The fantastic idea of two (or more) Lems

2021

Professor Agnieszka Gajewska omitted in her book "Holocaust and stars. The Past in the Prose of Stanisław Lem"1 a very important fact, namely that Stanisław Lem’s father, i.e. doctor Samuel Le(h)m MD, PhD was from 1st October 1945 until his death, i.e. 5th January 1954, full-time officer of the Stalinist State Security Office (UB).

Lem Little Known, 2021

This publication is, in my opinion, the first serious attempt to compile a comprehensive biography of Stanisław Lem in English. In this study, I will try to write the truth about Lem - as objective as possible in practice. After all, Lem himself wrote in his autobiography "Mein Leben" that "a man can write a series of autobiographies that differ significantly from each other, depending on the adopted point of view and selection criteria." I do not mean any attempt to "debunk" Lem, but to find the nucleus of the truth about him, which is, however, currently quite difficult, as there is still no publicly available Lem museum with an appropriate library and access to Lem's archives is still restricted in practice only for the group of "relatives and friends" of Stanisław Lem's son and the writer's former personal secretary.

ACTA LEMIANA MONASHIENSIS VOLUME 4 NUMBER 1‎, 2021

I try to find, why Stanisław Lem avoided any associations with Jews and Jewishness, especially in Poland.

In 1944, Lvov was liberated from the German occupation by the Soviet Army. The Lem family moved then from Zielona Street to Sykstuska Street, as the apartment on Brajerowska Street was then taken by someone else. Stanisław Lem resumed then his interrupted studies at the Lvov Medical Institute, where he was admitted for the second year of studies. He worked scientifically as a junior assistant (volunteer) at the Chair of Normal Physiology of the Lvov Medical Institute under the supervision of Professor Anatol Markovitch Vorobiov, former assistant of the Nobel Prize winner Ivan Pavlov. At that time, he was working on the issue of infrared radiation as an indicator of the functioning of the central nervous system, and he also began experimental research on the topic “Possibilities of creating a galvanic conditioned reflex in a frog” . He also received from the Soviet authorities a scholarship of 150 roubles per month for his excellent results in study and research.

2021

Working for Germans in Lvov, especially in a company working directly for the Wehrmacht or the Luftwaffe, was obviously a kind of collaboration, for which it is difficult to condemn Lem. However, to work in such a company as a formally free man (if anyone in these times and in this place he could say that he was a free man), he must have had 100% certain Aryan papers. How it could be possible? Well, most likely thanks to his father, Samuel Le(h)m, who was an Austrian officer, military doctor during World War I, decorated with the Golden Cross of Merit on a Medal for Bravery (das Goldenes Verdienstkreuz am Bande der Tapferkeitsmedaille). The fact is that thousands of Jews fought in the armed forces of the Third Reich. Although most of them just to survive, some of them even admitted that had it not been for Hitler’s anti-Semitism, they would have become zealous Nazis. For example, the American historian Dr. Bryan Mark Rigg wrote about it, according to whom at least 150,000 Jews and Germans with Jewish roots served in the Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS. i.e. the military branch of the German Nazi Party‘s SS organisation.

Acta Lemiana Monashiensis, 2021

At this place I would like to analyse in more detail Lem's fall as a writer, the fall that began after he published in 1987 his last science fiction novels Fiasco (Fiasco) and Peace on Earth (Pokój na Ziemi). Only two years after the publication of these books, the Soviet ("communist') system collapsed in Poland, but also and definitely, Lem's creative vein ended. His collections of essays published after year 1990, such as Lube czasy (1995, The Pleasant Times), Tajemnica chińskiego pokoju (1996, Secret of the Chinese Room), Sex Wars (1996), Dziury w całym (1997, Holes in the Whole), Bomba megabitowa (1999, Megabit Bomb), Okamgnienie (2000, The Twinkling of an Eye), Dylematy (2003, Dilemmas), Krótkie zwarcia (2004, Short Circuits) and especially Rasa drapieżców. Teksty ostatnie (2006, The Race of Predators. The Last Texts) are of almost unbelievably low quality, especially compared to the generally high quality of his earlier works, especially those written in the 1960s and 1970s. Also in German in Quarber Merkur‎ Nr 125 of 2024 as „Zeit des Verfalls. Die Periode von Lems schriftstellerischem Niedergang” (”The ‎time of decline. The period of Lem’s decline as a writer”)‎. Also in German in Quarber Merkur‎ Nr 125 of 2024 as „Zeit des Verfalls. Die Periode von Lems schriftstellerischem Niedergang” (”The ‎time of decline. The period of Lem’s decline as a writer”)‎.

