My guest is Dr. Richard Mordarski, Professor of Philosophy from Casimir the Great University in Bydgosc, Poland and a member of the editorial staff of FORUM. (more…)
I read A. Foremska’s article in the last issue about Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code with great interest. The author made several challenges and theological arguments against Brown’s book. In the case of such a sensational book, the question of whether we should engage in an apology of the Christian religion by use of such refined exegesis is a cause for discussion. In the end Foremska admits that the book is banal propaganda, with a simple mystery thrown in. (more…)
When I was a little boy the books by Julius Verne allowed me to travel. I went around the world in 80 days, I visited the oceans with captain Nemo, and I even traveled to the moon. A couple of years later came the time of Łajka, Gagarin, and Armstrong. All of a sudden the mankind was on a brink of conquering space. And this is when, for the first time, I saw a book written by Stanisław Lem. For a teenager in Poland, in the fifties, when everything was a “state secret”, his books about robots, astronauts, and space vehicles were like a magical world. Lem opened our eyes; his books moved galaxies and planets closer to us, while the technology became more understandable and accessible.
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The creation of Dan Brown, Da Vinci Code has experienced large commercial success, gaining a spot on modern literature lists in a world hungry for cheap thrills. Through the use of tested and proven literary tactics, skillfully enclosed in a story line, the writer makes money. The measures of Brown’s success are the millions of copies sold to readers who only understand the questions raised by the text at the surface. Without the historical knowledge, nor theological know how, the reader freely absorbs Hollywood’s approach to explaining the aspects of our existence. It is so predictable and always bought into, as long as the plot is full of mystery and conspiracy, at the same time not lacking in explosions and passionate love. These stories are a quick read, which is an accomplishment in today’s times, and where skillfully created intrigue pulls the reader from the beginning into the middle of an extensive plot in conflict with historical facts. The phenomenon is based on the moment when the reader, guided by the author, stops raising the necessary questions and no longer tries to counteract the absorbed ideas with historical facts.
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“Someone who wants to be Polish. An act of will is more important than a birth certificate. To be a Pole is not to change one’s national loyalty.”
Juliusz Mieroszewski, „Kultura”
If we had to choose the five Poles with the greatest degree of influence on the fate of Poland, and therefore Europe, in the twentieth century, among them would certainly be Jerzy Giedroyc, the creator and editor of Kultura in Paris and the founder of the publishing house Instytut Literacki (Literary Institute).
The work of Jerzy Giedroyc is so associated with the Paris-based journal Kultura that we often forget about his literary and government work during the prewar years. During his studies in law and history at the University of Warsaw, Giedroyc edited two titles, „Bunt Młodych” (Youth Rebellion) and „Politykę” (Politics). In these first years of his work, his numerous talents were already evident: his work ethic, excellent organization, and, most important, his ability to surround himself with excellent people. In addition to his publishing activities, the young Giedroyc was employed in the Ministry of Agriculture and, before the outbreak of war, he was secretary to the Minister of Industry and Trade.
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Those of us who were raised in Communist Poland have much in common. We are direct, act with a characteristic ease, and we tend to pay little attention to manners. The Polish post-war generations stand in direct contrast to the Polish pre-war intelligentsia. To many of us the pre-war intelligentsia is an abstract notion often associated with rigid etiquette and snobbism. When at the end of the eighties I arrived in Cleveland, the first representative of Polonia who reached out to me was Doctor Jerzy Maciuszko, a charming, courteous man full of gentleness, humbleness, politeness, and inherent high culture.
A Warsavian by birth, Jerzy Maciuszko, is a 1936 graduate of the Department of English Language at the University of Warsaw. He began his American career in 1951 as a lecturer of Polish Literature at Alliance College in Pennsylvania. Soon thereafter, he moved to Cleveland where he enrolled in the doctoral program in library sciences at Case Western Reserve University and worked in the department of foreign literature at the Cleveland Public Library. Upon defending his Ph.D. dissertation, Maciuszko was promoted to director of the prestigious John G. White Department at The Cleveland Public Library and continued his academic career teaching Polish literature at Case Western Reserve University.
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The columns of Forum introduce the literary profile of Janusz Glowacki, a Polish writer, living first in Warsaw, and now, for the last twenty-one years, in New York. Here is a fragment of the text in which he jokingly writes about his literary beginnings:
“…For a long time I dictated to my mother everything I wrote, using a ball pen, and so she was the first person who read and judged. A variety of good wishing acquaintances knew my mother was an editor in a publishing company, so they talked and assumed that it was impossible for me to write this stuff, since I am a playboy, who walks the streets of Warsaw’s New World in a shirt open down to my belt. And they swore it was my mother’s work, not mine, she did everything for me. Only when I started to write some “dirty” stuff they hesitated, because Mrs. Glowacka would not write this…”
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Czesław Miłosz (1911-2004) - “Slowly, because not until after reaching ninety, the doors opened for me and I walked out into the clarity of the morning (…) and I said that we are all children of the Lord. Because we come from where there is no divide between Yes and No, nor the division into Is, Will be, and Was.”
“Second Space” – Czesław. Miołosz
Czesław Miłosz – poet, prose writer, essayist, translator, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, was born on June 30, 1911, in Sztejnie on the banks of the Niewaza River in Lithuania. “Sztejnie, Ginejty, and Peiksiva – these were noble villages, very independent and sometimes in conflict with the local manors over lands in the forest. (…) The villages were purely Lithuanian and very aware of their heritage. (…) After the occupation of these lands by the Soviet Union the residents of these villages were transported to Siberia. (…) Buildings were torn down, orchards cut down and cleared (…).” This is how the Nobelist recalled his childhood.
“My childhood was quite sad. There were nine of us children. I had seven sisters and I often hid amongst them because we were subjected to the harshest discipline by our god-fearing parents. Our father was implacable, punishing our childish indiscretions relentlessly. I was terrorized by fear and the uncertainty of my lot . . .but yet, fascinated with the outside world… My existence was bleak, surrounded by poverty and harshness with only hard work to look forward to each day…”
Such are the memories of the earliest years of our celebrated novelist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature – Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont.
He was born on May 7, 1867 in the village of Kobiele Wielkie near Radom. His father was an organist and a secretary in the parish office and his mother was a housewife. Shortly after his birth, his parents moved to the outskirts of Lodz, taking up residence at their own farm, where Wladyslaw spent his childhood.
