Reymont in London: A Writer’s Spiritualistic Adventures
Nobel Prize winner Władysław Reymont is one of Poland’s best-known novelists… But did you know he also journeyed across Europe as a medium? Read on to learn about his mysterious experiences in England’s capital city – and how he depicted it in literature.
In July 1894, about two weeks after the completion of London’s iconic Tower Bridge, a train arrived in London from Dover. One of the passengers on this train was the Polish writer Władysław Reymont, who was travelling with Józef Drzewiecki, a homeopathic doctor and new member of the Theosophical Society. They were on their way to the next congress of this mystical association. How did the 27-year-old Reymont find himself headed to this London congress?
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Tower Bridge, London, 1894, photo: Wikimedia Commons
The trip in July 1894 was probably not Reymont’s first spiritualist excursion. He had already become involved in theosophy and occultism several years earlier. On the platform of the railway station where he worked, he had met a man named Puszow, who was a teacher and – as we can read in Reymont’s letters to his brother Franciszek – ‘a talented spiritualist’.
Puszow supposedly noticed Reymont’s extraordinary psychic abilities and invited him into his esoteric world. Was it some kind of cult-like manipulation? It’s difficult to say, but we know for sure that thanks to this accidental encounter, Reymont gained access to a world that was inaccessible to ‘ordinary’ people. In a letter to Franciszek, he describes his first meeting with ‘a spiritualist circle’:
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I enter, the salon is spacious, there are about thirty people in it, they all rise from their seats and welcome me, with their faces set in strange expressions. Mr P. approaches me and, bowing his head, whispers, ‘I greet you’. I’m astonished and say a few words to excuse myself to Mr P., he retreats into the depths of the living room and the whole company passes in front of me, bowing their heads and whispering, ‘I greet you’.
This meeting with a group of spiritualists from Paris, Berlin and Bologna in a house in Częstochowa made a great impression on Reymont. During the mystical meeting, the writer was told that he had been ‘chosen to preach and overcome matter through the spirit’. Beginning to work as a medium gave Reymont an opportunity for learning (as he wrote in his letters, he craved knowledge) – and to have a secure livelihood, for the society of spiritualists promised him subsistence.
Interestingly, reading Reymont’s letters, one can see in his involvement in these practices not so much a deep and genuine interest as a chance to improve his own fate and lift himself out of poverty. However, Reymont wasn’t certain about the decision he was about to make. He wrote to his brother:
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I’m not hallucinating, I’m in my right mind, I’m most acutely aware of everything – and yet when I think of what has happened to me, of the direction my life will take, I fear for myself, I fear that I’ll go completely mad.
After some time, however, he noticed, as he wrote, ‘the naivety of this pseudoscience and its followers’. This is why he turned down Puszow’s invitation to take another big trip together – this time the future Nobel Prize winner was to earn money as a medium in the United States, spreading spiritualistic doctrines among the Polish community.
Although he most likely attended séances from 1888 to 1890 not only in Wrocław and Vienna, but also in London, there is no available information about Reymont’s earlier trips. When it comes to the journey of 1894, the situation is completely different – letters to his brother, prose accounts and London themes in his short stories create a relatively coherent and detailed picture of Reymont’s stay in England’s capital city.
Drzewiecki, who sponsored Reymont’s voyage, was not only a doctor of alternative medicine and a theosophist, but also one of the most famous Polish vegetarians. He was the author of books that were quite trailblazing in Poland, such as Jarstwo Podstawą Nowego Życia w Zdrowiu, Piękności i Szczęściu (Vegetarianism as the Foundation for a New Life of Health, Beauty and Happiness), which has a chapter titled ‘Meat is Poison’. Thus, it’s no surprise that he arranged to stay in a vegetarian hotel at 28 Buckingham Street – a fact about which the future President Stanisław Wojciechowski, who was in London at the time, expressed some regret. ‘We could not offer him the meat he so strongly desired because his companion was taking him only to vegetarian restaurants’, he wrote in his diary.
