Masters of the Joke: Literary Hoaxes by Polish Writers

mistyfikacja koprowicz jacek.jpg, default, Maciej Stuhr in ‘Mistyfikacja’, directed by Jacek Koprowicz, 2010, photo: Agnieszka Balicka / Syrena Films

#language & literature

Among lovers of fiction, the expression ‘literary hoax’ is most often associated with the fictional poet Cherubina de Gabriak, who became the cause of a famous scandal during the Silver Age in Russia, or with the French writer Romain Gary, who, thanks to the pseudonym Emil Ajar, managed to win the Goncourt prize twice. In the history of Polish literature, there was no shortage of jokesters who were able to make fun of respected readers and sophisticated critics.

Gałczyński aka Morris Gordon Cheats

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Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński, photo: Ilustrowany Kurier Codzienny – Archiwum ilustracji / National Digital Archive

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Константы Ильдефонс Галчинский, фото: Иллюстрированный концерн Kurier Codzienny — Архив иллюстрации / Национальный цифровой архив

Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński, a great prankster, mocker and drunkard, was distinguished in his youth by his love of pranks and mystifications. When he met an elderly carouser in a beer hall, he took him to his friend’s house and passed him off as his father all evening. ‘I felt nauseous and empty all day, my head was ringing’ – that’s how he explained his act years later. “[…] I had no metaphor to express what surrounds us. I wanted to escape from harsh reality’. Considering Gałczyński’s extremely difficult relationship with his father, this joke had a bitter aftertaste.

It is no wonder that in his childhood Gałczyński dreamed of becoming a magician, and later he became friends with famous Warsaw conjurors. One of his ‘tricks’ entered literary history. While studying English philology at the University of Warsaw, Gałczyński presented an extensive paper on the life and work of a 15th-century Scottish poet named Morris Gordon Cheats at a meeting of the Literary Circle. It was a brilliant work containing a detailed biography of the poet, an analysis of his work taking the era’s historical and cultural background into account, abundant quotations from the Scottish author’s poems and ballads, and a solid bibliography. It is no wonder that he received a high grade for it, and everything would have been fine if it had not turned out that Morris Gordon Cheats never existed and that his biography and creative output were created by Gałczyński himself, who skilfully stylised the works after medieval English poetry.

The fraud was not immediately detected, although Gałczyński left quite a clear clue in the name of his hero: coined from the verb ‘to cheat’. A scandal broke out, and the chairman of the literary association, Aleksander Maliszewski, had to explain himself to the professor who was the group’s supervisor. Fortunately, as Maliszewski recalled, ‘the professor was not without a sense of humour’, so Gałczyński got away with his intellectual bravado.

Black poetry anthology ‘Niam Niam’

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Polish & Croatian writers in U Fukiera wine bar, Warsaw, 1930, photo: www.audiovis.nac.gov.pl (NAC)

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Exotic lands far from European capitals have always been a perfect setting for literary hoaxes. A textbook example is Prosper Mérimée’s book La Guzla, or a Selection of Illyrian Poetry (1827). The French classical writer passed off his own works as translations of Balkan folk songs. He managed to deceive Pushkin himself, who, inspired by them, created Songs of the Western Slavs. Talented followers of Mérimée turned up in interwar Poland: the poets Edward Kozikowski and Emil Zegadłowicz (the future author of the scandalous novel Zmory [Nightmares]) published the book Niam niam. Antologia poezji murzyńskiej (Yum Yum: Anthology of Black Poetry) in 1923.

