Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz with Megan Thomas (translator) and Ewa Małachowska-Pasek (University of Michigan)

Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz (1898-1939), born near Vitebsk in modern-day Belarus, came from a wealthy Polish family and had a short but very successful career as a journalist for the daily paper, Rzeczpospolita (The Republic), and as a novelist and screen writer in the 1920s and 30s. Most of his novels were made into films in the author’s own day. His most famous novel, The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma (1932), spawned two films, a television miniseries, and various stage versions, but has until recently been known in the English speaking world to a few cognoscenti as the novel that inspired Jerzy Kosiński’s Being There (1970). We think the recent translation of Mostowicz’s novel makes the case that it is worth reading for its own sake as a political satire that somehow seems to apply to every era.

In this episode we focus on The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma as a political satire that seems as relevant today as it was in 1932 and as it was for Kosiński in the 1960s and 70s. We consider whether the charge that Kosiński plagiarized from Mostowicz is fair by looking at a few possible examples of plagiarism, but we leave it to our viewers to make their own judgment on that question. We also ask our guests, Mostowicz’s translators, about the special challenges of translating humor, satire from a different era, intentional malapropisms, and Mostowicz’s complex wordplay.

Encounters with Polish Literature is a video series for anyone interested in literature and the culture of books and reading. Each month, host David A. Goldfarb presents a new topic in conversation with an expert on that author or book or movement in Polish literature.

Learn more about this episode, and see the biography of the guest on the Polish Cultural Institute New York's website. The linked page includes a bibliography of translations and material on Dołęga-Mostowicz in English:
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