[4] The first issue of the group's literary journal indicated that the association was established on the initiative of Helena Boguszewska (1886–1978) and Jerzy Kornacki (1908–1981) in June–July 1933, with Bruno Schulz, Adolf Rudnicki, and Zofia Nałkowska among the invited founder members.
"faubourg") has been explained as referring both to the group's programmatic preoccupation with the marginalized aspects of the culture and social life in the Second Polish Republic, and to the connotation of "outpost" – hence by extension avant-garde.
[5] The volume carried Sydor Rey's short story Królestwo Boże ("The Kingdom of God"), a fictional narrative of a visit to a privately owned factory by a friend of the proprietors.
The visit becomes an occasion for remarkably detailed observations on the work conditions of the employees and their relations with the management, the government (represented by an industrial inspector), and the outside world.
[9] While the author parades a plethora of various types of characters on his stage, from the szlachta individuals affecting a grand aristocratic manner, through lordlings enlightened by foreign studies enough to be able to fraternize with the working classes, to well-to-do Jewish businessmen, he devotes most space to the radicalizing poverty of the township and the impenetrable ignorance of the peasant masses of the surrounding villages, succeeding to depict this broad gallery of human types in particularly vivid brush strokes of great directness.
[9] Owing however to the well-nigh unmanageable breadth of the scope of his project, it has been observed by contemporary critics that the social doctrine on occasion takes precedence in his writing over art.
[11] Witold Gombrowicz too wrote a detailed and perhaps most considerate analysis of Kropiwniki, arguing that it is the literary debuts that are more interesting, for all their inchoate form, than an author's later works which, though benefiting from the writer's more crystallized pattern of thought, in general tend to say little that is essentially new.
[18] On the eve of the Second World War, in the spring of 1939 Sydor Rey emigrated from Warsaw to New York City, where he subsequently operated a second-hand bookshop.
If I, after well-nigh twenty years spent in the United States, have never thought for a moment of adopting English as my creative medium, it is because spiritually I continue to reside in my Homeland.
But at the same time this split can, in the long run, lead to the degeneration of the creative faculty — the most glaring case in point being that of the giant of Polish literature, Adam Mickiewicz.
[23] There is no evidence, on the other hand, that in the United States Rey found anything like a substitute for the land of his youth; in a poem entitled "Miasto na Long Island" (A City on Long Island) published in 1960 he speaks of a "city flat and straight like a cadaver", with street names invoking "Indians that have been exterminated, running streams that have been filled in, hills that have been levelled down, and forests that have been felled": what use to me this cemetery?
[29] Rey countered that the criticisms presented by Pankowski were illustrated by tendentiously selected quotations that did not constitute a representative sample and had been taken out of context, and that the overall method of extrapolating judgement of the whole oeuvre from bits and pieces was absurd, "rather like presenting an audience with the bottom sliver of Cézanne's Bathing Women — the figures cut off at the ankle — and averring this fragment to possess 'some characteristics of Cézanne's painting style', only to dispatch the artist in toto with the dictum that 'the rest of his output is much in the same manner'".
Poems that deal directly or (sometimes) veiledly with the principal tenets of the Judaeo-Christian religious doctrine — such as "Bajka" (Fairy Tale),[31] "Ojcze nasz" (Our Father),[32] or "Raz kozie śmierć" (Once a Death Befell a Goat) which quotes (in Hebrew) one of the Seven Last Words in the scornful context of a pastoral ditty[33] — may offend religious sensibilities, expressive as they are of his deep agnosticism and his radical questioning of the truth value of that doctrine.