Thumbnail — ‘Niam niam’, anthology of Black poetry, cover

On the cover, Kozikowski and Zegadłowicz were listed as editors and translators of the anthology, although in fact they created all this ‘Black poetry’ themselves over a bottle of wine. The edition was provided with an extensive quasi-scientific introduction containing disquisitions about the poetry of Central Africa and especially about the ritual poems and songs of the cannibal Niam-niam tribe, which constituted the bulk of the anthology. The book itself, in a thick brown cover with the inscription ‘Niam-Niam’ on it, evoked associations with a restaurant menu, and inside you could find, for example, the following verses:

I endures as long as my enemy endures –

I am elephant – a gecko he is –

I has drums from his skin

I plays on his bones

I beats the drum and howls –

he will die and I survives

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Emil Zegadłowicz, his apartment, Gorzeń Górny, photo: Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe

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This literary provocation was a huge success. Not only readers but also critics were fooled. Zegadłowicz and Kozikowski sent the book to the editors of leading literary and scientific journals, as well as to professors at most universities. Soon they began to receive letters of appreciation in which eminent scholars not only did not question the authenticity of this ‘Black poetry’ but also praised the translations for their faithfulness to… the originals (which, of course, no one had ever seen, as they never existed). Even the outstanding Polish literary historian Juliusz Kleiner took the bait. He wrote, ‘Indeed, the genuine though wild and barbaric breath of the primitive is what gives the “Black Anthology” its strange charm’.

Only Tadeusz Sinko, a famous philologist, questioned the originality of the anthology. ‘How do they know African dialects?’ – he wondered in the column ‘Murzyn pod Giewontem’ (Black Man from Giewont Mountain). – ‘It is certainly a hoax by Zegadłowicz and Kozikowski, who want to mock the negromania of the futurists’. But no one listened to the sceptic. There was even a discussion evening at the Polish Art Club in Warsaw, during which poems from Niam niam were recited and the issue of exoticism in art was discussed. Zegadłowicz admitted to the joke only years later, and the anthology Niam niam became a symbol of human gullibility.

Polish guest appearances of ‘Ruslan & Lyudmila’

Where is the line between hoax and plagiarism? Such a question may intrigue readers of the wonderful book Bajarz polski, czyli zbiór baśni, powieści i gawęd ludowych (Polish Storyteller, or a Collection of Fables, Novels and Folk-Tales), which was published in 1853 and has since been reprinted many times, enjoying great popularity in the country. The book was written by Antoni Józef Gliński, a self-taught writer from a peasant family who managed to ‘make something of himself’ thanks to his great determination and love of books. He lived in Vilnius, earned money by translating (he translated, among other works, Krylov’s fables into Polish), but his main passion was folklore. Bajarz polski, a four-volume collection of fables, stories and folk-tales prepared in a literary manner by the author, brought him great success and was translated into many European languages. However, insightful critics quickly discovered that many of Gliński’s fables had nothing to do with Polish folklore.

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‘Portrait of Pushkin’ by Orest Kiprensky, 1827, photo: Tretyakov Gallery

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It turned out that the writer was inspired not only by native folklore. Gliński, under the title ‘Polish fairytales’, published prose adaptations of Vasily Zhukovsky’s ballads, most of which were translations of poems by German and English Romantic poets Schiller, Southey, Uhland and Scott. Gliński did the same with Pushkin’s fairytales, for example ‘The Fairytale of the Fisherman and the Fish’. Bajarz polski opens with a detailed paraphrase of the poem ‘Ruslan and Lyudmila’ (of course, without pointing to the original). Gliński’s work is, of course, titled differently (‘Baśń o uśpionej królewnie, karle siłobrodzie i o głowie wielkoluda’ [The Fable of the Slumbering Queen, the Dwarf Strongbeard and the Giant’s Head]), and the characters have different names (Ruslan was transformed into Prince Dobrotko, Lyudmila into Pięknotka). However, everything else – the kidnapping of the bride from her marital bed, the insidious sorcerer with a beard that holds his magical power, the head of a giant in the wasteland with which the hero fights and other adventures of the protagonists – were all taken straight from the pages of ‘Ruslan and Lyudmila’. Motifs taken from popular folklore are indeed called ‘wandering’, but the appropriateness of such unceremonious borrowings is to this day the subject of disputes among literary scholars.

