The famous writer from Poland Lem Stanislav won the love of readers around the world with works in the genre of scientific and philosophical fiction. The writer became the laureate of many Polish and foreign prizes, including state awards of Austria, Poland, and the Kafka Prize. And also he became a holder of the Order of the White Eagle, the owner of degrees, an honorary doctor of several universities. The magnificent film "Solaris" was created based on the work of the same name, written by Stanislav Lem.
Biography
An extraordinary science fiction writer was born in the Polish city of Lviv in September 1921 in the family of a doctor respected by Lviv residents. He graduated from the men's gymnasium in September 1939. And then Lviv became a Soviet city. Lem Stanislav wanted to study technical sciences, but he failed to enter the polytechnic university. With the help of his father, he was arranged in the medical and began to study there without any enthusiasm.
Two years later, Lviv became a German city, and educational institutions stopped their work. He was not so simple, a future writer. Obviously Jewish descent made his life in the occupation of complete danger every minute. He could get into the ghetto and die there, as happened with almost the entire Lviv intelligentsia. True, they managed to straighten out the documents, according to which Lem Stanislav got a job as a mechanic at a German metal processing company. In 1944, Lviv again became a Polish city, and the future writer continued his studies at the medical institute.
To Poland
However, in 1946, Lviv again became a Soviet city, where the uninhabited remnants of Bandera gangs cut the Polish population to the root - whole villages, and the cities were very restless. Poles in response to their territory destroyed the Ukrainian villages.
Therefore, Joseph Stalin resolved these issues by repatriation. Within a few days, almost all Poles from western Ukraine left for Poland, and almost all Ukrainians from Poland went to western Ukraine. Lem Stanislav also fell into this great relocation and continued his studies already at the University of Krakow - at the Faculty of Medicine, which he did not treat otherwise.
Start
I did not even take the last exams, having received only a certificate, but not a diploma. Maybe because he was afraid to engage in an unloved affair, or maybe he “slanted” from the army, because with a diploma he would have to make a career as a military doctor. He got a job in 1948 after graduating from a university in a scientific laboratory as a junior assistant and was very happy about this.
He was no longer attracted to any work except one, and it was no longer engineering. Since 1946, he began to publish his fantastic works, that is, he became a writer. Stanislav Lem, whose photo everyone now probably saw, and many constantly keep it on his desk, at that very moment found what he was looking for.
"Man from Mars" and "Astronauts"
His first novel, Czlowiek z Marsa, was published in Nowy Swiat Przygod, a weekly magazine. Readers were inspired by the plan, literally from the first works Stanislav Lem became a cult writer in Poland, although the big book did not appear so soon.
It was already 1951, when the almost published Astronauci ("Astronauts") were almost instantly disappearing from the shelves. Now Stanislav Lem wrote, the reviews of whose works were full on the pages of the entire periodicals of the world, practically without ceasing.
No peace
A lot of Lem traveled to Germany, Czechoslovakia. He often traveled to the Soviet Union, although he had never loved him in the least degree, not even with a single political system (and he had seen almost everything). However, when it was very necessary, he said and wrote that he loves and respects ...
In 1982, when war again smelled in Poland, Stanislav Lem, quotes from the works of which people already used regardless of citizenship, place of residence, gender and age, moved to Austria, although he would have been glad at that moment in any country. He lived to eighty-four years, despite the anxiety of the first half of life. However, the heart was unhealthy, which is why he died in March 2006.
Style
Stanislav Lem, whose works most often speak of the failed communication of humanity and extraterrestrial civilizations, wrote a lot about the technologies of the future. Later works are marked by the idealization of social aspirations, close to the genre of utopia, where a person is bored due to technological development.
The texts are saturated with humor, satire, philosophy. Witters from science fiction lovers, who were fascinated by Stanislav Lem, quotes from "The Star Diaries of Iyon the Pacific", for example, have been used everywhere for many decades. Not in vain was the writer carried away not only by science fiction, but also by futurology.
Glory
Lem's books have been translated into more than forty languages, and they are also sold extremely many - far beyond thirty million copies. More than twenty adaptations were made on his works, among which the bulk was shot by Poland and the USSR, however, Czechoslovakia, Germany, England, the USA and even Azerbaijan were noted along with them. The best of the paintings is, of course, Solaris, shot by Tarkovsky, although Stanislav Lem, whose best works were both accepted and understood in the USSR, did not appreciate this masterpiece enough. Moreover, he called Tarkovsky an “idiot” for the incorrectly conveyed main idea.
