Tangled thread of a bizarre cloth. Roman Orwid-Bulicz and his “non-literary books”

Abstract

Roman Orwid-Bulicz was a lawyer and public official in the Second Polish Republic (1918–1939) turned writer and activist after the Second World War. Orwid-Bulicz, who lived and worked first in Germany and then in the United Kingdom, is an important representative of émigré popular culture. His literary works are characterised by great diversity: from simple crime novels to experimental plays on Katyń and concentration camps. In his novels, Orwid-Bulicz depicted life in the occupied Warsaw and concentration and labour camps as well as the beginning of the Soviet occupation of Poland in 1945; he also published a series of novels devoted to experiences of exile. His works were published in an episodic form in local newspapers as well. Orwid-Bulicz was an active and well-known member of the Polish social and cultural circles in London and a great supporter of President August Zaleski. Known as a “literary sergeant”, he served as both an entertainer and propagandist and a witness of the atrocities of the twentieth century. As one of a very few writers, Orwid-Bulicz penned works depicting the biggest hecatombs of the Second World War: deportations and the Katyń massacre, the martyrdom of the Jews and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the Warsaw Uprising, the Nazi concentration camps, and the arrival of the Soviets heralding a new occupation. These works stand in the stark contrast with his detective novels – still a relatively unknown but interesting aspect of the Polish émigré “occasional and applied” literature.