Uncle Stanisław Lem & I: An Interview with Michał Zych

michal_zych_portret_0.jpeg, default, Michał Zych, Kraków, photo: from his family archive, center, #000000

Seeing him struggle with orthography and with exams just around the corner, the sci-fi writer Stanisław Lem created regular dictation exercises for his 13-year-old nephew in 1970. Now over 50 years later, Culture.pl speaks to Michał Zych to see how that memorable summer with his uncle's lesser-known pedagogical ambitions affected his life.

Janusz R. Kowalczyk: Let’s take look at these sentences: ‘The blindworm finds people disgusting but it likes to eat monkeys and older boys making orthographic errors’. Or: ‘A buyer of slaves, sorting his merchandise, allocated sturdy men to mines, women to the kitchen, and the youth who don’t know orthography to draftage’. Sounds strict, yet surrealistic and funny. But also, I think, familiar?

Michał Zych: Indeed. But in order to properly present the whole context of these spelling tests, I’d need to go back five decades and explain how I found myself in my uncle, the writer Stanisław Lem’s, house in the town of Kliny. It was because I was quite a sickly child, and that’s where my grandmother and aunt lived. Each time I got sick, I ended up in Kliny under their care.

JRK: As well as under that of your uncle, a medic by trade.

MZ: He didn’t really tend to treat me, although when I was resting at his place, he would either bring me books, or take them away, in surges of a good mood. At my neighbour’s place, I discovered Karl May. Not just the Native American books, but also the ones about the Far East. I borrowed the entire set of books from him. And what would my uncle do then? He would take them away from me so that he could read them himself. Thankfully, he read them diagonally, so he would finish them very quickly.

As for me, I had a condition now known under the scientific name ‘dysorthography’. I was the cause of astonishment among my family, as I read quite a lot and no one could understand why I made such a monstrous number of orthographic errors. Everyone was under the impression that, since I read books, I should have the layout of combinations of letters encoded in my head. But it didn’t quite work that way in my case. As a result, as an elementary school student, when I would get back my spelling tests covered in the teacher’s corrections, I would arrogantly claim that they weren’t mine because I didn’t use a pen with red ink. Still, the moment was approaching in which something had to be done about it. My elementary school education was coming to an end, and high school entrance exams were looming on the horizon.

I was applying to one of the three most respectable high schools in Kraków – ‘Number Five’ [editor’s note: August Witkowski High School No. 5]. When compared with ‘Number One’ [Bartłomiej Nowodworski High School No. 1] and ‘Number Two’ [King Jan III Sobieski High School No. 2], ‘Five’ had a reputation of being the most laid-back. Regardless of that, I had to pass my Polish language written exam. I was a bit scared that I would end up, as my uncle had prophesied, becoming a tailor’s apprentice. He also advised me to start looking around for a confectioner’s rich daughter to marry, because that would provide the entire family with sweets, while I, a baker’s apprentice, wouldn’t have to worry about studying anymore.

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Stanisław Lem in his office, 1975, photo: Aleksander Jałosiński / Forum

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JRK: Sweets are not an unfamiliar topic for Stanisław Lem, who enjoyed snacking on them, while keeping his diabetes secret from his family. I understand that this is when the idea about the spelling tests appeared. I’m guessing that it was your uncle’s initiative?

MZ: It was indeed. My uncle decided to practice with me so I didn’t mess up on the exam. I was between seventh and eighth grades at the time. I spent part of my holidays in Kliny. There was a swimming pool next to a school there – not the one I attended, as I attended a different one, in the city centre – which made staying at my uncle’s place more pleasant. I also had more friends there than in my hometown – I still do. I often went swimming, especially considering that the weather was beautiful. But the time would come when my uncle would drag me off, and later – to discipline me even further – he would ask me to come back at a particular time. I came to these spelling tests of his, even though the sun shone beautifully outside, the birds sang, and just 150 metres away the swimming pool tempted me as my friends dove into it head first.

