Złodzieje żarówek

During the twentieth century, high-rise apartment blocks were built all over the world, but more than anywhere else in Central and Eastern Europe, where the landscape was permanently marked by these grey Lego bricks scattered across the horizon. Cramped, too hot or too cold, these buildings were unpopular but universal, because they were the cheapest and easiest to construct within a planned economy.

They have also featured in literature for several decades, as the setting for crime novels and romances, or for reflections about loneliness or childhood memories.

A hundred years ago, novelists were writing about the life of a village or factory community. Their novels include lots of information about customs and objects that are now historical, such as wedding rituals, working as a journeyman, scythes, spinning wheels and peaked caps. Różycki has done the same thing with the Polish block of the martial law years (the early 1980s), where name-days were celebrated, anti-government leaflets were printed, people got up before dawn to stand in queues for basic items, and the kids wore themselves out chasing each other up and down the stairs.

But, in fact, he has done more than that, because The Lightbulb Thieves is not just the impersonal inventory of an anthropologist. Instead it plays with the conventions of the digressive epic poem, but in prose; the familiar, fairy-tale nature of the characters and their mock-heroic depiction are visible at first glance. Yet Różycki also displays an immense effort of memory. This book is an act of anamnesis, and a way of doing justice to a downgraded place: just like in every human dwelling, there was friendship, romance, and love for one’s children, spouses and parents in the shabby blocks of Opole, too.