“Their Astounding Strength in Overcoming Their Past…”

Andrzej Stanisław Kowalczyk’s article discusses Gombrowicz’s position toward totalitarian ideologies. In the late 1930s, the subject of Italian fascism and German Nazism appeared several times in Gombrowicz’s works. Further, different versions of the same events appear in different works written in different periods of his life. Thus, for example, reactions to fascism and Nazism are described differently in articles published in the late 1930s in the journal Czas; in Polish Memories, written in Argentina in the late 1950s; and A Kind of Testament, written in France in 1968. In his article, after an examination of Gombrowicz’s diverse reactions to fascism throughout his work, Kowalczyk focuses on the memories of Nazism in Gombrowicz’s Berlin Diary, juxtaposing the author’s own memories to those of the Berliners and that of the Poles.