BERENT, WACLAW

born Sept. 28, 1873, Warsaw, Pol. died Nov. 22, 1940, Warsaw novelist, a member of the Young Poland movement, which was dominated by a desire to emphasize the expression of feeling and imagination in literature. Berent's first novel, Fachowiec (1895; The Expert), composed while he was a student of biology at the University of Zrich, describes, in a realistic style, a student who leaves school to become a common labourer. Berent later studied biology in Munich and while there wrote his best-known and most characteristic work, Prchno (1903; Rotten Wood), a caustic portrait of late 19th-century artistic and intellectual life in Berlin. As with his later novels, the style of Prchno is elaborate and difficult; Berent was never a popular author. Ozimina (1911; Winter Corn) centres on a group of wealthy aristocrats, gentry, and bourgeois at a ball in Warsaw. Zywe kamienie (1918; Live Stones), intended to be a poetic vision of the European Middle Ages, demonstrating the power of poetry and art and their influence on life, is long and elaborate and was not well received. His last novel, Nurt (1934; The Current), is an impressionistic and anecdotal biography of Polish personalities of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.