Slovakian translation of the novel “Salamandra” by Stefan Grabiński
The book was published by Europa, a Bratislava-based publishing house. In recent years, the same publishing house has also published other works by Grabiński – all translated by Tomáš Horváth. These included two novels, namely Cień Bafometa (“Tieò Baphomet” [“Baphomet’s Shadow”]) and Wyspa Itongo (“Ostrov Itongo” [“Itongo Island”]), as well as two short story selections “Màtvy priestor” and “Šialená záhrada”.
Salamander is the first of the novels written by Stefan Grabiński. It tells the story of an occult researcher who begins to encounter the same suspicious people on the street again and again. After a while, he gets to know some of them and together they enter the world of secret knowledge and unexplainable phenomena. However, he is unable to determine which of the odd events he is beginning to experience are real and which are merely illusions.
Stefan Grabiński ( born 1887, died 1936) is Poland’s most famous author of horror stories. In the first decades of the twentieth century, he published several collections of fantasy stories and several novels, and also wrote plays and theoretical works. His best-known works include short stories such as Demon ruchu (“The Motion Demon”), Problemat Czelawy (“The Problem of Professor Czelawa”), Maszynista Grot (“Engine Driver Grot”), and Muzeum dusz czyśćcowych (“’The Museum of Purgatorial Spirits”). In addition to the work of Edgar Allan Poe, his work was heavily influenced by parapsychology and the thought of philosophers such as Henri Bergson and William James.