2019

A paper delivered at the 26th Sefer Conference on Jewish Studies, Moscow, July 2019

Although socialist realism (in short socrealism) was not born in Poland 1949 in Szczecin, during the Polish Writers ‎Association’s 4th Congress, of but in 1934 in Moscow at the 1st Congress of Soviet Writers, where it was fully ‎expressed in the papers of Maxim Gorky and Andrei Zhdanov, the process of transplanting it into Polish soil took a ‎long time, as the elements of socialist realism had already appeared in the works of the revolutionary current and in ‎the prose of social realism before the war ‎. In the years of World War II, socrealism more boldly came to light in the ‎pages of Polish Soviet magazines, such as Almanach Literacki (Literary Almanach) and Nowe Widnokręgi (New ‎Horizons). After the war it was implemented gradually, which is documented by party-controlled literary discussions ‎and numerous works written before 1949, documenting the process of writers “sailing to the wind of great change”. ‎Lem’s socrealistic Hospital of the Transfiguration was thus not built in a vacuum. Its immediate historical and literary ‎context is a group of novels written between 1946 and 1948, often referred to as “settling of accounts by the ‎intelligentsia”. The protagonist of the Hospital of the Transfiguration and the whole trilogy is Stefan Trzyniecki, an ‎anaemic and lonely doctor from a land gentry family, who by working in a hospital tries to overcome the tendency to ‎isolationism, and in the following volumes of Time not Lost paves his way to socialism. It is an attempt to analyse the ‎attitude of the Polish intelligentsia when faced with new historical or social phenomena that overwhelm them. Polish ‎critics unanimously emphasized that the prose of this trend is characterized by a kind of ambivalence: its heroes do ‎not want and are unable to break out of the intelligentsia world of concepts and values, but their stubbornness and ‎faithfulness to the existing ideals leads them to failure, disgrace or non-compliance. They fail when faced with reality, ‎which proves the weakness of their characters or their inability to reconcile their own ideals with the rapidly changing ‎world.‎ Until the end of Stalinism in the People’s Republic of Poland, i.e. up to almost year 1956, socrealism was an official ‎cultural policy of the country. Writers and poets such as Nobel Prize winner Wisława Szymborska created works ‎glorifying Joseph Stalin, the Communist doctrine, and the Polish United Workers’ Party. However, following Stalin’s ‎death, there were some critical opinions expressed about such literature, but Socialist realism was still being practised ‎until the 1956 Polish October, when the policy was finally abandoned ‎. Stanislaw Lm was no exception to this trend, ‎so it is worth to get acquainted his literary output from this period, also because this rather “exotic” literature, ‎especially from the Western point of view, appeared in Poland during the Cold War, which according to some ‎symptoms and experts, could be returning in the third decade of the 21st century. Therefore, I present here ‎characteristic quotations from this period of Lem’s work.‎

2021

After finishing his utopian The Magellan Nebula in 1953, Stanisław Lem was no longer an orthodox socrealistic optimist. Although his first dystopian novel Eden was written in the summer of 1958, the first five basically dystopian voyages of Ijon Tichy (Twenty-second, Twenty-third, Twenty-fourth, Twenty-fifth and even Twenty-sixth) were published as early as in 1954. The major reasons of this radical change were twofold: 1 Szczepański had his home there, where he rested and met his friends. The house in Kasinka was bought by his from the founders of the YMCA camp. The building burned down in the 1930s, but the owners managed to rebuild it.

2021

In 1979 comes another oil crisis lasting more or less until 1982 and resulting from the support of the West (mainly the USA) for the regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and the Iranian revolution caused mainly by brutal rule of the Shah, which revolution led to the transformation of Iran from corrupted monarchy, completely dependent on the West into an independent Islamic republic. This resulted in the deepening of the global economic crisis, which basically continues to this day (2021) and which caused also economic collapse in Poland - country that at that time was strongly dependent on economic cooperation with the West. In a letter to SF Commentary, Stanisław Lem wrote that he no longer reads SF. Lem was considered this year as one of the Polish candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but ultimately it was awarded to Czesław Miłosz for mainly political reasons. It was then considered on the so-called West, that Lem was too little opposed to the authorities of the People’s Republic of Poland to deserve this, in reality very much political prize.