Word: hlasko
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Dates: during 1958-1958
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...Marek Hlasko, whose bitter novel The Eighth Day of the Week was a product of the temporary Polish thaw, has chosen voluntary exile, and he will not be welcomed back should he return. Polish Communist intellectuals, who have been spared some austerities under the Gomulka regime, are dismayed at the implications of the Pasternak case. "For many of them," the New York Times said, "what counted most was the belief that the whole episode would wind up in a much tougher attitude toward intellectuals...
...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...
Soon Marek Hlasko was sampling the joys of the free life. He moved in with friends who edited the Polish exile review, Kultura. Receiving sizable royalties from Western publishers, he traveled to West Germany and Italy in a beat uniform of blue jeans and cowboy shirt, boasted that he had run through $4,000 in just a few weeks of high living on the Riviera. He reportedly fell in love with German Actress Sonia Ziemann, who had starred in the movie version of The Eighth Day of the Week...
...while, the heat was building up against him at home. The Soviet Union denounced him in the Literary Gazette. A provincial Polish town burned his books. The Warsaw party daily Trybuna Ludu blasted him as a disciple of George Orwell, "that classical master of anti-Communist pamphleteering." Marek Hlasko wrote an answering letter that Trybuna Ludu refused to publish. "It was not I who made Warsaw," said Hlasko bitterly, "that Warsaw that was for so many years a city without a smile; it was not I who made the Warsaw in which people trembled with fear...