Responsibility Is Sexy

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is a writer. She has published several novels (“Paris London Dachau”, “Dla mnie to samo”, “Teraz”, “Nieszpory”) and collected interviews (two conducted along with Anna Dziewit: “Głośniej! Rozmowy z pisarkami” and “Teoria trutnia i inne”; and two by herself: “Jeszcze dzisiaj nie usiadłam” and “Piano rysuje sufit”). Agnieszka also published “Dusza światowa” – an extended interview with Dorota Masłowska. Together with Ewa Kuryluk, she wrote a book in the form of a conversation (“Manhattan i Mała Wenecja”), for which they received the Warsaw Literary Premiere Award.

To be able to voluntarily dispose of one’s attention

It’s a November evening in Munich and the temperature hovers at a frigid zero degrees. I get off the metro at Königsplatz and walk upwind through a vast square filled with red silk poppies. This installation, by the German artist Walter Kuhn, commemorates the centennial of the Armistice of Compiègne, which ended World War I. Because it’s so cold and windy, I have difficulty reading the map; there are hardly any passers-by I could ask for directions. It takes me a while to get to the Film School where a discussion featuring Edward St Aubyn and Edward Berger (who directed the recent Patrick Melrose television mini-series) is taking place. My bag is heavy with St Aubyn’s books: the Patrick Melrose novels in both English and Polish, as well as others, including A Clue to the Exit (a story about a terminally-ill screenwriter who, before he dies, decides to explore human consciousness and write a wonderful book, which he does on the Côte d’Azur and in the Moroccan desert); On the Edge (a novel about the search for the meaning of human existence set among a community of New Age spiritual seekers); Lost for Words (describing the behind-the-scenes workings of a literary award that seems to resemble the Booker Prize rather closely). I am also lugging St Aubyn’s latest work, Dunbar, and a novel from the Hogarth Shakespeare project, which also features Jeanette Winterson’s riff on The Winter’s Tale and Margaret Atwood’s retelling of The Tempest. St Aubyn took on the reworking of King Lear, and I can hardly imagine a better choice of text for him. I have also brought a file of my own notes – I’m planning to ask St Aubyn for an interview on the notion of freedom.

“What do I think freedom is? At the most basic level, I think that freedom is being able to dispose of your attention voluntarily, being able to think about the thing you want to think about and not to be distracted by obsession, retrospection or projection…” said St Aubyn in a previous interview. “What is the purpose of art?” reflects Sam, one of the protagonists in Lost for Words, and possibly the character closest to the author’s voice. “To arrest our attention in the midst of distraction.” Attention – the supposedly intimate space within us that is constantly exposed to external influences on every side.

Freedom is one of the key themes in St Aubyn’s work. In the Melrose novels, freedom is important because the protagonist has experienced drastic imprisonment throughout most of his life: first sadism and rape at his father’s hands; later, his own drug and alcohol addiction. This makes him strongly motivated in his quest to find a field of freedom; ‘some’ field of freedom, echoing Some Hope (the title of one novel in the M

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Agnieszka Drotkiewicz:

is a writer. She has published several novels (“Paris London Dachau”, “Dla mnie to samo”, “Teraz”, “Nieszpory”) and collected interviews (two conducted along with Anna Dziewit: “Głośniej! Rozmowy z pisarkami” and “Teoria trutnia i inne”; and two by herself: “Jeszcze dzisiaj nie usiadłam” and “Piano rysuje sufit”). Agnieszka also published “Dusza światowa” – an extended interview with Dorota Masłowska. Together with Ewa Kuryluk, she wrote a book in the form of a conversation (“Manhattan i Mała Wenecja”), for which they received the Warsaw Literary Premiere Award.

Publish date: 29.04.2019

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Stanisław Lem:

is one of the greatest and most frequently translated Polish writers. An asteroid and Poland’s first scientific satellite were named after him. He loved sweets, especially halva and marzipan. According to Philip K. Dick, he never actually existed.

Racing across mountains and remote backwoods, a solitary figure is on the run from a team of heavily armed hunters. Will he manage to get away? This translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones was specially commissioned to coincide with the first publication in “Przekrój” Quarterly of this previously unknown story by the great master of science fiction.

He’d run about a mile by now, but wasn’t even hot yet. The pine trees were sparser here. Their tall trunks shot up vertically, at a sharp angle to the sloping hillside veiled in gloom, out of which he could hear, now softer, now louder, the rushing of a stream. Or maybe a river. He wasn’t familiar with this area. He didn’t know where he was running to. He was just running. For a while now he hadn’t seen any blackish traces of bonfires at the small clearings he’d passed, or scraps of coloured packaging, trodden into the grass, drenched by the rain and then dried by the sun over and over again. It looked as if no one ever came out here, because there weren’t any roads, and the vistas on view from the open spaces weren’t interesting. There was forest everywhere, with green splashes of beech trees, then a darker and darker colour towards the peaks; the only thing that showed white against it were the insides of snapped tree trunks. The wind had toppled them, or they’d fallen from old age. Whenever they blocked his path, he focused his eyesight keenly to see if it was worth the effort of jumping over, or if it might be better to push his way underneath, between the dry, broom-like branches.

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The Hunt

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