Letters to The Grabinski Reader

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Slawek (TLO member yellowish haze) has been hard at work compiling a new Ligotti Bibliography for the first edition of Ligotti's work to be published in Poland. It is quite comprehensive and a great reference for anyone interested in Ligotti. I look forward to purchasing this volume as soon as it is published. He asked me if I wanted to transcribe and share the letters at TLO that Ligotti wrote to The Grabinski Reader in the late 1980s. He unearthed these in his correspondence with Miroslaw Lipinski, who has translated and brought Stefan Grabinski's stories into the English language. I happily agreed. This first post will be a little background information, and the two subsequent posts will be the letters.

Both Ligotti and Lipinski first came across the name Stefan Grabinski in The Fantasy Book by Franz Rottensteiner (Collier Books, 1978) There was a section on Poland and Polish writers -- two were mentioned: Grabinski and Bruno Schulz.





(The following is taken from an interview with Miroslaw Lipinski in tekeli-li! 4, 1992)

ML: Grabinski's entrance into the English language started with my own journal The Grabinski Reader in 1986 and the two translations therein, "The Area" and "Strabismus." "The Area" ultimately saw print in the Tor paperback Tales by Monnlight II (1989) and became the first English appearance of Grabinski outside the small press. Other translations have appeared in various small press publications. Letters of support have been received from such notables as Robert Bloch, Thomas Ligotti, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Karl Edward Wagner, Colin Wilson, among others. Even the late Milton Subotsky of Amicus Films had responded (Grabinski's House of Horrors?).

Tek: Did you actively seek out the support of J.A. Salmonson and Tom Ligotti?

ML: As far as Salmondson goes, I had seen a letter of hers in Crypt in which she stated how she was hoping to put together an international anthology of horror fiction. I presumed she would be interested, so I sent her the first issue. (I sent various people the first issue, everyone from Stephen King to Christopher Lee.) Jessica was one of the few people who responded. She sent a glowing letter about how much she admired Grabinski's work and how he deserved a larger public.
Other famous people who replied were Robert Bloch, truly a kind man. Karl Edward Wagner, and, later on, Colin Wilson, who claimed Grabinski is as important as Kafka!
As for Ligotti, he sent in for a subscription from Salem, Massachusetts, of all places, which he was visiting. I didn't know anything about him; he was basically unknown at that time and slaving away in the small press. He responded very positively to the first issue and mailed me his short story collection Songs of a Dead Dreamer, in admiration. He sent it book rate and it took three months to reach me - an incredibly long time, even for this class of mail. I'm sure that after a couple of months he didn't know what the hell was happening - he must have assumed that I had gotten it and didn't like it. Of course, when I did receive it and read it, I realized that this was an author who was doing very noteworthy things in the genre, things in opposition to the usual contemporary horror. I immediately dashed off a letter of my admiration. So he was a subscriber.


(The following is an excerpt from "Born to Fear: An Interview with Thomas Ligotti" by Slawomir Wielhorski (2012)

Ligotti recounts:

Like every writer who has ever appealed to me, Grabinski wrote about marginal characters living outside of conventional reality and occupying places pervaded by a dreary atmosphere of doom. I first came to know of Grabinski's existence when I read a few paragraphs describing his work in Franz Rottensteiner's The Fantasy Book. I was utterly tantalized by this glimpse of the works of the so-called Polish Poe. Years later, I learned that Miroslaw Lipinski had embarked on translating Grabinski's work into English when I read an advertisement for The Grabinski Reader in Robert Price's Crypt of Cthulhu. At the time, I happened to be in Salem, Massachusetts, where American Puritans killed some people they thought to be witches, and I immediately wrote to Lipinski on the stationary of the hotel where I was staying. Not long afterward I received the first issue of The Grabinski Reader, which contained "The Area" and "Szamoto's Mistress." These stories were everything I had come to expect from a European author of the morbid and the bizarre whose work, in fact, is indeed reminiscent of Poe's, as is a great deal of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century literature from Europe that developed in the shadow of Baudelaire and his translations of Poe. Both of these men brought out something that I believe had always been latent in European literature - a belief in the legitimacy of presenting repellent subject matter and negative evaluations of life in works of art and literature. By their overwhelming genius, Baudelaire and Poe permitted the writers of the world to speak of the physically and psychologically offensive aspects of being alive. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Europe, where the cautious advancements of Romanticism in each country's literature into the dark regions mushroomed into full-blown obsession with all things degraded and pessimistic in the broadest sense. With few exceptions, America did not provide fertile soil for this mutation, but Europe, which steadily degenerated in so many ways after the fall of Rome and the rise of medieval Gothicism, fully bloomed in the night of history. In Poland, Grabinski was one of its finest flowers of evil. Like Baudelaire and Poe, he took particular advantage of the new liberty to explore the more fantastic fixations of the erotic impulse. If you are an avid fan of the weird and the uncanny, it's probably inevitable that you are not going to be intrigued by natural human affairs. The whole genre of horror, in fact, is only of interest to those who are drawn to the unnatural in all its nuances. In keeping with this tendency nothing is natural in Grabinski's world, and nothing is innocent of a tendency to rot into nightmares of reason. The romanticized view of travel by railway will never breathe again after one has read Grabinski. As with all great horror writers, he saw the poisonous side of things wherever he looked. Moreover, over the span of each of Grabinski's stories, one doubts that there is any other side to be seen in life. And that is the primary task of every great horror writer: to expose the miscreation of this world and everything in it.

