Dr. Katarzyna Zechenter is Lecturer in Polish Literature at University College London. She received her Ph.D. in Slavic Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Dr. Zechenter has authored a number of essays, articles and book chapters on contemporary Polish prose, on Polish-Jewish writers, and on Kraków.
2007 0-7734-5466-7 This book examines, for the first time in English, the literary work of Tadeusz Konwicki, one of the most popular and widely translated twentieth-century Polish writers whose prose reflects post-war Polish history, politics, and Sovietisation. In portraying the impact of these changes on people in general and on the intelligentsia in particular, Konwicki recreated the complex Polish-Jewish-Belorussian-Lithuanian world that disappeared by 1945 but survived in the collective memory of the Polish people. Despite Konwicki’s wide-ranging topics and literary styles, the monograph has competently knitted these together around the question of living in the post-Holocaust world by: analysing the political and cultural themes of Konwicki’s fiction; examining Konwicki’s prose, along with some of his films, which have brought him international renown; engaging an impressive number of other critical works about Konwicki; and by explaining the political and social context in which Konwicki’s fiction appeared.