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: )r e STUDIES IN leT la GLOBAL GENRE FICTION l e Holocaust and the Stars The Past in the Prose of Stanistaw Lem Agnieszka Gajewska Translated by Katarzyna Gucio SERIES EDITORS: BODHISATTVA CHATTOPADHYAY AND TARYNE JADE TAYLOR HOLOCAUST AND THE STARS This book is a groundbreaking study of one of the greatest science fiction writers, the Polish master Stanistaw Lem. It offers a new direction in research on his oeuvre and corrects several errors commonly appearing in his biographies. The author painstakingly recreates the context of Lem’s early life and his traumatic experiences during the Second World War due to his Jewish background, and then traces these through original and brilliant readings of his fiction and non- fiction. She considers language, worldbuilding, themes, motifs and characterization as well as many buried allusions to the Holocaust in Lem’s published and archival work, and uses these fragments to capture a different side of Lem than previously known. The book discusses various issues concerning the writer’s life, such as his upbringing in a Jewish, Zionist-minded family, the extensive relations between the Lem family and the elite of Lviv at that time, details of the Lem family killed during the German occupation and attempts to reconstruct what happened to Lem’s parents and to the writer himself after escaping the ghetto. Part of the Studies in Global Genre Fiction series, this English translation of the Polish original, which has already been considered a milestone in Lem studies, offers a fresh perspective on the writer and his work. It will be an important intervention for scholars and researchers of Jewish studies, Holocaust literature, science fiction studies, English literature, world war studies, minority studies, popular culture, history and cultural studies. Agnieszka Gajewska is professor at the Faculty of Polish and Classical Philology at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznari, Poland. Katarzyna Gucio is an experienced and highly accomplished translator of Polish and English. Studies in Global Genre Fiction Series Editors: Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, University of Oslo, Norway and Taryne Jade Taylor, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, USA Studies in Global Genre Fiction offers original insights into the history of genre literature while contesting two hierarchies that constrain global genre fiction studies: (1) Anglophone literature and other global language literatures and (2) literary fiction and genre fiction. The series explores the exchanges between different literary cultures that form aesthetic concerns and the specific literary, sociopolitical, geographical, economic, and historical forces that shape genre fiction globally. A key focus is understudied genre fictions from the ‘global South’ — where geographical location or language often confines works to the margins of the global publishing industry, international circulation, and academic scru- tiny, even if they may be widely read in their own specific contexts. Contributions to this series investigate the points of disruption, intersection and flows between literary and genre fiction. The series analyses cross-cultural influences in literary classifications, translation, transcreation, localization, pro- duction, and distribution while capturing the rich history of world and global literatures. Editorial Advisory Board ¢ Takayuki Tatsumi (Keio University, Japan) ¢ Dale Knickerbocker (East Carolina University, USA) ¢ Pawel Frelik (University of Warsaw, Poland) ¢ Joan Gordon (Nassau Community College/Science Fiction Studies, USA) ¢ Amy J. Ransom (Central Michigan University, USA) ¢ Farah Mendlesohn (Anglia Ruskin Centre for Science Fiction and Fantasy, UK) ¢ Rana Issa (American University of Beirut, Lebanon) ¢ Alexis Brooks de Vita (Texas Southern University, USA) ¢ M Elizabeth Ginway (University of Florida, USA) ¢ Aino-Kaisa Koistinen (University of Jyvaskyla, Finland) ¢ Helge Jordheim (University of Oslo, Norway) ¢ Abhyit Gupta (Jadavpur University, India) ¢ Suparno Banerjee (Texas State University, USA) ¢ Isiah Lavender III (Louisiana State University, USA) Books in this series Indian Genre Fiction Pasts and Future Histories Edited by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Aakriti Mandhwani and Anwesha Maity For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com /Studies-in-Global-Genre-Fiction/book-series/SGGF HOLOCAUST AND THE STARS The Past in the Prose of Stanistaw Lem Agnieszka Gajewska TRANSLATED BY KATARZYNA GUCIO Routledge Taylor & Francis Group LONDON AND NEW YORK Cover image credit: Katarzyna Swinarska, Deserted Lviv (Lwow wyludniony) , 2016, charcoal, watercolor on paper and collage, 21 x 28 cm, Gdarisk, Poland. Used with permission. First published in English 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Agnieszka Gajewska The right of Agnieszka Gajewska to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Translated by Katarzyna Gucio All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Published in Polish by Adam Mickiewicz University Press 2016 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gajewska, Agnieszka, author. | Gucio, Katarzyna, translator. Title: Holocaust and the stars: the past in the prose of Stanistaw Lem/ Agnieszka Gajewska; translated by Katarzyna Gucio. Other titles: Zaglada i