The Polish Complex takes place on Christmas Eve, from early morning until late in the evening, as a line of people (including the narrator, whose name is Konwicki) stand and wait in front of a jewelry store in Warsaw. Through the narrator we are told of what happens among those standing in line outside this store, what happens as the narrator's mind thinks and rants about the current state of Poland, and what happens as he imagines the failed Polish rebellion of 1863. The novel's form allows Konwicki (both character and author) to roam around and through Poland's past and present, and to range freely through whatever comes to his attention. By turns comic, lyrical, despairing, and liberating, The Polish Complex stands as one of the most important novels to have come out of Poland since World War II.

The Polish Complex

Konwicki, Tadeusz

Literature & Fiction

Penguin??Books

Amid warnings of the earth's end Peter encounters the Anthropos-Spectre-Beast and travels with the Investigator Dog on mysterious trips into the Universe.

The anthropos-spectre-beast

Oxford University Press

"We live, as we dream—alone," Conrad revealed in Heart of Darkness. This novel by Tadeusz Konwicki, a Pole writing in his own language, is an extension of the theme of dream and life and their interlocking realities, and man's attempt to come to meaningful and personal terms with an existential and absurd universe. The antihero (in the Camusian sense) is shown at the opening of the novel just coming out of a coma, having tried to commit suicide by poison. He is surrounded by provincial townsfolk, villagers who in their isolation and emotional impoverishment have turned their energies to creating a new religion—a private God, non-identifiable as either Christian or non-Christian. Called "one of the most terrifying novels in postwar Polish literature,...greeted upon its appearance (in 1963) as a major literary sensation" (Czeslaw Milosz, History of Polish Literature), the novel moves through a series of flashbacks between present reality and recalled experiences. The language is that of a dream sequence with metaphors of nightmarish quality, both in intensity and "illogicality." The young Pole who narrates his experiences reveals himself to be caught up in a labyrinth leading nowhere, driven by an urge which ultimately is a need for punishment, and represents man's longing for a responsive and benevolent force over his destiny. Acutely feeling the lack, faced with a godless universe, he sees his choice to be between selfassertive survival at any price—moral, sensual, intellectual—or the selfpronouncement of worthlessness and the denouement of peace attained by suicide. The hero "escapes" death and is condemned to death-in-life. Konwicki's descriptions of the brutal mutual massacres of some of the war experiences of the narrator are unforgettable in their irony. The dialogue is witty and ironic, and retains the vernacular thrust of the Polish original. The author's experience as director and script writer earned him a Grand Prix (1958) at Venice for a film entitled The Last Day of Summer. His vivid awareness of the passing values in an increasingly superficial world of interrelationships and goals makes this passionate work a powerful indictment of modern man's progress in guilt and war and his impotence in melding his idealistic dreams and his life.

A Dreambook for Our Time

History & Criticism

Mit Pr

This autobiographical novel recalls the first days of Polish Solidarity and the declaration of martial law as well as the author's Lithuanian childhood, his anti-Nazi and anti-communist activities, and his halfhearted conversion to communism and dissident activities

Moonrise, Moonset (English and Polish Edition)

Contemporary

Farrar. Straus & Giroux

Konwicki careens purposefully from private history (his vices, obsessive Lithuanian reveries, and advancing old age) to a time capsule of cultural history: to portraits of the artists, writers, actors, and film directors who accounted for the explosive burst of creative activity in Poland after the war. His tone can be mischievous, cantankerous, or despairing, but also unexpectedly touching.

The New World Avenue and Vicinity

Biographies & Memoirs

Memoirs

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

From early morning until late evening on Christmas Eve, a group of Polish citizens, including workers, students, a peasant woman, and a police informer, stand in line at a state-owned jewelry store awaiting a shipment of gold rings from the Soviet Union

Polish Complex (English and Polish Edition)

Literary

As in his novel The Polish Complex, Konwicki's A Minor Apocalypse stars a narrator and character named Konwicki, who has been asked to set himself on fire that evening in front of the Communist Party headquarters in Warsaw in an act of protest. He accepts the commission, but without any clear idea of whether he will actually go through with the self-immolation. He spends the rest of the day wandering the streets of Warsaw, being tortured by the secret police and falling in love. Both himself and Everyman, the character-author experiences the effects of ideologies and bureaucracies gone insane with, as always in history, the individual struggling for survival rather than offering himself up on the pyre of the greater good. Brilliantly translated by Richard Lourie, A Minor Apocalypse is one of the most important novels to emerge from Poland in the last twenty five years.

Minor Apocalypse

Vintage

Moonrise, Moonset

Faber and Faber Limited

Amid warnings of the earth's end Peter encounters the Anthropos-Specter-Beast and travels with the Investigator Dog on mysterious trips into the Universe.

The Anthropos-Specter-Beast (English and Polish Edition)

Heller, Julek

S. G. Phillips

Polish Complex (American Literature)

Dalkey Archive Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Konwicki, Tadeusz. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Konwicki, Tadeusz