Born: August 19, 1909, Warsaw,Russian partition of Poland (presently Poland)
Died: April 19, 1983, Warsaw, Poland.
Opinion: He is "Alpha" in Czeslaw Milosz's renowned book The Captive Mind in which Milosz describes his writing as "sainted and supercilous," and says other Polish writers of the period disliked him and called him a "respectable prostitute."
Early Days. Andrzejewski was born into a middle class family.His father was a grocer and mother the daughter of a provincial doctor. He studied philology at the University of Warsaw in the Second Polish Republic.
Career. In 1932 he debuted in ABC Magazine with his first short story entitled Wobec czyjegos zycia. In 1936 he published a full collection of short stories called Drogi nieuniknione, in Biblioteka "Prosto z mostu", and soon received broad recognition for his new novel Lad serca from 1938. Immediately after World War II, Andrzejewski published the volume Night (Noc, 1945) and his most famous novel, the Ashes and Diamonds (Popiól i diament, 1948). Having joined the communist party in 1950, he left the party after the 1956 October Rebellion. In 1976 he was one of the founding members of the intellectual anti-Communist opposition group KOR (Workers' Defence Committee). Later, Andrzejewski was a strong supporter of Poland's anti-Communist Solidarity movement. Andrzejewski's vacillations from supporter of the regime in the post-war years to whole-hearted opponent in the Polish literary opposition involved with the Workers' Defence Council (KOR) and the beginnings of the groundswell that led to Solidarity are hard to condone or condemn. Milosz's harsh denunciation in his The Captive Mind stayed with the writer until his death, and he was never completely trusted. Although he was frequently considered to be a front-runner for the Nobel Prize for Literature, it was never awarded to him. He reportedly suffered from alcoholism which during his later years may have hindered his literary output. Andrzejewski, who was gay in spite of being married with two children, died of a heart attack in Warsaw in 1983. On 23 September 2006, he was posthumously awarded the Commander's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta by the Polish President Lech Kaczynski.
This article uses mostly material from the Wikipedia article "Jerzy Andrzejewski." Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. :
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English translations of some of his works:
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