In 1936, he debuted as a poet by publishing his poems Summer and Heat in Gazeta Polska under the name Paweł Makutra. In 1938, he published a fragment of his novel Wertepy in the Lviv newspaper Sygnały (the entire novel would get published only after the war).
The War
After the outbreak of World War 2, Buczkowski was mobilised and likely took part in the September Campaign. He was captured but managed to escape and hide in Podkamienie. After the outbreak of the German-Soviet war, he fought in the self-defence division. In March 1944, during the massacre of Poles in Podkemienie, the writer lost two of his younger brothers: Tadeusz and Zygmunt. Leopold made it through to Warsaw and married Maria Paprocka, who he had met in Podole in 1943. During the Warsaw Uprising, he lived in Warsaw together with his brother Marian – hiding, shooting photographs and writing a journal (published after the writer's death under the title Grząski Sad [editor's translation: Boggy Orchard]). After the Uprising's failure, he survived the work camp in Pruszków and settled in Kraków after the war. In 1950, he moved to Konstancin near Warsaw and lived there until his death in 1989.
Writer
As a writer, Buczkowski debuted quite late, only after he turned forty – his debut novel Wertepy was published in 1947 even though it was finished ten years earlier. Buczkowski himself dated his birth as a writer to the year 1935, when, in Podole, he was asked to serve as a recorder during the autopsy of a deceased cattle-rustler. As he said in a 1983 interview with M. Jarocka:
In one moment, the doctor said: 'Contents of stomach: three baked potatoes.' I confess that I became a writer at that moment. I was flooded by a lot of different questions in all possible undertones. When I was reading the report to the doctor, he said: 'Damn, this is great. Make a copy of this'. I made a copy and, with great resistance, began writing.
In Wertepy, which was written not long after that event, Buczkowski described a multi-cultural community living in his family area before the war. It consisted of Ukrainians, Poles, Jews, Russians, Armenians, Czechs, and Germans among others. The novel was also exceptional because of the exceptional level of cruelty and violence present in the relations between the peasant community of Dolinoszczęsna. Critics have described it either as expressionism or naturalism but also noticed that Buczkowski's writing cannot be easily classified into one of the defined literary schools. What stood out was the lyrical spontaneity which often eradicated the construction. Kazimierz Wyka, a prominent critic, preferred to focus on some of the layers of this prose instead of the characters or a traditionally defined storyline. Such qualities became even more prominent in Buczkowski's later writing.
Black Torrent
In Black Torrent, which was most probably written in 1947 (but only published in 1954), Buczkowski went a step further and created a novel with an amorphic, fragmentary construction. It is multidimensional, combines different themes and shows them from many simultaneous perspectives. The novel's theme was, partially, the reason for this kind of form – Black Torrent tells the story of a group of members of a self-defence force (Poles, Ukrainians, Jews) which meanders through Volhynia's forests at night. Critics tried to explain the chaos of the depicted world through psychological realism, dreamlike composition or nightmares. After reading Black Torrent, Jerzy Stempowski wrote:
It is evident that for the survivors meandering through the wintry forest, uncertain of the present time, plagued by hunger and typhus, the world of their past can only exist as a delusion. The form of Buczkowski's prose also approaches such quality.
Black Torrent, which is considered by many critics as the writer's most outstanding work, is also one of the most approachable.
In Dorycki Krużganek (editor's translation: Doric Cloister), published in 1957, Buczkowski pursued Black Torrent's themes (the novel's action is also set in Kresy during the war) and formal experiments. He entangled the narrative in a series of subsequent stories (with stories set within stories) connected by the themes of a film which was made by the Nazis in that area and the legendary kahal diamond, sought by everyone.
A Young Poet in a Castle
His next book, A Young Poet in a Castle (1959), was a breakthrough. It is essentially the only novella collection in the writer's oeuvre, even though it was described as a tome of anti-novellas and a rejection of the classical form of novellas and short stories. The critic Jan Tomkowski noticed that A Young Poet… introduces Buczkowski's characteristic tone of mockery, irony, jest (with sentences like 'This, however, will be discussed in a novel for young girls'). In terms of content, A Young Poet… also includes – for the first time – a drastic critique of the rules and capabilities of representation in literature. For example, as Jan Tomkowski wrote, in the novella with the deceitful title Romance 'we move between three levels of reality and encounter the work's actual protagonist only on the first level. On the second level, we meet the author, who is writing a novel about her. On the third level, the narrator ponders the author himself.'
In this work, also for the first time, Buczkowski used the method of combining documents with his own writing. We can see masked quotes and paraphrases of fragments of texts written by other authors, mainly of Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, which the Polish writer considered to be a masterpiece. There is an anecdote connected to this book: Buczkowski found a copy of Sartor in 1941, in the ruins of a library burned down by Germans. He considered the work as an absolute revelation and one of his most important intellectual adventures.