Kazimierz Brandys

Born Oct. 27, 1916, in L̸ódź. Polish writer.

Brandys began his literary career in 1946 with the novels Hobby Horse and The Invincible City, both about Warsaw during the Nazi occupation. The principal problem in Brandys’ creative work is man and the objective laws of history. He is the author of the tetralogy Between the Wars (1947–51), which deals with the destinies of Polish intellectuals who survived World War II; the novel Citizens (1954) about socialist construction in Poland; and the novella Sons and Comrades (1957), in which the essential element is the analysis of the departures from socialist norms in Polish social life. Moral, philosophical, and psychological problems are at the center of Brandys’ essays (for example, Letters to Madame Z., vols. 1–4, 1958–62; The Joker, 1966), the collection of short stories Romanticism (1960), and the novella A Way of Existing (1963).