In many ways Tadeusz Konwicki (born in 1926) is a typical example of a writer who entered mature life in Poland after the establishment of the communist dictatorship in 1945. His writing underwent a gradual transformation from socialist realism, which he embraced as his "creative method" in the late forties and early fifties, to a complete rejection of socialist principles and adoption of a new independent aesthetic. In one respect, however, his biography seems to differ from many others of his generation. Born near Wilno (Vilnius), the present capital of Lithuania, Konwicki completed high school by attending clandestine study classes. On the eve of the German retreat in 1944, he joined the Polish underground resistance movement, Armia Krajowa (the Home Army), which remained under the orders of the Polish government-in-exile in London. After the Soviets recaptured the region, the Home Army turned its arms against them. It considered the Red Army to be a new occupying force, more dangerous to true Polish independence than the previous invader. As a soldier of the Home Army who swore allegiance to its goals and ideals, Konwicki served in a unit which fought the Soviets. The outcome of this conflict was a foregone conclusion: patriotic motivation could not match Soviet military power. He described the agony of this experience in the novel Rojsty (Marshes). After the defeat, thousands of Home Army soldiers were captured, imprisoned, executed, or left to perish in the concentration camps of Siberia. The country that Konwicki thought of as his native land was handed over to the so-called Socialist Republic of Lithuania or, in other words, became part of the Soviet Union. He managed to escape to Poland, living first in Krakow, where he studied Polish literature, and shortly afterwards settling in Warsaw. Seemingly, Konwicki could celebrate: he came out of the ordeal safe and sound. Yet the painful loss of his homeland and forced emigration left an indelible mark on his personality. He perceived this change as something that could not be rationally explained, as something that shattered his sense of security. It also left him, a young man, with unfulfilled dreams. Later, in the novel A Minor Apocalypse, the main character—who in some episodes and statements can be recognized as the writer's alter ego—makes the following admission: "Fate only drove me a few hundred kilometers, but it separated me from my unfulfilled life by an entire eternity of reincarnation." This traumatic experience exerted a lasting impact on Konwicki's writing and lent to it a peculiar stamp of thematic unity: all his works are permeated with the retentive memory of the past, and, as if to cure himself from its burden, he leads the reader to a beautiful valley (the site of Nowa Wilejka where he was born), obsessively depicted throughout his whole prose and symbolizing the time and place of his lost adolescence.

By and large it can be said that Konwicki went through three basic stages of creative evolution. Early in his career he published a piece of literary reporting, Przy budowie (At the Building Site, 1950), and a few volumes of fiction, among which the most significant was probably the novel Wladza (The Power, 1953). Both of these books offered an optimistic view of postwar Poland ruled by the newly established communist order and complied with the norms of socialist realism, which had been imposed on Polish writers in 1949 as "the only correct method of artistic creativity." The second stage can be called a period of doubt and skepticism. It begins after 1956 and is characterized by an intense literary experimentation; now the author tries not only to reassess or even redefine his relation to the political and social conditions of his country but also to find new means of artistic expression to enhance his specificity as a writer. This period was opened by the publication of Dziura w niebie (A Hole in the Sky, 1959), but it began in earnest with the novel Sennik wspólczesny (A Dreambook for Our Time, 1963) and ended with Kalendarz i klepsydra (The Calendar and the Hourglass, 1976)—a volume of what the author himself defined as "essayistic prose." Shortly afterwards, Konwicki's evolution as a writer took yet another turn: in 1977 the official publishing house Czytelnik refused to accept his novel The Polish Complex, and the author decided to publish it in the "second circulation" or drugi obieg, also known as niezalezny obieg (independent circulation), the Polish terms for samizdat or tamizdat. Apart from The Polish Complex, three other books appeared in the underground press: A Minor Apocalypse, Moonrise, Moonset, and Rzeka podziemna, podziemne ptaki (Underground River, Underground Birds, 1984). For ten years Konwicki's name remained absent from official publications and banned from the press. While Konwicki steadfastly defended his quest for artistic renewal and independence, he grew in stature as an author of significance and entered the mainstream of European writing. It is the intention of this article to follow this process through an analysis of texts and to establish the most essential distinctive features of his narrative discourse or fictional world. In doing so, one ought to be aware that the transition from one stage to another is not rigid or brought into strong relief by a single work; rather, it is flexible and gradual, marked by the mutual coexistence and continuous recurrence (dynamic or passive) of some formal devices and thematic threads. Thus, for example, if some narrative characteristics of one period may have remained in its background they are strongly reactivated and come to the fore as prime formative constituents in the next. This is particularly relevant with regard to Konwicki's later writings.

