[2] Gombrowicz himself wrote of his novel that it is not "... a satire on some social class, nor a nihilistic attack on culture... We live in an era of violent changes, of accelerated development, in which settled forms are breaking under life's pressure...

The need to find a form for what is yet immature, uncrystalized and underdeveloped, as well as the groan at the impossibility of such a postulate – this is the chief excitement of my book.

A translation committee presided over by the Cuban writer Virgilio Piñera helped him in this endeavor, since Gombrowicz felt that he did not know the language well enough at the time to do it on his own.

[5] Jerzy Skolimowski directed the 1991 film adaptation of Ferdydurke (alternate English title: 30 Door Key) with an international cast including Iain Glen, Crispin Glover, Beata Poźniak, Robert Stephens, Judith Godrèche, Zbigniew Zamachowski, and Fabienne Babe.

[2] Writing in 1995, Warren F. Motte commented that the book "exemplifies that rare bird of literary avant-garde: a text that retains, decades after its initial publication, the power to shock.".