Jerzy Pilch

(1952–2020) – a prose writer, journalist, playwright, critic and screenwriter.

He came from Wisła and attended secondary school in Krakow, where he studied Polish Literature, at the Jagiellonian University. He went on to work as an assistant at his alma mater’s Polish Studies Institute and began his PhD, but failed to complete it. That was when he began publishing reviews and articles in Życie Literackie, Student, Echo Kraków and Twórczość, and then in the underground press; he also put out his first literary works. In 1983‒89 he was a columnist for the independent NaGłos magazine. Fired from the university, he took various jobs, devoting himself to literature as well. This became his main occupation after he received the Kościelski Foundation Award in Geneva in 1989 for his debut short-story volume, ‘Wyznania twórcy pokątnej literatury erotycznej’ (Confessions of a Covert Writer of Erotic Literature). He also contributed to Tygodnik Powszechny, Gazeta Wyborcza, Polityka, Dziennik and Przekrój, where he had regular columns; the press pieces he wrote under the title of ‘Dziennik’ (Diary) he later released in three volumes of books. His work was inhibited by his alcoholism, and then his Parkinson’s disease. In 2019, he moved to Kielce, where he died and was buried.

After his much-lauded debut, he scored another success with ‘Spis cudzołożnic’ (List of Adulteries, 1993), soon adapted for the screen by Jerzy Stuhr. Yet his real breakthrough came with a rather slender novel called ‘Inne rozkosze’ (Other Delights, 1995). For the first time, Pilch invited readers to the world of his childhood in Wisła, dominated by Protestant folk. This microcosm – fascinating and a bit terrible at once – was composed of eccentric relatives, weird neighbours or, more generally, colourful characters and their harmless manias. Pilch developed an original tragicomic formula, combining humour and gravity; here he showed – and again in ‘Tysiąc spokojnych miast’ (A Thousand Peaceful Towns, 1997) – that audacious style and showy rhetoric are on the surface of his literature, they are a linguistic or anecdotal shield, concealing problems like absence, loss or irrevocably disappearance. There is really no other way to read ‘Pod Mocnym Aniołem’ (A Mighty Angel, 2000), a brave novel for which Jerzy Pilch received Nike Literary Award. Its action may take place in Wisła, but, like his previous works, it is autobiographical; the writer draws from his own experiences with alcohol.

In his following books, the author set himself increasingly ambitious tasks – as in ‘Miasto utrapienia’ (City of Worry, 2004), where he took on the issue of fake identity and struck up a subtle dialogue with Thomas Mann’s Confessions of Felix Krull. Or in ‘Marsz Polonia’ (March of the Poles, 2008), based on a wedding motif. In this metaphorically dense, oneiric, Baroque novel, Pilch made a catalogue of the collective Polish phantasms and national obsessions. More or less starting with ‘Moje pierwsze samobójstwo’ (My First Suicide, 2006), dark tones came to take over his work. The past, once evoked through nostalgia, slowly became a realm of uncertainty, haunted by spectres. He modified his most coveted literary theme, the hometown-family myth. Lutheran Wisła was no longer a gentle place, it had seen too much death and passing, it was harder and harder to give the old residents their passions and wit.

For many years, Pilch perfected the art of interweaving spontaneous journalism and pure literature. In effect, he was regarded as having revitalised the newspaper column. He gathered his best pieces into three volumes, of which perhaps the most acclaimed was ‘Bezpowrotnie utracona leworęczność’ (The Irreversible Loss of Left-Handedness, 1998). He gradually began making his columns more private, even intimate. He collected his pieces from late December 2009 to late November 2011 in Diary, and this in turn cast light on the novel ‘Wiele demonów’ (Many Demons, 2013) – involving the experience of serious illness, which the author called ‘vanishing’. This is why there is no reading Many Demons without the context of Diary. The elegiac nature of the novel, its grim mood, are grounded in the biographical context (the illness); just about every motif or concept here serves to ‘outwit’ death, to cope with its horror. Published the same year as that novel, ‘Drugi dziennik’ (Second Diary) might be seen as part of an undertaking the author called drawing up a ‘timeline of disappearance’. He presented ‘Zuza albo czas oddalenia’ (Zuza, or: A Time of Distancing, 2015) as a ‘manuscript hidden in a shoe’, papers left behind by a dead man. This ‘find’ is the tale of a relationship between an old, ailing man and a young Warsaw prostitute. Pilch explores the limits of intimacy here, or indeed, the ethical grounding of what we might call the sale of our own intimacy. Having written of his illness and progressive incapacity for some years, he was perhaps forced to address this issue.

Pilch is also the author of scripts and plays for theatre, like the comedy ‘Narty Ojca Świętego’ (Skis of the Holy Father, 2004), written on a National Theatre commission. He was the initiator of the National Short Story Competition Write to Pilch, which he announced in Polityka in late 2003; the best stories appeared in the anthology ‘Pisz do Pilcha. Opowiadań współczesnych trzydzieści i trzy’ (Write to Pilch: Thirty and Three Contemporary Short Stories, 2005).

He received many awards for his work. Apart from the aforementioned Kościelski and Nike awards, he won the Polityka Passport for The Irreversible Loss of Left-Handedness. He also received the Father L. J. Szersznik Award for lifetime achievement and promotion of Cieszyń Silesia (2004), the Lutheran Church Award in Upper Silesia – Silesian Emerald, the Source of the Vistula gold statuette from the Wisła local authorities (2006), the Gold Cieszynianki laurels, awarded by the Communal Union of the Cieszyń Lands (2008), and the Father L. Otto Award from the editors of Zwiastun Ewangelicki for introducing Evangelical themes to journalism and literature (2013).

Since 2021, Wisła has held the Jerzy Pilch Festival of Words in the Granatowe Mountains, and since 2022, Kielce has held the Polish Literary Columnists’ Competitions for ‘Pilch’s Razor’ (as part of the Train to Literature Festival).

Many of his awards have been translated into foreign languages, and printed in separate volumes and anthologies.