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The Return is the title of the newest collection of short stories by Kazimierz Orłoś, a writer with an immense amount of works to his credit, who debuted in 1958. It must be understood from several perspectives and also in several dimensions. It is a return to the composition of short stories (following his two large tomes of memoirs), but it is also a return to places, and finally – to times.

Like few others, this Warsaw artist is able to capture in writing the Masuria region – the lake district in northeastern Poland – which is a place very special to him, and to which he devotes a few dozen narratives collected in his newest book. The quotidian life in the region, with its most simple activities – picking berries and mushrooms, digging wells, searching for a lost dog, listening to the song of an oriole and the chirping of a cricket – makes us halt and meditate on these simple things, from which musings we arrive at questions about human existence: What, really, is life? Where does it lead?

History has always been present in Orłoś’s writing: most recent history, wartime history, but above all that of the Polish People’s Republic, because that is the era in which Kazimierz Orłoś’s art developed. The story entitled “The Little Silver Plate” is very moving. It is the history of the degradation and profanity of something that might seem unchanging, holy and immaculate. In “Jacek” we meet a woman who at first arouses irritation in the main protagonist – again and again she stops on the street to stare at him. And finally the question tossed at the young man hurrying to the university classroom: “Jacek?” “Did he die in the uprising? He didn’t return home after the war from the camp, from banishment, from the Western or the Eastern Front? She waited on him, fooling herself that he would return, that he’s alive somewhere, maybe even next door. Even I might be Jacek.” So the author transports us somewhere back to the end of the 1950s. This book contains short stories that arose back then, though they were never published, such as the title piece “The Return”, which was read in installments over the radio in 1990. In this splendid, many-themed volume, we also find a description of the reality of the most recent years, marked with brutal political divisions. Two of the stories treat of this: “Thou Blessest Us” as well as “The Night of the Sovereign”. In this book we have the true return of a writer to the creation of literature in short form, of which he has been a master for many decades now.