[In the following review, the critic delineates the historical significance of the setting, plot, and characters of The Polish Complex.]

A prolific and talented novelist (who has also worked effectively in film), Konwicki has recently felt it necessary to express through fiction his most passionately held sociopolitical views. The Polish Complex, first published in London by "Index on Censorship" (1977) after limited samizdat circulation at home, points an accusing finger at Russia, the age-old enemy which has dominated, exploited and repressed Poland for almost two centuries. The writer comes from Vilno (the former capital of Polish Lithuania); as a very young man he joined the partisans and fought against the occupying Germans and later the Russians (for which he was sentenced to jail). Now, apparently, he has been again arrested by the new military authorities in his country.

In his work Konwicki returns almost obsessively to Vilno and to Lithuania's forests and marshes. Memoriesof the past, shimmering eerily, merge with feelings of guilt and disillusion from that now-shadowy war. The narrator K., an alter ego, propels us on a train of free association back and forth in time and space. He probes with irony the depths of bathos—the pedestrian absurdity of contemporary Polish life. The past is rendered with romantic pathos; the future is pathetic too, in a disturbing though unoriginal vision of a triumphant One-State.

The main plot is intentionally anti-climactic: on the day before Christmas a group of Varsovians wait in line at the central state-run jewelry store. Anticipating the arrival of a shipment of gold rings from the Soviet Union, they brave the raw weather, converse, quarrel, even fall in love. Ironically, the shipment turns out to contain only electric samovars; however, the assembled fortune hunters remain undeterred. After the store's closing, they repair to the hallway of a neighboring apartment building. When they part company, the first star hovers above the Palace of Culture irradiating light like a UFO. In the finale a black man and his Polish wife enter carrying their newborn infant.

The characters are aptly chosen to represent social diversity: a worker, a student, an affluent countrywoman, a seedy Laurel and Hardy twosome (one of whom was once ordered by the underground command to kill the narrator), a young police spy clad in fashionable denims, a youthful French anarchist (naively infatuated with Poland) and a languorous brunette store employee whose fresh beauty brings the ailing, aging narrator erotic stimulation and temporary fulfillment.

In essence the novel forms a mosaic in which digressive passages counterbalance and sometimes eclipse the story being told in the present tense. The digressions, often narrated as interior monologues, examine the way Poles see themselves and the world. Are they romantic, irresponsible mythmakers who transmit their "complexes" to future generations, or are they the innocent victims of brutal historical currents? Have their repeated self-sacrifices tended to preclude the practical acceptance of hard realities? Konwicki feels that, as a writer, he must show his country's travail, ultimately to place it within larger perspectives. The novel's main leitmotiv depicts, in turgid prose, an eternally dark, cosmic landscape marred by the excrescences of modern civilization, a faithless world lacking in moral fiber but rich in banality.