Born: September 25, 1960, Warsaw, Poland
Opinions. Stasiuk is one of the most successful and internationally acclaimed contemporary Polish writers, journalists and literary critics. He is best known for his travel literature and essays that describe the reality of Eastern Europe and its relationship with the West. Excerpt from Sueddeutsche Zeitung (11/7/2007): “In the land of the mute. Andrzej Stasiuk has penned a sophisticated and bourbon-fuelled portrait of Polish-German relations. Dojczland has divided Poland… By Thomas Urban.” In an interview in 2007, Stasiuk commented on his fascination with the topic as follows: "I fear both the Germans and the Russians, I despise them both equally, and I admire them both. Maybe it's the Poles' fate to be constantly meditating on their own fate in Europe and in the world. Being a Pole means to live in perfect isolation. Being a Pole means to be the last human being east of the Rhine. Because for a Pole, the Germans are something like well-constructed machines, robots; while the Russians are already a bit like animals."
Early days. After being dismissed from secondary school, Stasiuk drifted aimlessly, became active in the Polish pacifist movement and spent one and a half years in prison for deserting the army - as legend has it- in a tank. Stasiuk is married to Monika Sznajderman.
Work. In 1986, Stasiuk had left his native Warsaw and withdrew to a small hamlet of Czarne in the Beskid mountains, a secluded part of the Carpathian mountain range in the south of Poland. Outside writing, he spends his time breeding sheep and llamas. Together with his wife, he also runs his own tiny but, by now, prestigious publishing business Wydawnictwo Czarne, named after its seat. His experiences in prison provided him with the material for the stories in his literary debut in 1992, Mury Hebronu ("The Walls of Hebron"). After a 1994 collection Wiersze miłosne i nie ("Love and non-love poems") Stasiuk's bestselling first full-length novel Biały kruk (English translation as White Raven in 2000) appeared in 1995 and consolidated his position among the most successful authors in post-communist Poland. Stasiuk's subsequent writing has become increasingly impressionistic and concentrated on atmospheric descriptions of his adopted mental home, the provincial south-east of Poland and Europe, and the lives of its inhabitants. Galician Tales , one of three works available in English (the others being White Raven and Nine ) conveys a good impression of the specific style developed by Stasiuk. A similar text is Dukla (1997), named after a small town near his home. Dukla achieved Stasiuk's breakthrough in Germany and helped built him the most appreciative reader-base outside Poland, although a number of Stasiuk's books have been translated into several other languages including English. In an interview, Stasiuk confessed his …lack of interest in western Europe: "I haven’t been to France or Spain and I’ve never thought about going there...." Stasiuk himself cites Marek Hłasko as a major influence; critics have compared his style of stream of consciousness travel literature to that of Jack Kerouac. Stasiuk admitted that he "always wanted to write a Slavonic On the Road and place it in a quite geographically limited and historically complicated space". Stasiuk's travelogue Jadąc do Babadag ("Travelling to Babadag"), describes a journey from the Baltic Sea down to Albania, and arguably comes close to this ideal. In Stasiuk's own words, "[t]here is no individual, human story in this book [...]. I wanted rather to write about geography, landscape, about the influence of material reality on the mind" A certain exception to the stylistic preferences in Stasiuk's more recent work is the 1998 novel Dziewięć ("Nine"), which is set in Warsaw and records the changes affecting urban Polish society after the collapse of communism. Apart from (semi-) fictional writing, Stasiuk also tried his hand at literary criticism (in Tekturowy samolot , "Cardboard Airplane", 2000) and quasi-political essayism on the notion of Central Europe in Moje Europa: Dwa eseje o Europie zwanej środkową ("My Europe: Two essays on the Europe called 'Central'"). Stasiuk frequently contributes articles to Polish and German papers. Stasiuk's least typical work is Noc ("Night"), subtitled A Slavo-Germanic medical tragifarce , a stage play commissioned by the Schauspielhaus of Düsseldorf, Germany, for a theatre festival to celebrate the enlargement of the European Union in 2004. In the guise of a grotesque crime story, Stasiuk presents two imaginary nations, symbolizing Eastern and Western Europe and easily recognizable as Poles and Germans, who are entangled in an adversarial but at the same time strangely symbiotic relationship. In 2007, Stasiuk continued to deal with the Polish-German topic in a travelogue titled Dojczland , in which he described his impressions of Germany from his reading tours there. This book has climbed almost to the top of the Polish bestseller lists. At first glance it seems to be a travel book. Stasiuk describes what he experienced, saw and thought as he criss-crossed Germany on a reading tour. But in fact he draws a sophisticated double portrait of the Germans and the Poles with flights of sarcasm and a wonderful sense of grotesque. .. With the self-ironic, provocative approach of DojczlandStasiuk has again divided the critics in Poland. The left-liberal Gazeta Wyborcza is thrilled at how he "juggles with prejudices" and sees the book as a humorous but at the same time thought-provoking contribution to relaxing the relationship between Germans and Poles, where both sides take their share of the punishment. The nationalist conservative press, on the other hand, accuses him of bringing the nation into disrepute and taking insufficient account of the tragedies of history. They say he almost completely skates over the terrors of German occupation during the Second World War. In fact, the war is powerfully present at several places in the book. Stasiuk conjectures that it might be better were there no Germans in Germany, only gastarbeiter and immigrants. "They should disappear somewhere and just send money from time to time." Then he reflects on what good it could possibly do the Poles to learn so much about the misdeeds of the German crusaders of the Middle Ages in their first year at primary school. This single sentence suffices to challenge the whole current of patriotic education that in recent years has returned to confrontation and difference rather than searching for what the neighbors have in common. In the past two years, during the reign of the two Kaczynskis, Stasiuk was one of the main targets of the pro-government press. He was accused of besmirching the honor of the president and prime minister in the German media, and his sarcastic essays about the Polish zone of occupation in Iraq were regarded as tantamount to treason. Referring to his numerous invitations to Germany – which now also form the framework for Dojczland – the infamous political magazine Wprost called him a "paid influence agent of Berlin"
Honors and awards. 1994 Foundation of Culture prize, 1995 Koscielski prize, 2000 Nike prize for Jadac to Babadag (Traveling to Babadag)
Main source:
This article uses, among others, material from the Wikipedia article "Andrzej Stasiuk" licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. :
Wikipedia (includes a list of books)
This text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
This source was supplemented with information from:
Thomas Urban- In the land of the mute (review- translated from German)
English translations of some of his works see:
Constance J. Ostrowski,
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