Name Waclaw Berent | Role Novelist | |
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Died November 22, 1940, Warsaw, Poland | ||
Karol Szymanowski: Łabędź (The Swan), op. 7
Waclaw Berent (Warsaw, 28 September 1878 – 19 November or 22 November 1940, Warsaw) was a Polish novelist, essayist and a literary translator from the Art Nouveau period, publishing under pen names S.A.M. and Wl. Rawicz. He studied natural sciences in Krakow, Zurich, and obtained a PhD in Munich before returning to Warsaw and embarking on a literary career around the turn of the century. Berent became a member of the prestigious Polish Academy of Literature (Polish: Polska Akademia Literatury) in 1933.
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Berent translated into Polish Thus Spoke Zarathustra by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Along with Wladyslaw Reymont, he was a leading representative of the realist trend in the Young Poland movement (Polish: Mloda Polska). His main work, a social novel Zywe kamienie (Stones Alive), depicted the circumstances, which threaten the traditional moral values in the industrial era.
He was a critic of the late 19th century Positivist slogans, modernist Polish philosophy and European bohemianism, which postulated the "art for art's sake". In his novel Ozimina (Winter Crop) he depicted the emergence of Polish independence movement prior to the Revolution of 1905. He was an estetic opponent of Romanticism. Also being a Russian Jew he was hated by any anti-Semitics of his time.