From the very beginning, Konwicki's prose has been typified by a thematic triad: war, reminiscences of juvenile experience, and broad commentary on contemporary life. It is difficult to say whether any of these thematic components overwhelms the others in terms of recurrence. Rather, what we observe is their constant interaction throughout all of Konwicki's works. They are intertwined in a great number of narrative constants and appear even in his most "metaphysical" or, as he calls them, "existential" novels of the sixties such as A Dreambook for Our Time, Wniebowstapienie (Ascension, 1967), Nic albo nic (Nothing or Nothing, 1971). This thematic unity is reinforced by a quite frequent reappearance of the same situations, settings (for example, the above-mentioned valley), episodes, and characters. The reader will encounter Karnowski on the pages of Nic albo nic, Rzeka podziemna, podziemne ptaki, Moonrise, Moonset, and "Kilka dni wojny o ktorej nie wiadomo, czy byla" in Zorze wieczorne ("A Few Days' War Which One Is Not Certain Happened" in Evening Dawns, 1991). The same is true of other characters. Konwicki's prose, then, manifests a thematic consistency but not thematic homogeneity: with the exception of Rojsty, which is entirely devoted to the vicissitudes of a Polish guerrilla unit fighting the Soviets, they are always composed of the above-mentioned thematic triad. Consequently, due to this juxtaposition of themes, Konwicki's prose is basically either associative or kaleidoscopic in nature.

The Associative Chain: The Prose of Doubt and Suspicion

In Konwicki's ample literary output A Dreambook for Our Time constitutes a break with his style of the fifties with its distinctive rectilinear progression of the plot. Now the author begins to disrupt this sequential unity of his prose by disregarding both its temporal and spatial "logical" order. The novel leaves the impression of being "chaotic" with many loose ends hanging untied, and the reader is challenged to unravel the mysteries of the story. This outward disorder is matched by the vagueness of the narrator's position and the protagonist's behavior. Who is Paul? After a failed suicide attempt, he awakes from unconsciousness, surrounded by people who came to his room out of curiosity rather than compassion. They are insensitive observers without any intention to help him. As it turns out later, he cannot relate to them either, although most of them are as unhappy and degraded in their social condition as he is: Regina cannot find a partner to realize her dreams for love and happy marriage; the mutual animosity between the Korsak siblings grows with age, yet they are doomed to one another forever; the former partisan Krupa is obsessed with his unfulfilled sexual desire for Regina; militiaman Glowko, a drunkard, is terrorized by his wife; roadman Debicki (to his irritation, he is often addressed by local inhabitants as Mr. Dobas) suffers because of the conflict between his excessive ambitions and his actual occupational status. This register of unhappiness and failure can be extended. The characters are all sidetracked in a small, unnamed town, and even this miserable existence is endangered. A huge dam is planned for the area, and the whole valley, including the town, is to be flooded. Everything is surrounded by an air of uncertainty. Yet in this microworld of lost individuals Paul meets one person to whom he develops an emotional attachment: Justine. She is the wife or common-law wife (in this novel nothing is certain about the personal and professional details of the characters) of Joseph Car (pronounced "czar"), spiritual leader of a religious sect. There exists, however, another impediment on the road to a true and lasting relationship between Justine and Paul: it is the latter's past, which proves to be strangely interwoven with that of Car. Consequently, their relationship turns into a series of morbid encounters leading nowhere. Paul lives in two worlds: the world of the emotionally and even physically oppressive present and the painful past. A Dreambook for Our Time is a narrative of alternating images or fragments reflecting Paul's frame of mind (mental distress) and his inner instability. As he reflects upon his past and tries to recall its details, he gradually arrives at the realization that Car is his former colleague from the underground resistance movement who betrayed its cause and was sentenced to death. Paul was designated to carry out the sentence. Indeed, he shot at Car but without a firm intention to kill him; Car was wounded but survived. Now their paths cross again. There is additional, unresolved mystery in the story: a rumor has it that the adjacent forests still harbor a legendary underground fighter, Huniady. Is this Car's double? The question cannot be answered, and Paul is lost in conjecture. The novel ends with his leaving town.

Similar issues of the human condition in an unfriendly environment are pursued in Nic albo nic, except that in this case the number of characters is reduced. The novel is focused primarily on two protagonists: the young guerrilla fighters nicknamed Stary and Darek, whose occupational affiliations are not clearly defined. The young men of Stary's partisan detachment dream about a just postwar social order, and most of them believe in a change for the better in a future in which they will be able to fulfill their dreams. The reply to these dreams can be found in the fate of Darek, who lives in a new postwar reality. His life is enveloped in grayness, marked by dreadful events and loneliness; and there is an indication that he lives in a state of schizophrenic dissociation. The novel consists of two separate storylines or threads which do not intersect. It is unclear whether Darek is a porte-parole of Stary, who entered the new reality as a civilian. The reader can only guess and try to make some vague associations or to draw parallels. But if Stary indeed entered the world of Darek, it would mean that the lofty dreams of his generation have dissipated into nothingness. Darek's existential condition is even worse: if Stary had hopes about a bright future, Darek has been deprived of such comforts. The only "exit" left to him, the only solution available to him is death, which indeed befalls him toward the end of the novel. In short, the alternative to "nothing" is only "nothing," which explains the title of the novel. In its extreme pessimism Nic albo nic is akin to A Dreambook for Our Time, but the frightful description of human alienation in the former is stretched to the limits by the strong motif of death.

