The Dark Domain
Contents
Title
Introduction
Fumes
The Motion Demon
The Area
A Tale of the Gravedigger
Szamota’s Mistress
The Wandering Train
Strabismus
Vengeance of the Elementals
In the Compartment
Saturnin Sektor
The Glance
Afterword
The Area – A Contemporary Horror Story?
Copyright
Though he wrote a vast quantity of some of the most original and interesting fantastic and bizarre fiction of the 20th Century, Stefan Grabinski remained during his life-time a generally neglected figure in Poland and, except for two insignificant appearances in Italy, untranslated. His greatest successes occurred between the years 1918 and 1922, when five collections of his stories were published. This impressive output did little, however, to make Grabinski’s work accepted in a country that didn’t take supernatural fiction seriously. Grabinski did not court critics and the public, and quickly developed a combative stance in regard to criticism of his writings. It is not surprising – and it is most revealing – that in one of his earliest stories, ‘The Area,’ he formulated his fictional counterpart: the dedicated artist who disdains the normal and separates himself from the public while advancing toward a realization of powerful, supernatural forces born of his own imagination. Like the character in this story, Grabinski was an idealistic loner who strove for an understanding of the hidden forces of both the world and the human mind, and whose creative integrity depended upon representing those forces in the most potent framework available – in Grabinski’s case, supernatural fiction.
Grabinski was born in Kamionka Strumilowa, a town near Lwow, on February 26, 1887. The son of a district judge, he suffered from ill-health and developed tuberculosis of the bone at an early age. His sickly nature, coupled with a dreamy, introspective disposition, undoubtedly led to his involvement with fantastic fiction. In 1909 he self-published a small volume of macabre writings that disappeared as most self-published efforts do. Forced by necessity, he became a teacher in secondary school, but his literary aspirations did not abate. He continued writing and, after the disruption of the First World War, made his ‘official debut’ in 1918 with the six-story collection On the Hill of Roses. This volume – which included the Grabinski classic, ‘Strabismus’ – drew some fine reviews. Most impressed was Karol Irzykowski, an important critic and an author of innovative avant-garde fiction. Irzykowski, already familiar with a couple of Grabinski’s stories that had appeared in the respected journal Maski, proclaimed the author as strikingly original, someone who exhibited a keen intelligence and a masterful style – an extraordinary phenomenon in a country whose writers generally remained, because of the country’s tragic history, concerned with ‘Polish issues.’
Indeed, nowhere in Polish literature, before or since, has there been an author who excelled in supernatural fiction as Grabinski did and who devoted himself so singularly to that one genre.
While Grabinski proved he could write a straightforward chiller like ‘A Tale of the Gravedigger,’ most of his best work is open to multi-layered interpretation and involves a compendium of influences, both old and new, as it presents a coherent Grabinski-esque world view. A vigorous opponent of mechanism and determinism, he integrated the concepts of such ancient philosophers as Heraclitus and Plato with the contemporary philosophies of Henri Bergson and Maurice Maeterlinck in his battle against a modern world where man’s primordial sense of self and nature was being erased by machine, restrictive systems and people of little vision.
Bergson was a particularly important influence. Grabinski used his theory of durational time to splendid effect in ‘Saturnin Sektor.’ But it was Bergson’s concept of élan vital - that spiritual force, or energy, that underlies reality and influences matter – which struck the deepest cord in Grabinski. He merged this ‘vital force’ with theories of motion, advanced by scientists like Newton and Einstein, in a group of train stories, collected under the title The Motion Demon in 1919.
Undoubtedly because of the importance of train travel, The Motion Demon collection found the warmest reception of all of Grabinski’s books in Poland. It is easy to picture a train traveller reading with fascination and unease these tales of maverick railwaymen, insane passengers and mysterious trains. But Grabinski was not merely interested in entertaining the populace. The train world provided Grabinski with a perfect symbol for Bergson’s élan vital. Here was a forward-moving force, powerful, direct, one that could be felt under one’s feet and in the motions of the car, a force that could easily represent the hidden force of life; here was a milieu that every person of those times could understand. The train world was a direct conduit to the primary issues of Grabinski’s own anti-authoritarian, anti-materialistic world view.
Grabinski certainly did not shy away from another of life’s integral ‘forces’ – sex. While matters sexual were being investigated in the psychoanalytic debates of the day, Grabinski used his fiction to reveal, with frank boldness, the dark forces of the libido in such tales as ‘Fumes,’ ‘Szamota’s Mistress’ and ‘In the Compartment.’ In a couple of these tales Grabinski anticipated the issue of gender identity, so topical nowadays. Several of his train stories end with obvious orgiastic explosions, and ‘Szamota’s Mistress’ may be, on one level, a unique tale of masturbation-induced frenzy.
Atypically for one raised in a non-Western culture, Grabinski tended to stay away from using the rich Polish folklore tradition available to him. In this sense, his eyes were turned toward the West rather than the East; he took a modern approach to fantastic literature. When he did borrow supernatural entities for his fiction, they were known to the folklore of all European cultures. Yet even these entities became distinctly Grabinski-esque. In ‘Vengeance of the Elementals’ he used those malicious beings that influence and hover around the elements (in this case, fire elementals), and made them combatants in his own philosophical fight – besides giving them some amusing, and highly original, names. (Fire, of course, represented another basic ‘force’ that modern man was naively becoming less aware of and, hence, concerned about; which is why Grabinski also wrote of series of ‘fire stories,’ collected in The Book of Fire in 1922.)
All of Grabinski’s innovative tales were examples of a particular type of fantasy, which he proposed calling ‘psychofantasy’ or ‘metafantasy.’ As opposed to straightforward, conventional fantasy that displayed the outward and the ornamental, this type of fantasy employed as its basis psychological, philosophical or metaphysical concerns. The author, in effect, was a studious magus who would uncover the hidden, and maybe not explain ‘the dark domain,’ for that was something the mind could never do, but acknowledge its presence and treat it with psychic respect.
When Grabinski began to abandon, for the most part, the short story format around 1922 and turn to novel writing, his self-motivated calling as a serious investigator of the unknown flowered into mysticism, a circumstance that doomed his work in the eyes of the critics. Grabinski began taking far less of an intellectual stance in his writings, and his wicked humour, evident in many of his short stories, lessened and ultimately disappeared.
Not unexpectedly, his novels were not well received by the public. Grabinski, however, stayed his course and did not abandon the literature he felt could convey life as he saw it.
Yet his body would not let him wage his literary battle with full physical strength.
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