Cezary Michalski

(b. 1963) – a prose writer, essayist and journalist.

After doing a degree in Polish Studies, Cezary Michalski set off for France, where he worked as a secretary to Józef Czapski. He published in bruLion, which began coming out in 1987, and also in Tygodnik Literacki, for which he wrote foreign insight. In the 1990s, he worked at Programme TVP 1, at RTL7, and then at Radio Plus. He joined Kinga Dunin and Sławomir Sierakowski in running ‘Lepsze książki’ (Better Books) at TVP Kultura. He was also head of the opinion section at Dziennik Polska–Europa–Świat, and a journalist at Wprost and Newsweek.

His literary debut came rather late, and as something of a surprise to those who knew his four previous books. Michalski’s polemical temperament had come out in discursive takes on politics and ideology. His uncompromising journalism of the 1990s had sparked lively discussions, and he himself was considered one of the foremost right-wing Polish intellectuals. The protagonists of ‘Siły odpychania’ (The Force of Repulsion) are immigrants who left Poland in the mid 1980s. Marek is a cultural attaché in France, Wojtek is an eternal student and spiritual anarchist, and their shared lover, Marta, is the wife of an American sociologist. On the surface, Cezary Michalski’s first novel is a fairly banal love triangle, but on a deeper level, it is a story of ideas and disappointment with the ideological/political processes that took place in Poland after 1989.

Michalski’s next novel, ‘Jezioro Radykałów’ (The Lake of Radicals), aims to settle the score. The author grapples with his own biography and the genealogy of his close circles. The main protagonist of his novel is a forty-year-old, who, as a reward for working for a liberal party, is sent to Switzerland on scholarship, where he gets tangled up in a criminal affair. Waiting under arrest for the court’s verdict, his memory roams. He emerges as a lost and corrupt man. He also realises that both his Swiss peers and his Polish friends are ideologically bankrupt. In both novels, the action is a pretext. The author mostly wants a platform for his ideas and views, to face off political attitudes and programmes; the ‘adventures’ in his novels are purely intellectual.

In 2006, Cezary Michalski surprised readers again by announcing a collections of short stories ‘Gorsze światy’ (Worse Worlds) – a volume of grotesque fantastical prose with elements of political fiction. In the manner of classic fantasy, six of these works came about from exaggerating unsettling trends now visible (including the terror of political correctness, the increasing role of media, the growing opportunities to monitor ordinary citizens).

Michalski’s novel The Force of Repulsion was nominated for the Józef Mackiewicz Literaary Award in 2003. In 2008, he received the Beata Pawlak Award for ‘Listy z Ameryki’ (Letters from America), published in Dziennik.