"Formuła Lymphatera" Stanisława Lema - zapomniana opowieść o Ijonie Tichym?

Abstract

In 1961 Stanisław Lem published a collection of stories entitled The Book of Robots, which, among other short prose forms, included the first printed appearance of Lymphater’s Formula. It was preceded by an inscription “from the memoirs of Ijon Tichy”, which suggested that this text was a continuation of one of the two cycles, usually published together as The Star Diaries. The short story was republished many times in the following years, yet it was never included in The Diaries…, and the inscription that had appeared in The Book of Robots was consistently ignored. The present article is an attempt to answer the question why it has happened so. Having noted that the name Ijon Tichy does not appear even once in the analysed story, which is the greatest difficulty – though not the only one – in assigning the story to the cycle From the memoirs…, the author of the article compares the text of Lymphater’s Formula with other stories, habitually included in the series, and points out the thematic and formal similarities and dissimilarities between them. The results of this multidirectional comparative analysis lead to a conclusion that Lymphater’s Formula, most probably written as the ultimate closing chapter of Tichy’s memoirs (which would explain the inscription in The Book of Robots), when judged from a distance, displayed such a diversity from other stories that Lem considered it to be a separate, independent tale. This hypothesis is supported by the appearance of other stories featuring Ijon Tichy, which made it definitively impossible for Lymphater’s Formula to act as “the last chapter”.