GEORGE GÖMÖRI

Tadeusz Konwicki is one of the best-known living Polish novelists. Mała apokalipsa [published in the United States as A Minor Apocalypse] … is his ninth novel and his second one published in samizdat [an "underground" system for circulating dissident literature]…. His previous book in samizdat, Kompleks polski (1977), was an amusing though somewhat chaotic account of a day and night of encounters in the Warsaw of the seventies. His new novel goes further: it is Konwicki's first attempt to portray an anti-utopia that takes place in a vaguely defined future.

And a very grim future it is: Poland is on the verge of being incorporated (with the consent of the Polish Communist Party, of course) into the Soviet Union; it is a seedy, forlorn, half-awake land steeped in drunkenness where shadows from the past live on in a social and cultural vacuum. Technology and services are breaking down, but nobody seems to care; money has completely lost its value, a simple taxi-ride costing 5,000 złotys. The state controls not only information but time as well—nobody knows the exact date; it is a top state secret, and all calendars are falsified. Most people live in a near-somnambulistic state of complete apathy, although some kind of an Opposition still keeps functioning. It is this (officially tolerated) Opposition that orders the narrator of Konwicki's story, a writer like himself, to set himself on fire in the evening as a public protest against the latest political move of the regime. The plot is in fact a description of the narrator's last day in painstaking detail.

This gives an opportunity to Konwicki to go through most of the well-known motifs and gimmicks of his previous fiction. The hero awakes with a nasty hangover, has several meaningful encounters and less meaningful conversations, is interrogated by the secret police in the lavatory of a nightclub, makes love to a young Russian girl of unusual sex appeal, talks to disenchanted old Communists, meets his ex-girlfriends and gets ready for the final act of self-immolation. As always, Konwicki is very readable, but his perception of the future is strangely pessimistic: in fact, he seems to project certain depressing facts of contemporary Poland into the not-very-distant future, blowing them up to gigantic proportions. As for the West, one character claims that "we have demoralized the West … by our terrible example"—peaceful coexistence has produced creeping etatism and finally a Soviet-type mess in the West as well. In other words, this is the end of the road, at least for Konwicki's generation.

Mała apokalipsa is a cynical, wry, occasionally very funny book, but it is not the masterpiece that it was rumored to be in Polish intellectual circles. For one thing, there are too many in-jokes and wisecracks decipherable only to people who know what present-day Poland is like; also, for an anti-utopia, the construction of the book is too loose and haphazard. Or is this also a stratagem, a reflection of the unreality, sometimes the irreality, of a Poland tottering now forward, now backward on its tortuous path to Communism?