KONWICKI, TADEUSZ

born June 22, 1926, Nowa Wilejka, Pol. [now Naujoji Vilnia, Lith.] Polish writer, screenwriter, and film director known for his bitter novels about the devastations of war and ideology. A teenager during World War II, Konwicki joined the Polish resistance movement, fighting first the occupying Nazi army and then the Soviets. When his native province was awarded to Lithuania after the war, he and many other ethnic Poles were repatriated to Poland. Konwicki was educated at the Universities of Cracow and Warsaw and began writing for newspapers and periodicals. He served on the editorial boards of leading literary magazines and followed the official Communist Party line. His first work, Przy budowie (1950; At the Construction Site), won the State Prize for Literature. He began a career as a filmmaker and scriptwriter in 1956; his film Ostatni dzien lata (The Last Day of Summer) won the Venice Film Festival Grand Prix in 1958. By the late 1960s he had quit the Communist Party, lost his job in the official film industry, and become active in the opposition movement. Konwicki's work is suffused with guilt and anxiety, coloured by his wartime experiences and a sense of helplessness in confronting a corrupt and repressive society. Chief among his novels are Rojsty (1956; The Marshes) and Sennik wspczesny (1963; A Dreambook for Our Time), a book that writer and critic Czeslaw Milosz called one of the most terrifying novels of postwar Polish literature. His other works of this period are Wniebowstapienie (1967; Ascension) and Zwierzoczlekoupir (1969; The Anthropos-Spectre-Beast). His later booksincluding Kompleks polski (1977; The Polish Complex), the bitterly mocking Mala apokalipsa (1979; A Minor Apocalypse), and the lyrical Bohin (1987; Bohin Manor)confront Poland's social cataclysms of the late 1970s and the '80s. The autobiographical Wschody i zachody ksiezyca (1981; Moonrise, Moonset) recounts some of Konwicki's experiences during the period of martial law in Poland.