MAKUSZYIVSKI, KORNEL (1884-1953) - poet, literary and drama critic, the most popular Polish writer of literature for children, with many of his novels children's classics. Studied Polish and French literature at Lvov University, until 1918 he lived and worked in Lvov and Kiev, then moved to Warsaw. Represented a lighter side of Polish literature of the time; a master humorist, he wrote stories and novels about bohemian artistic life and in 1916 published his collection of fantastic stories Very Strange Tales.
MICINSKI, TADEUSZ (1873-1918) - poet, playwright, novelist and translator, he was one of the most original figures of the Young Poland artistic movement. Studied history at Cracow University and philosophy in Leipzig as a pupil of Wundt, and in Berlin. He spent 1897-98 in Spain where he developed a life-long interest in Spanish mysticism. His works represent the characteristic mixture of Manichaeism and a catastrophic view of history written in a highly stylised, expressionistic language. At its best, his poetry goes beyond the expressionistic mannerism and contains some of the best verse of Polish modernism, while his novels such as Nietota, Mene-Mene-Thekel-Upharisim! or Father Faust, push the boundaries of the literary genre and blend Western expressionism and symbolism with Eastern mysticism, bringing them together in a vast historio-philosophical panorama of peculiarly Polish decadence. An ardent believer in the union of Slav peoples, during the Balkan War Micinski worked as a war correspondent in Bulgaria and in 1915-18 in Russia, where he also joined the Polish Legions as an education officer. Returning home after the war he was murdered by a rioting mob.
MIRANDOLA, FRANCISZEK (1871-1930) - writer, poet and one of the most prolific translators in Polish literature. Born Franciszek Pik, the similarity of his surname to the name of the famous Italian poet Picco Mirandolla inspired him to adopt the pen-name of Mirandola, or Pik-Mirandola. Educated as a pharmacist, he also studied philosophy in Heidelberg and travelled in Germany and France. He made his debut in 1 898 with a volume of poetry Liber Tristium in the expressionist style of Young Poland. In 1916 he published a volume of short stories Tempore Belli, an atmospheric yet naturalistic picture of the First World War, and in 1919 Spoors, a collection of fantastic stories exploring the theme of the paranormal. His writing is imbued with a characteristic quiet, often moving lyricism, and it is in his prose, rather than poetry that he gave it its best form. He translated 200 volumes of French, German, Scandinavian and English literature, among them Baudelaire, Mallarme, Verlaine, Maeterlinck, Schiller, Goethe, Novalis, Hamsun, Defoe, Kipling and Tagore. For most of his life he lived in poverty, dividing his time between his pharmacy and literature; only towards the end of his life was he able to support himself with his literary work.
MROZEK, SLAWOMIR (1930-) - playwright, writer, satirist, one of the most popular writers in post-war Poland. Mrozek made his debut in 1950 as a journalist. He worked in various journals and newspapers, writing a satirical column, and in the experimental student theatre Bim-Bom. His sharp satirical writings - a pastiche of official and colloquial jargon painting a grotesque, absurd picture of reality - gained him notorious popularity. Between 1958-64 he published a number of plays, among them The Police (1958), The Turkey (1960) and Tango (1964) in which he also pictured the grotesque yet uncomfortably familiar world of primitive narrow-mindedness breeding ideological mythologies, the world of phrase, of highly stylised comic - and brutal - rhetoric. These plays established him as one of the most intelligent, penetrating and funny satirists of the Polish way of life, culture and traditions - i.e. Polish romanticism, and especially of the way they functioned in the context of new, two-faced communist reality. His later plays, The Slaughterhouse (1973), Immigrants (1974) and Vatzlav (1979), deepen the theme of individual alienation in the world of mad rhetoric. In 1963 Mrozek left Poland to live in Italy, and from 1968 in France. He won many Polish and international literary and satirical awards, among them Prix de l'Humeur Noir (Paris,1964) and Franz Kafka's Award (1987, Klostenburg, Austria).
REYMONT, WLADYSLAW (1867-1925) - journalist and novelist, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1924. Son of a village organist, he received only a basic education; he worked as an apprentice tailor, a railway worker, an actor in a small touring company and a journalist before committing himself fully to a literary career. His early works were influenced by Dostoyevski and combine naturalistic observation of social and psychological phenomena with an expressionistic manner of style. One of his best novels, The Promised Land is a dark panorama of an industrial city at the end of the 19th century - a Moloch-metropolis which breeds and devours its decadent, greedy children. His masterpiece The Peasants, compared at the time with the popular works of Knut Hamsun, won him international recognition and later the Nobel Prize. He had a life-long interest in spiritualism, the occult and the paranormal though it resulted only in a handful of stories and a novel The Vampire.
RZEWUSKI, HENRYK (1791-1866) - writer, journalist, publisher; born into an impoverished aristocratic family, Rzewuski was famous for his stories and anecdotes about the bygone era of the pre-partitioned, 18th century Poland. The literary legend has it that it was he who, with his gift for conjuring up colourful pictures of the old days, inspired the great romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz in creating the background and some of the characters in the latter's epic poem Pan Tadeusz. Apparently, encouraged by Mickiewicz to write down the stories he had learned and remembered from childhood, Rzewuski wrote several books extolling the virtues of the old way of life in "the noblemen's democracy". "I am Burnin"' is Rzewuski's classic, its title and the character of Mr Pogorzelski long established in the everyday culture.
