Prose writer, poet and publicist. Bratny became famous as the author of the novel ‘Kolumbowie: Rocznik 20’ (Columbuses: Generation 1920s), which gave its name to the wartime generation. He considered the most important role of literature was to stay closely connected to contemporary life. His creative output consists of more than a hundred different editions: poetry, collections of short stories, theatrical plays and novels.
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Roman Mularczyk – Roman Bratny’s official last name until 1954 – was the son of Józef Mularczyk, a legionnaire and colonel in the cavalry of the Polish Army, and Wanda (née Repetowska). His younger brother by nine years was Andrzej Mularczyk (later screenwriter and co-screenwriter of such films as Sami Swoi and Katyń). Roman was born on 5th August 1921 in Kraków. He spent his childhood in Garwolin, in the barracks of the 1st Horse Rifle Regiment, whose commander was his father. He learned the ins and outs of garrison life and the realities of military discipline, and it was there that he became fascinated with equestrianism. In 1937, Józef Mularczyk was posted to Grudziądz, where he moved with his older son, who attended the King Jan III Sobieski Classical Secondary School there. During this period, the young Bratny learned German well, which would sometimes save his life in the future. It was also a time of loneliness, and isolation from his former classmates, which was the reason for his escape into poetry. He was particularly enamoured of the work of Julian Przyboś, and his first mature poetic attempts were precisely a conscious imitation of the avant-garde poet. It says enough about his fascination that he rewrote the poet's entire volume during the occupation. In Pamiętniki Moich Książek (Memoirs of My Books) he recalled:
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I had read so much by Przyboś, perhaps I was even “written” by Przyboś, because I was transcribing his volume W Głębi Lasu (In the depths of the forest, actual title W Głąb Las – note AJ) by hand in the library on Koszykowa Street until the late pre-dawn hours. And those journeys home with scribbled pages through the darkened, silent city...
However, not much of his early poetic work has survived – the author himself admitted, in the margins of one of his diaries from 1942, that he destroyed 200 poems and kept 15 representative ones.
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Roman Mularczyk (Bratny), 1932, photo: Narcyz Witczak-Witaczyński / Wikipedia
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Times of war
In 1939, Bratny passed his final school examinations and, to his parents' surprise, instead of choosing a humanities major, he planned to study at the Academy of Political Science. He spent his post-secondary summer in a compulsory youth labor unit, where he built fortifications in Poland’s Eastern Borderlands. In September he moved to his mother's place in Konstancin, the villa ‘Boryczówka’ (during the occupation it was a meeting place for poets active in the underground, and a radio station also operated there for a while). According to Emil Marat, author of the biography Bratny: Hamlet Rozstrzelany (Bratny: Hamlet Executed), ‘he spent the first two years of the war mainly reading literature [...], tutoring, attempting to trade, playing ball and ferociously writing poems’. Initially, his underground activities were not connected with literary circles – he did not, for example, enter the circle around the underground Warsaw University, which was formed by young members of the SiN (Sztuka i Naród / Art and Nation) organisation. In 1942, he completed a course at the AK Infantry Reserve Cadet School and joined the underground right-wing military organisation Miecz i Pług (Sword and Plough).
Among other things, the organisation performed publishing functions and invested in underground printing presses. Among the numerous magazines published by the MiP was Kuźnia (The Forge), with which Bratny collaborated from 1943 to 1944, while in 1944 he co-founded and became editor of another MiP-published magazine, Dźwigary. As Marat writes, the magazine grew ‘out of a programmatic premise saying that art cannot be autonomous from reality, but should serve to shape it’. Bratny was then able to develop his organisational skills and demonstrate his literary talent. In 1943, he made his journalistic debut with the text Pisać Pięścią (To Write With a Fist).
Thanks to Dźwigary magazine, Bratny was also able to publish his poetic debut, Pogarda (Contempt). The edition contained three parts: the programmatic poem Wrogom (To the Enemies), poems from 1939 and poems from 1940 to 1944. The main theme of the volume is struggle as an order issued by history and the sense of brotherhood falling on the young. Zenona Macużanka, author of a biography of the writer published in 1982, noted:
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The solidarity of youth in the fight, this motif in general emblematic of the Columbus generation, will play a particularly large role in Bratny's work. [...] The author of Pogarda has no pretensions of becoming a "lyricist of militant life" [...]. Bratny aspired to this with all his might, and this very role is not only consciously undertaken by him, but created with conviction.
In his poetry, Bratny leaned towards the avant-garde, shying away from open lyricism. Tadeusz Gajcy reviewed his debut volume as follows:
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Bratny represents a predatory and vitalistic psyche. The atmosphere of bullets and struggle, spreading in his poetry, supported by autopsy, gives a howl of inner bravery, which, however, is lacking in the artistic plane.
