Moonrise, Moonset by Tadeusz Konwicki

First published:Wschody i zachody ksiezyca, 1982 (English translation, 1987)

Type of work: Journal-novel

Time of work: 1981

Locale: Warsaw; fictional passages take place in northeastern Poland, in and around the city of Wilno, and in the newly acquired western territories in postwar Poland

Principal Characters:

• The Narrator, the authorial persona of Tadeusz Konwicki who relates the tumultuous events of 1981 and re-creates his adolescent World War II and postwar experiences in fictional passages that are interjected into the narrative
• Polish society, a collective character and presence from which issue Solidarity members, prominent political figures, Konwicki’s fellow writers, the Communist Party, and various younger individuals from Warsaw’s artistic and dissident circles

The Novel

Moonrise, Moonset—a journal-novel encapsulating a year created “from juicy life and unfettered fantasy,” to use the author’s words—records events witnessed by the author-narrator during 1981 in Poland, in the aftermath of the “bloodless revolution” effected in the summer of 1980 by Solidarity, the union that became a social movement. The first chapters find the narrator musing on the hard-won freedoms and the strange melancholy accompanying Solidarity’s attainments, as well as on the Party’s embittering humiliation and its isolation from the new movement. The book closes with the declaration of martial law in Poland in December of 1981, the suppression of Solidarity, and the narrator’s interrogation by the police. Tadeusz Konwicki’s wide-ranging narrative—bursting with the daily minutiae of the author’s life, his reflections on Polish-Russian and Polish-Western relations, recollections of fellow writers (living and deceased), adolescent memories, confessions of weakness for various notorious public figures, fictional passages and remarks directed at his cat Ivan, to mention only a few of his subjects—is enclosed within these two startling moments in Polish history: Solidarity’s ascent and its sudden and violent deposition.

Within Moonrise, Moonset’s stream of observations, opinions, reminiscences, incisive political commentary (“The West has the subconscious desire to be raped by Russia”), remarks to the reader, complaints about the narrator’s health, and erotic adventures rise islands of historical fiction and fragments of unpublished novels which the author offers to the reader in answer to, in one case, the beloved Polish dissident Adam Michnik’s request that Konwicki write about his role as a young guerrilla fighter in the Home Army during World War II. In these passages, Konwicki describes his armed struggles against the invading German army and, later, against the Soviet “liberator.”

In the tradition of Polish writers Jozef Mackiewicz and Czesław Miłosz, Konwicki’s pulse quickens as he depicts the landscapes in and around Wilno. The Polish-Lithuanian countryside is rendered with astounding plasticity and precision, lending these segments of the book an immediacy and emotional resonance unmatched elsewhere in the work:

I have dreamed of that strange little town so many times, so many times has a sudden stillness reminded me of that place at the bend of the Wilia, so often has a paroxysm of metaphysical dread summoned up from dark oblivion those dozen or so months I spent in that little town not so far from Wilno, where there were three Catholic homes, a presbytery, a police station, my Grandmother Helena’s inn, as well as three or four Jewish homes, a little store, a blacksmith’s shop, and probably a bakery that made challah.

The Characters

The narrator is an aging writer and film director constructed by Konwicki as an obviously autobiographical authorial persona that is both intimate and detached. His is the all-seeing eye, the filtering presence which conducts a dialogue with the reader, shares its observations of “the Polish earthquake” (the Solidarity movement), bemoans Poland’s history as “a mound of graves,” and bares old Communist sympathies. The narrator describes the travails of making a film of Miosz’s book Dolina Issy (1955; The Issa Valley, 1981) and dissects relationships with fellow writers—Stanisaw Lem, Jerzy Putrament, Stanisaw Dygat—and with actor Zbigniew Cybulski, the Polish James Dean. Through observation, confession, reminiscence, and fictional remnant, Konwicki tries to grasp the many Konwickis, his own elusive essence.

Polish society also figures as a character and subject of this work as it is the workings of the Solidarity trade union, its battles, achievements, and aspirations (and the narrator’s marveling at them) that feed and underlie the narrator’s skeptical yet hopeful musings: “To exist, other countries need good borders, sensible alliances, disciplined societies, but a decent miracle will do us just fine....”

In the fictional passages of Moonrise, Moonset, the reader also encounters the character of Adam (named in honor of Adam Michnik). It is through this character that Konwicki’s narrator strives to create a bridge between the World War II experiences of his generation and those of Michnik’s. The aging writer wants to

shift the Adam of today to that scorching summer and have him experience that chain of episodes in my life.... I wanted to give Adam a little piece of my youth so that he too would have a war record.... I wanted to see how he, the darling of salons and temporary arrests, would bear up to that first burst of machine-gun fire, how he would take the sight of blood, and how he would react to the resurrection of freedom wearing the coarse-cloth uniform of slavery.

Critical Context

Within the context of Konwicki’s own writing, Moonrise, Moonset is a return to the hybrid and congenial form introduced to readers in Kalendarz i klepsydra (1976; the calendar and the hourglass), which Konwicki describes in Moonrise, Moonset as “a diary, a pseudo-memoir, autobiographical apocrypha...a stretch of life in calendar time, the novel as a chunk of life.” Unlike the novel form, in which Konwicki is well-versed—Sennik wspoczesny (1963; A Dreambook for Our Time, 1969), Kompleks polski (1977; The Polish Complex, 1981), and Maa apokalipsa (1979; A Minor Apocalypse, 1983)—the journal-memoir-confession-diary-novel hybrid form of Moonrise, Moonset allows Konwicki to record life “on the wing,” without the exclusion of “the garbage of life,” usually refined out of existence in a work of art.

Within the context of Polish literature, Konwicki’s attempt to get at the truth of experience and his own essence by shuttling between the lofty and the trite is not new. It is preceded by the more selective masterpieces of this nongenre which includes Witold Gombrowicz’s Dziennik (1957, 1962, 1966, 3 volumes; diary) and Kazimierz Brandys’ Wiesiace (1981-1982; A Warsaw Diary, 1978-1981, 1983). Polish writers acknowledge that this form graciously accommodates the large doses of current events, political commentary, critical opinion, and effluvia that constitute a writer’s life. It allows the writer more freedom to alternate the everyday with the extraordinary. From the perspective of world literature, Konwicki’s voice has joined those of other Central Europeans such as Milan Kundera, Miosz, and Gombrowicz in creating universal value through exacting yet relaxed analyses of individual and collective complexes, historical defeat, and the miraculous resilience of the human spirit in its struggle to wrest itself free of all man-made forms.

Sources for Further Study

Booklist. LIII, August, 1987, p. 1718.

Kirkus Reviews. LV, July 1, 1987, p. 976.

Library Journal. CXII, August, 1987, p. 142.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. November 15, 1987, p. 2.

The New York Review of Books. XXXIV, December 17, 1987, p. 44.

The New York Times. CXXXIV, August 13, 1987, p. 17.

The New York Times Book Review. XCII, August 30, 1987, p. 3.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXXI, June 26, 1987, p. 66.

The Village Voice. XXXII, September 15, 1987, p. 58.