Short stories
Lucifer Unemployed
Bezrobotny Lucyfer
Aleksander Wat · 1927
Synopsis
Nine tales in which the border between the real and the fantastical keeps dissolving and the conventions of religion, politics and culture are overturned. A Catholic Church run by priests and a pope of Jewish origin persecutes anti-Semites converted to Judaism under the leadership of a Ford; in the aftermath of the war, an island risen from the Indian Ocean takes in deposed monarchs, who return to barbarism; a man looks for a street that never existed, a spectator becomes part of the play he is watching.
Context
The collection was published in Warsaw by F. Hoesick in the last months of 1926, with the date 1927 on the volume. Nihilistic, catastrophist, with a jester's humour, it casts doubt on the received ideas of post-war Europe; the author himself later presented it as the trial from which his next commitment emerged, and this reading has become established among critics. Lillian Vallee translated it into English in 1990, with an introduction by Czesław Miłosz, and a French translation appeared in Lausanne in 2012.
Who it is for
Stories in a dense, at times labyrinthine prose, constantly ironic, which can be read separately.
Prizes and reception
His interwar prose book, reissued in Poland in 1960, then in 2009.
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