Stanisław Lem. Wypędzony z Wysokiego Zamku

The High Castle is a distinctive hill in Lviv; it is also the title of Lem’s autobiography in which he described his childhood. Could Agnieszka Gajewska’s most recent biography of the writer, Stanisław Lem: Exiled from the High Castle, have been called anything else if Lem’s whole post-war life – as Gajewska claims – was marked by an escape from Lvovian trauma on the one hand, and on the other by a bitter yearning for the time of childhood innocence, a time it is impossible to revisit?

The author has tackled Lem before: her Zagłada i gwiazdy. Przeszłość w prozie Stanisława Lema [Holocaust and the Stars: The Past in the Prose of Stanisław Lem] (2016) is a scholarly monograph on his oeuvre. In her present book, Gajewska significantly widens that perspective, emphasizes the previously signposted arguments, paints a vivid picture of the dreary era in which Lem created and lived. Her key to understanding the writer is the issue of his Jewish identity, wartime trauma and memory, which Lem tried to simultaneously efface and salvage throughout his life. This is why he escaped towards the stars. The war years are crucial to Gajewska. This is when Lwów (present-day Lviv) was occupied and Lem’s family had to go into hiding. Out of scraps of documents, reports and memories, the author meticulously reconstructs what happened to young Stanisław back then, what horrors he and his loved ones experienced. The author’s position is that an echo of these tragedies often returned later in Lem’s books, but in images that were seemingly unrelated to World War II. The doubler graveyard in Eden, the scrapyard full of destroyed robots in Return from the Stars, the horrifying events in the life of his character Rappaport, who was forced to transport dead bodies… There were many more such reminiscences in Lem’s writing, it’s just that nobody has connected these premises before. The common omission of that specific aspect of Lem’s writing is also discussed in the book.

Gajewska’s work removes the patina from the monument that Lem’s output has started to solidify into though the years, and refreshes it for the next generation of readers. This is only one of the reasons for which it deserves due attention.