Between the years 1918 and 1922, a World War came to an end, tens of thousands of cars traveled the sparse American and European roads (just), and rail lines were still the primary mode of long-distance travel; rapid long-distance travel was itself a new experience for many people in the world, and the railroad was still only decades old in Russia and Russian Poland. The density of criss-crossing train lines in late 19^th century, early 20^th century Germany, France, and England could serve as a proxy for their status as industrial and military superpowers. In the “divided Poland” of the 19^th century, the railway systems were under the control of Russia, Germany, and Austria, and even before Poland gained independence on 11 November 1918 the budding revolutionaries made a point of securing control of the train lines.

Now why am I expositing like some textbook about Polish train lines and Polish independence between the years 1918 and 1922? Because Stefan Grabinski doesn’t. Between the years 1918 and 1922, Grabinski, labelled by some critics as the “Polish Poe” or the “Polish H.P. Lovecraft,” published 5 volumes of short stories, and at least in the 11 stories translated by Miroslav Lipinski for his 1992 selection of Grabinski’s work, The Dark Domain, there is nary a mention of wars, politics, or contemporary Polish events of any kind. In fact, as the author(s) of Grabinski’s Polish Wikipedia page notes, Grabinski’s stories are set in made-up towns with made-up, symbolic character names. (The name of the main character in “Szamota’s Mistress,” for example, is just the Polish word for loss.) We will learn little more from Grabinski about the Poland of his time than we learn from Kafka about the Prague of his time; both inward-focused authors, Grabinski and Kafka extract their greatest drama depicting strange minds mentally interacting with strange, otherworldly environments.

In the three stories in The Dark Domain taken from Grabinski’s 1919 collection of train-themed stories The Motion Demon (“The Motion Demon,” “The Wandering Train,” and “In The Compartment”) it appears that while Grabinski doesn’t appear to care which country now controls the train lines, he is deeply interested in the experience of train travel and how the momentum of a train barreling down a track is symbolic of the movements of a psychotic mind, which follows its own track of logic even if it goes far afield of what the normies among us would call “reality.”

In the first of these three stories, “The Motion Demon,” we are introduced to a man named Tadeusz Szygon; though instead of immediately telling us his name is Tadeusz Szygon, Grabinski instead shows us the train he rides on, evokes the force of its pistons, the beating rain, and of course the train cars, the “hollow groan [that] issued forth into space from their black bodies, a confused chatter of wheels, jostling buffers, mercilessly trampled rails,” a “frenzied train of coaches” that “rushed breathlessly on, hurling behind it the blood-red memory of sparks and coal refuse.” Only after this poetic evocation of the train do we meet a man “in sleepy reveries” sitting in a first-class compartment, whose name we learn from the book stamp on the book he had been holding, now fallen to the floor. He is woken by a conductor, with whom he has this curious exchange.

“Pardon me, sir; ticket, please.”

With a faraway look in his eyes, Szygon glanced at the intruder:

“Ticket?” he yawned out casually. “I don’t have one yet.”

“Why didn’t you buy it at the station?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re going to have to pay a fine.”

“F-fine? Yes,” he added, “I’ll pay it.”

“Where did you get on? Paris?”

“I don’t know.”

The conductor became indignant.

“What do you mean you don’t know? You’re making fun of me, sir. Who else should know?”

“It doesn’t matter. Let’s assume that I got on at Paris.”

“And to what destination should I make the ticket out for?”

“As far as possible.”

The conductor fills out the ticket, then gets away from this strange man. But Grabinski, sticking with his main character, reveals that the truth about Tadeusz Szygon is much stranger than the conductor imagines. He is (as I summarized on Twitter) “a man who wakes up in random European cities after random travels by train in a fugue-like state.” Crazy in itself, but the story has not quite become a distinctly Grabinskian story yet, because there comes a moment in “The Motion Demon,” (as in pretty much all the stories in this collection) where Grabinski finishes taxiing his protagonist’s thoughts down reality’s runway and suddenly becomes airbourne with the craziness of thoughts unbounded by leaden reality, produced of an alternate logic that denies what everyone accepts and assumes rules where other people don’t see them. The leaping-off point of “The Motion Demon” comes as Grabinski describes Szygon’s “repugnance” for the train conductor and his ilk, and elucidates an alternate value system:

Szygon understood that he made his unusual journeys under the influence of cosmic and elemental forces, and that train travel was a childish compromise caused by the circumstances of his earthly environment. He realized only too well that if it weren’t for the sad fact that he was chained to the Earth and its laws, his travels, casting off the usual pattern and method, would take on an exceedingly more active and beautiful form.

