Maturity – immaturity dichotomy in Witold Gombrowicz’ novel Ferdydurke and in Journal

The individual identity crisis became an obsesive theme of the central-european literature, lived intensively in this space. From this point of view, Central Europe, around 1900, has a series of authors - Gombrowicz, Schulz, Kusniewicz, Svevo -, in whose writings one can observe the construct of this crisis. In this period appeared many journals, memoirs, autobiographical novels of polish, hungarian, romanian, czech, serbian, austrian writers who tried to redesign their identity through writing. Thus, adolescence, immaturity become successful narrative topics in the central-european literature, due to the fact that they could bring forward the vulnerabilities of this region, such as problematic identity, the moments of crisis, the liminal nature of it. One of these central-european writers is the polish Witold Gombrowicz, who exploited the theme of adolescence, of immaturity in his writings – both in his Journal and in the novel Ferdydurke. The aim of our study is to discuss the dichotomy – maturity / immaturity which appears in these writings mentioned above. It will also analyse and compare the narrative perspective featured in these two fictions, because the Journal, despite its name, has the nature of a literary text.