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on my six-month sobriety date there's a polish antiquarian books auction with a mint-condition copy of stefania zahorska's korzenie and since mine is falling apart i am going to bid on it as a reward (money i saved on booze) and an incentive (stay sober to write your stupid stefania biography with sufficient rigor)
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
anyway while listening to gay berlin i realized that stefania's allusion--in the letter about her apprehension re: gynecological surgery for what i think were either ovarian cysts or uterine fibroids, more likely the former--to sex hormones' influence on personality meant she was almost certainly familiar with eugen steinach's work. she kept up with medical literature--she originally trained as a doctor--and read the bulk of it in german. so if she read steinach and seemed inclined to accept a degree of endocrine bioessentialist determinism re: certain personality traits--or at least worried enough for herself not to reject the theory outright--then i am SO curious about how she synthesized those ideas with her understanding of psychoanalysis...!
and no you can't find the essay stef wrote about margit kaffka if you enter those search terms nor can you find reference to it anywhere, she's coy like she is about all of her acquaintances (though she does call her "pani margit," no last name), i just figured it out through the triangulation of biographical and literary details, the same way i figured out that the french critic she mentioned in another essay was andré salmon. by a combination of inference and background knowledge. nobody else knows this just like nobody else knows many other things i know about stefania zahorska. this is why i am stefania zahorska's biographer lol
the other day my mom said i couldn't just speak in the same register with everyone because i wouldn't be understood and i was like yes mother i know about code-switching but more importantly stefania zahorska used to write the same essay in different registers for university lectures, intelligentsia journals, radio broadcasts, socialist newspapers, movie magazines, and like, the paper for military families, because she wanted to reach as wide an audience as possible and actually successfully communicate with them in the language most likely to accomplish that. which is a pedagogical tool. and my mom was like do you really learn all of your social skills from women you're obsessed with. and i was like. Well Yes
everyone's like oh stefania zahorska was controversial for her politics, she was controversial for her criticism, she was controversial for her pedagogy, she was controversial for fucking a married man. well she was also controversial for writing really bad excessively freudian erotic prose in 1937 based on her personal experiences with her dead ex-husband. but nobody remembers THAT
ok so you know my zeitgeist project. there's "monitoring the situation," right, and then there are world-to-world connections (part of why i've been reading about the depression-era self-help boom), and then there are experiments in participatory culture, both mass & micro. and these enterprises are demanding a faculty of attention that i've allowed to atrophy since 2020. very strange but the exercise of "re-conditioning" my attention to the present as a kaleidoscope lens with aesthetic/social/historical/political/not quite economic because i don't understand economics enough yet but we're working on it facets has made me understand stefania's approach to constructivism and film in the interwar period so much better??? like from the inside???
omggg my favorite antykwariat in poland is selling a copy of stefania's ofiara (only 500 printed in the world) at the march online book auction and obviously i have one of the existing 500 copies myself and obviously it's in near-perfect condition but i have a Collector's Soul and it is my life's mission to amass the most substantial collection of stefania zahorska's work (besides her personal papers in london and the material that exists only in archival storage and on microfiche in warsaw)
