Teodor Parnicki uses novel and surprising literary structures: interview (or rather, and almost always, interrogation), informer’s reports, police reports, confessions, dream-journals, and letters (often fragmentary). He writes in extraordinarily long, dense, complicated sentences using odd grammatical constructions

Teodor Parnicki, Ostatnia powieść (The Last Novel)

In world literature there is a special category: the Great Unfinished Novel. It comprises such early-20th century classics as Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities, Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk, Franz Kafka’s The Castle, and, from more recent times:  Ralph Ellison’s Three Days Before the Shooting and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King. Teodor Parnicki’s thousand-page The Last Novel belongs to this revered company: the Polish author left it uncompleted at the time of his death on December 5, 1988. When it comes to complexity, however, this cognitive overkill of a novel stands out even among the above-mentioned titles. Based on the critical response of those Polish readers who managed to read, let alone digest, this colossal book, I can assume that it has secured the place as the most formidable work of 20th century Polish literature.
Teodor Parnicki is a great unknown for the Anglophone reader as none of his works have been translated into English so far. But the fact that he is little known outside Poland does not diminish his stature: his literary heritage is a dense forest we don’t see for a clump of scrawny trees. If you want to learn more about his life and work, I am more than happy to refer you to the fascinating article appropriately called Teodor Parnicki, the Man in the Labyrinth, from which I’d like to quote the following description:

Parnicki uses novel and surprising literary structures: interview (or rather, and almost always, interrogation), informer’s reports, police reports, confessions, dream-journals, and letters (often fragmentary). He writes in extraordinarily long, dense, complicated sentences using odd grammatical constructions (past perfect, for example, the use of which in Polish he single-handedly revives) and unusual vocabulary. He adds intentionally to the confusion of the text by referring to certain individuals by a number of different names or to different individuals by the same name. Often, not all clues to the mystery of the particular novel can be found in it – one has to turn to encyclopedias and scholarly works to understand some aspects of the plot or some of the ideas of the heroes. With each successive novel, the complexity and opacity of the text is increased. The novels become elaborate labyrinths in which the reader is constantly searching for clues and interpretations.

He sounds like our man, doesn’t he? In Parnicki’s last novel, posthumously published in 2003, this life-long symphony of increasing complexity reaches a deafening crescendo: the story unfolds over the period of 30 years, takes us all over the world and features more than a hundred characters from numerous countries; it discusses at length and in detail literature, politics, diplomacy and religion and lures the reader into an intricate web of international conspiracies and secret alliances — yet most of this information overload stems from a series of conversations between a man and woman in a Berlin apartment. The novel starts as a trite detective story. A woman called Ingrid Jakobsen approaches private eye John Wang with the request of solving the mysterious death of her first husband. They meet in his apartment for a talk. From then on, the pseudo-detective plot explodes into a kaleidoscope of elaborate storylines, proliferating puzzles, and cultural references overwhelming in their abundance. Gradually it becomes evident that the man and the woman are not so much interested in solving the murder mystery as in running a game of their own whose complexity boggles imagination. Since the elaborateness of the plot is aggravated by that of the language, it is perfectly understandable why The Last Novel has so few readers even in Poland. This obscure and bewildering testament to Parnicki’s extraordinary talent as a storyteller, stylist and world-maker is biding its time: it is patiently waiting to be read, understood and appreciated, and, perhaps, even translated some day.
- theuntranslated.wordpress.com/2018/10/08/the-great-untranslated-ostatnia-powiesc-the-last-novel-by-teodor-parnicki/


