Witold Gombrowicz and Resentment: We Really Do Not Yet Know What a Body Can Do

Abstract In this article, I discuss Witold Gombrowicz's short story “A Premeditated Crime.” The story belongs to Gombrowicz's early prose, from the collection of short stories Pamiętnik z okresu dojrzewania (Memoirs from the time of immaturity, 1933), renamed Bacacay in 1957, after the name of a street in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where Gombrowicz was living as a Polish émigré author. My goal is to focus on Gombrowicz's story as a new model of resentment (ressentiment). After briefly examining the perhaps most influential elaborations of resentment—those of Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Scheler and Dostoevsky—I focus on Gombrowicz's understanding of resentment as it appears in “A Premeditated Crime,” paying particular attention not only to the affinities to resentment as conceived by Nietzsche, Scheler, and Dostoevsky, but also to the important aspects where Gombrowicz departs from them. Within this context, I attempt to raise the crucial question for my project: What is Gombrowicz's contribution to our understanding of resentment?