Tadeusz Konwicki (22 June 1926 – 7 January 2015)[2] was a Polish writer and film director, as well as a member of the
Polish Language Council.
Life
Konwicki was born in 1926 as the only son of Jadwiga Kieżun and Michał Konwicki in Nowa Wilejka, where he spent his early
childhood. His father died early and Konwicki lived with his great-aunt and great-uncle who he later depicted in his novels. He attended a local King Zygmunt August
gymnasium. Immediately following the outbreak of
World War II, Wilno was occupied by the
Soviet Union and subsequently by
Nazi Germany, and all education for Poles was discontinued.
Konwicki continued his studies
underground and joined the eighth Oszmiana Brigade of the
Home Army that took part in the nationwide guerrilla operation code-named
Operation Tempest and
Operation Ostra Brama. He later disarmed and went into hiding from the Soviet Army. In November 1944, he joined Tur's (Witold Turonek) unit and fought until April 28, 1945 - one of the last guerrilla units in the area.[3] After the war Wilno (retrieving its name as Vilnius in the process) was annexed by the
Soviet Union and Konwicki was expatriated.
In the spring of 1945 Konwicki moved to
Kraków, where he enrolled at
Jagiellonian University. He also started to work as a journalist at Odrodzenie weekly, moving to
Warsaw in 1947 to continue his work for the magazine. In the capital, he was one of the leading advocates for
Socialist Realism in literature. In 1948 he finished his memoirs of his partisan years (Rojsty), but the book was not published until 1956. His literary debut was the
Produkcyjniak [
pl] (production novel) Construction Site (1950, Przy budowie), which was followed by the novel Power (1954, Władza). His 1956 novel From a Besieged City (1956, Z oblężonego miasta) also became quite popular.
In the years 1952–1966 he was a member of
Polish United Workers' Party. By the mid-1950s, Konwicki had become disillusioned by the communist regime in
Poland and fell out of grace with the party. His later works (beginning with A Hole in the Sky (1959, Dziura w niebie), are mostly concerned with the author's childhood and the semi-mythical, romantic land of his youth.
At this time Konwicki became the head of the
Kadr Film Studio and has since been recognized as one of the most notable members of the
Polish Film School. However, his work veered away from the style pursued by his contemporaries, due to its uniquely bitter quality. As a filmmaker he is known for his Venice'58 Grand Prix winner The Last Day of Summer (Ostatni dzień lata, 1958), All Souls' Day (Zaduszki, 1961), as well as for his masterpieces
Salto (1962) and How Far Away, How Near (Jak daleko stąd, jak blisko, 1973), as well as film adaptations: of Nobel Prize Winner Czesław Miłosz's book Issa Valley (Dolina Issy, 1982), and of Adam Mickiewicz's drama Forefather's Eve – Lava (1989).
He is widely known for two novels, published by the Polish underground press: The Polish Complex (1977) and A Minor Apocalypse (1979).[4] The latter work, a bitter satire about a washed-up writer who is asked to burn himself in front of the Soviet-built
Palace of Culture and Science, Warsaw; the novel was adapted as a 1993 French
feature film, directed by
Costa-Gavras. A Minor Apocalypse is a post-Orwellian parody that refers to specific historical events, such as self-immolation protests against the communist regime by
Ryszard Siwiec in Poland and
Jan Palach in
Czechoslovakia.