“It’s Also Różewicz”... Author of "Niepokój" as a Writer for Young People

(On a Lesser-known Episode from the Stalinist Era)

Abstract

The article presents one of the least known episodes in the biography of Tadeusz Różewicz. The poet, whose position in the artistic hierarchy of the epoch was relatively high, in the
years of Stalinism seems to be looking for a compromise between full-fledged artistic creativity and the image of the perfect world of communist utopia promoted by Stalinist politicians. This tendency is expressed in some poems in Pięć poematów (1950), Czas który idzie (1951), Wiersze i obrazy (1952), Równina (1954), and Srebrny kłos (1955). These texts have been relatively well described, while the short narrative works which Różewicz published in the years 1952–1953 in the magazine “Płomyk”, intended for young people, until recently remained almost unknown. The short stories titled Towarzysz Marian [Comrade Marian] i Gwiazdy Budapesztu [Stars of Budapest] are basically in line with the socialist realist tendency in force at the time. The former shows the idealized biography of one of the communist “saints”, Marian Buczek – above all, the allegedly heroic last days and hours of his life (Buczek dies with a gun in his hand while fighting the German occupier). Gwiazdy Budapesztu is an equally one-dimensional picture of the civilizational, social and technical achievements of communism in Hungary. The author of the article attempts to analyze these texts and see them against the background of the public life of the People’s Republic of Poland in the years of Stalinism.