Word: hlasko
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Marek Hlasko was seven years old when the Nazis invaded Poland. He was 13 when the Communists took over. He worked as a bellboy in a Warsaw hotel, put in six years as a taxi driver. Out of his experiences he wrote savagely realistic short stories that made Polish Reds wince. A tall, blond, flop-haired youngster who resembled the late Hollywood hero, James Dean, Hlasko headed a coterie that was analogous to Britain's Angry Young Men and the Beat Generation of the U.S. The difference was that Hlasko had more to be beat about-a fact that...
...Four of Hlasko's stories were made into movies. He became literary editor of the student newspaper Po Prostu, an audaciously outspoken weekly, until it was banned; he helped found the magazine Europa, but it was suppressed before its first issue reached the newsstands. Party-line critics railed that Hlasko was a "cynic and demoralizer," but a poll of Polish youth named him their favorite writer. Last year his novel, The Eighth Day of the Week, which dealt with the homelessness of a pair of Warsaw lovers, won Poland's highest literary award, though the Polish-West German...
Moral Atrophy. Seven months ago Party Leader Wladyslaw Gomulka's Red government, which wants to silence all "destructive" criticism but hesitates to act too precipitately, gave Marek Hlasko a passport to visit Western Europe. In Paris he was interviewed by the weekly L'Express. Was he a Communist? "There is no such thing as a Communist." What were the differences between France and Poland? "I think that people here are able, at least to some extent, to get an element of joy out of life." What was it like to live under Communism? "The misfortune...
Still in his 20s and still living in Poland, Marek Hlasko writes the kind of story that the regime must find irritatingly lacking in proletarian joy. The young workmen in The Most Sacred Words of Our Life are indifferent to their jobs, cynical and joyless. The young hero is lyrically awakened by a beautiful love affair with a tender and passionate girl. He leaves her in the morning to rush to work, and discovers that three of his fellow workmen have had the same girl, that she has spoken to them the identical, sacred words of endearment...