SCHULZ, BRUNO (1892-1942) - writer, literary critic, translator and graphic artist, one of the greatest and most original writers in Polish literature this century. Born in Drohobycz, a small, provincial town in the eastern provinces of Poland (now Ukraine), into an assimilated Jewish family. He was educated in Drohobycz, studied architecture in Lvov and painting in Vienna, then taught art in Drohobycz' local schools for the rest of his life. He was murdered in the Drohobycz ghetto by a Gestapo officer. Schulz started writing probably in his early thirties and made his debut in 1933 with a collection of short stories Cinnamon Shops (in English translation published as The Street of Crocodiles), which originated as postscripts to letters to his friend, the poetess Debora Vogel. The book was an instant critical success and in 1937 Schulz published another collection of short stories Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass. Apart from his literary criticism the two collections contain the bulk of his literary output (though there are persistent rumours about the existence of his novel The Messiah buried in the depths of the KGB archives); the story "The Comet" was published in 1938 outside these collections in a literary magazine.
SIEMIENSKI, LUCJAN (1807-1877) - poet, novelist, literary critic and translator. Born into a landowning Polish family in Galicja (south-eastern Poland) and brought up with the ideal of independent democratic Poland, he took part in the November Uprising (1830-31) against Russia. After release from captivity he joined a political conspiracy and was active in the literary group Ziewonia whose programme propagated the common heritage of Slav cultures, with an emphasis on ethnic tolerance. He translated numerous Russian and Ukrainian classics, collected folk tales, songs and poetry, and wrote his own stories and poetry in their style. Arrested in 1837, he escaped to France and spent the next to years in exile. In 1848 he returned to Cracow where he lived till the end of his life, working as a literary editor and translator (his crowning achievement translations of Michelangelo, Horace and Homer).
SZCZYPIORSKI, ANDRZEJ (1924- ) -journalist and writer, at first sympathetic to communism but later a dissident who was interned in 1981 during martial law; in 1989 he was elected to the Polish Senate on the Solidarity ticket. In his early novels Szczypiorski dealt with the ideological conflicts and existential crises of the war generation; in a historical novel A Mass for the City of Arras he wrote about the persecution of the Jews and heretics, analysing the mechanism of mass psychosis which dest
roys individual rights and lives. In 1988 his novel The Beautiful Mrs Seidenman won him world-wide critical acclaim. He also wrote lighter detective and fantastic stories under the pen-name of Maurice S. Andrews.
WOROSZYLSKI, WIKTOR (1927- ) - poet, writer, journalist and translator. Born in Grodno (now Bielorussia), Woroszylski studied literature in Lodi, Warsaw and Moscow. At first committed to the communist ideal, he became disillusioned with the system after the turbulent "thaw" of the mid sos, and although he never denounced his socialist sympathies, in the late 1970s he became the editor of a dissident periodical and in 1981 was interned during martial law An expert on Russian and Soviet literature, author of biographical works on M. Saltikov-Shchedrin, W. Mayakovski and S. Yesienin, Woroszylski is a leading translator of Russian poetry; he has also written a number of popular novels for children.
Wiesiek Powaga was born in Poland in 1958 where he trained as a film make up artist and studied psychology. In 1981 after martial law was declared he settled in London. He had a great variety of jobs, including working in restaurants, on building sites and as a carpenter before reading philosophy at London University.
For the past few years he has worked as a commercial and literary translator from English into Polish and Polish into English, as well as being the London correspondent for several Polish music magazines.
' A traditional knee-length frock worn by Polish noblemen in 1518c.
'Sarmatia - anciently a region reaching from the Vistula and Danube to the Volga and Caucasus, the legendary cradle of Poland.
' Holy Alliance - a league formed after the fall of Napoleon by the sovereigns of Austria, Russia and Prussia, professedly to regulate all national and international relations in accordance with the principles of Christian charity.
2 An allusion to a masterpiece of Polish romantic literature "The Un-Divine Comedy" and its author Count Zygmunt Krasinski who, shaken by waves of popular unrest sweeping the postNapoleonic Europe, depicted an apocalyptic vision of the collapse and destruction of European culture.
' Hetman - one of the four highest commanders of the Polish army up until 18c.; a position usually held by members of aristocratic families.
' White Eagle - Polish national emblem.
' Pigdzik - an ordinary surname, but one which through its coarseness showed its bearer to be of peasant stock.
' Preference - a French card game resembling auction bridge, popular in Poland at the turn of 19c.
' Psalm no 59 in King James version of the Bible (or 58 in the Vulgate):
Deliver me from my enemies, 0 my God, defend me from them that rise up inme...
2A fur-lined coat worn by Polish noblemen.
2 A Polish diet, in 15-18c. Poland held at all levels from provincial dietines to the national General Seym.
' Bar Confederacy - an armed league of Polish nobility and aristocracy established in 1768 in the city of Bar in Podole against the last king of Poland Stanislaw August Poniatowski, his reforms and the Russian domination.
4 The legend has it that Prince Josef Poniatowski - nephew of the last king of Poland Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski - threw himself into the river Elbe after the defeat of Napoleon in the "Battle of the Nations". This defeat dashed all the hopes the Poles had for the resurrection of an independent Poland under Napoleon's protectorate, with Prince Josef as its head.
' Lucifer - Satan, but also the planet Venus as morning star; hence the name "Venus of Hell" later.
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