Mickiewicz & ants

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Grażyna Szapołowska & Michał Żebrowski in ‘Pan Tadeusz’, directed by Andrzej Wajda, photo: Mirek Noworyta / Agencja SE / East News

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Most Polish literary hoaxes are, of course, associated with the name of Adam Mickiewicz. The most scandalous of them is a ‘fragment’ of the famous poem Pan Tadeusz, published under his name many years after the poet’s death. The text was titled ‘Spotkanie się pana Tadeusza z Telimeną w Świątyni Dumania i zgoda ułatwiona za pośrednictwem mrówek’ (Master Thaddeus’s Encounter with Telimena in the Temple of Musing and the Consent Facilitated by the Mediation of Ants’ and told how the femme fatale Telimena accidentally sat on an anthill in the park, and when the ants started to bite her, Master Thaddeus rushed to her aid and gallantly assisted the lady in removing the cruel insects from her gown and stockings. Then the following events transpired:

Throwing aside the ruffles in one bold flow.

Like a wedge when it’s struck from above with a blow,

Master Thaddeus sped, barely moving his arms

Into the skirts that hid Telimena’s charms;

And feeling her breasts rising up like waves,

The passionate vision boils the young blood in his veins;

He does not retreat, but hies forward unfazed

To a place one might designate as ecstasy’s craze.

Like a mare when her rider puts spur to her sides

Not heeding deterrents blindly forward he strides

And so Telimena, as if in a spur-stung dance

Threw her body ahead and her lily-white hands

She wrapped around young Thaddeus’s neck.

[trans. MP and Dobrochna Fire]

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‘Portrait Adama Mickiewicza na Judahu skale’ by Walenty Wańkowicz, 1828, photo: Piotr Ligier / Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie

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Walenty Wańkowicz, Portrait of Adam Mickiewicz at Judahu Cliff, 1828, Photo: Piotr Ligier / National Museum in Warsaw

Some writers and critics recognized the style of the great romantic in the published fragment, concluding that Mickiewicz wrote it for fun and therefore did not include it in the main text of ‘Pan Tadeusz’. Others, not wanting to make the leading Polish poet famous as a pornographer, speculated who the real author of the scandalous text might be. Suspicions fell on the poet and playwright Aleksander Fredro, after which frivolous poems about Telimena and ants were published under his name. Fredro was already dead at that time and could not deny anything. Later, the ‘Encounter’ was attributed to the satirist Władysław Buchner, editor of the satirical magazine Mucha (The Fly), which was published in Warsaw at the beginning of the last century. However, the most likely creator of this funny apocryphal work is Buchner’s friend the poet and satirist Antoni Orłowski, who wrote under the pseudonym Krogulec. There was a campaign against him in the press for slandering the good name of the ‘poet-prophet’, which was definitely an exaggeration. Mickiewicz, despite all his seriousness, also wrote extremely frivolous texts.

Unrecognized Słowacki

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‘Ojciec zadżumionych’ by Juliusz Słowacki, fragment of cover, Kraków, 1909, photo: Biblioteka Narodowa, Polona

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The tradition of ‘crediting’ the classics has existed for a long time. Juliusz Słowacki’s work already gave rise to several interesting pastiches and ‘fanfics’ (a word derived from fan fiction). Take, for example, the continuation of Słowacki’s unfinished poem ‘Król-Duch’ (Spirit King), written by the literary critic and publicist Stanisław Tarnowski in the 1850s. At the beginning of the past century, the critic Wilhelm Feldman almost lost his position as editor-in-chief of the magazine Ilustracja Polska (Polish Illustration) for making a joke about Słowacki’s work. A certain W. St. sent him Słowacki’s work ‘Ostatnie reminiscencje. Do Laury’ (Final Reminisces: To Laura), passing it off as his own and asking for an evaluation. The editor replied irritably that the poem belongs in the trash, which caused quite a scandal.

