A leading Polish novelist, Tadeusz Konwicki is the author of Kompleks polski which came out in Zapis 3 two years ago, after it had been turned down by the censor, and which Farrar, Straus & Giroux will be publishing in the USA under the title of A Polish Complex. When writing his next novel, Minor Apocalypse, an Orwellian tale that takes place in Poland in the not-too-distant future ( possibly even in 1984), Konwicki decided not even to submit it to the censorship but to write it directly for Zapis, the unofficial and uncensored journal. The novel, from which extracts are printed below, then came out as Zapis 10. Its hero, a writer, is visited by two elderly dissidents on the day when the Communist Party leadership puts forward a proposal that Poland should be incorporated into the Soviet Union. His visitors suggest that he protest against this by setting fire to himself in a public place. Rejecting their scheme, he nevertheless acquires a can of petrol and goes on a tour of Warsaw, meeting a number of characters, many of whom are recognisable as the real people the author used as his models ( the film director Andrzej Wajda and the dissident Jacek Kuroń are perhaps the best-known examples). His encounters, and the realisation of what conditions in the country are really like, make the hero change his mind, and he decides to carry out the self-immolation on the steps of the Warsaw Palace of Culture.
Violently Peaceful: Tibetan Self-Immolation and the Problem of the Non/Violence Binary