Tadeusz Konwicki - Selected English bibliography

Dissident writer and film-maker, born in Lithuania. After fighting with guerrilla forces in Lithuania against both German and Russian occupation in World War 2, he moved to Poland, where he made his home, and began to write. His book, A Minor Apocalypse, was banned. In the 1950s, At the Construction Site was a much prized novel about the Party as an engineer of souls. He was denounced in 1968. A later book, Moonrise, Moonrise (1988), is about the early struggles of the Solidarity movement. His films include Salto and The Last Day.

Tadeusz Konwicki (born 1926) is a Polish writer and film director, a member of the Polish Language Council.

Konwicki was born June 22, 1926 in Nowa Wilejka near Vilnius, where he spent his early childhood. Immediately following the outbreak of World War II, Vilnius was occupied by the Soviet Union and subsequently by Nazi Germany, and all education for Poles was discontinued. Konwicki continued his studies underground. After the war Vilnius 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. His 1956 novel From a Besieged City (1956, Z oblężonego miasta) also became quite popular.

By the mid 1950s, Konwicki had become disillusioned by the communist regime in Poland and fell out of grace with the party.

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.

He is best 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 Polish Communist Party Headquarters, was subsequently adapted as the basis of a French film bearing the same title.

Selected English bibliography

Tadeusz Konwicki (1970). ISBN 0-14-004115-X. Tadeusz Konwicki (1977). ISBN 0-19-271407-4. Tadeusz Konwicki (1982). The Polish Complex (Kompleks polski). New York, Farrar Straus & ISBN 1-56478-201-8. Tadeusz Konwicki (1983). New York, Farrar Straus & ISBN 1-56478-217-4. Tadeusz Konwicki (1987). New York, Farrar Straus & ISBN 0-374-21241-4. Tadeusz Konwicki (1990). New York, Farrar Straus & ISBN 0-374-11523-0. Tadeusz Konwicki (1991). New York, Farrar Straus & ISBN 0-374-22182-0. Tadeusz Konwicki (1994). ISBN B00092VYV8.