Parandowski, classicism, health

Jan Parandowski, in an archival interview on PR2:

“A book can make a great change in a person’s life, especially young, impressionable person’s life; it can cause a wonderful flowering; but it can also break and destroy him. This places a great responsibility on the author: he must not betray his readers’ trust. They expect from him things beautiful and wise; he must not instead give them stupidity or ugliness.”

Parandowski was a classicist. A note he had once written to himself listed his "companions". It started with Homer and Horace and ended with Plato and Żeromski. Tellingly, several very famous names were missing from the list: Joyce, Kafka, Dostoevsky.

“The characters of a novel are people in whose presence the author, for some reason, chooses to spend time”, he went on. He couldn’t imagine wanting to be in the company of any of the characters of Brothers Karamazov; or Ulisses; or Amerika. He didn´t understand why any authors did.

That´s classicism for you: Classicism as mental health which does not bother to refute, but simply rejects disease.