My uncle would sit me down in his office in the so-called old house, the place where I currently live, in the very room from which I’m now talking to you, and would dictate these little stories to me a vista. He would maintain the pace of an ordinary conversation. And he didn’t repeat anything, so I had to write hastily, at an imposed rhythm. Another factor that made writing these stories down correctly more difficult was that I found them incredibly funny. I quickly learned not to pay attention to their content and only focus on the spelling, as my uncle was capable of being very strict. After finishing a dictation, he would read it and, mocking me mercilessly, emphasise all the errors. It would then become even more necessary for me to arrive on time for the spelling test the next day.

JRK: It’s astonishing that all the manuscripts of these dictations survived to this day. I suspect that few people would keep such proof of their failures, no matter how old. How did you manage to do it?

MZ: The only thing I can take credit for is that I realised the value of these unusual musings by a successful writer. The experience was even more unique, because my uncle would blurt out the dictations with no previous preparation. I would arrive, and he would say, ‘Oh, here you are! Sit down!’ and he would spew out another story in one breath. Despite my orthographical density, I was well aware of their significance. So I painstakingly collected them and stored them.

JRK: As you did with your uncle’s autographs.

MZ: Yes, I have my own manuscripts with my uncle’s corrections. I stored them in my desk and always kept an eye on them, so they didn’t get lost. Especially when moving houses. In the 1990s, when I was launching my publishing house Przedsięwzięcie Galicja [Galicja Enterprise], I came to the conclusion that it would be worth publishing them. I obtained my uncle’s permission. He was even more eager for me to do it, when he had the opportunity to read them again. He read them and roared with laughter: ‘Michaś, I didn’t realise I was so witty!’ I had brought him a lot of joy. When he gave interviews, he would frequently mention these spelling tests as an unexpected discovery from many years before. Of course, these stories had the air of his more or less malicious humour.

JRK: When they finally went out into the world, they also had some astonishing adventures.

MZ: The punchline of publishing the book of dictations was a situation in which a representative of a nationalist-Catholic political party protested against them. When they debuted at the national orthographic competition, he accused its organisers and the author of spreading ‘the civilisation of death’ due to the fact that one of the stories mentioned preparing a dish from a young boy’s liver. So, plenty of anecdotes popped up around them.

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Stanisław Lem and Michał Zych, Kraków, photo: from a family archive

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JRK: It’s worth adding that Professor Jerzy Jarzębski, in a postscript to volume 33 of Stanisław Lem’s ‘Collected Works’, noted that ‘the facetious cruelty of Lem’s imagination didn’t quite match the peculiar sadism with which the author of exemplarily Catholic tales from the ‘Złote Różdżka’ (‘A Golden Wand’) collection would seriously punish naughty children for trivial misbehaviours (‘The Holy Spirit advises hitting the little ones with a wand’ – begins the educator, whereas he ends with cutting off children’s fingers with scissors and burning them alive’). Can we find more pleasant sides to the publishing of his dictations?

Thumbnail — The cover of Stanisław Lem's 'Dictations, or Rather How Uncle Staszek Taught Then Michaś, Now Michał, to Write Without Errors', 2001, photo: Przedsięwzięcie Galicja

MZ: A short animated film is being made on the basis of one of these stories to show the difficulty of Polish orthography which students have to tackle from a very young age. I signed an agreement for this enterprise with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute. I’ve seen a storyboard for this project – they’ve done something that would seem completely untranslatable! Prior to that, I hadn’t been able to imagine that Dictations could be published in foreign languages, or only as ludicrous humoresques in the spirit of ‘pure nonsense’. It turns out, however, that one can also familiarise foreigners with the difficulty of learning the rules of Polish spelling. The copyright to the Dictations undertaking were passed on to me, which in theory makes me their co-author.

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The Adventures of the Blindworm: An Orthographic Short Story by Stanisław Lem – Animation

JRK: Which just goes to show that sometimes it’s worth making mistakes.

