Włodzimierz Odojewski

(1930–2016) – a writer, author of radio plays and journalist

He made his prose debut in 1951 on the radio with a fragment of his novel ‘Wyspa ocalenia’ [Island of Salvation]. He worked with the Po prostu weekly magazine, publishing poems and prose in Twórczość, Nowa Kultura, Współczesność and Życie Literackie. In the early 1960s, he worked as director of Polish Radio’s Contemporary Theatre Studio. Removed from his job for political reasons, in 1971 he went on scholarship to the Academy of Literature in Berlin, where he stayed (in 1973 he took political asylum in West Germany). In 1965, he became a member of the Polish PEN Club. As an émigré he worked in the culture department of Radio Free Europe, where he ran the literary programme On the Redlist. He published in London’s Wiadomość, Paris’s Kultura and other émigré journals. In 1989, he became a member of the Association of Polish Writers.

Odojewski’s prose draws from the literary tradition of the great existential questions. We find an obsession with time, memory, inevitable disaster and catastrophe. The space in which the protagonists of Odojewski’s prose moves about is mythical, a world of great passions, the constant clash of values. His novels display a great literary craft. He uses Faulkner’s internal monologue technique, Joyce’s formal innovations, and the French nouveau roman. He wrote dense, metaphorical prose, using a dark palette, alluding to archetypal symbols. In ‘Miejsce nawiedzone’ (Haunted Places, 1959), the monologue of a mortally ill writer, or in ‘Czas odwrócony’ (Time Reversed, 1965), the tale of a onetime member of a resistance movement from the Second World War, a painful and dramatic past is opposed to a barren and sombre present, seen in constant retrospectives, which explains the impression of blurring time frames so characteristic of Odojewski’s prose, the intersecting of present and a vague phantasmagoric déjà vu. Odojewski is sometimes called a writer of a single plot: the short stories in ‘W kwarantannie’ (‘In Quarantine’, 1960) and ‘Zmierzch świata’ (‘Twilight of the World’, 1962), and the novel ‘Wyspa ocalenia’ (Island of Salvation, 1966) anticipate his main work, the great epic novel ‘Zasypie wszystko, zawieje…’ (It Will Cover and Bury Everything..., completed in 1967, but only published as an émigré, in 1974). Its action takes place during the war in the Polish eastern lands, today within Ukrainian borders. This multi-levelled novel, a family saga of sorts, recounts the tangled fortunes of two half-brothers: one fights with the Polish partisans, the other with the Ukrainians and the SS-Galizien. The great historical fresco that is Odojewski’s novel, telling the viciously cruel story of the fratricidal struggles between the Poles and the Ukrainians in the ‘bloody melting pot of nations’ – for a war is underway, and these lands are being pacified by German armies, while the Red Army is moving in from the East – weaves in a dark layer of erotic fascination: the love of a relative of the novel’s main protagonist for the wife of his brother the Russians murdered in Katyn. The Katyn episode – during the German part, one of the protagonists tries to transport the murdered man’s body – was one reason why the novel could not be officially released in Poland.

In later short-story volumes, the writer returned to his favourite themes. ‘Zabezpieczanie śladów’ (Covering the Tracks, 1984) shows the fate of Poles deported to work camps in the Soviet Union, again with a Katyn plot. ‘Zapomniane, nieuśmierzone…’ (‘Forgotten, Unhealed’, 1987) and ‘Jedźmy, wracajmy…’  (Let’s Go, Let’s Return, 1993) offer snapshots of Poles as émigrés in the West and tell of uprooted people living with past trauma.

‘My ambition is to show a vanished world in a short story or a novel, so that it remains in our memory. That’s why I evoke past times and their human emotions, their human pain, fears, love, hate, and their historical facts’, wrote Włodzimierz Odojewski.

Odojewski won many awards. In 1966, he took the Kościelski Foundation Award in Geneva; in 1985, Paris’s Kultura journal awarded him the Zygmunt Hertz literary prize. In 1989, he received the Stanisław Vincenz Award, and in 1991, the Odra magazine award for prose. In 1998, he took the Polish PEN Club Award for lifetime achievement, the Turzański Foundation in Toronto award, and the Władysław S. Reymont Literary Award. In later years, he also received the Andrzej Kijowski Award (2001) and the Minister of Culture and National Heritage Award (2006). He was given the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta (1994).