Maurice Nadeau: [1]
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“The ‘testament’ is astonishing, not so much because of its ‘revelations,’ which are deliberately paradoxical or even provocative, than because of the immutable self-confidence which Gombrowicz managed to sustain in the worst situations of his life (a twenty-three year exile in a country where, to begin with, he could not even speak the language) and because of the equally unshakeable confidence he had in his work. He knew it was new, original, unperishable. He was a part of it.
It expressed, as he wrote, his most intimate, most unadulterated and indomitable self in his long struggle with a difficult existence - a struggle to conquer a "form" of his own. His work was his own victory and he his rightly proud of it.” Maurice Nadeau, preface to the English edition of A kindof Testament, London, 1977 |
Witold Gombrowicz as seen by Vladimiro Elvieri, 2004.