I laughed as I read this (superficially) absurd credo because it felt so familiar to me. Whereas Szygon’s chafes at the laws of physics (apparently) and that’s silly, it makes some degree of metaphorical sense if we think of the train not as a train, the conductor as more than a conductor, and the laws of physics as meant instead to represent the written (yes) but primarily unwritten laws of humanity, circumscribing our lives by the stringent demands modern capitalism makes on us to stay constantly busy, constantly doing useful, society-contributory things. (An article about the death of true leisure in the New York Times the other day makes this very point.) To maintain respectability, we must follow some track and remain moored to it, and woe unto him or her who deviates from their track. What makes Szygon admirable (from one perspective) and perhaps antisocial (from another) is that in “casting off the usual pattern and method” he rejects the rules of human society as they are presently constituted. The unshakeable reality everyone else sees is to him but a “childish compromise.”

This is not the sort of attitude that would find much sympathy with critics and readers for whom this so-called “childish compromise” is the baseline of daily existence, the unquestioned water we’re all just swimming in (to borrow David Foster Wallace’s oft-cited metaphor.) As the story proceeds, Szygon has a confrontation with the conductor, who turns out to be a monstrous “demon of motion” Szygon verbally spars with for a couple pages over the meaning of “motion.” Syzgon contends that though we are moving faster today, in interstellar terms, we are just tiny beings carried along by an orbiting planet; we move faster, but our faster movement is relatively meaningless when compared to the inexorable movements of the terrestrial ball.

The conductor (representing the overwhelming attitude of the moderns) demurs:

“I don’t deny their existence [these cosmic movements]. But of what concern are they to me? I’m only interested in the speed of my train. The only conclusive thing for me is the motion of engines. Why should I be concerned about how much forward I’ve moved in relation to interstellar space? One has to be practical; I am a positivist, my dear sir.”

Szygon calls this “an argument worthy of a table leg,” which points to one of the key differences between Szygon’s worldview and the conductor’s: Szygon is concerned with absolute truth, whereas the conductor cares mostly about practical, instrumental truth: what will help me go faster and work better in my local environment? The conductor wants to be a leg that holds up the table, whereas Szygon rejects the need to hold up the table altogether. He would prefer not to be society’s furniture and, by the end of the story, he murders the conductor, the avatar of usefulness and instrumentalism.

Let us here posit that murdering usefulness is hardly an ideal resume item, but therein lies the point: we have so internalized the logic of usefulness that the logic of non-usefulness seems as though it were a crazy fantasy. And as we step back from this story, it becomes clear that Stefan Grabinski is more than a mere fantasy writer; his fiction uses fantasies—his character’s psycho-pathologies—as metaphors to critique modern life. Yet during his career (and for many years after), Grabinski’s fiction was viewed simply as “weird.” It is only lately that it is recognized (as Lipinski writes in his introduction) as “a direct conduit to the primary issues of Grabinski’s own anti-authoritarian, anti-materialistic world view.”

Stefan Grabinski was born on 26 February 1887 in the small town of Kamionka Strumilowa near what is today the Ukrainian city of L’viv (Lwow if we’re transliterating Polish); this corner of the world, Polish Galicia, which has been alternately Polish, Russian, and now Ukrainian, does not seem to have left much of a mark on Grabinski’s writing except in making him, like his younger contemporary Bruno Schultz, an isolated writer unmoored from local traditions. He was in early youth diagnosed as having tuberculosis, and struggled with the disease his whole life. This illness is generally credited as giving him the sort of dour cast of mind that creates a mystic, a questioner, and a weird loner.

Grabinski has been described as a horror writer and as the greatest Polish fantasy writer, though he was generally dismissed by critics of his own time period, for whom realistic novels about problems facing the newly independent Poland was the vogue (and it was with precisely this sort of fiction that two authors of the previous generation, Stefan Zeromski and Władysław Stanisław Reymont, vied for the 1924 Nobel Prize in Literature.) The 1980 Nobel Prize winner Czezlaw Milosz doesn’t even mention Grabinski in his 1968 History of Polish Literature, and neglects to include him as a fourth while listing Stanislaw Witkiewicz, Bruno Schulz, and Witold Gombrowitz as the three authors of the interwar period who “broke radically with the nineteenth-century ‘mirror of life’ novel.”

Polish literary historian Julian Kryzanowski on the other hand does briefly discuss Grabinski in his 1980 History of Polish Literature. He emphasizes how anomalous Grabinski was for his time by noting that of the authors selected by Julian Tuwim for his 1949 collection Fantastic Tales of Poland, Grabinski was the only modern Polish author. In these same years the fight for Polish independence weighed heavily of the minds of Polish writers. Grabinski’s contemporaries found his works “weird” and “bizarre.” He identifies Edgar Allan Poe as “Grabinski’s master” but lays down the other half of Grabinski’s strangeness to the influence of Freudianism and research in psychopathology, and says that while Grabinski “undoubtedly made good use of these ideas,” his stories are “monotonous” and display a “lack of the flights of imagination” which one sees in the works of Bruno Schulz, who Kryzanowski profiles in his next paragraphs and praises highly.

