Tadeusz Konwicki

Prose writer, screenwriter and film director. Founder of the 'cinema d'auteur' in Poland and author of 20 books. Born in 1926 in Nowa Wilejka, near Vilnius (today Naujoji Vilnia, Lithuania), died on January 7th in Warsaw at 88 years old.

Konwicki was educated at the Universities of Cracow and Warsaw and began writing for newspapers and periodicals. He served on the editorial boards of leading literary magazines and followed the official Communist Party line. His first work, Przy budowie (1950; “At the Construction Site”), won the State Prize for Literature. He began a career as a filmmaker and scriptwriter in 1956; his film Ostatni dzień lata (“The Last Day of Summer”) won the Venice Film Festival Grand Prix in 1958. By the late 1960s he had quit the Communist Party, lost his job in the official film industry, and become active in the opposition movement.

Konwicki’s work is suffused with guilt and anxiety, coloured by his wartime experiences and a sense of helplessness in confronting a corrupt and repressive society. Chief among his novels are Rojsty (1956; “The Marshes”) and Sennik wspóczesny (1963; A Dreambook for Our Time), a book that writer and critic Czesław Miłosz called “one of the most terrifying novels of postwar Polish literature.” His other works of that period are Wniebowsta̦pienie (1967; “Ascension”) and Zwierzoczłekoupiór (1969; The Anthropos-Spectre-Beast). His later books—including Kompleks polski (1977; The Polish Complex), the bitterly mocking Mała apokalipsa (1979; A Minor Apocalypse), and the lyrical Bohiń (1987; Bohin Manor)—confront Poland’s social cataclysms of the late 1970s and the ’80s. The autobiographical Wschody i zachody ksie̦życa (1981; Moonrise, Moonset) recounts some of Konwicki’s experiences during the period of martial law in Poland.