The Dark Domain (Dedalus European Classics)

by Stefan Grabiński

Despite their total fantasy, never once touching reality, Wrzesmian’s writings jolted, puzzled and amazed: people never dared to venture past them with just a shrug of the shoulders. Something resided in these short and dense works that riveted the attention and fettered the soul; a powerful suggestion arose from these incisive compendium-like works – written in such a seemingly cold style, as if a reporter’s or a teacher’s – under which pulsated the fervour of a fanatic. For Wrzesmian had believed in what he had been writing; for he had acquired as time went on the firm conviction that any thought, even the most audacious, that any fiction, even the most insane, can one day materialize and see its fulfilment in space and time. ‘No person thinks in vain; no thought, even the strangest, disappears fruitlessly,’ he used to repeat many times to his circle of friends and acquaintances.

I was happy; I was that former self, full of belief and confidence in the future, infused with the love of goodness and beauty, fascinated by life and its secret wonders. I was at the peak of my emancipation, without a particle of alien matter, with the cleanest ego … .

‘Does the world which encompasses me exist at all? And if it indeed exists, is it not created by thoughts? Maybe everything is only a fiction of some deeply meditating ego? Somewhere out there in the beyond, someone is constantly, from time immemorial, thinking – and the entire world, and with it the poor little human race, is a product of this perpetual reverie.’

Eventually he reduced the doubts which tormented him to this dilemma: Either there is something ‘unusual’ beyond me, something fundamentally different from that reality which I know as a human being – or else there is nothing, a complete emptiness.