The publication of his first poetry volume was also the first official use of the pseudonym ‘Bratny’. Marat cites a story described by Bratny's first wife:
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Joanna Żwirska recalled that after Topornicki/Gajcy's first visit to Konstancin, they escorted a visitor to Warsaw on a train. The man asked Roman why he hadn't chosen a nickname for himself. "Jędrek [Andrzej Mularczyk] is wandering around the bushes in the park, we're already walking out into the alley to the station, Roman looks over and calls out to him: – Hey, brother [Polish – brat], where are you, brother...”. Gajcy then exclaimed: "Brat-ny"! "Thus, on this road while escorting Charles, Roman's literary pseudonym was born".
In September 1954, the writer officially discarded the surname Mularczyk and officially adopted an underground name.
When the Warsaw Uprising broke out, he participated in it from the beginning to the end, commanding the ‘Bełt’ unit in the City Centre. After the capitulation, he was deported as an officer of the Home Army and was held in camps in Lamsdorf, Sandbostel and Lübeck, where he was eventually released.
The literary fruit of this time was a volume of short stories titled Ślad (Trace), published in 1946 by Eugeniusz Kuthan in the series Writers of Underground Poland. It expressed the need to talk directly about the experiences of his generation – ‘a tumultuous political reckoning with times past and a lyrical elegy in honour of those who perished’. It was then that the journalistic text Hamlet Rozstrzelany (Hamlet Executed) was written, Bratny's reckoning with the uprising, which, however, was never published in its entirety.
After the war
After the liberation of the camp by the Allies, Bratny went to Paris, served for a time in the Polish Armed Forces in France, and then returned to Warsaw. He carried out his pre-war plan and graduated from the Academy of Political Science in 1949. Starting in August 1946, he became editor of the journal Pokolenie (Generation), in 1947 he joined the editorial team of the journal Nurt (The Current), and in 1948 of Odrodzenie (Rebirth). In 1948, he also published three volumes of poetry: Losy, W Karty z Historią and 15 Batalionów.
In the late 1940s, Bratny wrote a lot, not only out of a sense of mission, but also for his livelihood. As Marat notes, much of his prose and poetry created up to 1955 bore the hallmarks of Socialist Realism, hence when this ideology was imposed as a binding doctrine of art at the 1949 Congress of Polish Writers in Szczecin, Bratny was already excelling. Marat points out that despite the ‘task-oriented’ socialist realism, Bratny still created original, interesting and non-schematic works.
The convention also called for support of theatrical activity, recognising theatre as a medium with which one can easily reach less educated people. In 1949, Bratny moved to Szczecin, where he took over as literary manager of the Polish Theatre. That year, his one-act play Pobita Kra was published, as well as a volume of poetry Słowo Miliarda. He began to write so-called 'common room plays' – short, one-act pieces intended for staging in company and village common rooms or canteens. In 1950 he published the play Zwycięstwo Gralaków, while in 1952 he published Przeciw Krzywdzie, Sześć Godzin Ciemności and a collection of one-act plays Ludzie, Którzy Rosną.
Szczecin was also a significant episode insofar as it was there that he met Alicja Wahl, a painter, to whom he was married from 1954 to 1968. Three years after their marriage, their daughter Julia was born.
After returning from Szczecin, Bratny wrote short stories (including Kryśka Brzytew) and poems. From 1950 to 1952 he was part of the editorial board of Nowa Kultura.
The voice of a generation
In May 1957, Bratny's most important novel arrived in bookshops, the importance of which was also recognised outside the literary world – for it was considered the voice of an entire generation. The book Kolumbowie: Rocznik 20 consisted of three parts. The first, Death for the First Time, depicted the times of the occupation, the second, Death for the Second Time, the uprising, while the third part, entitled Life, showed the post-war fate of the characters. Despite the fictionalisation of the events depicted, it is obvious that the author based the story on his own experiences, and the novel's characters were modeled on real characters from Bratny's close circle. However, this does not invalidate one of the most important features of the book – its universality.
First of all, the book described the experiences of a generation whose youth fell during the war, and the title of the novel quickly passed into the vernacular as the name of this generation. It quickly became a bestseller, and the vast majority of reviews were favorable or even enthusiastic. As Macużanka wrote, the Columbuses were noted for their 'plasticity of detail, the briskness and drama of the narrative, the accuracy of their observations', as well as their ‘heartfelt earnestness’. Marat notes the following about what builds the strength of Bratny's book:
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[R]egardless of the ideological plots concerning the Home Army, Operation Storm and so on [...] the novel brought to light and perhaps to some extent saved the memory of what was the core of the underground activity of the wartime generation of young intelligentsia: the conviction that freedom is a social issue, but in this social context – also, and perhaps above all, an individual one.
