Tadeusz Konwicki with Katarzyna Zechenter - Encounters with Polish and Ukrainian Literature – S4E7

Tadeusz Konwicki (1926-2015) made a major contribution to the culture of dissent in Poland toward the end of the Communist period leading up to the Solidarity movement. He was born near what is today Vilnius, Lithuania, and his work betrays a strong nostalgia for the forests and landscape of Poland’s former Eastern borderlands, which were also home to the great Romantic poet, Adam Mickiewicz, and Nobel Prize winner, Czesław Miłosz. He fought in the Home Army during the war, making his way to Warsaw, where he became a journalist and joined the Party, writing at first in the socialist realist mode that was mandatory at the time, turning toward reminiscences of childhood and then bitter satire as he became disillusioned with the Communist system. Beginning in the mid-1950s he began to make films and worked in the KADR film studio, making his debut in 1958 with The Last Day of Summer, which would point the way toward a new kind of “auteur cinema” in Poland, written, directed, and filmed by a single author.

In this episode, we focus on his major novels, A Dreambook for our Time, The Polish Complex, A Minor Apocalypse, and Bohin Manor, reflecting on some of the lesser-known works in passing. We discuss some of the controversies relating to his early socialist realist period, and the representation of women and the male gaze in his works, as well as the importance of his novels of the pre-Solidarity period of the 1960s and 70s in the formulation of a discourse of freedom and multicultural pluralism in Poland.

Learn more about this episode, and see the biography of the guest on the Polish Cultural Institute New York's website: https://instytutpolski.pl/newyork/202...

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Bartek Remisko, Executive Producer
David A. Goldfarb, Host & Producer
Natalia Iyudin, Producer