Wladyslaw Broniewski

Władysław Broniewski (born December 17, 1897 in Płock , † February 10, 1962 in Warsaw ) was a Polish poet and soldier. He is considered to be one of the most important representatives of revolutionary poetry and socialist realism in Poland.

Life

Broniewski came from an Intelligentsia family of originally noble origins. After attending high school in his hometown, where he a. in the - illegal - scout movement, he joined the Polish legions of Józef Piłsudskis in 1915 . As one of the more important military leaders - despite his young age - he was awarded various medals and also fought in the war against Bolshevik Russia in 1919/1920. He then made up his Abitur and began studying at the University of Warsaw . Originally feeling like a socialist, Broniewski joined the revolutionary left after the assassination of President Gabriel Narutowicz . At the same time he approached the revolutionary poetry of Soviet stamps and worked on left-wing literary and political magazines. He was arrested in 1931 for these activities.

After the outbreak of World War II , he volunteered, but was no longer deployed and then went to Soviet-occupied Lviv , where the military authorities sometimes offered left-wing artists good job opportunities. As an opponent of the Soviet invasion of Poland, Broniewski soon realized that his options were limited and that he, too, was subject to censorship. In 1940 he was imprisoned by the Soviets, including in Moscow's Lubyanka , and released a year later, he joined the Polish army of General Władysław Anders and moved with them to the Middle East.

After the war he returned to Poland and became one of the most important authors of the new socialist state. However, he remained true to the link between national and internationalist elements. Shaped by the spirit of Polish romanticism , he vacillated between a pathetic-triumphalistic and an elegiac-catastrophic mode of expression. His poem Bagnet na broń (Bayonet Mounted ), composed in 1939, was one of the most influential appeals to defend the Polish state and is still read in schools today. In his work, however, there are embarrassing eulogies about Stalin that are reminiscent of the worst poems by Johannes R. Becher .

Hit by personal strokes of fate such as the accidental death of his daughter Anka in 1954 and notorious for his hardly hidden excessive alcohol consumption, he withdrew more and more from the public in the mid-1950s, now wrote more reflexive and naturalistic poems and worked as a translator from Russian . Broniewski died of throat cancer in 1962 . For his work in Stalinist Poland he was twice awarded the First Class State Prize. Today it is considered a classic of Polish poetry of the 20th century, whose mixture of conformism and non-conformism is repeatedly emphasized.

Works

Wiatraki (1925)
Dymy nad miastem (1927)
Troska i pieśń (1932)
Krzyk ostateczny (1938)
Bagnet na broń (1943)
Drzewo rozpaczające (1945)
Nadzieja (1951)
Anka (1956)

German translations:

Hope. Selected poems . Translated by Max Zimmerling. Foreword by Friedrich Wolf . Berlin (East): Dietz Verlag 1953.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME	Broniewski, Wladyslaw
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Polish poet
DATE OF BIRTH	December 17, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH	Plock
DATE OF DEATH	February 10, 1962
Place of death	Warsaw