Jan Józef Szczepanski

Writer and translator who left his imprint on intellectual life in Poland

Jan Józef Szczepanski, writer and translator: born Warsaw 12 January 1919; died 20 February 2003.

A moral authority for his juniors and his peers, described by friends as a "cheerful sceptic", Jan Józef Szczepanski was a man of courage and integrity who, though he never felt he had the makings of a public figure, left his imprint on the last half century of intellectual life in Poland.

As a writer, he was wary of fiction and literary conventions. Before the Second World War, he volunteered for military service, then studied Indian philosophy at Warsaw University. In 1939, he fought in the September campaign, escaped from German captivity to occupied Kraków, and became a clandestine student of philosophy at the Jagiellonian University. He also found time to write poetry, join the Home Army partisans, and start writing Polska jesien ("Polish Autumn"), a biographical, largely documentary transcript of the lost campaign that is strikingly devoid of bombast or martyrology.

When the censor insisted on a schematic rewrite, Szczepanski refused to comply and had to wait 10 years for publication, but received the Hemingway Prize (1959). Earlier, his short story of partisan warfare entitled "Buty" ("Boots", 1947) was so drastic in its unveiling of unpalatable truths that several hundred outraged readers sent him abusive letters, convinced that he had become a Communist hack.

Szczepanski's situation was ever idiosyncratic: he once claimed that in the days of mass conversion to Christianity, he would have clung to paganism. Under totalitarian ideology, he remained aloof from socialist realism and was never tempted to flirt with the regime, explaining that he lacked literary ambition, and that the moral cost of being published was too high.

Consistently loyal to the tradition of his youth, he felt unable to identify with Roman Catholic orthodoxy, but found himself working for many years as film critic of the liberal Kraków Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny, the only oasis of tolerance and intellectual polyphony over several decades of Communist domination.

As a novelist, he was largely precursory. Even before the Thaw he spearheaded the literature of "re-evaluating the past" with Portki Odysa ("Ulysses' Breeches", 1954) and in Pojedynek ("The Duel", 1957) addressed the problem of truth under totalitarianism long before Alexander Solzhenitsyn did. His historical narratives tackle major moral and historiosophic issues. Well before terrorism came on the world agenda, his portrayal in Ikar ("Icarus", 1966) and Wyspa ("The Island", 1968) of a 19th- century Polish insurgent deported to New Caledonia for attempting to assassinate the tsar probes the extreme existential situation of an idealistic hero driven to the utmost limits of sanity and loneliness.

In the 1960s Szczepanski also wrote several award-winning film-scripts, was literary director of the Groteska Theatre in Kraków, and travelled over several continents, from Spitzbergen to Chile and the Persian Gulf, to California, Tanganyika, South Africa and India. The resulting travelogues betray his endless fascination with human and cultural otherness, and a committed interest in Third World national identity. His subsequent fiction inclined more towards retrospection, reportage and philosophical meditation.

In 1975, firmly believing in the primacy of ethics over aesthetics, Szczepanski publicly condemned state censorship, signed the Memorial of the 59 Intellectuals protesting proposed changes to the Polish constitution, and committed himself to other dissident activities. With Andrzej Kijowski he co-authored the screenplay for Krzysztof Zanussi's film about Pope John Paul II, From a Far Country (Z dalekiego kraju, 1980).

In 1980, Szczepanski was elected Chairman of the Union of Polish Writers in the most turbulent period of its history, through the Solidarity heyday and then under martial law, until it was brutally suppressed by the authorities in 1983. The story is told in Kadencja ("Term of Office", 1988). Symptomatically, in 1990, he published Malenka encyklopedia totalizmu ("A Small Encyclopaedia of Totalitarianism").

A keen Alpine climber, Szczepanski also translated Guillaume Apollinaire, Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, Hindu and Negro fables, and Conrad's Nostromo into Polish. His awards include the PEN Club Prize (1975), the Jurzykowski Prize for Literature (1978), the "Odra" Prize (1980) and the Herder Prize (1981). His somewhat Conradian decalogue is probably best summarised in the collection of essays entitled Przed nieznanym trybunalem (1975) – about the unknown tribunal which judges human life and deeds.

Nina Taylor-Terlecka