gwiazdy. English Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2022. | Series: Studies in global genre fiction | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2021032597 | ISBN 9780367428723 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367428730 (paperback) | ISBN 9780367855642 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Lem, Stanislaw—Criticism and interpretation. | Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in literature. | History in literature. Classification: LCC PG7158.L392 G3513 2022 | DDC 891.8/5373—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021032597 ISBN: 978-0-367-42872-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-42873-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-85564-2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9780367855642 Typeset in Bembo by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India CONTENTS Biographical Notes vi Author’s Note Vil Series Editors’ Preface Vill Introduction 1 Lem(berg) Land 36 2 The split 72 3 Holocaust in space 118 Conclusion 157 Index 161 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES Agnieszka Gajewska is Professor at the Faculty of Polish and Classical Philology at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznari, Poland. She is the author of Zagtada i gwiazdy. Przesztosé w prozie Stanistawa Lema [The Holocaust and the Stars: The Past in the Prose of Stanistaw Lem], Poznan, Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM 2016, for which she received the postdoctoral title of doktor habilitowany. In her earlier research work, she focused on feminist criticism (the monograph Hasto: feminizm, 2008), minority discourses (she edited an anthology of Polish translations: Teorie wywrotowe, 2013) and political prisoners (various articles). She is currently working on a biography of Stanistaw Lem. She is the director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Gender and Identity Studies at Adam Mickiewicz University. Katarzyna Gucio 1s an experienced and highly accomplished translator of Polish and English. Her credits include literature (for her Polish translation of The Tattooist of Auschwitz by H. Morris, she received the Best Foreign Book of the Year Award), monographs and other scholarly works (including English editions of books by award-winning scholars, such as Wire-Bound State. The Lodz Ghetto by A. Sitarek, British Diplomacy and the Concept of the Eastern Pact by D. Jeziorny or Kantor, A Monograph by Dominika Larionow, to be released in 2020). She has completed numerous translation projects in collaboration with most major art institutions and museums in Poland and continues to work with them on a regular basis. Since 2013, she has been part of a team (and as of this year—the chief translator) tasked with translating the enormous collection of documents saved from the Warsaw Ghetto (the so-called Ringelblum Archive) into English. She also translates poetry—a collection of her translations of poems by W. B. Yeats will come out in April 2020. AUTHOR'S NOTE This book, Holocaust and the Stars: The Past in the Prose of Stanislaw Lem, was published in English thanks to the financial support of the Faculty of Polish and Classical Philology AMU in Poznari. Additional funding for this translation and editing have been provided by the University of Oslo under the “Frie Midler tl Forskning” scheme as well as by COFUTURES (European Research Council grant agreement no. 852190). The monograph was created as part of a project financed by the National Science Center, granted on the basis of decision no. DEC-2011/03 / B / HS2 / 0348. SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE In Holocaust and the Stars, Agnieszka Gajewska offers a groundbreaking study of one of the greatest science fiction writers, the Polish master Stanistaw Lem. Lem is an industry by himself; his works have been filmed (most famously Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris from 1971 and Ari Folman’s The Congress from 2013) and have been the inspiration for scientific and technological theories such as the cutting-edge constructor theory, and he has been both highly controversial and highly influential. While there are a number of critical studies on Lem, including several in the last few years alone since his death in 2006, such as works by Peter Swirski and the translation of his 1964 non-fiction masterpiece Summa Technologiae (U Minnesota Press, 2014) among others, little light has been shed on the impact of the Holocaust on his oeuvre. In this book, Gajewska painstakingly recreates the context of Lem’s early life and his traumatic experiences during World War Two due to his Jewish background, and then traces these through original and brilliant readings of Lem’s fiction and non-fiction. Gajewska considers language, worldbuilding, themes, motifs and characterization, as well as many buried allusions to the Holocaust in Lem’s published and archival work. She uses these fragments to capture a different side of Lem than previously known, since Lem himself rarely discussed his early life and his wartime experiences. The book was published in 2016 in Polish as Zaglada i gwiazdy. Przesztos¢ w prozie Stanistawa Lema. This edition has been specially translated and revised for English language publication. The book has already been considered a milestone in Lem studies, receiving a stellar reception in academic and popular reviews.