His first collection of stories The Walls of Hebron (1992) contained descriptions of his prison experiences: images of life in a cell and a record of a naked, dehumanised existence in a world ruled by force and cunning. Shocking accounts of humiliation and brutality combined with a pathos bordering on the lyrical, with sarcasm, artfulness, linguistic refinement and a flair for poetic shortcuts – this is Stasiuk's prose. His next books reinforced his reputation. Tales of Galicia, 1994, presents semi-fictionalised, semi-journalistic accounts of the lives of the residents of a village in the provincial foothills, with keenly observed details of the manners and morals of the period of political transformation, clearly drawn characters, a plot straight out of a folk ballad, and a climate in which poetical lyricism coexists with brutality. The stories in Through the River (1996), are a continuation of similar narrations in a similar setting. Stasiuk's book Dukla (1997), has been nominated for the 1998 Nike Prize, and Winter... (2001) for the 2002 Nike Prize.
On the Road to Babadag won the 2005 Nike Award and was published in English in 2011 to glowing reviews. The book is a mysterious, journey through the other Europe. Stasiuk is not interested in museums or quaint villages and admits he is ‘drawn to decline and decay’, which comes through in his writing, giving it a realistic, raw feeling. National Public Radio's Jess Crispin praised the book, remarking in her June 2011 review that it ‘stretches far beyond the confines of its genre. Its scope is massive, covering philosophy and history, literature and politics.’
He says that the beginning of his writing came at a very pleasant time. Nobody applied any pressure on him, nobody wanted anything from him. Today, he does not even remember whether he associated literature at that time with money or with reality. It probably did not enter his head that he could busy himself with anything other than writing and living.
Listen, write, cut
He is regarded as one of the most important Polish writers of the middle generation. His books have been translated into many languages, including English, German, French, Hungarian, Dutch, Czech, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Ukrainian and Italian. Stasiuk's plays are successfully performed in Germany. His Tales of Galicia was screened by Dariusz Jabłoński under the title Wino Truskawkowe (Strawberry Wine; 2008) and was very well received by the critics.
He once said that his literary manifesto was ‘Write, cross out, think, look, listen, write and cross out, cross out, cut…’ He explains that for him ‘every book is a defeat because it cannot describe or name the world as we would wish. That is why you begin the next one and the next.’
He is not particularly concerned about whether, as a writer, he has someone to speak to. As he states, he speaks to himself. He tells himself stories which he has not found anywhere else. He writes books which he himself would like to read. Except he doesn't read them because they bore him or because he no longer likes them. He discovers with surprise, however, that there can be found people who read them, as it were, on behalf of the author.
He made his debut with Mury Hebronu (The Walls of Hebron), written in strong prose in which he described his prison experiences. For deserting from the army, he ended up in the military prison in Płoty, then in a prison in Stargard Szczeciński. For refusing to work, he spent a month in solitary confinement.
All in the details
When he found himself outside, a friend at whose house he had hidden after his desertion told him to write everything down. The book was ready in three weeks. It was published soon after 1989. Jerzy Pilch wrote an enthusiastic review in bruLion periodical. Stasiuk already knew by then that he wanted to become a writer. Looking for solitude and peace, he went south to the Beskid Niski mountain region. In the village of Czarne, his friend had a Lemko cottage dating back to 1937. The budding prose writer decided to settle there. In Zima (Winter), published in 2001, he wrote:
I have an obsession with things, events, trivial details, rhymes, I like to know what things are called and that is why I prefer poor neighbourhoods to rich ones, because in them things have real value and it is very likely that people might love them just a bit simply because they don't have anything else. They don't adore them but love them, and they don't even know about it.
In Beskid, Stasiuk earned a living as the caretaker of an Orthodox church. He showed tourists around and replaced windows blown out by the wind. In the end, conservators dismantled the church and transferred it to the open-air museum in Nowy Sącz. He wrote about all of this in Tales of Galicia. In Czarne he worked on The White Raven, a story about a group of friends who couldn’t make sense of their lives and escaped to the mountains in search of perhaps their last adventure. Martin Pollack of Germany's Der Spiegel called the book ‘A singular story of friendship, failure and death, told breathlessly in the raw language of suburban Warsaw, but also in solicitously drawn, keenly piercing pictures.’
He also spent several nights writing his excellent memoirs, full of irony, which he entitled Jak Zostałem Pisarzem: Próba Autobiografii Intelektualnej (How I Became a Writer: An Attempt at an Intellectual Autobiography). This book was not greeted enthusiastically by everyone. In one of his feature articles, Bronisław Maj (poet and literary critic) called Stasiuk ‘the Edek of Polish literature’ (Edek: a character from Sławomir Mrożek’s Tango). Paweł Dunin-Wąsowicz, in turn, wrote that ‘Stasiuk demolishes his own myth about a cool life history. Army, desertion, own goal, prison? – how predictable. But – the less interesting the things he describes, the more I chortled when I was reading this book. Stasiuk the banalist!’
To travel is to live
For the Czarne Publishing House, the author completed Dukla, which he considers to be his best work next to the novel Nine, which is devoted to Warsaw. Nine is a tale about a minor businessman embroiled in a gangster story and Stasiuk's American publisher described it as "an existential criminal novel." An excellent review of the book appeared in the prestigious books supplement to The New York Times Books Review. Some Polish reviewers, however, stated that Nine testified to the author's creative crisis. The author addressed the critics:
My God, if I were to listen to everyone's voice, I would never have written half of what I wrote and I would have written the other half terribly. In fact, none of these voices interest me much. Nine is my best book and I hope everybody has such a crisis in which I am supposed to be wallowing.
He always loved to travel. In his younger days, he would hitch-hike from one end of Poland to the other. He would thumb down a lorry, jump into the back and observe the landscapes from beneath the tarpaulin. After moving to Beskid, the destination for his journeys was at first Dukla, a small town in the Krosno poviat with a palace and park complex, a church, a Bernardine monastery and the ruins of a synagogue. Later, Stasiuk starting travelling around Slovakia, crossing the border at the crossing point in Konieczna nearby.
He would compare how his mind was working in various conditions. After his first journey south, he thought that he would like to return there. And he did return, whenever the opportunity arose.
In Paris or Venice there is no longer any room for legends, for dragons or griffins, I am not able to think up anything interesting on the subject of those places. It grieves me but I do not feel any melancholy or human loss in a German town – I can only feel those things in a Transylvanian town, because there the feelings are clearer and more beautiful.
He regards travelling as an experiment conducted on himself and also as a pleasure. He repeats after Andersen that "to travel means to live. In any case, doubly, triply, many times over."
Once it was believed that time spent in the church was not the time from real life because people do not age by that much time. This belief still exists in the countryside, which is why you see so many old women in churches who are trying to put off their time of dying by remaining in a holy place. Stasiuk suspects that perhaps the lay response to this is travelling, where the laws of everyday life cease to function. A traveller is not fully an inhabitant, a citizen, a member of a community. Perhaps he is not even fully a human being.