Konwicki's prose cannot be properly understood without attention being paid to the novel Zwierzoczlekoupiór (The Anthropos-Specter-Beast, 1969). In his conversations with Nowicki, the author claimed that The Anthropos-Specter-Beast was written for "the pleasure of readers and my own"; he links it with Dziuru w niebie and Kronika wypadków milosnych (Chronicle of Love Events, 1974) into one cycle of what he calls "recreational and doleful" prose. If The Anthropos-Specter-Beast is indeed as docile or "innocent" as Konwicki suggests, why then was it so fiercely attacked by Party hacks and official critics shortly after its publication? It seems, therefore, that it would be much more appropriate to place this novel within a different context, namely, to discuss it as part of Konwicki's writing of the sixties in which the associative flow of narration reveals itself as the dominant creative principle. Konwicki's prose does not move forward by cycles, but its growing maturity and changing nature can be measured by decades, by temporal progression—the sixties being the period of camouflaged disappointment, skepticism, and suspicion. The writer himself admitted that he began to write in a code, to apply Aesopian language. In this, Konwicki was not alone. In the 1960s many Polish writers and artists began to produce works that seemingly did not relate to contemporary external reality. In this respect the novel was not only symptomatic of Konwicki's work but in many ways quite characteristic of Polish literature of the sixties.

The novel is related by a first-person narrator, a little boy named Peter who declares in his opening sentence that "This book is not meant for obedient sons and daughters." Indeed, it's not. It is a tale of a naughty boy who knows how to vex his parents and to go his own way. He considers the adults to be naive and unworthy of trust. But the significance of the novel lies not in its external layer of events but in its plot, which distinguishes itself in two ways: first, Peter befriends Sebastian, a dog who can speak his language, and second, together they embark on an adventure of liberating a little girl, Eva, who is held captive and with whom they are both in love. Thus for the first time Konwicki ushers into his prose both the fantastic and some elements of the traditional romance. The narrative unfolds as a chain of alternating images of the real versus the unreal, and above the entire novel hovers the atmosphere of a Peter Pan story but without its optimistic ending. Peter finds an escape from the dreadful reality in the unreal: it is the fantastic that allows him (or so he imagines) to realize his dreams. And vice versa: the real appears before him as something alien, irrational, something that assumes the shape of the "anthroposspecter-beast." The function of the unreal and the real are reversed, the latter being unfriendly, hostile, and even terrifying. By the end of the novel, however, one can hardly avoid asking if the fantastic world is as friendly as Peter seems to believe when he cooperates with the old dog Sebastian. After a series of bold escapades, they succeed in liberating Eva from Troip (almost the reverse spelling of the name Piotr), her captor; yet when Peter thinks that his dream of happy union with Eva is at hand, the old dog brutally throws him off and leads Eva away from him. In the end Peter has no choice but to return to his parents. In both The Anthropos-Specter-Beast and Nic albo nic, the protagonists experience a painful condition of total isolation and disappointment and reach an existential cul-de-sac.

Kaleidoscopic Variety: The Prose of Protest and Rejection

The publication of Kalendarz i klepsydra in 1976 presaged change in Konwicki's writing. Distinct from everything that Konwicki had already written, it abandons plot as the means of organizing the narrative. Written in the form of a diary, Kalendarz i klepsydra preserves the fragmentation of the earlier prose yet is devoid of its associative ambiguity. It strikes with the directness of its discourse in which the denotative function of language comes clearly to the fore. The only principal character of the text is the author himself, and the book delights with its manifold presentation of happenings, gossip, and observations taken directly from either his personal life or the broader framework of his artistic, political, and social milieu. We are faced with a literary collage—the succession of themes, subjects, and images that occur with kaleidoscopic speed, as if the author intended to encompass the whole of reality. Thus we find here some threads that he later develops into full-scale stories (for example, about his grandmother Konwicka), comments about his previous works (both as a filmmaker and writer), confessions about his friendships, unflattering commentaries on Polish TV and the Union of Writers, and expressed frustrations caused by everyday life's inconveniences and nonsense. The register of subjects can go on. At the same time, this "essayistic prose," as the writer himself calls it, is imbued with a pervasive sense of self-irony and irony, indicating his own limitations and helplessness. On the first page of the book he indicates that "the nicest thing would be to write the truth" and nothing but the truth. The conditional mood used in this sentence indicates, however, that there are some impediments to the fulfillment of this wish. Somewhat later in the text he strengthens this statement by referring to his book as a "simulated diary." In other words, it is not devoid of a certain degree of fictionality because the writer cannot ignore some external constraints. Paradoxically, the refusal to name these constraints directly reveals to the reader the truth about censorship. Ten years later, when Konwicki returned to "official circulation" (that is, official publishing houses) by writing Nowy Swiat i okolice (New World Avenue and Vicinity, 1986), he wrote openly that "I am writing a book for the censors." It should be pointed out, however, that in spite of these authorial limitations, Kalendarz i klepsydra contains some formidable pages of direct and intransigent criticism of the communist regime. When he writes about senseless life and the collective dying of a whole nation, his attack on the existing political system reaches hitherto unknown dimensions and force. In this book Konwicki came as close as possible to testing the patience and vigilance of the censor. Beyond this point lay the imminent ban on publishing. He crossed this line in his next novel, The Polish Complex.

