Witold Gombrowicz has been widely recognized as an important figure in twentieth-century Polish literature and is one of the most original and influential of European novelists, playwrights, and essayists of his time. His works, despite the extraordinary degree of technical difficulty involved in the process of their translation, have been translated into all major languages and published or staged worldwide, and his achievement has occasioned a plethora of biographical and critical studies in Polish, French, and English. The first of his four principal novels, Ferdydurke (1938; translated as Ferdydurke, 1961), is a milestone in the history of Polish fiction; at least three others of his works--the novels Trans-Atlantyk (1953; translated as Trans-Atlantic, 1995) and Kosmos (1965; translated as Cosmos, 1967) and the play Operetka (1966; translated as Operetta, 1971)--deserve the name of masterpiece; his three-volume Dziennik (1957, 1962, 1966; translated as Diary, 1988-1993) has been hailed by many critics as the single most important Polish book of nonfiction...