	TLO THOMAS LIGOTTI ONLINE

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The Grabinski Reader #2, Spring 1987


Thank you for the speedy response to my request for The Grabinski Reader, and thanks above all for undertaking this project in the first place. Now that I have read "The Area" and "Strabismus," it's clear that all my hopes were justified: Grabinski is obviously a genuine visionary of nightmare beside whom the so-called "masters of the macabre" of present-day" horror appear as just so many imposters. It's also obvious that aside from being an adept translator in the abstract, you have a special and far rarer sensitivity which has enabled you to do justice to the tone and color of Grabinski's imagination.
For your convenience, I've enclosed a copy of a French translation of a Grabinski tale, with all pertinent information from this volume. I'm very much looking forward to future issues of The Grabinski Reader and hope that they will appear as often as possible.


Thomas Ligotti
St. Claire Shores, MI

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The Grabinski Reader #3,Spring 1988


Thank you for The Grabinski Reader #2. I think there may be some who will judge the tales in this installment to be inferior to "The Area" and "Strabismus." My own feeling is that, as much as the stories in the first Grabinski Reader, "Saturnin Sektor" and "Before the Long Journey" effectively convey the essential vision of their author -- and to me this is the supremely important consideration. Once I've been captivated -- as I have with Grabinski -- by an author's obsessions and manner of expressing them, I cease being critical on a superficial level and occupy myself by seeking further signs of that essence which originally held my imagination. And I found that essence in the dreams recounted by the narrator of "Before the Long Journey" and in passages like the following from "Saturnin Sektor": "Distant misty lands unfold before me, enchanting precipices, unknown worlds with gloomy depths. I am visited by files of the dead, processions of strange creatures, and capricious elemental beings. One appears, the other leaves -- ethereal, beautiful, dangerous . . . ."
Given my rather single-minded approach to appreciating favorite authors, I welcome repetitions, fixations, and all true fascinations that hypnotically reveal the heavens and hells of an imaginary universe. And I hope to have much more of the same from future translations of Grabinski's work. Thank you again for bringing us this great weird author.


Thomas Ligotti
St. Claire Shores, MI

[yellowish haze]

Ben,

Thank you for taking your time to transcribe the letters and for providing this background information on Ligotti and Lipinski. This makes a fantastic addition to the site!

I hope in the foreseeable future we will be able to complete the collection and find the remaining published letters.

The Summary Bibliography on the Internet Speculative Fiction Database lists two other letters that are still to be tracked down:

Letter (Crypt of Cthulhu #63) (1989)
Letter (Crypt of Cthulhu #71) (1990)

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I was finally able to track down some copies of The Grabinski Reader. They were fairly inexpensive at $10 each. I acquired issues #2-5.

I noticed an addendum that Miroslaw Lipinski added to TL's letter in issue #2, which I am including in this post. I am also posting a few odds and ends.

Issue #4 of The Grabinski Reader contains the 14-page essay Stefan Grabinski and the Reification of Nightmare by Paul R. Kesler.

(An addendum to Ligotti's letter in issue #2 of The Grabinski Reader, 1987.)

Editor: I am indebted to Mr. Ligotti for bringing forth an unknown (to me) French translation of the Grabinski story "Slepytor" ("The Sidetrack"). Appearing in Roger Caillois' Anthologie du fantastique (Gallimard, 1966), the translation was done by Mme Halicka. The story, incidentally, is taken from a Grabinski volume dealing exclusively with the eerie and symbolic world of trains. The next issue of The Grabinski Reader will contain one translation from this impacting collection.

