Leszek Elektorowicz

(1924-2019, born Lesław Witeszczak) – poet, prose writer, essayist, literary critic, translator and editor

During the war he was a Home Army soldier, and a louse-feeder at the Lviv Institute for Typhus and Virus Research. He passed his school-leaving exam at an underground school and graduated in Polish studies at the Jagiellonian University. As a poet he debuted in 1947 with the poem “Drzewo” (Tree), published in “Dziennik Literacki” (issue 8), and as a critic – in that same periodical in 1949 (issue 44).

In the years 1950-56 he stopped participating in literary life and publishing to protest against socialist realist doctrine. In 1957 he became part of the team at “Życie Literackie”, from which he was in removed in 1971 after criticising Władysław Machejek’s politics. In the years 1972-77 he was the literary director of the Bagatela Theatre, but was removed after the 1976 Radom strikes for signing a letter defending the workers. He co-created the first independent Polish literary magazine “Pismo” (1980-83) and was a founding member of the Polish Writers Association. In 1966/67, as part of the Creative Writing School, he gave lectures on Polish poetry at various universities including Iowa, Berkeley (California), Chapel Hill (North Carolina) and Texas.

Elektorowicz’s indomitable spirit combined with an interest in Anglophone literature meant that his services in terms of promulgating knowledge are inestimable: he not only translated British and American literature, but also wrote about it, educating Polish readers. He devoted four books to it. The first, “Zwierciadło w okruchach” (The Mirror in Shards), already includes incisive sketches and essays discussing the writing of – among others – Henry James, William Faulkner, Henry Miller, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck.

His insight into Western world and culture allowed Elektorowicz to compare events on both sides of the Iron Curtain. In his prose, he often made use of that ability during the time of the Polish People’s Republic. The short 1974 novel “Gwiazdy drwiące” (Sneering Stars; the title was taken from a Juliusz Słowacki poem) features the character of Bernard – the son of a prisoner of the Dyhernfurth camp – who stayed in the West after the war and settled in the USA, and now returns to Poland to visit his father’s grave and the camp he was held in. This manoeuvre lets the author recall the horrific camp life, show contemporary America and the dull Polish reality. Under the guise of criticising American culture and Bernard’s “small stabilisation” as he enjoys a comfortable life in America, Elektorowicz exposes and criticises communist Poland for lack of free speech, economic and technological backwardness, petty party politics, omnipresent drunkenness. The narrator condemns the ever-complaining Bernard for apparently being a bad patriot, because he got tricked by those “American trinkets”, was not idealistic enough. The then editors of Oficyna Wydawnicza “Czytelnik” were fooled and decided that his earlier books and that one, published in 1974, are “a gauntlet thrown down to so-called small realists” – as Włodzimierz Maciąg wrote on the flap. In reality this incredibly bitter book could inspire workers in Radom to strike or encourage highlanders from Podhale to leave for America, for Jackowo, for “Czikago”.

Elektorowicz played a different game with the communist authorities in the fascinating historical novel “W lochu Ferrary” (In the Ferrara Dungeon, 1980), whose protagonist is the wrongfully imprisoned Italian poet, Torquato Tasso. The novel was published at the end of 1980, but it was sent for typesetting in January; it is easy to surmise that it was a way to support oppressed intellectuals and writers. It is a defence not only of Tasso himself, but also of the right to creative freedom, freedom of speech. Elektorowicz also stood up for freedom for himself: he was a poet too, a poet first of all, a student of Juliusz Słowacki.

An important, recurring motif in his poetry is memory: the memory of his own traumatic youth in the times of Stalinist terror, oppressive and constantly recalling indelible images of suffering and cruelty. As he struggles with it, the subject of his poems uses various strategies which the poet presents by referring to, for example, the metaphor of the body – which carries the trauma, but also the truth about the past, and the path to process it – like in the volume “Całe kłamstwo świata” (All the Lies in the World). Many of his poems are characterised by metrical regularity, melodic and rhythmical phrasing, and a peculiar simplicity, unclouded by multidimensional metaphor or complex play of cultural symbols; this led Kazimierz Wyka to place them within the genre of modern sentimentalism, concerned with the authenticity of feeling and moral decisions. Such are poems from the volumes “Niektóre stronice” (Some Pages) or “Z(a)myślenia” (CONtemplations): they discuss themes of ethics, are unafraid to reference the sacrum, but are also deeply rooted in the everyday. In his poetry, Elektorowicz universalises what is subjective, personal and emotional, while also staunchly and poignantly speaking up for the truth and against propaganda and falsehood. The poet’s historiosophy is far from facile optimism; it is accompanied by the conviction that “the stone of truth always / falls to the bottom” (from the volume All the Lies in the World).

The Polish Radio broadcast two audio dramas based on his prose: In the Ferrara Dungeon and “Przeklęty teatr” (The Cursed Theatre). His writing was published in literary press abroad and in foreign-language anthologies of Polish poetry in Czech, English, French, German and Hebrew.

In 2000, Elektorowicz received the Minister of Culture and National Heritage Prize for his services to Polish culture. Laureate of the gold distinction “For Community Work for the City of Kraków” (1971) and the Gold Cross of Merit (1975). In 2009 he was awarded the Gold Gloria Artis Medal for Merit to Culture.