"The Polish Complex" is as zany as [Benedict Erofeev's] "Moscow Circles" and as intellectual as [Milan Kundera's] "The Joke." Konwicki, born near Wilno, which is now part of Soviet Lithuania, fought as a teen-age Partisan in 1944–45, and in his early writings supported the new Communist order. A screenwriter and director as well as a productive author, he until "The Polish Complex" expressed his disillusions obliquely enough not to rouse the censors. Here in this banned novel, which was published in the underground Polish press in 1977, he seems to express a personal crisis as well as political exasperation; the Konwicki persona drinks too many "binoculars" (two tall hundred-gram glasses of vodka), has chronic pain in his chest, suffers a heart attack, and while recovering from the attack in a back room copulates with a voluptuous shop attendant who calls him "old man." "I've been through it all." he tells her. "I have no curiosity left, my curiosity's exhausted, or actually, it was never satisfied and now nothing will satisfy it." He sees himself as "a miserable creature with emphysema of the soul." (pp. 131-32)

The texture of the present-day, ostensibly autobiographical passages is airy, startling, disjointed, and deft—somewhat like that of Raymond Queneau, if Queneau had been a less happy man. Konwicki enjoys that easy access to the surreal noticeable in Polish writers as disparate as Lem and Witold Gombrowicz and Bruno Schulz, as Jerzy Kosinski and I. B. Singer. But our attention scatters amid these tipsy incidents and arguments; it is in two extended historical fantasies that Konwicki shows his imaginative strength and brings the reader into the continuing Polish agony. The first, over fifty pages long, describes the attempt of a twenty-three-year-old soldier, Zygmunt Mineyko, to lead, under the name Colonel Maciej Borowy, a section of the uprising of 1863, one of a number of unsuccessful nationalist rebellions in the long century (1795–1918) when Poland didn't exist on the map, having been partitioned among its three large neighbors; the second historical episode, in a later time of troubles, shows another young man, with the name of Traugutt, saying goodbye to his wife in a hotel room before going off to accept "the leadership of the People's Government" in Warsaw—an assignment certain to cost him his life. No doubt both these doomed heroes are enshrined in the collective Polish memory; for any reader the sense of circumambient oppression, of futile daring, of terror and bravery amid the details of the daily are evoked with a masterly command of such sensory realities as the noises of drunken Russian officers in the adjoining hotel room and the singing sound of sand spinning from the wheels of a carriage. Of course, Communist writers have often sought breathing space in historical fiction, where dangerous contemporary issues can be avoided or disguised, and are at home there; nevertheless, the immediacy of these "old-fashioned" pieces of Konwicki's narrative oddly overpowers the whimsical, skittish rest. A sexy strain of imagery does link the Polish past and present: the desirable women all savor of grass and herbs. Colonel Borowy admires a young wife whose eyes "shimmered with the colors of moss and heather" and whose scent is mingled of "sleep, lovage herb, and impetuous love." Traugutt's wife "gave up her warm cloak, which smelled of heather" and, when further undressed, "her damp sweat … smelled like herbs." And our aging author joins these warriors whose "sweetheart [was] Poland, golden-haired Poland" when, rather ignominiously couched with his shop assistant, he finds "she smelled like the wild herbs of the earth." An earth that, in the Polish complex, floats underfoot, not quite possessed, parcelled out, dominated historically and now by others.

Estrangement—from earth, sky, and the ruling powers in between—is not absent from Western contemporary literature, either, and there is no assurance that under a capitalist system Erofeev would drink less, Ludvik [the protagonist of "The Joke"] would find it easier to locate what he calls "final beauty," or Konwicki would be spared the discomforts of turning fifty. Yet all three books have been outlawed in their respective homelands, and therefore must contain words judged dangerous by the authorities. The absurd cowering by Communist governments in the face of honest and questing art is one of the wonders of the world, a fertile source of embarrassment to its enforcers and an apparent declaration of bad faith; for from such fear of the truth we can only deduce a power that believes itself to be based upon lies. (p. 132)