Before Drzewicki and Reymont reached London, however, they spent two days in Berlin (and the entire route also included other cities, such as Cologne and Brussels). ‘Forty-eight hours of Berlin life is enough to become horribly tired of the city and bored’, wrote Reymont, probably disappointed by Berlin’s slow pace in the month of July. One of the few events he attended was the spectacle of a human zoo – a racist colonial practice, in which people from Dahomey, a former African state that existed in the area of present-day Benin, ‘performed’ in the Panopticum Passage as entertainment for the rich, bourgeois residents of Berlin.
Shortly before arriving in London, Reymont carefully observed the landscape visible through the window. He described the architecture of the city’s outskirts in a sentimental tone (‘there’s no trace of a village even remotely resembling ours, bricks everywhere’). He even criticised the spatial planning there, complaining about the numerous adverts and announcements: ‘People here seem to erect houses, fences and towers just to be able to plaster them with sheets of paper’. It’s not difficult to imagine, however, that the British landscape of the time was far less polluted than contemporary capital cities…
London definitely overwhelmed Reymont. ‘A swarm of people, […] one literally falls into a maelstrom of people and houses’, he wrote in his memoir. His account is rather peculiar – it’s a perceptive, subjective observation full of scepticism and devoid of the typical rapture of a traveller, written in suggestive and impressionistic language. Reymont’s notes from that period bring to mind the journey of another famous writer – the trip taken by Witkacy two decades later, when he accompanied Bronisław Malinowski to Ceylon. That long voyage also failed to soothe the writer’s strained nerves.
It seems that London aggravated Reymont’s already sufficiently neurotic moods. On 14th July, the second day of the Theosophical Society’s congress, Reymont wrote:
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They think I’m gifted, but God, you see my wretchedness, you know what I really am, and I simply don’t believe in myself. Sometimes a fear grips me that I’m incapable of doing anything at all, and I see and feel my own ineptitude, for I’m aware of my ignorance.
There are many such melancholy and even depressive confessions in Reymont’s notes and letters. It would have been difficult, at any rate, to find peace in a city that one perceives as too dynamic, noisy, frenetic and exhausting. ‘London is ugly and sad, but it’s not common’, stated Reymont, who intuitively wandered around the city, overwhelmed by an excess of stimuli. He wandered and observed things, not knowing the language; from his observations, he later constructed a very gloomy portrait of the city (‘People wander around like shadows […]. The smell of rotten fish and decaying wood is aggravating’).
He begins his first letter to his brother as follows: ‘What shall I write to you about this colossal beast of a city? It’s so huge that it defies the imagination’. He tried to organise his time in such a way as to combine an intensive exploration of the vast city with literary work. In his correspondence with his friend Ignacy Noiret, he described his daily schedule in London: ‘I divide my time in such a way that I sleep eight hours, spend 12 hours driving, walking around and sightseeing, and spend four hours writing down my impressions’.
He poured all his energy into experiencing the city. In his writings, London appears ruthless, gloomy, and rushing blindly ahead. He observed not only the architecture, but also the people, the cuisine and the weather (‘it’s simply disgusting; because of the fog and damp, the city is so dark that it looks as if it has been deliberately blackened by soot’). In his short stories, London appears as an urban monster, a place where it is impossible to feel well. On the topic of English cuisine, he wrote that since he had managed to endure it, he was now capable of enduring anything:
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This nation consumes absolutely no salt. The food is so bland and different from ours that one must be sick before becoming accustomed to it. Due to its strangeness, the cuisine here has a bad effect on my battered digestive organs.
The Theosophical Society’s convention in the summer of 1894 was held at Blavatsky Lodge, which had been established seven years earlier. Its co-founder was Helena Blavatsky, one of the world’s most significant figures in occultism and theoreticians of theosophy, and co-founder of the Theosophical Society. The lodge was located in a two-storey house on Avenue Road surrounded by a garden, with a gilded sign above the entrance reading ‘The Theosophical Society’.
