t r a n s l at o r ’s a f t e r w o r d
At present, one of the few objects in Poland commemorating the life and work of Bruno Jasieński — a high school that bore his name in his hometown of Klimontów — has officially undergone a name change,* on the grounds that the writer in question is not “a role model for today’s youth” and, indeed, has a “demoralizing effect” on their young minds. Leaving aside the question of the desirability of judging literature on such criteria, what seems most astonishing is that even now, over seventy years after his torture and execution in a Soviet prison, Jasieński is still such a socially awkward commodity, certain to make Anglophone readers as uncomfortable as Polish ones. Most of the greatest writers seem to have been born at the wrong time, but only a small handful of the truly odd ones feel as though they wouldn’t be quite at home — or embraced — at any time.
objective section Bruno Jasieński arrived in Paris in the fall of 1925. In his last surviving statement for the Russian nkvd before his execution, he listed three reasons for leaving Poland: (1) he had graduated from university and was due to serve twenty months of compulsory military service, (2) he was being sued for alleged blasphemy during one of his poetry readings in Lwów (today’s Lviv, Ukraine), which could have resulted in a year or two in prison, and (3) he was an unemployed literature graduate whose scandalous reputation scarcely promised him work as a high-school teacher. Difficult as it may be to imagine from today’s perspective, his *The school is now officially the Urszula Ledóchowska Liceum, named after the plucky
Roman-Catholic nun-cum-saint.
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