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Both Thomas Ligotti and Miroslaw Lipinski have stated that they were introduced to Stefan Grabinski in The Fantasy Book: An Illustrated History From Dracula To Tolkein by Franz Rottenssteiner (1978) This is the section on Grabinski from the chapter: Poland.


Although fantasy has always been a somewhat neglected aspect of Polish literature, there nevertheless exist a number of remarkable Polish excursions into the fantastic. In Polska nowela fantastyczna, a representative anthology in two volumes, compiled by Julian Tuwim and published by Panstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy in 1953, there are not only tales by classic writers like Jan Potocki, Josef Maksymilian Ossolinski and Boleslaw Prus, but also two stories by Stefan Grabinski (1887 -1936).
Grabinski may be considered the most important modern writer of weird fiction in Poland. A teacher by profession, he was a withdrawn, lonely, unhappy man who suffered from tuberculosis. Like Lovecraft, he was married for only a short time. The literary recognition he longed for didn't come, although his first volumes of short stories had a friendly reception. But Grabinski was always regarded as merely a specialist in horror stories, not as a general writer. This caused him to engage in a bitter campaign against his critics, and to attempt to elevate his stories to 'poetic' heights by insertion of overly lyrical passages. But as a writer of weird short stories he was highly original and gifted.
Some of these stories introduce new fantastic entities like the White Wyrak, a monster inhabiting factory chimneys, while others open up new backgrounds for the horror form. In several, the action takes place in trains, which seems to have exerted a powerful hold on his imagination. Grabinski's outstanding quality is his gift for fusing the natural with the supernatural. Many of his stories have sinister settings like graveyards, mortuaries, ill-lit hospitals, lonely old houses and the like, but his landscapes in general are infused with a sense of brooding evil and imminent supernatural manifestation, suggestive of fantastic forces lying dormant in nature, and waiting for an opportunity to emerge. It really seems as though he believed in his fire demons and earth spirits.
Grabinski's stories also have a strong erotic content, though the author seemed to have feared women and their fatal powers. In his tales, women tend to appear as demons who, while remaining unchanged themselves, act as catalysts of disaster for the males encountering them. One of his best stories 'Dziedzina' (The Area), in which the imaginary creations of a writer of weird fiction come to life and kill their creator, whom they hate for having conceived them without giving them flesh. Often Grabinski's heroes are lonely, peculiar characters, outsiders misunderstood by the world, like Grabinski himself. His best stories were collected in the volumes Na wzgorzu roi (On the Hill of Roses, 1918), Demon ruchu (The Traffic Demon, 1919), Szalony patnik (The Frenzied Pilgrim, 1920), Ksiega ognia (tThe Book of Fire, 1922) and Niesamowita opowiesc ( An Uncanny Story, 1922) He also wrote a number of fantastic plays and mannered, rather weak novels. In 1958 a new collection, Niesamowite opowiesci, was issued, and in 1971 and 1974 respectively, the German "Library of the House of Usher' presented two collections of Grabinski's stories: Das Abstellgleis (The Railway Siding) and Dunst (Fume).

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(Google translation)

The special of this eleventh number of "Zothique" is dedicated to the Polish Poe, Stefan Grabinski, (1887-1936), one and only writer of weird literature in Poland between the two wars, author of extraordinary fantastic tales tinged with deadly sensuality and dark symbolism. In these pages, in addition to writings on his figure and on his work, you will find real rarities published for the first time in Italy, including his essay on fantastic literature and an interview (perhaps the only one) re-emerged from dusty archives of ' era. It is not for nothing that this number boasts the collaborations of the writer's top Italian specialists. An author, Grabinski, who after his rediscovery immediately became a cult, and who never fails to surprise, as demonstrated by the two unpublished stories presented here, "Fumo Infernale" and "La Masseria del Delirio", among the most chilling released from his pen. In addition to the special, you will also find a dossier on "The Tales of the Unmentionable" by Marco Marra and Gerardo Spirito, the duo from Campania who is establishing itself on the Italian weird scene, accompanied by an extraordinary story by Marra written especially for us: "Ode alla Nube Black". Finally, we inaugurate a collaboration with the Circolo "L'Altroquando" by presenting the three winning stories of their most recent fantastic and horror fiction contest.

Zothique looks like a fine magazine. They have also had special editions for Gustav Meyrink, William Hope Hodgson, and Robert E. Howard.