MZ: As long as you don’t overdo it. When it comes to me, I really did learn to spell flawlessly. I used to write on a typewriter, now I use a computer, which corrects spelling errors. So the ‘red font’ appears once again.

JRK: What we have now thanks to computer programs was foreseen by Stanisław Lem in his novels. He anticipated the appearance of the Internet and a range of amenities that make life easier, but this would also become humanity’s nightmare. He himself used a typewriter until the very end. You, his nephew, however, working as a publisher, can’t do without a computer.

MZ: Strictly speaking – an ex-publisher. I haven’t been doing that for a few years now. For various reasons, including my health, publishing is now beyond me. I intended to start writing down memories of my uncle, which I’m being encouraged to do – especially since I was witness to many situations during my childhood, when my cousin, Tomek Lem, hadn’t been born yet. Anyway, later on, Tomek studied in the US, while I was in Kraków. So I’ve got a lot of information about my uncle’s life but my current health makes it impossible for me to write it all down.

JRK: That’s a huge shame. We can only hope that it will soon be possible. I have to ask: how does it feel to live in your uncle’s home, where he famously fought the flooding in the basement for years? Does that still happen?

MZ: The house happens to stand in one of the lowest points in Kliny. In its vicinity there’s now the Maciek and Dorota Park, devoted to writer & journalist Dorota Terakowska and documentary film maker Maciej Szumowski. The park is beautiful but prior to that there was a meadow there, where I could admire animals approaching the garden – roes and rabbits. They’re gone now. Instead, I’ve got the noisy children in the park. All the water from the meadows would flow through the garden, causing the ground water levels to rise. My uncle’s basement and garage were periodically flooded, which he complained about, for instance, in his correspondence with Sławomir Mrożek.

There were various methods of weatherproofing, draining methods, but their efficacy was very selective and the water did sometimes seep into the basement. When my wife and I moved into the house, we added additional drainage but, after one particularly heavy rainfall, a geyser burst out in the basement and broke through the cement screed. It was while the renovation was still on-going; but the house has been drained for a while now.

Anyway, it was the same with my uncle’s new house. Here, clay retains water at 2 or 3 metres, hence the floods and watercourses. Nevertheless, my childhood in Kliny, surrounded by wild fields, was one of the best things that could have happened to me. I rode here on my horse as late as in the 1980s, crossing the Wisła River on a ferry. I would tie the horse up by the house or lead him to my uncle’s new house so that my grandma could ride – she would return to her equestrian skills with tenderness.

JRK: Is the book ‘Dictations, or Rather How Uncle Staszek Taught Then Michaś, Now Michał, to Write Without Errors’ the only work by Stanisław Lem published by Przedsięwzięcie Galicja?

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A centrefold from Stanisław Lem’s ‘Dictations, or Rather How Uncle Staszek Taught Then Michaś, Now Michał, to Write Without Errors’, 2001, photo: Przedsięwzięcie Galicja

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MZ: The co-editor and I have published some historical books. I specialised in textbooks on sailing, which I’m the most proud of. Sailing is the most pleasant activity for me, one for which I have a true passion. I switched to deep-sea cruises quite a few years ago. In 2020, I suffered as – for the first time in years – I didn’t sail, for obvious reasons. At some point, I worked with a charter company, I hosted their portal Skippers’ Tavern, so I could always charter a yacht on better terms.

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Michał Zych, photo: from his family archive

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Michał Zych, born in 1954 in Kraków, a graduate of the Jagiellonian University (Polish Studies, Theatre Studies). Between 1976 and 1981 he was a journalist at TVP Kraków’s cultural section. He was fired after Martial Law was introduced. After a brief stint as a carpenter’s apprentice, he opened, together with Adam Rąpalski, a second-hand bookshop on Łobzowska Street. In the 1990s, he directed a dozen or so TV ads and launched the publishing house named Przedsięwzięcie Galicja (Galicja Enterprise). He is currently retired.

_{Interview originally conducted in Polish, Jan 2021, translated by AWP, Feb 2021}

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