Ferdydurke. Editorial Sudamericana. Buenos Aires. 1964.

Quarto (13 cm x 20 cm), 260 pp., (Includes Half-title, Title page, this one with the owner's signature and date), 1 sheet. Paperback publisher binding. Good copy, which belonged to the journalist and editor Ramiro de Casasbellas.

Gombrowicz's first novel, published in 1937, with which he gained notoriety -among admirers and detractors- for the decided criticism of the nationalist part of Warsaw society. In the acid satirization of the school, the bourgeoisie and the landed nobility, Gombrowicz develops the themes that will cross all of his literature: immaturity and youth, appearances, nationalisms. In 1967 this novel earned him the prestigious International Editors Award, of Formentor, Mallorca.

Witold Gombrowicz (Małoszyce, Poland, 1904 - Vence, France, 1969), novelist and playwright, was in our country invited as a Polish writer, when the Second World War began. He later wrote in his diary: “I went to Argentina by pure chance, only for two weeks, and if by chance of fate the war had not broken out during those two weeks, I would have returned to Poland, although I will not hide that when the die was cast and Argentina slammed down on me, it was as if I was finally hearing myself”. He stayed in our country for twenty-four years.

Despite his short work, Gombrowicz is one of the most important avant-garde writers of the century. Corrosive and tragicomic, he was very critical of the alienation of the individual and his freedoms before the onslaught of nationalism, precisely in the framework of a world -and particularly his native Poland- that succumbed to German national socialism. The poet Jorge Di Paola wrote about Gombrowicz: “This perpetual, involuntary exile, perhaps exiled from all conventional ideas and aesthetics, has in Argentina the fate of those who do not send the part. Revered by almost the entire post-Borgean generation, from Ricardo Piglia, through Germán García and Fogwill to Juan José Saer, and many more, his books are hardly found in any bookstore (...)”, and in turn Juan José Saer wrote: “Piglia says that Gombrowicz is the best Argentine writer of the 20th century. It is undoubtedly an ironic exaggeration intended to test Argentine nationalism, but it is not totally inaccurate; the Witoldian theme par excellence, immaturity, the incompleteness that he attributed to Polish culture had been, since the 1920s, unequivocally the concern of Argentine intellectuals”.

S.O.H-X-SM