Tadeusz Konwicki passed away on January 7, 2015. Here is a text-memoir that was written after hearing this sad news.
I just learned that Tadeusz Konwicki is dead. My favorite writer. And I don’t think I can describe what I felt when I read his books. To this day I remember a lot of sentences:
“I will always see myself in every situation from all sides at once. I will always be faithful and unfaithful. I will be good and bad. I will crave holiness and maybe never get close to it?”
“Everyone has some kind of phobia, and all I have is trouble.”
“Sunset – magical time of day, which gave me an infrequent opportunity to plunge beyond the horizon of commonness into another dimension of thought and emotion.”
“I, for one, love the tragedy adjacent to the ridiculous. This combination somehow captures our existence here.”
“I have a far-growing gland of boredom within me. People tell me if it is possible to end up bored????”
It is difficult to forget at least this:
“Be greeted with nothingness, non-existence, eternal emptiness. I humble myself before you, long for you and fear you. I, who cling with one foot to this earth, which surprises me, saddens me, and rarely amazes me with its fleeting beauty foreshadowing nothing and auguring nothing. I, whose fine winds issuing from the bent, wrinkled surface of the earth carry me toward the sky, I, who with such difficulty return to earth, each time rubbing my eyes in astonishment, I would like to leave behind a wad of eternal energy, a tuft of permanent waves, an indestructible imprint on the permafrost of infinity. I am not caused by pride or selfishness. I would like to join the whole someday and understand even a particle. May my agony of this flicker of existence give me the right to know, although I do not know myself what kind of knowing. I have rejected all compulsions, with the rest of my strength I wade against the current, oppressed every day by one monotonous, intrusive, humiliating, meaningless thought: what does it mean? and what do I mean? Be greeted. But who? But why?”
„Bądź pozdrowiona nicość, nieistnienie, wieczna pustka. Korzę się przed tobą, tęsknie za tobą i lękam się ciebie. Ja, który trzymam się jedną stopą tej ziemi, co mnie dziwi, zasmuca, a rzadko zdumiewa ulotnym pięknem niczego nie zapowiadającym i niczego nie wróżącym. Ja, którego drobne wichry wydobywające się z pogiętej, pomarszczonej powierzchni ziemi unoszą w stronę nieba, ja który z takim trudem wracam na ziemię, za każdym razem przecierając oczy ze zdumienia, ja chciałbym pozostawić po sobie zwitek wiecznej energii, kłąb trwałych fal, niezniszczalny odcisk na zmarzlinie nieskończoności. Nie powoduje mną pycha ani egoizm. Chciałbym się włączyć kiedyś do całości i zrozumieć choćby cząstkę. Niech moja męka tego mgnienia egzystencji da mi prawo do poznania, chociaż sam nie wiem, jakiego poznania. Odrzuciłem wszystkie przymusy, resztką sił brnę pod prąd, gnębiony codziennie jedną monotonną, natrętną, upokarzającą, bezsensowną myślą: co to znaczy? i co znaczę ja? Bądź pozdrowiony. Ale kto? Ale dlaczego?”
My master’s thesis was on kitsch in the prose of Tadeusz Konwicki.
I remember a certain wonderful day in Warsaw. The day I dared to visit Mr. Tadeusz. It was probably 2007 or 2008, and I was going to a meeting carrying… a rose. I had decided that I would not chicken out this time, like I had a few months beforehand. I would just go to and pay him an unannounced visit, to knock on his door, and I don‟t know, say, it’s me, Marta, I adore you, your books, your thoughts in them, I adore, appreciate! or whatever!
That day with my heart beating in a way that I never knew that it could!!!!!!! I went, and I brought him a rose. A red one, of course. I rang the intercom and … no one answered. A kind neighbour was just coming out of the staircase and said that Mr. Konwicki was out for a walk (today I know it was Saski Park) and that he would probably be coming back soon. I sat down on the steps and waited. And in a moment I saw my beloved writer! Lo and behold, he stood in front of me and asked: “MARTA?”
What a good fortune it was, Mr. Konwicki had remembered me, for some time earlier I had sent him my work, my collages with him, a postcard with Mona Lisa McGuinness (from Ireland) – this postcard I noticed a moment later on the writer’s table, once I was in his apartment!
I recall today, the night of January 7-8, 2015, when the news of the writer’s death reached me, that day, my emotion, the people close to me who were with me that day, all those to whom with red cheeks, unable to get a single word out, I called with the news that, just like that, Mr. Konwicki invited me to his home “for a cup”, showed me the paintings, the couch on which in a semi-reclined position he always wrote, and took a photo with me on his balcony, with the Palace of Culture in the background behind us! !!!!!!!! (In my room it hung on the wall of gigantic size, framed; once a visiting friend asked me if it was my boyfriend!!!!!!) And that I was so touched that I could not speak!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And then the author of “The Anthropos-Spectre-Beast” (“Zwierzoczłekoupiór”) escorted me to the restaurant where my friends were waiting and said hello, shaking each one’s hand. I will
never forget those moments!!!!!!!!!!!
I am sad. My heart is squeezed. I miss You, Mr Konwicki! I hope that where you are now, the Palace of Culture is no longer a “stone cake of caution” but just a big most delicious cake!
Illustration at the top: I used a caricature by David Levine.