In Konwicki's evolution this novel constitutes a major innovation as regards both form and content. It alternates between two concerns—the present and the past—and four narrative voices. Each of them reports on a different set of events but reflects the same existential condition: individual and collective enslavement. The largest part of the novel is narrated by the author himself, who appears as a character (under the name of Tadeusz Konwicki) and who even indicates his real address in Warsaw. One Christmas Eve he stands in a queue before a jewelry store to buy Soviet gold. This leads him to a chain of unexpected adventures. The second, "historical," theme refers to the Polish insurrection of 1863 and its suppression by the Russians. It has two invariants: a second-person narrator and a third-person narrator. The fourth voice is an "I" narrator, too, who makes his presence known by a letter. In relation to the totalitarian political regime in Poland, this section of the book is most revealing in its accusatory frankness and denial. The author applies the device of misattribution: the sender of the letter, a Pole who emigrated after the war, resides in a faraway country on another continent. However, this unnamed country has been forced to accept the political system of "its omnipotent neighbor to the north." He describes the agony of its existence, its total moral and social decay, but most of all, the suffocating lack of freedom. In his letter to a Polish friend he looks up to Poland as the "homeland of freedom," as "lair of tolerance," as "big white angel in the middle of Europe." Freedoms that Polish people enjoy inspire the author of the letter with hope and hearten him. In other words, all features that have usually been ascribed to the West are now attributed to Poland and vice versa: characteristics for which the communist regime was known in Poland are bestowed upon a country the geographical location of which is indeterminable but which belongs to the Western hemisphere.

The above-mentioned device of misattribution is close to what is known in science fiction as extrapolation. Konwicki explores the possibilities of the latter device in his dystopian novel A Minor Apocalypse, which exploits the topoi of "a world to come" and as such rests on the use of temporal displacement. The action is set in Warsaw on the eve of Poland's joining the Soviet Union as its sixteenth republic. The capital hosts its powerful neighbor's first secretary, and he and his Polish counterpart embrace and they kiss "each other on the mouth." The masses who "support" this merger are greatly enthusiastic and Polish and red banners abound. But the Polish banners—known for white and red colors of equal width—have been altered: the white part remains only as a thin stripe, hardly visible on the top. But underneath this external and official world pulsates a troubled underground opposition that wants to organize a protest against Poland being "swallowed" by the Soviet Union. This plan is to be implemented by someone who would be ready to commit the highest act of self-sacrifice by making a burnt offering of himself, that is, by setting himself on fire in front of the Party Central Committee building. The choice falls on the narrator. When he asks for explanation ("why me?"), Hubert, one of the leading members of the dissident camp, has this to say: "You see … an act like this can make sense only if it shakes people here in Poland and everywhere abroad. You are known to Polish readers and you have a bit of a name in the West, too. Your life story, your personality are perfect for this situation." When the narrator responds that some other artists are better known in the West than he and therefore better suited for the sacrifice because it would make a greater impact on the world's opinion, Hubert replies: "That would be too high a price to pay. Too high a price for the country and our community. You are just right." This scene sets the tone for the whole novel. The conversation between representatives of the opposition and the narrator borders on the absurd. The matter-of-fact arguments of Hubert and Rysio trying to convince their friend to commit suicide and the use of the short phrase "you have a bit of a name in the West, too" evoke a comic picture rather than a favorable image of the dissident movement and the way it operates. While Konwicki may have intended to settle a few personal accounts with some of his colleagues, the novel points to the abnormal conditions in which the political struggle takes place. This abnormality is also visible in, or "harmonized" with, a total decay of the external, material setting, that is, the city; its buildings are dirty, gray, falling apart. This vision of gloom and doom is further enhanced by the description of nature: "The Vistula's water was dun-colored, slimy, close to flood level"; there are "trees so small there wasn't room on them for even a single pigeon, trees which yielded miniature fruit, each one propped up by a small branch or dried stalk"; and so on. As with any dystopian fiction, A Minor Apocalypse is a satire. It derides the Orwellian vision of a society turned real in the seventies. Yet at the same time it is permeated with a mood of despair. In such a society everyone is bound to go through a "comic inferno" because everything deviates from the norm. As much as the writer may sympathize with the goals of the opposition and foster its cause, he shows that its mode of existence is not comparable to that of an opposition in a democratic society and casts doubt as to whether its methods of struggle in such a deviant situation make sense. Richard Lourie is right when he comments in his introduction to the English translation of the novel that Konwicki examines "tensions, both tragic and comic, generated by a situation where conscience demands sacrifice and reality offers no hope that the sacrifice will be of any value or significance."

