Lem Stanislav: quotes, photo, biography, bibliography, reviews

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

The famous writer from Poland Lem Stanislaw won the love of readers around the world with his works in the genre of science fiction. The writer became the laureate of many Polish and foreign awards, including the state awards of Austria, Poland, the Kafka Prize. And also he became a holder of the Order of the White Eagle, the owner of academic degrees, an honorary doctor of several universities. The magnificent film "Solaris" was created based on the work of the same name, which was written by Stanislav Lem.

Biography

An extraordinary science fiction writer was born in the Polish city of Lvov in September 1921 in the family of a doctor respected by the people of Lvov. He graduated from the men's gymnasium in September 1939. And then Lvov became a Soviet city. Lem Stanislav wanted to study technical sciences, but he failed to enter the Polytechnic University. With the help of his father, he got a job in medicine and began to study there without any enthusiasm.

Two years later, Lviv became a German city, andeducational institutions have been shut down. He was not so simple, the future writer. Clearly Jewish origin made his life in the occupation full of every minute danger. He could end up in the ghetto and die there, as happened with almost the entire Lviv intelligentsia. True, they managed to straighten out the documents, according to which Lem Stanislav got a job as a mechanic in a German metal processing company. In 1944, Lviv again became a Polish city, and the future writer continued his studies at the medical institute.

To Poland

However, in 1946, Lvov again became a Soviet city, where the unfinished remnants of the Bandera gangs slaughtered the Polish population to the root - entire villages, and even in the cities it was very restless. The Poles responded by destroying Ukrainian villages on their territory.

Therefore, Joseph Stalin solved these issues by the method of repatriation. Within a few days, almost all Poles from western Ukraine left for Poland, and almost all Ukrainians from Poland went to western Ukraine. Lem Stanislav also fell into this great migration and continued his studies already at the University of Krakow - at the Faculty of Medicine, which he did not treat differently.

Start

I didn’t even take the last exams, having received only a certificate, but not a diploma. Maybe because he was afraid to do something he didn’t like, or maybe he “dropped out” of the army, because with a diploma he would have had to make a career as a military doctor. He got a job in 1948 after graduating from the university in a scientific laboratory as a juniorassistant and was very happy about it.

He was no longer attracted to any job, except for one, and it was no longer engineering. Since 1946, he began to publish his fantastic works, that is, he became a writer. Stanislav Lem, whose photo is now probably seen by everyone, and many of them constantly keep it on their desk, it was at that moment that he found what he was looking for.

"Man from Mars" and "Astronauts"

His first novel Czlowiek z Marsa was published in Nowy Swiat Przygod, a weekly magazine. Readers were imbued with the idea, literally from the first works Stanislav Lem became a cult writer in Poland, although a large book did not appear so soon.

It was already 1951, when his newly published Astronauci ("Astronauts") almost instantly disappeared from the shelves. Stanislav Lem was now writing, reviews of whose works were already full on the pages of all the periodicals of the world, almost without ceasing.

No rest

Lem traveled a lot in Germany, Czechoslovakia. He often traveled to the Soviet Union, although he never liked it in the slightest degree, under any political system (and he saw almost everything). However, when it was really necessary, he said and wrote that he both loves and respects …

In 1982, when Poland smelled of war again, Stanislaw Lem, whose quotes from his works were already used by people regardless of citizenship, place of residence, gender and age, moved to Austria, although at that moment any country. Lived up toeighty-four years old, despite the anxieties of the first half of life. However, his heart was unhe althy, which is why he died in March 2006.

Style

Stanislav Lem, whose works most often talk about the failed communication between humanity and extraterrestrial civilizations, wrote a lot about the technologies of the future. Later works are marked by the idealization of social aspirations, close to the genre of utopia, where a person is bored due to technological overdevelopment.

Texts are full of humor, satire, philosophy. Wit-witted sci-fi lovers, who were fascinated by Stanislav Lem, quotes from the Star Diaries of Iyon the Quiet, for example, have been used everywhere for many decades. It was not in vain that the writer was fond of not only science fiction, but also futurology.

Glory

Lem's books have been translated into more than forty languages, and they have also sold extremely many - well over thirty million copies. More than twenty adaptations of his works were made, among which the main part was filmed by Poland and the USSR, but Czechoslovakia, Germany, England, the USA and even Azerbaijan were noted along with them. The best of the paintings is, of course, "Solaris", shot by Tarkovsky, although Stanislav Lem, whose best works were both accepted and understood in the USSR, did not appreciate this masterpiece enough. Moreover, he called Tarkovsky an "idiot" for incorrectly conveying the main idea.

