Tadeusz Konwicki Critical Essay | Critical Review by Stanislaw Baranczak

SOURCE: "Poland's Jester in Chief," in New York Times Book Review, January 27, 1991, p. 25.

In the following review, Baranczak locates the tenor of Konwicki's views in New World Avenue in the tradition of the jester role, focusing on the paradoxical thematic and stylistic tone of the memoir.

In 1959 the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski published a trailblazing essay, "The Priest and the Jester." The two personifications stood for the two opposed strategies of modern intellectuals—conservativecelebration of absolute values and critical questioning of them. Mr. Kolakowski himself chose the jester because, in his view, the jester's seemingly insolent and cynical "vigilance against any absolute" offered, paradoxically, the only chance to save humanity's endangered values, to provide for "goodness without universal toleration, courage without fanaticism, intelligence without discouragement, and hope without blindness."

Now that three decades have passed since Mr. Kolakowski's pronouncement, his coeval and compatriot, Tadeusz Konwicki, looms as...
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