Novel
A Minor Apocalypse
Mała apokalipsa
Tadeusz Konwicki · 1979
Synopsis
On an official holiday, in a run-down Warsaw, an ageing writer who no longer writes, a former champion of socialist realism who has gone over to the dissidents, is visited by two comrades from the opposition: they propose that he set himself on fire that very evening in front of a government building, to protest against the country's annexation to the Soviet Union. Carrying a can of petrol, he crosses the city in search of matches and meets apparatchiks, artists, dissidents and women he has let down, a panorama of a defeated society.
Context
The novel appeared in 1979 in the tenth issue of Zapis, a literary journal published outside the censorship, and circulated in underground editions, hunted by the political police. The first official edition appeared in 1988 from Alfa; sold straight from a lorry in a Warsaw street, it sold five thousand copies in a day. Translated into thirteen languages, the book inspired Costa-Gavras in 1993 to make La Petite Apocalypse, a film the author refused to regard as an adaptation.
Who it is for
A novel of a single day, grotesque and bitter, which can be read without knowing everything about the Poland of the time, even though allusions abound in it.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as his most resounding novel and as the most famous of the clandestine books under the communist regime.
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