[In the following review, Baranczak provides an overview of Lem's literary accomplishments and discusses his early realist novel Hospital of the Transfiguration.]

Q: What puts Stanislaw Lem in a category with François Rabelais and Anton Chekhov? A: All three started out in the medical profession. The best known representative of European science fiction, as well as the most widely translated among Poland's living authors, Lem wandered into literature almost reluctantly. Something of a Polish Isaac Asimov, he can claim an up-to-date familiarity with many fields of science; as the legend goes, he devours professional journals from astrophysics to zoopsychiatry at the rate of a dozen a day. Some of his non-fictional works, such as the wittily yet forbiddingly titled Summa Technologiae, or the highly technical treatise on literature's cognitive aspects, Philosophy of Chance, leave the poor literary critic in helpless awe. But Lem's mind works in mysterious ways. Loaded, computer-like, with an intimidating amount of scientific information, it emits a torrent of novels and short stories that betray this computer's unmistakably human qualities, from compassion to an acerbic sense of humor.

For this sort of mind, medicine might have seemed a better outlet than literature. Born in 1921, Lem received as sound a medical education as was possible in the war-ravaged cities of Lvov in the early '40s and Krakow between 1946 and 1948. After graduation he tried for a while to pursue all of his incompatible interests at once, by writing everything from poems and short stories to popular essays on science to articles published in professional medical journals. Perhaps the only way to avoid a dissociation of personality was for him to make all these fields and genres converge, in science fiction.

In Poland just after the war that was an adventurous thing to do. For one thing, all eyes were turned toward the immediate past. The memories of wartime inhumanity still smarted. It seemed that for many years to come literature would be confined to bearing witness to what had happened, to describing, as one contemporary Polish writer put it, “the fate that humans had procured for humans.” At the same time, all individual musings on the future (and what else is science fiction if not a private-enterprise vision of the future?) were being more and more strictly weeded out, to be replaced with “scientifically” elaborated prospects, courtesy of Marxism and its aesthetic extension, Socialist Realism. The Polish term for science fiction is, in fact, “scientific fantasy,” a contradictio in adiecto. In Stalinist Poland, visions of the future were expected to be “scientific” all right, but unhealthy fantasizing was strictly forbidden.

Young Lem was clever enough, however, to outsmart the guardians of Socialist Realism's purity. He created his own version of science fiction and managed to get it past the censor. After the serialized publication of his first, now forgotten novel, The Man from Mars, in a teen magazine in 1946, the appearance in 1951 of his first published book, The Astronauts, brought him a huge success. Needless to say, this novel would not have seen the light of day at all had it not been fashioned more or less along the obligatory ideological lines of its time. The global Communist future depicted here is definitely rosy. Space exploration flourishes in the spirit of true internationalism, that is to say, with Russians at the helm. Even in this book, however, Lem's perspicacity somehow has the last word. He manages to pose a number of rather non-Socialist Realist questions concerning the nature of human civilization or the ethical complications involved in mind's triumphs over matter.

In the post-Stalinist years, naturally, Lem's skill in asking such questions has found incomparably more room to develop. Over the past 30 years he has been developing as a writer with breakneck speed, not only writing profusely but constantly surprising his readers. What strikes Lem's faithful followers most, I think, is his uncanny thematic and generic versatility, combined with a poetic gift for totally unexpected literary approaches. Nobody could have predicted, for instance, that after the success of his first couple of middle-of-the-road science fiction novels he would switch to pure-nonsensical satires with strong anti-totalitarian overtones, as in The Star Diaries (1957). Or that alongside his ingenious yet relatively regular space-exploration novels such as the famous Solaris, he would later publish farcical fables like The Cyberiad, Kafkaesque parables like Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, or philosophical thrillers like The Investigation, not to mention even crazier generic oddities such as A Perfect Vacuum, which is a collection of reviews of nonexistent books.

And this is not all. It is merely the Lem available in English. Lem's die-hard Polish fans also know him as more than a science fiction writer. To them he is also a philosopher, a literary theoretician and critic (writing sagaciously on the subject of science fiction itself), a brilliant memoirist, and even a poet (although this early component of his output, unearthed and published in Poland in 1975, was not much more than a surprise gift for Lem's admirers).

Wait a second, there's more. There is also Lem the realistic novelist. And quite a traditional realistic novelist he is, too. Hospital of the Transfiguration shows us a Lem hardly imaginable to anyone who has read his Memoirs of a Space Traveler or The Futurological Congress. What we actually see here is the resolute direction of his early writing, before it was irreversibly diverted from that straight route by his success with science fiction. The Astronauts was Lem's first published book, but Hospital was the first mature novel he completed. It had been written long before The Astronauts, in 1948–49, though it was published only in 1955.

