Cause of death heart attack Role Author Name Jerzy Andrzejewski | Nationality Polish | |
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Died April 19, 1983, Warsaw, Poland Books Ashes and Diamonds, The Gates of Paradise Spouse Maria Abgarowicz (m. 1946–1971), Nona Barbara Siekierzynska (m. 1934–1945) Children Marcin Andrzejewski, Agnieszka Andrzejewska Movies Ashes and Diamonds, Wielki tydzien, Gates to Paradise, Innocent Sorcerers, Unvanquished City Similar People Stanislaw Baranczak, Andrzej Wajda, Zbigniew Cybulski, Czeslaw Milosz, Jan Jozef Lipski | ||
Jerzy Andrzejewski
Jerzy Andrzejewski ([ˈjɛʐɨ andʐɛˈjɛfskʲi]; 19 August 1909 – 19 April 1983) was a prolific Polish author. His novels, Ashes and Diamonds (about the immediate post-war situation in Poland), and Holy Week (treating the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising), have been made into film adaptations by the Oscar-winning Polish director Andrzej Wajda. Holy Week and Ashes and Diamonds have both been translated into English. His novel The Gates of Paradise was translated into English by James Kirkup and published by Panther Books with the anglicised spelling "George Andrzeyevski".
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Life and career
Born in Warsaw in 1909, Andrzejewski studied philology at the University of Warsaw in the Second Polish Republic. In 1932 he debuted in ABC Magazine with his first short story entitled Wobec czyjegoś życia. In 1936 he published a full collection of short stories called Drogi nieuniknione, in Biblioteka Prosto z mostu, and soon received broad recognition for his new, Catholic-inspired novel Ład serca from 1938. Immediately after World War II, Andrzejewski published the volume Night (Noc, 1945) and his most famous novel so far, Ashes and Diamonds (Popiół i diament, 1948). Having joined the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR) in 1950, he left the party after the 1956 Polish October protests and riots. In 1976 he was one of the founding members of the intellectual opposition group KOR (Workers' Defence Committee). Later, Andrzejewski was a strong supporter of Poland's anti-Communist Solidarity movement.
He is thinly fictionalized as "Alpha" in Czesław Miłosz's renowned book The Captive Mind, in which Milosz describes his writing as "sainted and supercilious," and says other Polish writers of the period disliked him and called him a "respectable prostitute."
Although he was frequently considered to be a front-runner for the Nobel Prize for Literature, it was never awarded to him. He reportedly suffered from alcoholism which during his later years may have hindered his literary output and prevented him from becoming a real moral authority. Andrzejewski died of a heart attack in Warsaw in 1983. On 23 September 2006, he was posthumously awarded the Commander's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta by the Polish President Lech Kaczynski.
List of works
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