Polish · 1922–1983
Białoszewski survived the Warsaw Uprising as a twenty-two-year-old civilian, moving through cellars and sewers while the city was destroyed around him, and then spent twenty-five years not writing about it. He lived in a Warsaw flat, ran a private theatre in his own room for audiences of a dozen, and wrote poems out of the debris of spoken Polish — grammatical mistakes, shop signs, overheard complaints, the noises people make instead of words. Critics called it the poetry of the peripheries. He was homosexual in a country where that was not discussed, and he built a life almost entirely outside official literary institutions. A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising, published in 1970, is written in that same broken speech and is regarded as the truest account of the event precisely because it refuses heroism.