Eustachy Rylski

(b. 1944) – a prose writer, essayist, playwright and screenwriter.

Born in Nawojowa near Nowy Sącz, he spent his childhood in Sobieszów, outside of Jelenia Góra. In 1959–63, he attended secondary school in Karpacz, and in 1965 passed his exams at the Secondary School for Workers in Wałbrzych. At the same time, in 1963–66, he worked as a technical clerk at the automobile base of the Forest Transport Centre in Sobieszów. Then he took Post-Secondary Hotel Studies in Jelenia Góra (1966–68). He was a construction worker at the Wrocław Industrial Building Company (1968–69), a state clerk in the Physical Culture and Tourism Committee and the Voivodeship Physical Culture Committee in Wrocław (1969–71) and programme director at the Brzeg Dolny Culture Centre near Wrocław (1973–78). In 1978, he moved to Warsaw to work as a tutor at the Construction School Complex (1978–80). In 1981–85, he was a shareholder in a firm that renovated flats.

In 1983, a fragment of his debut short story, ‘Stankiewicz’, was published by Literatura weekly (no. 11–12). Rylski’s book debut came a year later, a highly acclaimed volume containing two micro-novels: ‘Stankiewicz’ and ‘Powrót’ (‘The Return’). Readers appreciated the bold plot and old-world narrative style, evoking classic nineteenth-century prose. Both stories are set during the Russian Civil War, and the retrospective parts go back to the events of 1863 (the January Uprising).

Rylski returned to the Russian theme in a novel published twenty years later, ‘Człowiek w cieniu’ (Man in the Shadows, 2004). The action takes place in the early 1990s in Warsaw, and the protagonist is a lawyer about to turn forty, a Pole of Russian extraction. The complex history of his Russian forebears make up the peculiar, retrospective layer of the novel. In the present-day layer, a detective story dominates. This lawyer works for the Russian mafia and is tangled in a dangerous psychological game, with his employer, a dangerous mob boss, as his opponent.

A year later came a novel that was highly praised by readers and critics alike: ‘Warunek’ (The Condition). The protagonists are two officers of the Napoleonic army: an aristocrat ranked captain and a lieutenant, the son of an impoverished priest from a ramshackle village. The action takes place in September 1812, near Moscow. This is not historical prose, nor is it an adventure novel in the Alexander Dumas or Henryk Sienkiewicz vein. It is a novel about a difficult friendship and hatred binding two brave men, about honour, sacrifice, courage and overpowering emotion.

After the success of The Condition, Rylski published ‘Wyspa’ (The Island, 2007), a volume of three new short stories and one reprint (‘Dziewczynka z hotelu “Excelsior”’ [‘The Girl from the Excelsior Hotel’] – previously in ‘Tylko chłód’ [Only a Chill] of 1987), and then the extended version of an old play (‘Chłodna jesień’ [Chilly Autumn] of 1989), now the novel ‘Na Grobli’ (On the Tomb, 2010). The writer made constant efforts to address issues that are characteristic of late modernism. So it is no accident that the longest story in The Island, ‘Dworski zapach’ (‘Smell of the Court’), features the character of a great writer, modelled on Witold Gombrowicz. As a result, the subject is dichotomies: low – high, trivial – sublime. In turn, the main protagonist of On the Tomb is recognisably Iwaszkiewicz; the central issue of the book is the relationship between a great artist and political powers (in communist Poland), it also has much to say about the conflicts between life and art and the problem of the aristocracy of the spirit. In a 2009 essay collection, ‘Po śniadaniu’ (After Breakfast), Rylski speaks with feeling about the books that shaped him, or which ‘entered’ his life to stay – such as the prose of Hemingway, which he adored in his youth.

The action of the later, quasi-autobiographical novel ‘Obok Julii’ (Next to Julia, 2013) takes place in 1963 and also – in the opening chapters, at least – is a fiery extolment of the decade in which the future writer sucked the marrow from life and felt youthful vitality. Interestingly, this novel can be seen as a summation of the major ideas in Rylski’s work, especially that of powerful manhood. It is in Next to Julia that he most intensely delved into what makes a man: it revolves around the concepts of honour, dominance, courage or maturity. Depicting the fate of the main protagonist, Janek Ruczaj, the writer outlines, albeit indirectly, his own spiritual biography, trying to grasp the fascinations and experiences that have been essential in his life.

In 2014, he released a short-story collection, ‘Szara lotka’ (The Grey Dart), made up of old and new works, of which Zdzisław Pietrasik wrote: ‘Reading the nine old and new stories, we see the writer has not changed his style, perhaps only perfected it. Today he is more precise (sensory description of the characters) and more ironic. As he once said in an interview: “As for me, I am one-hundred-per-cent sure that I will not unravel the mysteries of existence in my work. But from time to time, I try”.’

As a dramaturg, Rylski made his debut in 1990 in Theatre Television with the play Chilly Autumn, directed by Janusz Zaorski. He is the author of acclaimed plays, published in Dialog monthly, among others: ‘Zapach orchidei’ (The Smell of Orchids), Netta, ‘Wilk kazański’ (The Kazan Wolf), ‘Dzień podróżny’ (Day of a Journey) and the play the author himself rated highest, Chilly Autumn, portraying the life of an author wrapped up in politics.

The Kazan Wolf shows the ethical dimension of compromises that bind a young lawyer from an intellectual family to his employer, a rich, though primitive businessman involved in quasi-legal activities. Alongside the thriller plot line this is, above all, a psychological tale of the modern world without values, ruled by money and violence. Netta, in turn, is about the trouble in making a film by a talented action-cinema director who has decided to try something more ambitious. As a result, he writes a film that is beyond him as a director. In an accurate, but bitterly ironic and sarcastic way, Netta speaks of the astonishing paths of low and high art and the ambiguous ties between the political and business elite and the art world. Day of a Journey, then, is a drama that suddenly turns suspenseful. At a forgotten station where trains have long since stopped calling, a bored station master is playing a game of chess and talking about life and faraway journeys with a young man he once supervised. They closed the boy’s school, his father never sobers up at home, so contact with the old man is his entire world. Suddenly a couple of uninvited guests turn up at the abandoned station and the values instilled in the boy are confronted by brutal force. The masks fall, and the situation begins to slip out of control.

Rylski belongs to the Polish Writers’ Association. He has won many awards, distinctions and badges. In 1985, he received the Literatura weekly prize for debut of 1984, in 1987 the Warsaw Literary Premiere Prize for Only a Chill, in 2004 the Warsaw Literary Book Premiere Prize June 2004 and, in 2005, the Józef Mackiewicz Literary Award (both for Man in the Shadows). 2006 saw him nominated for the finals of the Nike Literary Award, the Silesian Literary Wawrzyn and the Angelus Central European Literary Award for The Condition. In 2016, he received the City of Warsaw Literary Award in the category of Warsaw writer, and in 2018, the Special Award and honorary membership in the ZaiKS Authors’ Association. In 2011, he received the Gloria Artis for Merit to Culture Gold Medal.