Andrzej Stasiuk

Andrzej Stasiuk (1960) is a Polish writer, poet and publicist. Since 1987 he lives in Beskids, at Slovak-Polish state borders, where he established and runs a small publishing house Wydawnictwo Czarneje. It is focused on publishing talented writers from Central Europe. He has written several books, such as Dukla, together with Yurii Andrukhovych he wrote Moje Europa. Dwa eseje o Europie zwanej środkową (My Europe: Two essays on the Europe called ‘Central’), Jadąc do Babadag, Taksim, and the latest Grochów.

Everything for 9.99

Photo: Michal Korta Sienkiewicz’’s Teutonic Knights spoke the Goral dialect. The writer apparently shared the perception of his contemporaries of the Gorals as the ethnically purest Poles, their dialect and culture having preserved a kind of intact ur-Polishness. Nobody really cared that they are partially descended from nomadic shepherds from the Balkans, from the Carpathian mountains of Romania. It is quite possible that this fact was not widely known at the time. Not least not among the Gorals. All their exotic sounding words are more likely to be derived from the Romanian, or perhaps even Italian, but nobody would admit […]

The Twilight of Proletarian Afterglow

I had a dream the other night. I dreamt of the Passenger Car Factory where my father had worked for over forty years. After World War II it was the first – and for a long time the only – factory producing passenger cars in Poland. It was built in 1951. The first car it produced was the Polish version of the Russian GAZ M20, known as Pobeda, which means Victory. The factory occupied a large district on the periphery of Warsaw and must have been one of the largest employers in town and one of the largest in the […]

Cursed by History

In his latest book, my friend the Ukrainian writer Taras Prochasko proposed a rather daring thesis. He suggested that, had Germany won the last war, Ukraine would have ended up in the European cultural sphere. My initial response to this statement was that of profound resentment. Of course, I understood that Poland and Ukraine fared very differently during World War II. In a way, Hitler had flirted with the Ukrainians, holding out the prospect of some rudimentary autonomy (or so, at least, it seemed to the Ukrainians), forming Ukrainian SS units and various auxiliary and police units. Poland had simply […]

Veľkorysosť v postmodernistickej krajinke / Stĺpček

Teraz je túto krajinu vidno najlepšie. Začína sa jar. Dni sú teraz dlhé a svetlé. Stromy ešte nemajú lístie, a tak výhľad nič nezakrýva. Krajina je nahá. Začiatkom jari je vidieť, že je hrdinská a dramatická. Mení sa, sťahuje zo seba kožu. Chvíľami je škaredá ako odhalená kostra. Všetky tie reklamy popri cestách, bilbordy, veľké farebné tabule, vychvaľujúce lacný tovar, monštruózne fotografie mäsa: pliecko 9,90, sedliacka klobása 16,90, kuracie filé… Lišaje ostrých farieb pokrývajú steny, zakrývajú stromy, nebo, krajinu. Všetky tie lákadlá, bez ohľadu na to, či ide o mäso, oblečenie, telefóny alebo vyučovanie jazykov – pôsobia rovnako pornograficky, sú […]

Waiting for Fresh Blood

Photo: Peter Župník Libya. In Poland in the 1970s and 1980s the word sounded like an incantation. It sounded like Open Sesame. Qaddafi needed engineers, technicians and workers to modernize his country. Communist Poland started a long-term love affair with him, sending him workers. The Colonel’s revolutionary and anti-Western rhetoric made him appear like something of a political ally. However, for ordinary people it was the economy that counted. While the average salary in Poland at the time was the equivalent of 20 US dollars, the colonel paid (after a fee extorted by the communist administration) at least fifteen times […]

Practe sa! / Esej

Líbya. V sedemdesiatych a osemdesiatych rokoch v Poľsku toto slovo znelo ako zaklínadlo. Znelo ako „Sezam, otvor sa”. Muammar Kaddáfí potreboval inžinierov, technikov, robotníkov na modernizáciu krajiny. Komunistické Poľsko s ním malo dlhoročný románik, ľúbostný vzťah a posielalo tam ľudí za prácou. Revolučná a protizápadná rétorika z plukovníka robila čosi ako politického spojenca. Ale obyčajní ľudia to videli ekonomicky. Priemerný plat u nás v tom čase dosahoval ekvivalent dvadsať dolárov, zatiaľ čo plukovník platil (po odrátaní vazalskej dane pre komunistickú administráciu) aspoň pätnásťkrát viac. Na vtedajšie poľské pomery to bolo Eldorádo, úplná Kolchida. O tom, že dostanú „zmluvu v Líbyi”, […]

The Polish Ark

Photo: Peter Župník Arriving in Licheń, on a summer’’s day. Approaching from behind I caught my first glimpse of it against the background of the lake: first the azure of the water, then the green of the reeds and the forest and finally all that golden glimmer materializing from the soil like a mirage. Yes, like a golden cloud. A gift from outer space. I drove to a crossroads and then slowly made my way through a bazaar of Blessed Virgins, Jesuses and Popiełuszkos. Turned out in plastic, on rugs, as three-dimensional spectres, on sheet metal. The stalls selling commodities […]

The Gold Harvest

It is a book that won’’t appear until March, yet it has already been hailed as the most important publishing event of 2011. Newspapers have written about it. Journalists and politicians have discussed it on television. It is enough to type the first word of its title into a search engine and hundreds, if not thousands, ofreferences come up. Internet fora are flush with comments. Some are full of indignation, outrage and hatred for the author. He has been called a traitor, a renegade, a liar, a cheat and a slave of mammon. Furious bloggers swear they won’’t touch the […]

Denník, písaný neskôr / Esej

Alebo raz v lete v Zgorzelci. Ráno som vstal a vybral sa smerom k mostu. Mesto sa mierne skláňalo k rieke. Všade boli zmenárne a nápisy, že sú tu lacné cigarety. Chlapíci už postávali v dvojiciach, v trojiciach. Štvrť páchla po starej omietke a práchnivejúcich drevených schodoch. Ako stará Ząbkowska a Brzeska. Stáli, fajčili a dívali sa, ako sa začína deň. Vyčerpaní večným vyčkávaním. Ďalej sa začínal most. Nevedno prečo mu dali meno Jána Pavla. Možno, aby zaimponovali Nemcom, že tu nie sú len tie lacné cigarety? Prešiel som na druhú stranu do Görlitzu. Mali tam park, ranný chládok a ešte námestie, všetko […]

S netvorom o ovciach / Rozhovor

Vypnúť televízor, čiže JaroBronisława a započúvať sa do zvončekov na krku ovce a pri voľbách si nemyslieť, že sa rozhoduje o osude kozmu, radí spisovateľ Andrzej Stasiuk, zahľadený do ovcí. Kedy ťa naposledy trafil šľak? Takých chvíľ býva čoraz menej, som čoraz zmierenejší s realitou. Kedysi som častejšie vyskakoval, ale teraz vravím, “OK, v poriadku”. Ako napríklad: OK, nie som „pravý Poliak“? V akom zmysle? V tom, ktorý dominuje v diskusii v posledných týždňoch. Posledné týždne som našťastie a na nešťastie strávil v Amerike, tam tú diskusie akýmsi zázrakom nebolo počuť. Takže vďaka tomu ma tá nasratosť z toho, čo sa dialo po tragédii už trochu prešla. Ostali estetické […]