The Anthropos-Spectre-Beast by Tadeusz Konwicki

That present moment is a vision of a police state in which the population, under constant surveillance, slowly loses its own contours and collapses into a shapeless mass. They share an analysis of social memory that contains the evil of wartime and Stalinist evil, as well as the construction of a protagonist who is first unable to accept his own identity because it contains elements of guilt, and then is unable to establish that identity because the way to it is blocked by the lack of a connection between his own person and the present moment around him. The portrait of contemporaneity, a sterile region and acid-etched time, is most intense in the cycle of novels that includes A Dreambook for Our Time (1963), Ascension Into Heaven (1967), and Nothing or Nothing(1971).

These works, among Konwicki's most beautiful, evoke the region around Vilnius as a land of growing up and of initiation into the sense of life, of learning about love and death, a land where feelings are born and where the reconciliation with existence - a Faustian acceptance of duration - occurs. He died on January 7, 2015.įrom the Besieged City (1956) inaugurates a Vilnius cycle that would include the novels A Hole in the Sky (1959), The Werewolf (1969), A Chronicle of Amorous Incidents (1974) and Bohin(1987). He is regarded as a spokesman for the yearnings, attitudes, hopes and rage of several generations. He is one of the writers who have left the most lasting impression on post-war Polish literature and culture.

Konwicki was the conscience of Polish society and the crazed mirror in which it is reflected. This author of twenty novels, film director and screenwriter (the founder of the 'Polish cinema des auteurs' was born in Lithuania in 1926.

The Anthropos-Spectre-Beast by Tadeusz Konwicki