Another Beauty

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by Adam Zagajewski,

Foreword by Susan Sontag

University of Georgia Press

Due/Published February 2002, 240 pages, paper

ISBN 0820324108

New in paper (F02)

One of Poland's most important poets, Adam Zagajewski came of age in the Communist Cracow of the 1960s and '70s. Another Beauty explores this critical period in his life when he was a student of philosophy and psychology and earned his keep lecturing to tired factory workers and Party hacks. It was in Cracow that Zagajewski began writing poetry and joined the fledgling Polish opposition movement. He offers rare insight into the atmosphere--both gloomy and prankish--of the increasingly toothless, faltering Communism, as he presents a mock-heroic epic of dissident tribunes, police informers, naive idealists, and clandestine publishers.

But Another Beauty is also the story of Zagajewski's life as an artist, of his double liberation: first from the official lies and imposed collectivism of the regime and later from the imposed intellectual collectivism of the opposition. This memoir offers a counterpoint to Zagajewski's poetry.