In most cases the action of Konwicki's stories is laid at a time loaded heavy with consequences. In A Dreambook for Our Time Paul arrives in a small town when it is about to be flooded for the purpose of building a dam; in Kronika wypadków milosnych Witek lives out his first juvenile fascination with Alina just before the outbreak of World War II; the protagonists of The Anthropos-Specter-Beast are seized by bewilderment at the news that a comet is heading toward the earth; Nic albo nic describes events preceding Darek's death; and so on. In this respect A Minor Apocalypse is no exception. The narrator relates the last day of his life as he decides to comply with the request of his "friends" to commit self-immolation in front of the Central Committee building. The way this story moves forward reminds us of accelerated cinematic frames: it presents a condensed review of the last day with a speedy succession of happenings, interspersed with flashbacks and reflections about art, Russia, the meaning of dissent, and so on. Thus in his final hours of wandering around the city he meets a philosopher, visits a hiding place of dissidents, makes a new acquaintance with a Russian woman named Nadezhda (meaning "hope"), and feels toward her an instant attraction. He attends his friend's film show, is arrested for a short while, and is interviewed by an arrogant but intelligent security officer. After his release, he runs, by strange coincidence, into a group of women to whom he made love in the past, and finally he reaches the site of his fateful destination. In one respect, however, this book seems to stand out against previous work: it tells us not about an individual death but about the collective death of the whole nation with its material resources and natural environment. It is a sinister memento, a warning that under communist rule Poland has drawn toward a point beyond which lies but nothingness.

In Moonrise, Moonset Konwicki once again resorts to diary form to convince the reader of the authenticity of narration. Written during the period of Solidarity, and with obvious disregard for censorship, his narrative strategy seems to be well suited for this purpose and the time in which it was conceived. The dramatic turn of events and their rapid succession seems to invite the author to create something that can be referred to as documentary prose. Indeed, the book runs an impressive gamut of topics. There are complaints about economic inefficiency, lack of goods, political persecution, instant snapshots of city life, reminiscences, comments on other writers and his relationships with them, encounters with the clairvoyant Father Klimuszko, and more; the book ends with a relatively short description of the imposition of martial law in December 1981. As was the case with A Minor Apocalypse, Moonrise, Moonset contains strong political overtones and can be read as a discursive attack on the failures of communism. However, given some details and indications in the text, I would suggest that this book should be received by the reader above all as literature. One should not lose sight of the fact that whatever has been presented in this book is rendered through a highly subjective agent—the author himself, who does not hide his sentiments. Everything is seen through the prism of his sympathies and antipathies. Vis-à-vis external reality, he remains the sole "hero" who selects the narrated material according to his whims. Konwicki does not write a document—he creates the illusion of a document. The effect of probability and verisimilitude, however, is not achieved by developing an intricate plot as in so-called "realistic" prose but by the manipulating measures of a narrator who is openly engaged in an interplay with his reader. For example, as he describes in the final section of Moonrise, Moonset the imposition of martial law in December 1981, the narrator tells us about meeting Tadzio Skorko, a fictional character created by him in A Minor Apocalypse. In the early days of martial law Konwicki was pressed by the Security organs to sign a declaration of loyalty. He was interrogated by a young security officer who bore a striking resemblance to Tadzio Skorko, the detective who spies on the narrator of A Minor Apocalypse: "That sleek and painstakingly created literary figure had suddenly sprung to life before my very eyes one December day in martial-law Warsaw." What we have here is fiction entering life and turning out to be as truthful as reality itself or, in short, invention becoming reality. However, this fragment is not devoid of a certain paradox: while displaying concrete referential validity, it reveals at the same time the ontological status of fiction. The author clearly declares "responsibility," so to speak, for creating the character. The boundary between reality and fiction is both blurred and maintained.

The Meaning of Form: Konwicki as Postmodernist Writer

It would be easy, even tempting to classify Konwicki as a dissident writer. As indicated above, one can provide a sufficient number of arguments to justify such a claim. And yet one has doubts whether the author of A Minor Apocalypse can be contained within the category of dissident writing. The reason is quite obvious: the world described by Konwicki goes through not partial but total, global degradation. This is, of course, most evident in A Minor Apocalypse, but other works, particularly Rzeka podziemna, podziemne ptaki, attest to this perception as well. In A Minor Apocalypse Konwicki aims the shaft of his satire at the regime, but simultaneously he draws a political cartoon of the opposition because it is a "child" of abnormality, of a decaying system, and as such it is in a sense degenerate too. The writer's sympathy tilts clearly toward dissidents, yet in some instances he does not spare them from direct critical remarks while at the same time having some positive words to say about the officials in power. In Moonrise, Moonset he dares to criticize the novels of Stefan Kisielewski, one of the most prominent and respected Polish dissidents (who died in October 1991 in Warsaw), and has a few propitious comments to make about the late Janusz Wilhelmi, a critic and editor closely associated with the Party apparatus of the Central Committee. It looks as if Konwicki tries to create a certain balance, to create the illusion of reality in its manifold diversity, which in its turn does not necessarily correspond to the notion of dissident literature.

