Konstanty “Kot” Jeleński :
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“I have received Cosmos, which enthused me […] Cosmos, for me, is one of the most stunning and deepest contemporary books. It is a novel that is truly on a ‘cosmic’ scale: the macrophysics of the constellations and the microphysics of the grass and scraps are opposed to an analogous cosmos in the human being, on the basis of correspondences and references. […] This is the artistic transposition of the entire problem of determinism and non-determinism, the fluctuations of the whole contemporary science.
It’s also one of the first incursions into a domain neglected by Freud: the ‘physical unconscious’, which is the part that relates to the functioning of the entire body in all human activities….” —Letter from Konstanty “Kot” Jeleński to Witold Gombrowicz, June 19, 1965 [Trans. Dubowski] |
Drawing by Mieczysław Gorowski.
Jean-Paul Sartre :
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“There are also novels of another genre, false novels like Gombrowicz’s, that are kinds of infernal machines. Gombrowicz has a very good knowledge of psychoanalysis, of Marxism and other subjects, but he keeps a skeptical attitude towards these subjects. Hence, he makes objects that destroy themselves in their very act of construction—thus creating the model of a novel that can be at once analytic and materialist.”
—Jean-Paul Sartre, “Sartre par Sartre” (“Sartre by Sartre”), Le Nouvel Observateur, #272, January 27, 1970 [Trans. Dubowski] |