However, at the American film of the same name with Clooney, he only winced. Indeed, there are basic thoughts in general as suchno. Lem disliked American science fiction writers in every possible way and criticized to the extent that he was expelled from the American Science Fiction Society. Not recognizing Bradbury and Sheckley, Clark and Asimov, he only spoke well of the Strugatskys, especially praising "Roadside Picnic". It even seemed strange to him that he didn't write it.

Dictionary

Stanislav Lem is a writer who is inherent in word creation. The number of neologisms he created and used by his followers exceeded nine thousand. The Poles and Russians were the most fortunate in this respect. The translators who worked on Lem's works were very talented, and the proximity of the languages contributed to the translation, so we can fully enjoy the writer's humor.

Translations into non-Slavic languages were much less fortunate, it is unlikely that the Americans or the French will be able to get as much pleasure from reading the works of Stanislav Lem. Probably, without explanation, it is clear what kind of medicine is " altruizin", what kind of room is "powerless", for which intelligent robots called a person "pale" and how "bumba" and "bloomba" differ from an ordinary bomb. And a wonderful term - "false animals", it is immediately clear - synthetic. No less witty is the "postment" with "sepules".

The writer very aptly and witty puts his thoughts into the words: "The machine, stupid, ingenuous, incapable of thinking, does what is ordered. And the smart one first thinks what is more profitable: to solve the proposed problem ortry to get away from it?". "The limits of moral responsibility are much wider than the scope of judicial codes." "The essence of old age is that you gain experience that cannot be used."

Theme

Together with such a subtlety of linguistic images, the breadth of coverage of universal realities and non-realities is striking: both utopias, and dystopias, and light fairy tales about space, and heavy social engineering, an alternative present and a very cloudy future, a little world around the corner, full of drug addict dope, and conquered humanity, conquered the universe…

And certain metas are scattered everywhere, forcing the reader to think, and not necessarily the way Stanislav Lem supposedly thought. His bibliography is so extensive that it makes it possible to dwell only on the most significant works.

137 seconds

This is a classic sci-fi story where an idea is the protagonist - it's a super-intelligent computer network. Futurology, which the author adhered to in many works, appears here in the aspects of foresight, prediction of events that have not yet occurred. The plot is unassuming, but offset by philosophical issues, such as how time is reflected in the human mind. Time appears to be the most difficult dimension to perceive.

Absolutely empty

This cycle is written in the first person, where the author acts as a literary critic who reviews unwritten works. Lots ofphilosophy, humor, impudent satire in relation even to their own ideas about the world in which the literary hero lives. This is a book about futile dreams and the flow of great thoughts into absolute emptiness, because that is where all the unfulfilled lies.

Altruisin

Even among the robots there are hermits, if this is a fantasy story. A certain Dobricius, a hermit robot, meditated in the desert for sixty-seven long years, and then decided to make his neighbors happy. Then his fellow designer Klapauciy told an interesting story from the life of the Enesers, those who had reached the NSR (the highest stage of development). They, too, once desired to make the whole world happy - with riches, satiety, an excess of goodness. And what came of it? Everyone understands happiness in their own way…

Return from the Stars

This novel is unlikely to have the purity of the genre, which is usually inherent in the author. This is not science fiction by and large, rather the opposite: its problems concern sociology, ecology, the relationship between nature and man. Following in the footsteps of HG Wells ("The Time Machine"), Stanislav Lem raises the topic of human adaptation in the environment, when the hero finds himself in an era thousands of years away from the one where he was born. Here, too, there is irony, and serious relationships, and fantasy, and reality, and sarcasm, and phantasmagoria. There are no spaceships here, but there is the versatility and unpredictability of human psychology.

Educating Tsifrusha

Klapauciu was not up to Trurl, the rector of the university is troublesomeposition, and Trurl, in anguish, designed a typewriter, named Tsifrusha and began to educate her. The boredom gradually subsided, Trurl went about his business and stopped feeling lonely. However, it so happened that a gap appeared in the process of education, since three meteorites in a row fell into Trurl's garden, where his classes with Tsifrusha took place, which turned out to be the tail of an icy comet that flew by. These meteorites contained unexpected guests: a robot drummer, a drum, and an android holding a glass of poison in his hand. Trurl and Tsifrusha immediately thawed and revived their guests, and then listened to interesting stories…