Even less convincing are attempts to label Konwicki "a very Polish writer." At first, he admits, he was quite disturbed by such qualifications but later rendered himself indifferent to these misreadings of his texts. On more than one occasion Konwicki complained, and not without justification, that Polish criticism showed little understanding of his writing. His alleged "Polishness" is a good case in point, for what does it mean to be a "Polish writer"? This quality is attributed to him just as it is to many other writers in Poland, in fact, to all of them! It also demonstrates a certain intellectual deadlock in choosing strategies for critical discourse. Konwicki's example shows clearly that it is impossible to comprehend fully the innovative nature of his writing by making use of hackneyed thinking, that it is necessary to place him against the broader background of contemporary Western culture. Indeed, Konwicki is a "Polish writer" but in the sense that he uses Polish material as pretext to tackle issues of formal, existential, and historical significance which must strike us with their modern or, perhaps, their postmodernist bent.

Let us dwell for a moment on Konwicki's tendency to write about "a little bit of everything." Most of his works constitute a conglomerate of wide-ranging happenings, feelings, and thoughts; they juxtapose various temporal and spatial narrative levels, and one is left with the impression that the writer has an almost programmatic stake in presenting nothing else but the plurality of commonplaceness. As if to confirm this observation, Konwicki writes in New World Avenue and Vicinity,

I am not a philosopher, I have no philosophers in the family and suffer no pain from this calamity. I have a different affliction. What riles me is another misfortune…. I smart, writhe, and agonize under the curse of resemblances. I resemble all of you, bright and dumb, great and small, saints and sinners. I resemble you to the point that I have hardly formed a thought when already find it in you. I can hardly write a word before seeing it written by somebody else. Barely do I start my death agony when I see one just like it next to me.

This passage brings to mind an association with a postmodern movie in which the principal descends from the screen to mingle with the audience and to become "one of them," to continue its existence as a "real" individual. In short, the author ostentatiously displays his populist stand.

Brian McHale, for one, reflects on possible thematic ontologies of literature. He differentiates between the paramount or shared reality of everyday life "marked by circumscribed meanings and modes of experience" and private or peripheral realities that include a wide range of topics: dreaming, playing, hobbies, sex, holidays, gambling, mass media, entertainment, games, therapy, the use of alcohol and drugs, religious conversion, Utopian alternative societies, mental disorders such as schizophrenia, and so on. The imitative realm of postmodern fiction refers exactly to this "pluralistic and anarchistic ontological landscape" typical of advanced industrial cultures. If viewed against the background of the shared, paramount reality that constitutes the common ground for interaction between people, this multiplicity of private realities is marginal and signifies an attempt to escape from it. At the same time, by depicting peripheral realities, postmodern fiction expresses an anarchistic refusal "either to accept or to reject any of a plurality of available ontological orders." McHale concludes that "postmodern fiction does hold the mirror up to reality but that reality, now more than ever before, is plural."

In this context such formulations as "'anarchistic ontological landscape' typical of advanced industrial cultures" or "an anarchistic refusal 'either to accept or reject any of a plurality of available ontological orders'" deserve our special attention. First, it should be pointed out that an "anarchistic ontological landscape" is typical not only of advanced industrial cultures: albeit suppressed, it was strongly present for the past twenty years or so in totalitarian communist regimes as well. On the level of literature it found its expression in so-called "jeans prose" or "little realism," which represented either a form of revolt/insubordination against the officialdom of the communist system or an exclusive preoccupation with small, everyday worries of ordinary people. Most recently, these anarchistic tendencies made themselves known in the form of unprecedented political fragmentation. With the collapse of communist power, hundreds of new parties emerged and declared their willingness to participate in free elections, which resulted, for example, in thirty parties entering the newly formed Polish parliament. Even in Czechoslovakia, where the tradition of democracy and political expediency has always been strong, there exist close to 300 political groups, some of them (as in Poland) with openly anarchistic programs and manifestos. As for Konwicki, it should be noted that in a recent interview he declared that he has remained in full sympathy with the current anarchistic movements and has taken exception to all codified values. Second, he remains faithful to the principle of "anarchistic refusal either to accept or to reject any of a plurality of available ontological orders" in that he preserved a certain moderation in criticizing what he negates and expressing lukewarm praise for what he supports. Therefore, although he has been critical of the communist state and predicted its inevitable downfall, one can find in his Moonrise, Moonset the following lines: "I'm not clapping my hands for joy and not whacking my thigh in delight because the totalitarian Communism practiced in our poor land will fizzle out in the end." While he does not accept communism, neither does he celebrate its fall because he is equally suspicious of what is to come in its aftermath. The writer anticipates that other problems will arise; in short, his creative attitude is underlaid by skepticism and mistrust.

McHale's characterization of postmodernism adheres so well to Konwicki's prose that one could unmistakably recognize in Konwicki an almost programmatic representative of postmodernist fiction. [Most probably some strong terminological objections prevent Polish critics from using postmodernism as a viable concept in relation to contemporary Polish literature. It has much to do with the way the term modernism (Polish: modernizm) is understood in Poland. This term refers strictly to a full-fledged movement that occurred in Polish literature at the end of the nineteenth century. Consequently, the introduction of the term postmodernism is potentially confusing and would not correspond to the meaning one attributes to it today. The term modernism as known in the Anglo-American cultural tradition is consistently defined in Polish literary scholarship as avant-garde (Polish: awangarda).] But this adherence goes beyond the above-mentioned specificity. Konwicki has also been perceived as one who writes in the vein of romantic tradition. Indeed, his world is populated by dreamers, lonely strangers, and detached individuals who typify the "peripheral" or "private" reality McHale has talked about. It should be noted, however, that Konwicki's link with romanticism, or more precisely, his revaluation of it, does not end here; it is transformed into a broader confrontation with history or, one could say, bears a clear stamp of historicity.

