Kazimierz Brandys

Kazimierz Brandys (born October 27, 1916, Łódz, Poland, Russian Empire [now in Poland]—died March 11, 2000, Paris, France) was a Polish novelist and essayist remembered both for his early espousal of Socialist Realism and his later rejection of communist ideology.

Brandys was born into a middle-class Jewish family. He graduated with a degree in law from the University of Warsaw in 1939. After having survived the Nazi occupation of Poland in World War II, he joined the editorial board of the Marxist weekly Kuźnica (“The Forge”) in 1945. The following year Brandys made his literary debut with the novel Drewniany koń (“The Wooden Horse”), in which he related the ordeal of the Polish intelligentsia under the Nazi terror. In a more ambitious, four-volume epic novel, Między wojnami (1948–53; “Between the Wars”), he described from a communist viewpoint the moral and ideological experiences of a generation of Polish intellectuals before, during, and after World War II. These early works established Brandys as a leading exponent of Socialist Realism.

In the early 1950s, however, Brandys began to voice disillusionment with communism. After a partial relaxation of government controls over Poland’s cultural life in 1956, he mildly criticized the ideology in the novellas Obrona Grenady (1956; “Defense of Grenada”) and Matka Królów (1957; “Mother Królów”; Eng. trans. Sons and Comrades). In his Listy do Pani Z., 3 vol. (1957–61; Letters to Mrs. Z.), as well as in a volume of short stories, Romantyczność (1960; “Romanticism”), he analyzed the moral and psychological transformations of contemporary Poland, and after the release of Nierzeczywistość (1977; A Question of Reality), a work openly critical of communism, Brandys was banned from publishing in Poland.

In 1977 Brandys was associated with Zapis, a literary journal of dissident writers, in which he published essays on life in Warsaw, eventually incorporating these into his multivolume series of memoirs Miesiące (1980; “Months”). Volume one was translated into English as A Warsaw Diary 1978–1981 (1983), and an abridged version of volume three appeared as Paris, New York: 1982–1984 (1988). Brandys was an active supporter of Solidarity, and he settled in Paris after the trade union was outlawed by the Polish government in 1981.