Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

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Polish in birth and in spirit, a Soviet writer by location duing his more productive years:

> Lem was born in 1921 in Lwów, interwar Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine)

> In 1945, Lwow was annexed into the Soviet Ukraine, and the family, along with many other Polish citizens, was resettled to Kraków, where Lem, at his father's insistence, took up medical studies at the Jagiellonian University.

> After the war, under the Polish People's Republic (officially declared in 1952), the intellectual and academic community of Kraków came under complete political control. The universities were soon deprived of printing rights and autonomy.[79] The Stalinist government of Poland ordered the construction of the country's largest steel mill in the newly-created suburb of Nowa Huta.[80] The creation of the giant Lenin Steelworks (now Sendzimir Steelworks owned by Mittal) sealed Kraków's transformation from a university city into an industrial centre.

It's a stretch, but not by much, to consider Lem as someone who spent time under the Soviet umbrella.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Lem

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krak%C3%B3w

Poland was never part of Soviet union.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union

It was a part of Soviet Bloc though.

By the same logic a writer from Turkey which was part of Western Bloc should be called a western writer? What about a writer from Japan?

That's a mighty stretch you try to construct. Born in Poland, lived in Poland, just had the bad luck for being there during times when soviets cough cough russians were taking whatever want, and terrorizing the rest.

For most Polish people this would be quite an insult even disregarding current war waged by russia just next to them, which is pretty much impossible to ignore if you live there.

But wasn't Poland occupying the city from 1918-1939? It was Austro-Hungarian city beforehand? Also I wouldn't characterize Soviet occupation as bad luck and Polish as a heaven on earth. Yes, he was born in 1921, 3 years after Polish army invaded the city and terrorized it. I don't know enough history about the period until 1939, but just extrapolating 1918 events to the whole period of Polish occupation.

Lwów was probably most Polish city in the region, and generally what's now Western Ukraine had skewed towards polish in cities and ukrainian in rural areas.

In reality, for as late as 1939 the main differences were language and religion, and considerable chunk of rural population considered themselves "locals" not linking with nation-state idea.

This reflects on Commonwealth being rather multi-ethnic and Austro-Hungarian occupation and repression changing little on the areas they took.

Eastern and Central European history has less stable borders/states than Western/Northern Europeans and Americans often assume. Nationalities existed under various empires without much state-aspirational nationalism until the 19th century. People practicing various religions, speaking various languages lived under changing lords or free in the wild fields, then fled en masse in times of conflict and lived somewhere else. Forced mass-conversions and massacres changed demographics a number of times over the last thousand years. Bureaucracies remained largely intact through their posession by empires, soviets, then nation(ish)-states.

Modern states in the region are real, but contingent, and shouldn't falsely be projected backwards through history.

That's why I mentioned the idea of "locals" - apparently during census in interwar Poland, some rural regions especially in modern West Ukraine had as much as over 20% declaring their nationality as just "locals".

> I don't know enough history

Clearly.

Weird to see you accuse someone of intellectual dishonesty, and then turn around and take a quote out of context to throw a dig at somebody else, purely because you don't agree. Very shameful behavior, honestly.

I'm sorry if the response was blunt, nevertheless people really have to take a responsibility for their education and not make inflammatory comments about history of the parts of the world they don't understand or are unwilling to understand.

There is plenty of information regarding history of Lviv and this region in general. It's long and sad, tragic and sometimes beautiful but never simple.

Besides, I found that most people who feign ignorance know history very well and use it for their own agenda. If you know what to search in someone post history it becomes more or less obvious.

FWiW I have a couple of good friends | past co-workers from Poland in addition to one fairly influential teacher (I'm in Australia) and understand the history and absolutely not Soviet aspect of this argument.

The phrase "Soviet Writer" can be treated more loosely though and can be taken to embrace those that wrote about or had their writing influenced by Soviet events and it's difficult to imagine Lem not being aware of nor affected by the social upheaval radiating out from the formation of the USSR.

His identity is Polish, his writing contains elements that stem from | react to Soviet history and culture .. it's hard to write and not be affected by loud neighbours that raid your kitchen and stomp on your belongings.

Implying that Lem was a Soviet writer feels just wrong.

All I can say is that if you could tell an average Soviet citizen that Lem was a Soviet writer, you would see a very surprised face.

That does not make his art not Polish or Soviet.

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