My Century
My Century

Author: Aleksander Wat

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2013-01-30

Total Pages: 460

ISBN-13: 1590175425

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In My Century the great Polish poet Aleksander Wat provides a spellbinding account of life in Eastern Europe in the midst of the terrible twentieth century. Based on interviews with Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz, My Century describes the artistic, sexual, and political experimentation—in which Wat was a major participant—that followed the end of World War I: an explosion of talent and ideas which, he argues, in some ways helped to open the door to the destruction that the Nazis and Bolsheviks soon visited upon the world. But Wat’s book is at heart a story of spiritual struggle and conversion. He tells of his separation during World War II from his wife and young son, of his confinement in the Soviet prison system, of the night when the sound of far-off laughter brought on a vision of “the devil in history.” “It was then,” Wat writes, “that I began to be a believer.”

Lucifer Unemployed
Lucifer Unemployed

Author: Aleksander Wat

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 140

ISBN-13: 9780810108400

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In these nine stories the Polish writer Aleksander Wat consistently turns history on its ear in comic reversals reverberating with futurist rhythms and the gently mocking humor of despair. Wat inverts the conventions of religion, politics, and culture to fantastic effect, illuminating the anarchic conditions of existence in interwar Europe. The title story finds a superbly ironic Lucifer wandering the Europe of the late 1920s in search of a mission: what impact can a devil have in a godless time? What is his sorcery in a society far more diablical than the devil himself? Too idealistic for a world full of modern cruelties, the unemployable Lucifer finally finds the only means of guaranteed immortality. In "The Eternally Wandering Jew," steady Jewish conversion to Christianity results in Nathan the Talmudist reigning as Pope Urban IX. The hilarious satire on power, "Kings in Exile," unfolds with the dethroned monarchs of Europe meeting to found their own republic in an uninhabited island in the Indian Ocean.

Aleksander Wat
Aleksander Wat

Author: Tomas Venclova

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 1996-01-01

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13: 9780300064063

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Aleksander Wat was, in many ways, the archetypal Central European intellectual of the mid-twentieth century, a man who experienced and influenced all the tumultuous political and artistic movements of his time. Yet little has been published about him, even in his native Poland. This book is the first account of Wat's turbulent life, accompanied by a thorough analysis of his extraordinary poems and prose works in their diverse periods and genres. Tomas Venclova, himself a poet of international renown, has uncovered numerous new biographical details, made the surprising discovery of an unfinished novel Wat began fifty years ago, and woven together the themes of Wat's life and work. At different times a futurist, surrealist, and Communist fellow traveler, Wat turned away from communism after his imprisonment by the Soviet secret police and became a vociferous spokesman for democracy. Venclova tells Wat's story from his Polish-Jewish upbringing in the early 1900s, his participation in the literary avant-garde in the 1920s, and his work as editor of an influential Communist journal before World War II through his emigration to the West in 1959 and his death in 1967. Venclova argues convincingly that Wat's literary achievement promoted the rejuvenation of Polish and East European letters after the Stalinist era. His broad intellectual influence on many, including Czeslaw Milosz, helped to consolidate the moral and political opposition to totalitarian ideology that has profoundly changed political realities in the late twentieth century.

Caviar and Ashes
Caviar and Ashes

Author: Marci Shore

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2006-01-01

Total Pages: 959

ISBN-13: 0300128622

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""In the elegant capital city of Warsaw, the editor Mieczyslaw Grydzewski would come with his two dachshunds to a cafe called Ziemianska."" Thus begins the history of a generation of Polish literati born at the ""fin de siecle,"" They sat in Cafe Ziemianska and believed that the world moved on what they said there. ""Caviar and Ashes"" tells the story of the young avant-gardists of the early 1920s who became the radical Marxists of the late 1920s. They made the choice for Marxism before Stalinism, before socialist realism, before Marxism meant the imposition of Soviet communism in Poland. It ended tragically. Marci Shore begins with this generation's coming of age after the First World War and narrates a half-century-long journey through futurist manifestos and proletarian poetry, Stalinist terror and Nazi genocide, a journey from the literary cafes to the cells of prisons and the corridors of power. Using newly available archival materials from Poland and Russia, as well as from Ukraine and Israel, Shore explores what it meant to live Marxism as a European, an East European, and a Jewish intellectual in the twentieth century.

The Sound of Modern Polish Poetry
The Sound of Modern Polish Poetry

Author: Aleksandra Kremer

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2021-12-07

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 0674261119

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An illuminating new study of modern Polish verse in performance, offering a major reassessment of the roles of poets and poetry in twentieth-century Polish culture. WhatÕs in a voice? Why record oneself reading a poem that also exists on paper? In recent decades, scholars have sought to answer these questions, giving due credit to the art of poetry performance in the anglophone world. Now Aleksandra Kremer trains a sharp ear on modern Polish poetry, assessing the rising importance of authorial sound recordings during the tumultuous twentieth century in Eastern Europe. Kremer traces the adoption by key Polish poets of performance practices intimately tied to new media. In Polish hands, tape recording became something different from what it had been in the West, shaped by its distinctive origins behind the Iron Curtain. The Sound of Modern Polish Poetry reconstructs the historical conditions, audio technologies, and personal motivations that informed poetic performances by such luminaries as Czes_aw Mi_osz, Wis_awa Szymborska, Aleksander Wat, Zbigniew Herbert, Miron Bia_oszewski, Anna Swir, and Tadeusz R—_ewicz. Through performances both public and private, prepared and improvised, professional and amateur, these poets tested the possibilities of the physical voice and introduced new poetic practices, reading styles, and genres to the Polish literary scene. Recording became, for these artists, a means of announcing their ambiguous place between worlds. KremerÕs is a work of criticism as well as recovery, deploying speech-analysis software to shed light on forgotten audio experimentsÑfrom poetic Òsound postcards,Ó to unusual home performances, to the final testaments of writer-performers. Collectively, their voices reveal new aesthetics of poetry reading and novel concepts of the poetic self.

A Book of Luminous Things
A Book of Luminous Things

Author: Czesław Miłosz

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 9780156005746

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Nobel laureate poet Czeslaw Milosz personal selection of 300 of the world's greatest poems written throughout the ages and around the world.

Lost Time
Lost Time

Author: Jozef Czapski

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2018-11-06

Total Pages: 137

ISBN-13: 1681372592

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The first translation of painter and writer Józef Czapski's inspiring lectures on Proust, first delivered in a prison camp in the Soviet Union during World War II. During the Second World War, as a prisoner of war in a Soviet camp, and with nothing but memory to go on, the Polish artist and soldier Józef Czapski brought Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time to life for an audience of prison inmates. In a series of lectures, Czapski described the arc and import of Proust’s masterpiece, sketched major and minor characters in striking detail, and movingly evoked the work’s originality, depth, and beauty. Eric Karpeles has translated this brilliant and ­altogether unparalleled feat of the critical imagination into English for the first time, and in a thoughtful introduction he brings out how, in reckoning with Proust’s great meditation on memory, Czapski helped his fellow officers to remember that there was a world apart from the world of the camp. Proust had staked the art of the novelist against the losses of a lifetime and the imminence of death. Recalling that triumphant wager, unfolding, like Sheherazade, the intricacies of Proust’s world night after night, Czapski showed to men at the end of their tether that the past remained present and there was a future in which to hope.