The mysterious ‘Eleonora’

Symbolist poets were great fantasists and lovers of mystifications. One could come across the most bizarre masks at the endless carnival balls of the era of decadence. Two books were published in 1895 in Kraków by the ‘fake’, as we would say today, Wydawnictwo Dekadentów Polskich (Polish Decadents Publishers): the poem Eleonora. Trójhymn duchów smętnych Fosforycznego Skalderonona (Eleonora: Three-Part Hymn of Cheerless Spirits by the Phosphorescent Skalderon) and the volume Jęk Ziemi. Pantologia Dekadentów Polskich (The Groan of the Earth: Panthology of Polish Decadents), which contained poems and stories collected by a certain Julian Pogorzelski. Using both pseudonyms was a group of pranksters, in which the lead was taken by the poets Kazimierz Przerwa-Tetmajer and Adam Krasiński. The books were a brilliant parody of the style of the Polish decadents of that time, representatives of the Young Poland movement. Decadentism in Eleonora reached a high degree of intensity:

On the bronze tremor of sounds the pale-yellow night fell

And power grew from the cold spirits of degeneration’s hell

The ties of mysterious dreams by a prisoner’s trembling hand were rent

As the purple glow of naked bodies was unveiled by the dark moon’s ascent

[trans. MP and DF]

Kazimierz Przerwa-Tetmajer, photo: nac.gov.pl

The ‘panthology’ also included prose poems, such as ‘Rozmowa przy haszyszu’ (Conversation Over Hashish), in the style of Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen. Critics initially took both books very seriously, writing about the influence of Balmont and the French poets maudits. However, as we know, you can recognize a master by his craft. Henryk Sienkiewicz was the first to recognize the hand of a professional in Eleonora and raised accurate suspicions pointing to Kazimierz Przerwa-Tetmajer. After several decades, Eleonora and The Groan of the Earth have become funny rarities, the delight of collectors. Julian Tuwim, who collected literary mystifications and parodies, carefully stored these books and also wrote a short article about them.

Witkacy: the final mystification

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Still from ‘Mistyfikacja’, directed by Jacek Koprowicz, 2010, photo: Agnieszka Balicka / Syrena Films

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The fame of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz’s mystifications, which was already circulating during his lifetime, also accompanies his posthumous existence. Witkacy committed suicide on 18 September 1939 upon learning of the Red Army’s attack on Poland. It seems that it would be difficult to imagine a more expressive ending. So why did the special services of socialist Poland search for the living writer in the 1960s?

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Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz with friends, Zakopane, 1932, photo: from collection of Ewa Frańczak & Stefan Okowicz

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Witkacy had a soft spot not only for the female sex, drugs and alcohol but also for phantasmagorical jokes. The artist repeatedly marked letters and postcards with dates far into the future. Then he would pass the card to one of his friends and ask for it to be sent to the recipient exactly on the given date. Therefore, Witkacy’s widow, Czesława Oknińska-Korzeniowska, received correspondence from him in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Moreover, she was not the only person who received news from the artist. In 1957, Zuzanna Zarotyńska, one of the writer's many friends, received a postcard with a desperate appeal: ‘Zuzia, help me, I’m at my wit’s end! Your Stach’. The authenticity of the writer’s handwriting was confirmed by a later expert opinion. It is difficult to say today why the Security Service of the Polish People’s Republic found out about the artist’s jokes from beyond the grave. The services probably noticed the strange dating of the correspondence when censoring letters. It is also possible that someone voluntarily brought them a postcard received from Witkacy. Then the security service, convinced that the writer was alive, initiated an investigation into finding him. Witkacy could not be found, but this story left a mark on Polish culture – in 2010, director Jacek Koprowicz made a surprising film, Mistyfikacja (Mystification) based on this legend; in it, the surviving Witkiewicz was played by the brilliant Jerzy Stuhr.

