Wladyslaw Broniewski

Born Dec. 17, 1897, in Plotsk; died Feb. 10, 1962, in Warsaw. Polish poet.

Broniewski took part in World War I. In the years 1921-24 he studied philosophy at the University of Warsaw. He published his first collection of verses, Windmills, in 1925. In 1925, with V. Vandurski and S. R. Stande, he published a programmatic poetic bulletin, Three Salvos. The bases of his art in the 1920’s and 1930’s were the ideas of revolutionary struggle, proletarian internationalism, and antifascism, reflected in Smoke over the City (1926), the poem The Commune of Paris (1929, confiscated by the censors), Sadness and Song (1932), and The Last Cry (1939). In the art of Broniewski, one of the major representatives of socialist poetry, his own lyrical diary and the history of the Polish people’s struggle for socialism are inseparably combined. He emigrated to the USSR in 1939; during 1942-45 he lived in Iraq and Palestine, and he published collections of patriotic and intimate lyrics: Fix Bayonets! (1943) and Tree of Despair (1945). After returning to his native Poland in 1946, Broniewski’s art varied; it included publicistic lyrics imbued with ideas of socialist construction; reflective, landscape lyrics consisting of meditations over the fate of Poland; and intimate verses. He wrote the collections Hope (1951) and Anka (1956), the cycle New Verses (1957-62), and the poems Mazovia (1951) and Vistula (1953). Broniewski also translated works of classical Russian and Soviet writers. He was awarded State Prizes in 1950 and 1955.