Biography
Societies and nations are not fit to be tossed from corner to corner. Fortunately, I have lived to see a time when you could say that you were a Lwowian, that Poland lay on the banks of the Zbruch River or in Vilnius.
I was a Lvovian00:00
LVIV
Poland, where Stanisław Lem was born, looked different than it does today. Lwów, his hometown, was located in the south-east of Poland, a country reborn after the First World War.
After the aggression of the Third Reich and the USSR against Poland in September 1939, Lwów – under the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact – found itself under the occupation of the Red Army. The next German occupation of the city followed the German attack on the USSR in June 1941.
The end of the war and the arrangements struck at the Yalta conference meant that Lwów became part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Poles would be forcibly displaced from the city.
Lem’s parents
Stanisław Lem hailed from an assimilated Jewish family. His parents: Samuel Lehm and Sabina née Wollner got married in 1919. Their son Staś was born two years later.
Lem often recalled the figure of his father in his memoirs, whereas he wrote less about his mother, reflecting somewhat a reluctance on the part of the writer to write in intimate terms about his loved ones. For most of his life, for example, he did not want to talk about his Jewish roots.
The early years
Stanisław Lem’s date of birth is assumed to be September 12, 1921. However, it was probably September 13th. The date was changed to… avoid bad luck.
Staś was the only child. When he was born, his father – a laryngologist – was 42 years old. The childhood and early youth of the future writer are preserved in his memoirs as a carefree time, filled with play and creative pastimes; a child whom his older self called a „demon of destruction”.
Coming of age and war
Stanisław Lem spent the first 24 years of his life in Lwów. He attended elementary and primary school and later went to the local gymnasium. It was in Lwów where he began his studies at university, and it was in Lwów where he finally encountered the horrors of war. He and his parents had many brushes with death. Lem’s immediate family was murdered by the Germans.
Stanisław Lem’s life in Lwów – especially his experiences of the trauma of the Second World War and the German-Soviet occupation – is very important for understanding the writer’s work: his vision of the world and the course of his life.
Kraków and Lem’s first literary forays
In the summer of 1945, Stanisław Lem and his parents had to leave Soviet Lwów. As part of the repatriation action, they came to Kraków. Here Lem continued his medical studies, although ultimately he did not want to become a doctor. He chose literature. His debut story „Man from Mars” appeared in the press in episodic form (1946). The writer published short stories and even poems. In „The Hospital of Transfiguration” (1948), and then in the following parts of the „Undefined Time” trilogy, he returned, though not directly, to his Lwów years.
Science and literature
Thanks to his work with the Scientific Conservatory at Jagiellonian University (1948-50), Stanisław Lem had access to also English-language research papers on cybernetics (at that time, for ideological reasons, not recognized in the USSR), game theory, logic, psychology and natural sciences. In 1951, his debut novel Astronauts was published, followed by The Magellanic Cloud and The Star Diaries. In 1953 he married Barbara Leśniak, a medical student. A year later, his father, Samuel, passed away.
The Golden Age
The 1960s and 1970s strengthened the position of Stanisław Lem as one of world’s foremost science fiction writers. This golden period of creativity began in 1961 with such important works as Solaris and Return from the Stars. A few years later, Summa Technologiae and Cyberiada were published. Lem’s works of fiction were intertwined with essays where Lem posed a number of fundamental questions relating to happenstance, the possibility of contact with aliens, and artificial intelligence.
Lem became a celebrated figure of science fiction. His books would be translated into other languages. The screening of Solaris by Andrei Tarkowski received the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1972.
Emigration
For the first time he seriously thought about leaving Poland after the events of March in 1968 (a political crisis related to student protests, a struggle between factions in the Communist Party, anti-Semitic campaigns, and, consequently, the forced exodus of thousands of Poles of Jewish origin). Ultimately he remained because of the birth of his son, Tomasz. In 1981, after the declaration of martial law by the communists in Poland, he revisited his plans to emigrate. In 1982 he went on a one-year scholarship to West Berlin. A year later, he and his family managed to move to Vienna.
During his stay in Austria, in the years 1983–1988, he established cooperation with the Parisian Kultura – an prominent magazine edited by the community of post-war Polish emigrants in the West.
The final years
After 1988, Stanisław Lem returned from forced emigration to Poland and abandoned fiction. He began to write columns and essays: for Tygodnik Powszechny (the column „The World According to Lem”), for the Wroclaw-based Odra („Silhouettes”) and for the PC Magazine (these works were later published in magazines such as Megabit War.
He was awarded further honorary doctorates, including in 1998 one from the Lwów State Medical University. His surname is still uttered in many languages of the world thanks to 2002’s Solaris, directed by Steven Soderbergh.
Stanisław Lem died in Kraków on March 26, 2006.
