London

London entered Władysław Reymont’s life as part of his brief spiritualist career and remained significant as both a personal experience and a source for his later fiction. His visit connected his interest in the occult to The Vampire, while the city’s overwhelming scale, noise, and smell helped shape the industrial world of The Promised Land.

The Spiritualist Visit

For several years, Reymont was fascinated by theosophy and the occult, and appeared as a medium at spiritualist séances. This interest brought him to London in 1894, where he attended a meeting of The Theosophical Society, co-founded in 1875 by the Russian author Helena Blatavsky. The spiritualist journey later resulted in his novel The Vampire, published in 1911.

A City That Shaped Fiction

London also left Reymont with a forceful impression of the modern industrial city. He found it both oppressive and fascinating, describing its immense scale, din, and unpleasant smell in a letter to his brother. Those qualities foreshadowed his portrayal of Łódź in The Promised Land, which appeared in book form in 1899 and depicted an industrial city at the height of unrestrained capitalism. London thus mattered not only as the setting of a formative visit, but as an experience transformed into a literary model.