However, the American film of the same name with Clooney generally only frowned. Indeed, there are no basic thoughts there at all. Lem did not like American science fiction in every way and criticized to the extent that he was expelled from the American Society for Science Fiction. Not recognizing Bradbury and Sheckley, Clark and Asimov, he spoke well only of the Strugatsky, especially praised "Picnic on the sidelines." It even seemed strange to him that it was not he who wrote it.
Vocabulary
Stanislav Lem - a writer who is inherent in the creation of words. The number of neologisms created and used by followers exceeded nine thousand. Most fortunate in this regard are the Poles and the Russians. The translators worked on Lem’s works very talented, and the proximity of languages contributed to the translation, so we can fully enjoy the writer’s humor.
Translations into non-Slavic languages were much less fortunate, it is unlikely that the Americans or French can get as much pleasure from reading the works of Stanislav Lem. Probably, without explanation, it’s clear what kind of medicine is “altruizin”, what kind of room is “powerless”, why intelligent robots called a person “pale” and how “boom” and “bloom” differ from a regular bomb. And a wonderful term - "false animals", immediately clear - synthetic. No less witty is the “shame” with “sepulchi”.
The writer very accurately and witty puts his thoughts into words: "A machine, dumb, ingenuous, unable to smite the mind, does what it takes to order. But the clever one first thinks what is more profitable: to solve the proposed problem or try to get out of it?". "The boundaries of moral responsibility are much wider than the scope of judicial codes." "The essence of old age is that you gain experience that cannot be used."
Theme
Along with such a subtlety of linguistic images, the breadth of creativity of universal realities and non-realities is striking: both utopias, dystopias, and light tales about space, and heavy social engineering, an alternative present and a very muddy future, a world around the corner, full of drug addict, and conquering humanity, conquering the universe ...
And everywhere certain meta are scattered, forcing the reader to think, and not necessarily in the way Stanislav Lem supposedly thought. His bibliography is so vast that it makes it possible to dwell only on the most iconic works.
137 seconds
This is a classic science fiction story where the idea serves as the protagonist - a super-perceptive computer network. Futurology, which the author adhered to in many works, appears here in the aspects of foresight, prediction of events that have not yet occurred. The plot is unpretentious, but compensated by philosophical problems, for example, how time is reflected in the human mind. Time is the most difficult to measure dimension.
"Absolute emptiness"
This cycle is written in the first person, where the author acts as a literary critic who reviews unwritten works. A lot of philosophy, humor, daring satire in relation to even his own ideas about the world in which the literary hero lives. This is a book about vain dreams and the flow of great thoughts into absolute emptiness, because this is where everything unfulfilled is located.
"Altruizin"
Even among robots there are hermits, if this is a fantastic story. Someone Dobricius, a hermit robot, thought for sixty-seven long years in the desert, and then decided to make his neighbors happy. Then his comrade designer Klapautsy told an interesting story from the life of the Eneserts, the very ones that reached the NDS (the highest stage of development). They also once wanted to make the whole world happy - with wealth, satiety, an excess of good. And what came of it? Everyone understands happiness in their own way ...
"Return from the Stars"
This novel hardly possesses the purity of the genre, which is usually inherent in the author. This is not science fiction by and large, rather the opposite: its problems concern sociology, ecology, the relationship between nature and man. In the wake of Herbert Wells (The Time Machine) Stanislav Lem raises the theme of human adaptation in the environment when a hero finds himself in an era thousands of years away from where he was born. Here, too, there is irony, and serious relationships, and science fiction, and reality, and sarcasm, and phantasmagoria. There are no spaceships, but there is the versatility and unpredictability of human psychology.
"Education of Tsifrusha"
Clapautia was no longer up to Trull, the rector of the university was a troublesome position, and Trull designed the machine in longing, called Tsifrusha and began to educate her. Boredom gradually disappeared, Trull went about his business and ceased to feel lonely. However, it happened that a breach appeared during the upbringing process, because in a row three meteorites fell into the Trurul garden, where he studied with Tsifrusha, who turned out to be the tail of an ice comet flying by. Unexpected guests appeared in these meteorites: a robot drummer, a drum and an android with a glass of poison in their hand. Trull and Tsifrusha immediately thawed and revived their guests, and then listened to interesting stories ...