Life
Konwicki was born in 1926 in Nowa Wilejka near Wilno, where he spent his early childhood. He spent his adolescence in Wilno, attending a local gymnasium. Immediately following the outbreak of World War II, Wilno was occupied by the Soviet Union and subsequently by Nazi Germany, and all education for Poles was discontinued. Konwicki continued his studies underground. In 1944, he joined the ranks of a local Home Army partisan unit, taking part in Operation Tempest and Operation Ostra Brama. After the war Wilno (retrieving its name as Vilnius in the process) was annexed by the Soviet Union and Konwicki was expatriated.
In the spring of 1945 Konwicki moved to Kraków, where he enrolled at Jagiellonian University. He also started to work as a journalist at Odrodzenie weekly, moving to Warsaw in 1947 to continue his work for the magazine. In the capital, he was one of the leading advocates for Socialist Realism in literature. In 1948 he finished his memoirs of his partisan years (Rojsty), but the book was not published until 1956. His literary debut was the production novel Construction Site (1950, Przy Budowie), which was followed by the novel Power (1954, Władza). His 1956 novel From a Besieged City (1956, Z oblężonego miasta) also became quite popular.
In the years 1952-1966 he was a member of Polish United Workers' Party By the mid 1950s, Konwicki had become disillusioned by the communist regime in Poland and fell out of grace with the party. His later works (beginning with A Hole in the Sky (1959, Dziura w niebie), are mostly concerned with the author's childhood and the semi-mythical, romantic land of his youth.
At this time Konwicki became the head of the Kadr Film Studio and has since been recognized as one of the most notable members of the Polish Film School. However, his work veered away from the style pursued by his contemporaries, due to its uniquely bitter quality. As a filmmaker he is known for his Venice'58 Grand Prix winner The Last Day of Summer (Ostatni dzień lata, 1958), All Souls' Day (Zaduszki, 1961), as well as for his masterpieces Salto (1962) and How Far Away, How Near (Jak daleko stąd, jak blisko (1973)), as well as film adaptations: of Nobel Prize Winner Czeslaw Milosz book Dolina Issy (1982), and of Adam Mickiewicz's epic poem Dziady - Lawa (1990) .
He is widely known for two novels, published by the Polish underground press: The Polish Complex (1977) and A Minor Apocalypse (1979). The latter work, a bitter satire about a washed-up writer who is asked to burn himself in front of the Soviet-built Palace of Culture and Science, Warsaw, was subsequently adapted as the basis of a French film bearing the same title. A Minor Apocalypse is a post-Orwellian parody that refers to specific historical events, such as self-immolation protests against the communist regime by Ryszard Swiec in Poland and Jan Palach in Czechoslovakia.
Konwicki currently lives in Warsaw and continues to inspire youth writers and filmmakers.
Read more about this topic: Tadeusz Konwicki
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“With only one life to live we can’t afford to live it only for itself. Somehow we must each for himself, find the way in which we can make our individual lives fit into the pattern of all the lives which surround it. We must establish our own relationships to the whole. And each must do it in his own way, using his own talents, relying on his own integrity and strength, climbing his own road to his own summit.”
—Hortense Odlum (1892–?)
“A tree is beautiful, but what’s more, it has a right to life; like water, the sun and the stars, it is essential. Life on earth is inconceivable without trees. Forests create climate, climate influences peoples’ character, and so on and so forth. There can be neither civilization nor happiness if forests crash down under the axe, if the climate is harsh and severe, if people are also harsh and severe.... What a terrible future!”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)