It is also worth paying attention to the terminology itself – in the Columbuses metaphor, the first association is Columbus as an explorer, but Macużanka also notes another connection: an error in the calculus of predictions and reaching a different homeland than the Columbuses intended. She wrote:
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This [...] name, despite the objections that were raised shortly after the novel was announced, conveys the atmosphere of an arduous trek to something longed for, although unknown, and contains a picture of the road to an unknown destination, under difficult conditions. Finally, the name contains a charge of curiosity and courage, bravado and patience, and, in the end, full dedication to the cause.
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Roman Bratny, 1970, photo: Aleksander Jałosiński / Forum
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Writer to the end
After the success of Kolumbowie: Rocznik 20 Bratny continued to analyze his generation in other works. Among the novels are Szczęśliwi Torturowani (Happily Tortured, 1959), an attempt to come to terms, morally and ideologically, with the Columbuses generation, as Marat put it: a kind of postscript to the novel about the Home Army, who, due to the still recent success of Columbuses, were also warmly received. Shortly thereafter, the novel Życie Raz Jeszcze (Life Once More, 1962) was published, referring by its title to the third part of Columbuses. A significant aspect of it was the broadening of the area of social life, which the author depicted – until then the heroes were mainly people from the circle of the Home Army, but here the heroes came from the circle of intelligentsia and had slightly different life stories.
In 1963, Bratny became deputy editor-in-chief of Kultura and held this position until 1971. In 1974, he took over as literary director of the Powszechny Theatre in Warsaw.
In addition to literature, he was also involved in hunting – it was a big part of his life and an integral part of his image (as well as a reputation as a seducer and macho). He bought a plot of land with an estate in Karwik on Lake Seksty, an ideal hunting base. Suffice it to say that he was a lifelong member of the Journalists' Hunting Club Circle and the Writers' Hunting Circle, and in 1999 he received the Medal of Hunting Merit from the Polish Hunting Association ‘in recognition of his deep hunting knowledge, which he passes on to the next generation of hunters, his passion and organisational skills, the efficiency of the hunts he conducted and his tremendous ability to bring people together’. Among his hunting-related books are 1976’s Hobby Wielkie jak Łoś (Hobby as Big as a Moose, 1959’s Niespokojne Tropy (Restless Tracks), a 1987 collection of short stories called Co Las Mi Powiedział (What the Forest Told Me) and a 1993 collection of columns titled Rok Myśliwego (The Year of the Hunter).
In the late 1960s, the writer became involved with Ewa Młynarska (later Ewa Bratny-Młynarska, with whom he was married until his death. Together they had a daughter, Berenika.
Roman Bratny occasionally travelled – to the Middle East, South America and Siberia. Over time, however, he increasingly valued the tranquility of his home circle and stepped away from activity in public life. However, he continued to write. In 1978 he published the novel Radość Nagrobków in the grotesque vein, the psychological-criminal Na Bezdomne Psy (1977) and the mini-novel Kiepskie Zmartwychwstanie (1980) about the plane crash in which a Polish cultural delegation died. These were the times of the protracted crisis of the 1970s – the wave of literary reckoning with the past and the diversification of attitudes and individualisation of ideological quests had passed. During this period, Bratny, with his usual self-reliance, came out with the assumption that the worst option for a writer is silence. That’s why he did not stop writing – in the 1980s and 1990s he published numerous novels and short stories, including Rok w Trumnie (1983) and Miłowanie Kata (1986). He also published two volumes of Pamiętniki Moich Książek (Memoirs of My Books, Volume I – 1978, Volume II – 1983), or his memoirs, which Marat describes as 'a compendium of the ‘right’ interpretations of his books and the motivations behind their creation'. In 1995 he published his last, and second most important novel after Columbuses, Anioł w Butach z Ostrogami (Angel in Boots with Spurs). The last work – very eloquently – was the writer's reckoning with life. It could almost be called an autobiography, but it was separated from this by the fictionalisation of memories – something characteristic of Bratny's entire oeuvre.
Roman Bratny was awarded the Officer's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta (1959), the Order of the Banner of Labour Second Class (1964), the Bronze Medal for Merit for National Defense (1966), the Order of the Banner of Labour First Class (1986) and the Medal of Merit for National Culture (1987).
He died on 5 November 2017, and was buried at Powązki Cemetery in Warsaw.
Sources:
Macużanka, Z. (1982). Roman Bratny. Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy. Marat, E. (2024).
Bratny: Hamlet Rozstrzelany. Wołowiec: Wydawnictwo Czarne.