Reymont described the hall in which the convention was held as furnished ‘in the style of an Indian temple’. The guests sat in rattan armchairs placed on a thick mat, with a mirror and a portrait of Blavatsky towering over them. The convention was an opportunity to meet people from various countries who had been initiated into theosophy, and from Reymont’s written observations, it seems that half of the guests were women.
The writer and practicing spiritualist focussed in his notes much more on the entourage at the event than on the content of the speeches – most likely he was simply forbidden from reporting on them (after all, Reymont does not hide in his writings the fact that Dr Drzewiecki didn’t permit him to cite his speech). However, he didn’t neglect to describe in detail his meeting with the president of the Theosophical Society, Annie Besant – the successor to Blavatsky, who had been dead for three years:
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A very strange woman. […] Huge hair that’s completely grey, a face that isn’t pale but completely white, without a drop of blood in it, without a single vein running through it. […] She doesn’t look at anyone while she speaks and tilts her head forward, which gives her the impression of being very shy. […] She told us about Blavatsky, about India, about the backwardness of the materialistic doctrine that prevails in Europe and about the obstinacy of credentialled scholars who reject everything they don’t know or understand.
London must have overwhelmed Reymont so much that he didn’t write much more about the actual purpose of his journey across Europe. This was certainly also because of the mysterious aura of these meetings and the ‘information embargo’. However, he fictionalised his spiritualistic experience – including it in the horror novel Wampir (The Vampire), published in 1911, which had earlier been published in instalments under the working title We Mgłach (In the Fogs, in reference to London, of course).
Wampir tells the story of Zenon, a Polish immigrant who arrives in England’s capital city and encounters enthusiasts of spiritualism. Those who know Reymont mainly as the author of The Promised Land and The Peasants might be surprised that he wrote something so stylistically dreadful (pun intended), but it’s a very interesting work of Polish literature. Incidentally, it’s worth adding that another one of Reymont’s lesser-known works is his last novel, Bunt (The Revolt). In its depiction of an animal revolution, it criticises totalitarian ideology – and is sometimes regarded as the prototype of Orwell’s Animal Farm, which was published 20 years later.
Although Wampir resembles the script of a corny horror film, it does a good job of capturing the mystical atmosphere of the fog-shrouded city and the strange events that transpire there. It’s also full of reflections on human existence and the experience of transcendence put into the mouths of its characters:
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Everything is a terrible mystery. All around us lies darkness, where fear and eternal death lurk! There are words that kill, there are names whose sound causes worlds to fall apart, there are wishes that come true without our will, there are thoughts on which the stars’ movement depends!
On this trip to the Theosophical Society’s convention, Reymont spent 10 days in London and then arrived in Paris on 25th July. In the end, London exhausted Reymont. He concluded his notes from this stage of his trip by writing about how tired he was of ‘the hellish city that is London’. Oversaturated with stimuli, he didn’t write in England as much as he would have liked. He was unable to write there. He looked forward to resting in the peaceful Polish countryside.
Originally written in Polish, Feb 2021, translated by Scotia Gilroy, Apr 2021
Sources: ‘Lato 1894 za Granicą’ (Travels Abroad in the Summer of 1894) by W. Reymont (Wrocław, 1948); ‘Medium Piszące’ (The Writing Medium) by M. Warneńska (Łódź 1970); Władysław Reymont by B. Kocówna (Warsaw 1973); ‘Reymont: Opowieść Biograficzna’ (Reymont: A Biographical Tale); ‘Miasto Jako Teatr: Obraz Londynu we Wczesnych Zapiskach Podróżnych Władysława Stanisława Reymonta’ (The City as Theatre: A Portrait of London in the Early Travel Writings of Władysław Stanisław Reymont) by M. Kochanowski; ‘Listy Władysława Stanisława Reymonta do Brata’ (Władysław Stanisław Reymont’s Letters to His Brother) by B. Kocówna, in ‘Pamiętnik Literacki’ 60 (1969); tradycjaezoteryczna.ug.edu.pl.
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