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Themerson, Stefan

Entry updated 26 February 2024. Tagged: Author.

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(1910-1988) Polish-born film director, scriptwriter, photographer, publisher and author, active in Poland from 1928 as the author of at least ten children's books, and in the 1930s as a maker and producer of five experimental films. Almost all this work was executed in collaboration with his wife from 1931 and lifelong creative partner Franciszka Themerson (1907-1988), beginning with their founding of the Polish Filmmakers Cooperative. At least one of the films they produced is of sf interest: the short, extremely intense Europa (1931) – an interpretation of Europa (1929 chap; trans Michael Horovitz 1962 chap) by Anatol Stern (1899-1968) – is a Satire surreally adumbrative of World War Two. The last existing print was long thought lost at the hands of the Nazis, but was retrieved in 2019. Separated in 1940 from Franciszka Themerson, he was able to rejoin her in the UK in 1942, in active service with the Polish army in exile; the couple remained in the UK until their deaths. Themerson continued publishing in Polish and French, but increasingly turned to English. He was a member of the Collège de 'Pataphysique and co-founded with Franciszka the Gaberbocchus Press in 1948, which they ran until 1979.

Given over as they were to paradox, games of logic and the dislocations of Semantic Poetry (his own term), Themerson's novels have never been easy to pigeonhole but can be thought of – very roughly – as exuberant Fabulations. Professor Mmaa's Lecture (1953), a Satire which comes as close to conventional sf as any of his early work is a Beast Fable [see TheEncyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] with clear affinities to the tone and substance of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726), including a scene in which a giant sleeping human is tied to the ground by members of the termite cast of the tale. En passant the eponymous Mmaa lectures his audience on these vast new primitive mammals, creatures addicted to torture and species-extinctions who are taking over the world, threatening the home termitarium; his understanding of Homo sapiens is both accurate and fatally remote, consistent with the 1953 cover of the tale, which replicates an image from an essay on termites by Henry Smeathman (1742-1786), a disciple of Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society for 1781. Mmaa's world is described in detail: knowledge and all Memories are indelibly inscribed in the bodies of individual termites (see Libraries); Perceptions are conveyed through smells; the social hierarchy is savage. In the end this world is inadvertently destroyed by humans on a surreal rampage. The book was introduced by Bertrand Russell.

Though they radically displace the normal world, none of his other fictions could be called sf; but his last two novels – The Mystery of the Sardine (1986) and Hobson's Island (1988) – assemble many characters from previous books into worlds which are mirrors of our own – an Anti-Earth floats in the heavens of the first tale, and Euclid is refuted – where they engage in levitations, speculations and prestidigitations galore. His last published tale, the posthumous Critics and My Talking Dog (2001 chap), again a Satire, examines the consequences of creating a talking dog, which literally undermines the narrator's Perceptions of the world. [JC]

Stefan Themerson

born Plock, Poland: 25 January 1910

died London: 6 September 1988

works

Pre-World War Two titles, none in English, not listed; English-language titles are selected.

nonfiction

about the author

  • Nicholas Wadley, editor. The Drawings of Franciszka Themerson (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Gaberbocchus Press/Uitgerverij De Harmonie, 1991) [nonfiction: including material on Stefan Themerson: illus/pb/Franciszka Themerson]
  • Jasia Reichardt. Fifteen Journeys: Warsaw to London (Champaign, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 2012) [nonfiction: pb/Nick Wadley]
  • Jasia Reichardt and Nick Wadley, editors. The Themerson Archive Catalogue (London: Themerson Estate/Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2020) [nonfiction: published in three volumes: pb/]

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