Spotkanie. Opowiadania; Na tyłach. Eseje i szkice

Andrzej Bobkowski (1913–1961) was born in Wiener Neustadt near Vienna and raised in Vilnius and Kraków. He learnt foreign languages in his travels around Europe and studied economics at the prestigious Warsaw School of Economics. He grew up in a family of diverse cultural traditions, both Catholic and Protestant, gentry and bourgeois, and also artistic and military. He frequented literary and political circles. Juliusz Osterwa, the eminent reformer of the Polish theatre, was one of his uncles; another was Aleksander Bobkowski, the Vice Minister of Communications, who also happened to be son-inlaw to the President of Poland. Bobkowski left Poland in 1939 and settled in Paris for the next nine years. His first published works were written on the banks of the Seine. Of these, the most outstanding remains the Wartime Notebooks: France, 1940–1944, a literary journal from the time of the German occupation. In 1948, the writer emigrated to Guatemala, where he became a pioneer of the model aircraft movement and a smallscale entrepreneur. The majority of the works collected in the volumes presented here were written in Guatemala. Spotkanie [Meeting] consists of a series of pieces written while still in Paris and also a cycle of Guatemalan stories. They are linked by themes characteristic of modernist prose of the first half of the twentieth century, focused on moral and religious questions. The volume Na tyłach [Behind the Front] comprises a cycle of travel pieces, in which the brilliantly portrayed French provinces and shores of both the Atlantic and Mediterranean are accompanied by penetrating observations of the effects traced in people by the recent war. The second part of the collection contains Bobkowski’s journalistic pieces on the subject of life and the political changes taking place in Central America. The volume ends with a semi-autobiographical review of a biography of Joseph Conrad which contains Bobkowski’s famous self-designation as a “Kosmopolak” (Cosmo-Pole).