My century : the odyssey of a Polish intellectual / Aleksander Wat ; edited and translated from the Polish by Richard Lourie ; foreword by Czeslaw Milosz.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Wat, Aleksander.

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Lourie, Richard, 1940-

Series:

New York Review Books classics

Standardized Title:

Mój wiek. English

Language:

English

Polish

Subjects (All):

Wat, Aleksander.

Poets, Polish--20th century--Biography.

Poets, Polish.

Genre:

Biographies.

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copy)

Physical Description:

xxx, 407 pages : illustrations, 1 map ; 21 cm.

Place of Publication:

New York : New York Review Books ; [Berkeley, Calif.] : distributed by Publishers Group West, 2003.

Summary:

In "My Century" the great Polish poet Aleksander Wat provides a spellbinding account of life in Eastern Europe in the midst of the terrible twentieth century. Based on interviews with Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz, "My Century" describes the artistic, sexual, and political experimentation --in which Wat was a major participant-- that followed the end of World War I: an explosion of talent and ideas which, he argues, in some ways helped to open the door to the destruction that the Nazis and Bolsheviks soon visited upon the world. But Wat's book is at heart a story of spiritual struggle and conversion. He tells of his separation during World War II from his wife and young son, of his confinement in the Soviet prison system, of the night when the sound of far-off laughter brought on a vision of "the devil in history." "It was then," Wat writes, "that I began to be a believer."

Notes:

Translation originally published: Berkeley : University of California Press, c1988.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1590170652

OCLC:

53307799