The Library – The Motion Demon by Stefan Grabiński

Read by Marcel Krueger:

The main train station in Przemyśl looks splendid. It's Neo-baroque exterior resembles Vienna Central, and is a reminder of the time when it was one the stops on the Galician Railway of the Austro-Hungarian empire, built in 1861 and connecting Przemyśl to Vienna, Kraków and Lwów (Lviv). It was restored in 2012 and must be one of the most beautiful train stations in Poland today.

Also due to its importance as a railway hub, Przemyśl was surrounded with a large ring of forts, which were besieged by the Russian armies during World War I, and the city occupied by the Tsarist troops from March to June 1915, when the city (and the railway) was reconquered by the troops of the Emperor. 

Throughout World War I a tall and thin, sickly looking gentleman with a nice moustache was frequenting the main station. He was no soldier or employee of the railways, but instead kept taking notes. Nevertheless, he even had a special permit from railway authorities to visit restricted areas of the station normally off limits for civilians. He worked as a teacher, and later his pupils would recall seeing him often on the viaduct over the rail tracks. 

This was Stefan Grabiński (1887 - 1936) a writer who has been called the 'Polish Edgar Allan Poe', and his work was one of the precursors of fantasy fiction in Poland. Stefan graduated from University in Lwów (Lviv), and then worked as a teacher of Polish in the city and later in Przemyśl. He also had a weak constitution, suffering from severe tuberculosis over many years. Throughout his time working as a teacher, he wrote novels, plays, and short stories, and also published articles and stories in newspapers and magazines. A collection of short stories, Exceptions: In the Dark of Faith (Z Wyjątków. W Pomrokach Wiary), written under the pen name Stefan Żalny, was self-published in 1909, and a second collection of short stories, On the Hill of Roses (Na Wzgórzu Róż), followed 9 years later. The book that however firmly established Stefan as an author of the fantastic in Poland of the interwar years was his short story collection The Motion Demon (Demon Ruchu) that was published in 1919. 

It is this collection that I read with delight during the travel- and train-less lockdown we are still undergoing here in the Republic of Ireland where I live. Published in paperback by the NoHo Press in 2014 with a fantastic cover illustration based on a lithograph by Margit Schwarcz from 1931, this is a wonderful small book and, despite the fact that it is a hundred years old, essential rail reading. Stefan's stories are firmly rooted in the reality of train travel as he saw it in the early 20th century, but then - as told by a potentially unreliable narrator - there is always an added layer of madness and horror which might either be psychological or truly supernatural. There are no speaking ravens or tentacled ancient gods in these stories, but instead railway catastrophes caused by phantom trains, lunatic railwaymen and train demons that might only exist in the minds of the protagonists. He displays both a fascination of the speed of trains and in the secret world of railway- and signalmen that travellers normally do not see, and at the same time weaves in a luddite criticism of travelling too fast that would not go amiss in today's slow travel movement. Mirosław Lipiński has finely translated Stefan's sumptuous prose for the English edition, exemplified by the first paragraph of the title story:

“The express Continental from Paris to Madrid rushed with all the force its pistons could muster. The hour was already late, the middle of the night; the weather was wet, showery. The beating rain lashed at the brightly lit windows and was scattered on the glass in teary beads. Bathed in the downpour, the coaches glittered under roadside lamp-posts like wet armour, spewing sprightly water from their mouldings. A hollow groan issued forth into space from their black bodies, a confused chatter of wheels, jostling buffers, merciless tramped trails. Frenzied in its run, the chain of coaches awakened sleeping echoes in the quiet night, enticed dead voices along the woods, revived slumbering ponds. Some type of heavy, drowsy eyelids were raised, some large eyes opened in consternation, and so they remained in momentary fright. And the train sped on in a strong wind, in a dance of startled air, while smoke and soot clung lazily to its rear; the train rushed breathlessly on, hurling behind it the blood-red memory of sparks and coal refuse…”

Stefan remained in Przemyśl and near its station until 1931. He had to leave the teaching profession because of worsening health in 1927, and as his tuberculosis worsened he was forced to spend more for treatment. He nevertheless kept on writing and publishing, again mostly focussing on supernatural, psychological short stories, with a lesser focus on rail travel though: the collections Pilgrim’s Madness (Szalony Pątnik, 1920), An Incredible Story (Niesamowita Opowieść) and The Book of Fire (Księga Ognia, 1922) were followed by his longest prose work, Passion (Namiętność), which was published in 1930 and inspired by a trip to Italy. 

In 1931, he settled in the resort and spa town of Brzuchowice (now Briukhovychi) where, despite some recent financial return for his writings, he increasingly fell into obscurity and was abandoned by most of his friends. In 1936, he died in utter poverty and isolation in Lwów (Lviv) and is buried there. His life and work was mostly forgotten for the next 70 years but in recent times, also due to the tireless efforts of his translator Mirosław Lipiński, has been discovered as an important part of the literary canon of Poland and translated into German, Italian and Japanese as well. Stefan Grabiński is now regarded as one of the first of his countrymen who found both horror and delight in the quotidian of his time, in places where other writers never bothered - or dared - to look. The Motion Demon is a wonderful and flavourful book with a slight hint of madness that I can't wait to take with me on the rails once I can travel again.

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The Motion Demon is published by NoHo Press

Marcel Krueger is the Books Editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His writing has been published in numerous places both online and in print, and he is the author of Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps (I.B. Taurus, 2017) and Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Taurus, 2020). You’ll find him on twitter here.