Konwicki's revaluation of romanticism makes itself known, for example, in his struggle with the tradition of romantic perception of Polish history. With references to this question, The Polish Complex has to be recalled. The action of this novel is frequently interrupted by temporal shifts consisting of sudden lapses of the narrative line from the remote past to closer historical events of World War II and contemporary life. These various temporal sequences are mediated through the narrator; they merge in him and represent his reincarnations at some critical turns of history. He is the preserver of collective memory. In fact, when facing the burden of romantic tradition and trying to overcome it, Konwicki makes use of palimpsest: he inscribes the contemporary experience of his narrator into history as a text shaped by a romantic worldview and, vice versa, invokes history in a modern setting stripped bare of any romantic attributes. His collective memory, placed against the background of Russia's presence, reminds one of the futility of efforts to liberate the nation from foreign oppression. This is best illustrated by one of his protagonists, Zygmunt Mineyko, the young leader of an insurgent detachment during the 1863 uprising, who dreams of defeating the Russians and regaining independence. His idealistic expectations are routed in confrontation with the harsh reality of the occupation. To make sure that this is not just an isolated event in Polish history, Konwicki applies a temporal leap, building a clasp which braces both the past and present: Wanda of 1863, who entertains Zygmunt Mineyko at her estate before his leaving to face the imperial Russian army, reminds the author-narrator (a reincarnated Zygmunt Mineyko?) of another Wanda whom he met in 1944. Both these women and fighters for independence of 1863 and 1944 (that is, Mineyko and the author-narrator) share the same lot: defeat and loss of freedom. A similar device of temporal shift can be found in Rzeka podziemna, podziemne ptaki.

The above-quoted passage from New World Avenue and Vicinity ("I am not a philosopher …"), can also be interpreted as a direct challenge to Adam Mickiewicz's "Improvisation" from part 3 of the drama Forefathers. In his romantic ecstasy the poet wants to "embrace both past and present generations" of his countrymen, but at the same time feels himself to be above them, endowed with special powers, and therefore demands for himself the role of the nation's leader. Konwicki counters this with a modest and simple answer: "I resemble all of you, bright and dumb, great and small, saints and sinners…." It should not be surprising, then, that Konwicki's grapple with romanticism comes most vividly to the fore in his recent movie Law a (Lava, 1989), a cinematic narrative about Forefathers. If, as Maria Janion wants it, the current period marks a definite end of the romantic cycle in Polish culture, then it can be said that Konwicki is the one who contributed to this closure in a most interesting and effective manner. Furthermore, one can also argue that if there is any validity to the claim that "Konwicki is a Polish writer," then its concretization is to be found in the writer's polemics and rejection of romanticism. He achieves this through a recurrent application of the grotesque.

That said, a modification of the above observation is hastily needed. Konwicki's relation to romanticism is twofold: polemical or outright negative on the level of content (or its "philosophy") and positive, even creative with regard to its formal specificity and legacy. It manifests itself forcefully through the revival of romantic irony. Romantic irony became known for its introduction of the element of open interplay between the writer and the reader, showing that the ultimate responsibility for whatever happens in a literary work of art rests with the author or the narrator. This concept of revealing the ontological status of fiction has been acknowledged by today's critics as the prime feature of postmodern fiction.

To be sure, one should not overlook the difference between romantic irony and the postmodern foregrounding of ontological questions related to the mode of existence of literature as an artistic phenomenon, but the difference exists more in the degree of intensity with which this formal device appears in both movements than in principle. While romanticism used it on a limited basis as a hint pointing to the artful ability on the part of the writer to manipulate his/her work, postmodernism thematizes this question as an important subject.

