“Ashes and Diamonds”, a novel published in 1948, continues to provoke heated debates and sharp divisions. A masterpiece of Polish prose or crude propaganda? A politically motivated attempt to discredit the anti-communist underground after 1945, or a bid to portray the tragic choices faced by the generation of the Home Army? And who was the author whose life follows a strangely convoluted not atypical course: a respected Catholic writer before the war, Czesław Miłosz’s colleague in literary underground during the Nazi occupation, a communist toady pilloried by Miłosz as “Alpha the Moralist” in The Captive Mind, and finally a dissident and co-founder of the Committee for the Defense of Workers?

Jaroslaw Anders discusses these and other questions surrounding the novel, the author, and Andrzej Wajda’s internationally acclaimed film against the backdrop of communist and post-communist cultural politics.

The talk is followed by a Q&A moderated by Dr. Malgorzata Pospiech.

More: KF webinar page with registration is here

by AR