Stanisław Lem in a perfect vacuum

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Stanisław Lem, photo: Wojciech Druszcz / Reporter / East News

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The great mystifier and visionary Stanisław Lem had much more original and profound literary ideas than he had time to implement. Perhaps this was the reason for the creation of the book A Perfect Vacuum (Doskonała próżnia, 1971), the content of which consists of reviews of made-up books by non-existent authors. It is more than just an anti-novel; it is a collection of extremely fascinating, unrealized literary ideas, each of which could easily become a global bestseller. The list of reviews included, among others, a novel describing its own creation (‘Toi’ [You]); a literary ‘constructor’ thanks to which readers can freely distort masterpieces of world literature by using fragments of famous novels cut into strips (‘Do Yourself a Book’); a cruel story about a mentally disabled child whose parents treat him like a genius, thanks to which he actually begins to show the features of a genius (‘Idiota’ [The Idiot]); as well as a fictitious speech given by an imaginary Nobel Prize winner (‘Nowa Kosmogonia’ [New Cosmogony]), and many others.

Lem continued this fun in his next work, Imaginary Magnitude (Wielkość urojona, 1973), in which he collected all his prefaces to non-existent books. He wrote both A Perfect Vacuum and Imaginary Magnitude so convincingly that it is difficult to doubt the existence of all these works. Why did he want to mess with the minds of readers? Under the cover of an elegant literary joke, there is of course the truth about upcoming trends in world literature and human thought in general. But it can be assumed that Lem’s real goal was completely different: the writer is expanding the boundaries of the known world and giving us a truly royal gift of sharing an extremely original, artistic model of the universe.

Jerzy Falkowski’s dangerous games

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Meeting of Polish PEN Club, presentation of Bronisław Zieliński Award, Warsaw, 1960, photo: Andrzej Szypowski / East News

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Jerzy Falkowski, journalist, critic and writer, is one of the most outstanding representatives of the Polish bohemia of the 1960s – a hooligan and a hoaxer, remembered today only by theatre experts. He wrote a lot about the Polish theatre of that time, although it is not known what attracted more attention: his great theatre reviews or his inventive, sometimes cruel jokes and drunken escapades. Falkowski was able to fall asleep in a refrigerator, go to a meeting with his fiancée’s parents wearing shoes without soles, throw a plate of pasta at a communist party luminary, call several famous writers at night and, pretending to be Jerzy Andrzejewski, set them against one another. His main mystification concerning the Polish poetry of those years remains one of the most mysterious puzzles in Polish literature to this day.

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Agnieszka Osiecka & Jarosław Abramow-Newerly, 1963, photo: Sławek Biegański / Forum

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Agnieszka Osiecka i Jarosław Abramow-Newerly, 1963, fot. Sławek Bieganski / Forum

Falkowski was a master of literary parody and often – usually in a bar over a glass of vodka – entertained his friends, famous Warsaw poets, with poetic improvisations, masterfully imitating the style and characteristic literary devices of his fellow guests. Once, for laughs, one of them published a parody by Falkowski under his own name. No one noticed this change and soon Falkowski gained additional income by starting to write poems for money for certain respected poets, concealing his authorship, and they paid him 500zł per poem. Some people used Falkowski’s services for exciting literary fun, while others he relieved in moments of creative crisis… The game was risky, so when the forty-year-old Falkowski died in 1970 (to which his turbulent lifestyle contributed), some living classicists became seriously concerned whether their dead ‘co-author’ may have left an archive with copies of the poems written at their request. Such an archive was not found, but many years later it became clear that just before his death Falkowski had a platonic intellectual affair with a Warsaw pupil. Like Pygmalion, he wanted to create a subtle aesthete out of this minor Galatea.

He proposed a canon of readings, and in addition, he dictated to her poems by his poet friends, known throughout the country, and asked her to write them down in a special notebook. These were precisely the works that Falkowski wrote for famous colleagues. What happened to this notebook? The student grew up and emigrated to Germany. The notebook, which could become the Polish literary sensation of the century, is still in her possession. But when the author of this text contacted the executor of Falkowski’s will, she firmly refused to comment on the contents of the mysterious manuscript. Well, this is apparently one of those literary mysteries that is as difficult to solve as determining the authorship of The Tale of Igor’s Campaign.

Translated by Michał Abel Pelczar

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