In this respect Konwicki provides a formidable example. It would be difficult to find another contemporary Polish writer who diversifies narrative perspectives with such ingenuity as Konwicki does. He applies in his stories three pronouns, "I," "you," and "he," and most often the combination of them in a single story. He achieves extremely interesting results with the first- and second-person narrator, the latter again being a device often preferred by postmodernists. This is particularly true of his later works such as Bohin Manor, Rzeka podziemna, podziemne ptaki, and "Kilka dni wojny o ktorej nie wiadomo, czy byla," but it is also evident in his earlier, middle-period novels, such as The Anthropos-Specter-Beast, where he applies the narrative perspective of a tenor eleven-year-old-boy. In Bohin Manor the narrator, who identifies himself with the author, constantly reveals his presence by commenting on the difficult task of finding the truth about his paternal grandmother who "most probably had a love affair with a young, handsome Jew" which resulted in a child born out of wedlock. Being a gentrywoman, she was repudiated for this "sinful relation" by her family. But nothing is really certain. These are only fantasy speculations of the narrator. At the outset of the story he puts into motion some events that he cannot control. The narrator is present in the same room with his grandmother, and yet he has no power to prevent her ill fortune: "I am unable to warn my grandmother Helena Konwicka; I don't have the power to restrain the course of events; and I cannot avert the finale of which I am thinking even now, concealed in a horrible solitude, gnawed by the fears of old age, racked by a sense of doom that can suddenly cause a person to shudder and shove him blindly into the black abyss of the unknown." We find this kind of narrator's interventions throughout the whole of Bohin Manor, and they amount to a subtheme of the novel. Parallel to the main story of the grandmother Konwicka runs the commentary of her grandson—the narrator who has difficulties in recreating her life lost in the silent past. Rzeka podziemna, podziemne ptaki offers yet another narrative variant: it alternates between the first-and the third-person narrator. In the opening remarks the "I" narrator states that he is flying over an ocean to reach the site of his native land. He embodies a spirit that arrives from an unknown world to discover what is happening in the place of his origin. Both his observations and memories of his youth are contrasted in separate chapters with the harsh reality depicted by the third-person narrator who talks about both the past and the present. As in Konwicki's previous works, reality is intertwined here with the fantastic which is accepted as something ordinary and is not brought into relief as being exceptional. Moreover, the autotelic and self-reflective mode of Konwicki's prose manifests itself either through the numerous comments made by protagonists about the writer's works or through direct reflections of the writer himself. The latter case is typical of what he terms "essayistic prose." The former case is most evident in The Polish Complex, where the author-narrator appears under his real name as both the novel's demiurge and its protagonist who often listens to what other characters have to say about his literary accomplishments.

Conclusions

Konwicki might be right in his ironic remark that he is not a philosopher, but his prose definitely spurs some philosophical reflections about literature and the position of writers in Central and Eastern Europe. Up to the present moment, the almost universally accepted opinion has been that, due to political divisions, there exists a clear-cut demarcation between the artistic conventions of the East (this usually included the so-called "people's democracies" of Central Europe and the Soviet Union) and the West. With his literary output of the last fifteen years or so, Konwicki (and in my view there are other writers like him) seems to challenge this conviction. Indeed, if Konwicki could be classified as a dissident writer, it can be equally justified to say that he attained his position via the postmodern creative process. His postmodernist sensitivity clashed, as it were, with political reality. With his comments about palimpsest, about identifying himself with the feelings and thoughts of ordinary people, about pastiche and parody, Konwicki, consciously or not, hints at his artistic affinities and makes an almost direct invitation to critics to see some aspects of his creative work in a broader cultural context, a recontextualization that would also extricate both him and the critics from such simplifications as labeling him a "Polish" or "dissident" writer. It is, of course, understandable why Polish critics have been reluctant to draw such comparisons. Close to fifty years of isolation shaped the conviction that East and West have little, if anything, in common in terms of aesthetic bonds and similarities. Such a stand was also to a great extent determined politically: any positive comparison with the Western cultural landscape could have been used to justify the legitimacy of the totalitarian regime. This was particularly true of Polish conditions. Yet in the wake of such a striking example as Konwicki, one can hardly ignore this problem any longer. In connection with this point, another question ought to be raised, too: What are the boundaries of postmodernism?

Jameson has defined postmodernism as "the cultural logic of late capitalism." Cultural models, even if based on sophisticated sociological analysis, are always thought provoking, but as a rule they leave too many unanswered questions to be trusted as adequate or unquestionable solutions. After all, feudal and backward Russia created simultaneously with the economically and politically more fully developed West the same type of "realistic" literature. It seems that the contemporary postmodernist condition transgressed far beyond its original limits and became part of the cultural scene outside the technologically advanced, capitalist West. However, it should be pointed out that Konwicki's creative experience is, first of all, of utmost significance and has its greatest innovative bearing on the shaping of modern Polish literature itself.

There exists in the Polish cultural tradition a deeply rooted conviction about "high" and "low" art. If literature is to fulfill any important function, it has to communicate a "profound" message. Consequently, modern Polish criticism assumes that the existing link between Polish literature and the more universal values of world literature is to be sought primarily through the works of such writers as Milosz, Herbert, or Herling-Grudzinski. Konwicki challenges this view not by questioning the significance of these writers but by telling his readers, either directly or indirectly, that in the modern cultural condition the difference between high and low art has been blurred. In doing so, he may claim some affinity with his great predecessor and countryman Witold Gombrowicz, who mocked pomposity and devalued in his prose some national as well as literary symbols and ideals sanctioned by tradition. Similarly, but with a tinge of tragic tension absent from the works of Gombrowicz, Konwicki demonstratively stresses his "ordinariness" and openly attacks in his conversations with Nowicki "our terrible chase for elitism and fear of commonness." He presents himself as a populist writer. In developing this artistic stand, the author of A Minor Apocalypse opened a new avenue by which Polish literature might be connected to the broader flow of its contemporary Western counterpart. Konwicki has modernized Polish perceptions about art and literature; he has brought them, so to speak, up to date. And in this, I believe, lies his originality and very important contribution to the Polish cultural scene of today.