The publisher's blurb for the new book never mentions that Hospital of the Transfiguration is part of a larger whole. It is the first volume in a trilogy titled in Polish, with an anti-Proustian wink, The Time Not Lost. Not that it would have made any sense to have the entire trilogy translated and published here. Its second and third volumes are marred by many flaws; in recent decades Lem himself has condemned these two volumes to oblivion and allowed the Polish publishers to re-edit only the first. Indeed, the closer to the final chapters of the last volume, the more forgettable this trilogy seems to today's reader.

The edifying intent is clear in the title. The novel was supposed to be a sort of modern bildungsroman, in which a young man's experiences make him gradually a fuller person, and thus make his “time” of trial worthwhile and “not lost.” The trouble, however, was that young Lem had ambitiously decided to set the plot of his trilogy against the background of his own turbulent times. These included not only the war years, but the immediate postwar phase of People's Poland as well. In cognitive and aesthetic terms, this was a suicidal decision. Whoever in 1948–49, or especially in the several years that followed, wished to write a contemporary novel based in Poland faced a brutal alternative: either to write for his desk drawer or to lie. Lem attempted to find a middle road by trying to save as much of the picture's complexity as possible, but only at the cost of ultimately portraying Socialist Poland as the blessed haven for his troubled hero and his nation.

There were, to be sure, hundreds of far less honest books produced in Poland at the time, and Lem does not really have much reason to blush. Still, it was wise on his part to cut The Time Not Lost down to the Hospital of the Transfiguration. Read separately, this brief novel, though certainly not flawless, offers Lem's admirers a highly interesting look into his early realistic aspirations and concerns. Rather than emulating H. G. Wells, he is quite visibly inspired by an entirely different novelistic tradition here, one that extends from Dostoyevsky to Thomas Mann (the setting and the ideas of The Magic Mountain must have been a crucial influence); and if the final results are not quite up to these two names, it is certainly not for Lem's lack of ambition.

Lem's own Hans Castorp is a young doctor fresh out of school, named Stefan Trzyniecki, and his Davos is a hospital for the mentally ill in the Polish provinces during the first months of the Nazi occupation. At the novel's outset, Trzyniecki, having just taken part in a relative's funeral in the country (his kin are mostly landowning families, but he himself is a poor city-dweller), succumbs to a spiritual crisis, caused by many things at once: his realization of the senselessness of suffering and death, his depression after his country's defeat, the instinctive repulsion most people awake in him, and finally the Gombrowiczian sense of his own unbearable incompleteness and indefiniteness. In order to escape from all this he decides not to return home, and instead to accept his friend's invitation to join the staff of a nearby psychiatric asylum.

Here the book's best part starts. Hospital of the Transfiguration proves the old point about realistic literature: whenever the author touches upon the concrete subjects he knows thoroughly, instead of voicing general truths, his writing always gets better, becomes more convincing, not merely in an informative but also in a strictly aesthetic sense. In reading Lem's novel, it is not its philosophical or moralistic import, but the raw substance of tangible experience, the fruit of his medical training, that appeals most.

By contrast, the devices Lem employs to drive his bildungsroman points home lend the novel an air of predictability. The book's very title deflates the suspense: we know beforehand that the hospital setting and the symbolic “transfiguration” of the protagonist in it will serve as the novel's pivotal elements. The underlying concept of the isolated microcosm of a hospital as a sort of testing lab where human characters mature or break under pressure, where, despite all isolation, the external world constantly makes its ominous presence felt, where finally the protagonists, all their self-centered escapism notwithstanding, are forced to make a moral choice, quickly becomes too transparent and obvious.

Yet Lem's portrayal of the hospital itself still retains a great deal of literary power, from the stark realism of the ward or the operating room to the hidden mechanisms behind the asylum's functioning—the web of cruelty, intrigue, and indifference that binds the doctors and patients alike, the deranged or unscrupulous behavior of some and the desperate efforts of others to preserve the last vestiges of sanity and humaneness. The pages that depict this world show Lem in his element. The book's final chapter, in which the Nazis take over the hospital and force the doctors to consent to the patients’ liquidation, is supposed to provide both tragic peripeteia and moralistic dilemma, but it seems almost conventional by comparison. This novel's plot—which begins with a funeral and ends with an act of physical love—locates the tragic conflict in the human body rather than in the realm of history or ethics; its bitterness is less that of a moralist than that of a physician who knows pain, madness, and death from close personal observation.

This book may provide the answer to the question of why Lem the budding realist switched to science fiction. Was the failure of the next parts of his trilogy an indication to him that under the conditions of censorship the futuristic disguise would help him write more honestly about humanity's contemporary problems? Or did he simply find himself, as an artist and thinker, at realism's dead end? The disparity of weight between the theme of human biology and the theme of human history in Hospital of the Transfiguration suggests yet another possible answer. Lem is one of those writers who is interested more in the essential immutability of human existence than in any superficial evolution that history may provide. Paradoxically, he visualizes the future only to find more proof of his suspicion that human fate has remained, will remain, bound by the same laws of pain, love, and death, no matter what space suits we wear or what utopias we build.