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The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma [Kariera Nikodema Dyzmy]

2022; Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America; Volume: 67; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/23300841.67.4.25

2330-0841

Anna Gąsienica Byrcyn,

Language and Culture

The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma [Kariera Nikodema Dyzmy] is Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz's masterpiece that brought him considerable fame. First published in 1932, this satirical novel was viewed as a political pamphlet aimed at Józef Piłsudski's Sanacja regime. Dołęga-Mostowicz was a journalist who worked for the Rzeczpospolita newspaper. In his editorials, he attacked the Sanacja regime and Piłsudski. He wrote The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma as a critique on the ruling class in power during the interwar years. Throughout his lifetime, he enjoyed great popularity as a prose writer and authored many books with appealing and vivid protagonists.The novel is set in Warsaw, the capital of Poland and Koborowo, an estate near Grodno, against the canvas of the interwar period, when a newly independent Poland is faced with many challenges, including economic difficulties, political corruption, social injustice, devastations by World War I, and the problem of unifying regions which had been parts of different countries for 123 years. The book focuses on the main protagonist named Nicodemus Dyzma, who is a former unemployed post office clerk from Kresy, the Eastern provincial town of Łysków, but then makes a staggering career in land management and banking by pure coincidence and deceit.Dyzma is an adventurer, a swindler, and a paid dance partner from the demimonde. He arrives penniless in Warsaw wanting to find a job and succeeds by playing the mandolin in bars. He rises from rags to riches turning into a well-known, prominent, wealthy, and influential man thanks to the unexpected events and opportunities that he happens to encounter and using them cunningly to his profit to climb up the social and political ladder.Consequently, one day famished Dyzma strolls in the streets of Warsaw and finds a lost invitation to a party reception of a well-known minister. He decides to crash the splendid party at the exclusive Hotel Europejski wearing his elegant tuxedo hoping to get a bite to eat for free. At the reception he mixes with the crowd and manages to fit in pretty well without standing out until Jan Terkowski, the head of the minister's office, knocks his plate, filled with a salad and a pate, out of his hand before he has a chance to taste it. Dyzma has no idea who Terkowski is, he reproaches him by making a remark that sets him as a connoisseur of life, while he is just a plain, but a shrewd man who is street wise and knows how to take advantage of opportunities that come to him at the right time. Dyzma's actions are noticed directly by Wacław Warenda, a colonel of uhlans, who is stunned and amused at the same time, so he introduces him to Jaszuński, a minister of agriculture. They both congratulate Dyzma on handling Terkowski, taking him for a powerful and influential man. From this point on, fortunate Dyzma befriends various prominent people. He impresses them with his manners and viewpoints telling them what they wish to hear. Eventually, he gets acquainted with a rich landowner by the name of Leon Kunicki, a former con artist, who is taken by Dyzma and offers him a well-paid job as a manager of his country estate in Koborowo, although he has zero experience in the area of land and forest management. But the clever and flat broke Dyzma accepts the job. He arrives in Koborowo and realizes shortly after that he is not cut out for this position, so he pretends to be ill with rheumatism. At the estate, Dyzma falls for Kunicki's classy wife, Nina. She takes care of him while he pretends to be extremely sick. He also meets Nina's brother, Count Jerzy Powinimski, who explains to him that Kunicki is an unquestionable crook named Kunik. He married Nina when their father had financial problems. Jerzy asks Dyzma to contact his aunt Countess Józefina Przełęska in Warsaw and to help destroy Kunicki, and he is more than happy to fulfill his wishes.Before long Kunicki, who trusts his new manager, sends him to Warsaw on a business matter related to timber and grain. Dyzma takes control of the business in the Koborowo estate and using Kunicki's ideas on the improvement of agriculture in Poland starts to build his way up in the circles of Warsaw. He becomes acquainted with Jan Ulanicki, the vice-minister of agriculture and Countess Przełęska. And in due course, Dyzma manages to receive a series of prestigious appointments. He attends various balls and receptions, and at one such gathering he meets Countess Koniecpolska, a founder of a Masonic Tri-Star Lodge and her friends, who, captivated by Dyzma-entrepreneur, invite him to join their lodge and become the Great Thirteen, which he accepts after some hesitation because in general, he does not esteem women very highly but uses them to achieve his goals.Meanwhile, Dyzma fears that his past will be uncovered, consequently he is forced to hide his previous activities from his rivals. He organizes shrewdly the murder of his former supervisor from the provincial post office, who shows up unexpectedly in Warsaw to blackmail him, to prevent the truth about his background coming out. He succeeds in tricking Kunicki and marries Countess Nina when he is certain that he can provide her with a life of luxury but decides to refuse the post of prime minister for fear that his past and his limitations will be revealed, including his lack of knowledge of English and the nonexistence of his diploma in economics from Oxford as well as the absence of his connections there.Nevertheless, thanks to his luck and the ability to manipulate and use people, Dyzma's status grows from the clerk to the land proprietor of the Koborowo estate and a husband of Countess Nina. He is able to delight and impress the high society of government ministers and their noble ladies with his puzzling responses and “mistakes” or faux pas that he constantly commits, which are viewed as wise, and they are interpreted as authentic or done on purpose. His deficiency of refinement and knowledge about things that are expected of him are taken either as witty or eccentricities, or by the people around him as attempts to put them to a test. They believe that Dyzma has an extraordinary mind and possesses some inexplicable power, and they praise his genius as the Napoleon of economy that saved the heart and soul of the landed gentry. Dyzma is aware of his shortcomings and purchases three books to fill in gaps in his knowledge: The Dictionary of Foreign Words and Phrases, The Universal Encyclopedia, and The Bon Ton Handbook. In due course, Dyzma passes as a wealthy aristocrat from Curland who graduated from a lycée in Riga and received a degree in economics from Oxford (although he does not know the English language) and enters the circles of high society in Warsaw. Finally, Dyzma attains a job as the President of the Grain Bank, hires an excellent assistant, who actually runs the business matters for him, marries lovely Nina, and later is offered a position of prime minister in Warsaw. The only person who recognizes in Dyzma an opportunist and a faker is Count Powinimski, Nina's brother, who ironically is considered in his aristocratic milieu to be a lunatic and a madman and no one wants to believe him.The demand for a powerful man in the corrupted society enables Dyzma to receive honors and distinctions through his calculating and canny activities. He is formed by the people who need him to fulfill their fancies and caprices. In Poland, Nicodemus Dyzma turned into a proverbial Dyzma as an archetype of the unrefined opportunist and impostor who makes his way up by his ruthlessness and scheming as well as the consent of ill-informed society.Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz's novel The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma was very popular during the interwar period in Poland and it remained such until modern times because of its excellent political satire and character portrayal. The book has been adapted into a film entitled Nikodem Dyzma (1956), a TV series Kariera Nikodema Dyzmy (1980), and a comedy Kariera Nikosia Dyzmy (2002). The book is heavily “influenced” Jerzy Kosiński, a Polish American novelist, who wrote his famous novel Being There (1970), later made into a film by Hal Ashby.Ewa Małachowska-Pasek and Megan Thomas did an exceptional job on the translation of The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma into English, rendering splendidly its expressive language, creating the fitting mood, and setting the fast-paced narrative in motion. The publication of this first English translation of the novel that appeared in Poland about a century ago is welcomed and greatly appreciated just as was the case with Ignacy Krasicki's The Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom [Mikołaja Doświadczyńskiego przypadki, 1776], the very first Polish novel and a classic example of eighteenth-century satire, translated into English by Thomas H. Hoisington and issued by the Northwestern University Press in 1992.