Dzieła zebrane

Stanisław Rembek (1901-1985) was one of the most outstanding Polish prose writers of the twentieth century. He was also a writer with a tragic biography. He was particularly unlucky: his most important books told of Polish victory over the Bolsheviks in the war of 1920, in which he himself took part as a gunner. For this reason, his works were not reprinted or discussed in communist Poland, while Rembek himself was consigned to the margins of literary life.

It should come as no surprise that the first three volumes of Rembek’s Collected Works [Dzieła zebrane] contain works about the Polish-Bolshevikwar: his diary from that time, short stories as well as two novels: Nagan [Nagant Revolver] and W polu [In the Field]. The latter – originally published in 1937 – was especially admired by contemporary critics and belongs today to the canon of Polish war literature. The history of a single infantry company, annihilated during a Bolshevik offensive, becomes the pretext for a realistic, indeed cinematic description of the battlefield. At the same time, Rembek provides an insightful analysis of the phenomenon of modern warfare as well as the mindset of the men fighting in it. In his prose, war is a multifaceted experience seen from the perspective of ordinary soldiers. Its hideous physiology is significant, but above all – its psychology and even its metaphysics, what war does to people’s minds and how it affects them. War in Rembek’s novels takes the form of a constant emotional response, prompted by a feeling of physical threat, which over time is called courage, fear or heroism. In the Polish-Bolshevik war, the Polish writer also observed the clash of two experiences: the Romantic-chivalric experience and the modern. Hence his images of battle oscillate between pathos and naturalism. Here war is often a killing field, yet sometimes the participants are enchanted by its menacing beauty. In Poland, In the Field and other of Rembek’s war novels and stories are compared to Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Babel’s Red Cavalry and Jünger’s Storm of Steel.