Interest in Grabinski’s work has surfaced in various other countries in recent decades, but until the 1992 publication of a selection of Grabinski’s stories translated by Miroslav Lipinski, titled The Dark Domain, the author had never appeared in English. Along with Lipinski’s ongoing project to translate all of Grabinski’s stories into what he is calling on his website “The Centipede Edition,” a Grabinski story “The White Wyrak” appeared in Anne and Jeff Vandermeer’s 2012 collection The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories and The Dark Domain was reviewed in the Guardian by noted Weird Fantasy author China Miéville. But while these new apostles of the Weird (with a capital W) have claimed Grabinski as one of their own, Grabinski’s fantasy varies from that of Miéville and Jeff Vandermeer in that its weirdness emerges out of the logic of the character’s thoughts rather than the author’s insertions of fantastical elements, and more than being a mere student of Edgar Allan Poe, Grabinski is a philosophical trickster akin to Jorge Luis Borges, proffering not freeform fantasies, but rather methodical workings out of what would happen if various psycho-fantasies (about travel, knowledge, power, sex) were externalized and brought to life; what would the consequences be if the imaginary manifestations of our neuroses became real? The result would be a Grabinski story.

The story “Vengeance of the Elementals,” from Grabinski’s 1922 collection of fire-themed stories The Book of Fire, is characteristic of this method. We are introduced to Antoni Czarnocki, “the fire chief of Rakszawa” (and another eccentric protagonist in the mold of Grabinski himself), who when he’s not out fighting fires for the good people of his city, is doing original research on fires, plotting them out with maps and noting their relative frequencies by day and location. (Grabinski makes this all seem very dry and logical; I mentioned on Twitter that he sneaks up on you with Kafkaesque matter-of-factness, and can make you suddenly burst out laughing when you realize how thoroughly you’ve been snookered into going along with sheer nuttiness.) Before we know what’s happening, we find out that fires occur most frequently on Thursdays, which “the Germanic races name the thunder day” because of its association with Thor. Moreover, Czarnocki has discovered that fire is actually the product of metaphysical sentient creatures whom he calls “the fire elementals” and (like a fire-chief Van Helsing) he “became quite familiar with the psychology of these strange creatures and their crafty, deceitful nature, and he taught himself how to neutralize and subdue this enemy.” As he became a more effective fire-chief qua ghostbuster, “he also perceived that his altered tactics had been noticed by the other side.” Out of this set-up—born, let’s remember, out of taking literally a stew of loosely connected Kabbalistic nonsense—Grabinski fashions a great horror story out of the magnificent rise and spectacular ending of the famous Czarnocki, his struggle with and eventual destruction at the hands of the vengeful fire elementals, who send our hero secret warnings in the ashes from his fireplace.

If there was a story in the collection that struck me as particularly masterful, it was “The Glance.” Talk about doing more with less! The set-up of the story is minimal: before we even know the main character’s name, we know that his lover Jadwiga “left his house for what proved to be the last time. … An hour later she perished under the wheels of a train.” What’s more (and what turns out to be the nub of the whole story), she left the door open when she left, and now here he is, trapped inside his own room, unwilling to leave. Then, “As [Odonicz, the main character] stood there, it suddenly crossed his mind that Jadwiga had left him forever, leaving behind some complex problem to be unraveled whose outward expression was the open door.” He begins to fixate on the door. “One dreaded the angle becoming too great, the door opening too wide. It seemed the door was playing around with him, not wanting to show what was hiding beyond it. Only the edge of the mystery was revealed to him.” In this story, mystery takes on a life of it’s own; not merely a concept, mystery for the protagonist is a palpable force, a thing pushing against the other side of the open door.

Odonicz makes it out of his house only to struggle with yet another obstacle: a corner which he must go around when leaving his house. The edge of the corner, the unseen mystery of what cannot be seen, takes on monstrous dimensions for Odonicz and terrifies him. He begins to suspect that something is following him, just out of sight, but he dares not turn around and look. Instead, he closes himself off inside his own house like an agoraphobic, simplifying his existence, fighting to maintain an environment full within his control. He must reject what lies beyond the visible and controllable (like whatever makes the door swing back and forth) and therefore in order to protect himself against what he can’t control, he begins to suspect that the entire universe is within his control; that is, he embraces solipsism:

“And if, indeed, there is nothing beyond the corner? Who can affirm if beyond so-called ‘reality’ anything exists at all? Beyond a reality that I have probably created? As long as I’m steeped in this reality up to my neck, as long as it is sufficient for me—everything is tolerable. But what would happen if I wanted one day to lean out of my safe environment and glance beyond its borders?”

But this is the path to loneliness and oblivion.

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. … And so a battle started between these two extremes, these two contrary tendencies. On one side he was choked by the iron claws of fear before the unknown, and on the other side he was propelled by a tragic curiosity into the arms of the daily-growing mystery.

Should he look beyond? Should he protectively narrow his world, or dangerously glance outside it? You wouldn’t think this almost purely psychological drama would be so engrossing, but in the hands of Stefan Grabinski it becomes so, so I won’t spoil how the story ends.