Leopold Tyrmand

Leopold Tyrmand (1920-1985) oli üks neid poola kirjanikke, kelle täht lõi särama stalinismile järgnenud sula ajal - nii nagu ka Zbigniew Herberti ja Marek Hlasko oma. "Päevaraamat 1954" lahkab Poola elu juba aegamisi mureneva stalinismi ajal. Kindlasti on Tyrmandi esitatud küsimustest tähtsaim see, kuidas jääda totalitaarses süsteemis iseendaks, kuidas säilitada sisemine vabadus. "Päevaraamat 1954" nägi esmakordselt trükivalgust kirjutamisest aastakümneid hiljem - 1980. aastal Londonis.

Leopold Tyrmand, a Polish Jew who survived World War II by working in Germany under a false identity, would go on to live and write under Poland’s Communist regime for twenty years before emigrating to the West, where he continued to express his deeply felt anti-Communist views. Diary 1954—written after the independent weekly paper that employed him was closed for refusing to mourn Stalin’s death—is an account of daily life in Communist Poland. Like Czes?aw Mi?osz, Václav Havel, and other dissidents who described the absurdities of Soviet-backed regimes, Tyrmand exposes the lies—big and small—that the regimes employed to stay in power. Witty and insightful, Tyrmand’s diary is the chronicle of a man who uses seemingly minor modes of resistance—as a provocative journalist, a Warsaw intellectual, the ""spiritual father"" of Polish hipsters, and a promoter of jazz in Poland—to maintain his freedom of thought.

This collection of essays from Chronicles of Culture criticizes the "new class" of liberal culture in a witty and urbane fashion.