account of the property it possessed, the offices it held, and the marriages it contracted, my family was slightly above the average run of Polish nobility, though it never formed part of the Aristocracy. Although I was not a count, a certain number of my aunts were countesses, but even these countesses were not of the first water—they were just so so.

 In 1863 the Czar of Russia confiscated the property of my grandfather, Onufry Gombrowicz, falsely accused of having participated in the Polish uprising. With what remained of his money my grandfather purchased a small estate two hundred kilometres south of Warsaw. His son, my father, Jan, married the well-endowed daughter of Ignacy Kotkowski, the owner of the Bodzechow estate, and bought Maloszyce, where I was born.

 My father was not only a landowner, he was also an industrialist. He started off at Bodzechow as manager of a paper mill which belonged to my grandfather Kotkowski, and was then given other jobs in the management of some larger factories.

 So, in that Proustian epoch at the beginning of the century, we were a displaced family whose social status was far from clear, living between Lithuania and the former Congress Kingdom of Poland, between land and industry, between what is known as ‘good society’ and another, more middle-class society. These were the first ‘betweens’, which subsequently multiplied until they almost constituted my country of residence, my true home.

 My father? Handsome, tall, distinguished, very proper, punctual, methodical, not very broad-minded or artistic, a practising Catholic, but no bigot. My mother, on the other hand, was extremely vivacious, sensitive, imaginative, lazy, indolent, nervous, almost too nervous, riddled with complexes, phobias, illusions. (The Kotkowski family had numerous mental diseases. When I stayed with my grandmother in the country I was almost frightened out of my wits: the large, low house was divided into two parts, one inhabited by my grandmother, the other by her son, my mother’s brother, an incurable lunatic who paced the empty rooms at night, trying to overcome his terror by strange monologues which gradually turned into curious chants and ended in inhuman screams. That lasted all night. The atmosphere was pervaded by insanity.)

 I am an artist because of my mother. I inherited my father’s lucidity, his level-headedness, and his sense of discipline. But my mother also had an extremely irritating characteristic—yes, she was one of those people who are incapable of seeing themselves as they are. Worse still—she firmly believed herself to be the very opposite of what she was—and that had something provocative about it.

 By nature she was, as I said, lazy and bereft of any practical sense. However, in those Proustian days, there was a quantity of servants; the French governess looked after the children and my mother simply gave orders to the cook, the maid, or the gardener. But that didn’t stop her saying that she had ‘the whole household on her hands’, that work was ‘ennobling’, that ‘the garden at Maloszyce is all my own work’, and ‘fortunately, I have a practical mind’.

 ‘In my spare moments I like to read Spencer and Fichte’, she would say in all sincerity, although the works of these philosophers occupied the lower shelves of the library, their uncut pages gleaming.