Teodor Parnicki, 1908-1988, was an unusual writer with an unusual biography. Born in Berlin to German-speaking parents of Polish descent, and interned along with them in Russia during the first world war as enemy civilian (his father had been posted there as a railroad engineer by a German company), he was resettled in Siberia. To escape internment, his parents declared themselves Polish. During the upheavals of the Revolution which soon swept across Russia, young Parnicki, estranged from his widowed and remarried father, joined the stream of refugees which poured into China. It was in this way that Teodor eventually completed his high school education in a Polish gymnasium in… Harbin, Manchuria. It was there, while reading Sienkiewicz (about whom see my post here), that young Teodor resolved to become a Polish novelist. And it was thus that he resolved to repatriate to the newly reestablished Poland. You see, he had decided to become a writer of Polish historical novels before he was Polish.
His third novel, Aetius, the Last Roman (1937), met with considerable critical success, but the outbreak of the Second World War interrupted his publishing career. Parnicki joined another great wave of wartime emigration, and eventually settled in Mexico, where he continued to write historical novels, in Polish, at first destined for his drawer, and later for extremely limited editions of the semi-independent-semi-dissident Catholic press back home. (Late in his career, a large edition of Parnicki would run to the miniscule 10,000 copies). He moved back to Poland only in 1967, probably pressed by financial need.
This isolation from his readers has taken Parnicki’s craft in the direction of ever increasing arcanity and density.
Its arcanity manifests itself in several ways, for example in his unusual choice of historical settings – Greek Bactria in the 2nd century BC, Alexandria in the second century AD, 5th Century Byzantium, Vinland (the Viking settlement in New England). The novels often set out, ostensibly, to solve a historical riddle, such as: whether two different (authentic) historical figures may really have been the same person or what could have been the real motives (or causes) of some historical action or event. His later novels often take the form of an investigation into a conspiracy theory of some kind. The riddles are often based on recondite historical facts supported by great deal of archival research. The sense of mystery is intentionally manipulated by the use of mystery-novel techniques with which Parnicki very ably heightens the interest of the “investigation”. Yet, unlike most mystery novels, Parnicki’s riddles usually remain unsolved in the end –and, if anything, they become even more hopelessly entangled, leaving us with the sense of the overwhelming complexity of the world we live in.
Perhaps not surprisingly, given his personal history, Parnicki often turns to investigation of personal and cultural identity. His 1955 novel, The End Of The Harmony of Nations, is set among the Greek rulers of Bactria, outnumbered by their Iranian subjects, cut off from the rest of the Greek world by the recent Parthian conquest of Persia, and, while desperately trying to hang onto their Greekness, confounded by the problems raised by their king’s unexpected – and fabulous – conquests in India. The central story concerns an investigation by the Greek secret police of a young Greek man arriving from the east, from China, whom they suspect of being a spy. The investigation becomes a debate on the nature of Greekhood when the young man criticizes them of having become barbarians but takes a more bewildering turn when he himself turns out to be half-Jewish and – frantic to deny his Jewishness. Intellectual attitudes are thrown in complete disarray when the investigation is taken over by a special agent sent by Greek king Demetrios from across the Indus – a black untouchable Indian, and a renegade Buddhist monk, who disputes the Greek exception, both on critical grounds (“we, too, have our Homer, our Eurypides, our Plato”) and practical considerations (“at first there were 500 Indians for every Greek soldier, then 5,000, then 50,000, then a million”). Large parts of the novel read like philosophical dialogues, interspersed with private rumination and dreams. And they all are aimed to answer the question: who am I? Who are we?
It is not a novel for the action-oriented.
In Parnicki’s novels, the question of personal identity often assumes the form of search for one’s antecedents.
And so, in the 1962 novel, Only Beatrice, papal investigators in Avignon follow the hero’s search to discover his paternity. He stands before the Pope John XXII (1249-1334) seeking acquittal for the crime of having led a group of peasants in the burning alive of some Cistercian monks in Poland, monks who had raised him as an orphan, and several of whom he suspects in turn of having fathered him. The novel takes the form of a series of transcripts of interrogations of the hero by papal inquisitors (and, on one occasion, by the Pope himself).
The sensational element is this: the pope takes an interest in the case because the hero, a deacon, claims to have confessed the monks before having turned them over to the mob. One of the monks, he claims, confessed that he had once been a member of a sea expedition which had set out in the 1290’s from Lisbon and sailed due west until it reached, according to him, an island surprisingly similar in description to Dante’s Purgatorio.
The Pope’s interest in this is connected with his views (never expressed as official dogma, and possibly something he changed his mind about sometime during his pontificate) that those who died in the faith did not see the presence of God until the Last Judgment. (The point is important to Catholics, since if the dead are not in the presence of God, then the whole idea of prayers to the saints would seem to be undermined). The novel thus offers an explanation of how that change of mind may have happened: the Pope may have heard evidence that the Purgatory (though in actual fact, only America) actually does exist.
More than a sensational mystery drama, the novel is also a psychological thriller with the inquisitors trying to understand the man’s motivation (and thus likelihood of his veracity) by investigating his convoluted past. As a young boy he had failed to deliver a message from the monks to King Przemysl II of Poland, the message being the question “Is tomorrow the Ides of March?” — a coded warning to the king of an imminent attempt on his life. Against instructions, the boy had asked the question before entering the house where the king was staying, thus warning the plotters that their conspiracy had been compromised, and hastening the assassination.
He thus becomes burdened with responsibility for the shedding of royal blood, and the failure of the project to revive the Polish monarchy, a sense of failure, shame, and guilt, which turns into hate against his fathers who had entrusted him with the task; and which turns the boy, and later man, into a faithful executor of various cloak-and-dagger tasks on behalf of the king’s daughter, Elzbieta Ryksa, later queen of Bohemia (and an important player on the European stage as the chief opponent of the Anjou claim to the Czech throne).
Queen Ryksa, seen in the novel ruthlessly manipulating the hero’s blind love and dedication for her, is a type of character which returns in Parnicki’s novels again and again, the great woman: powerful, intelligent, educated, manipulative, cunning, ruthless, loved blindly and utterly and hopelessly by the hero, and – completely unattainable. The motto of the novel, taken from Russian poetry, introduces her:

There is no heaven, no hell, no void, no abyss,
There is only – Beatrice,
And she, precisely, isn’t.

To this great woman Parnicki returns again in his 1958 novel, The Word and The Flesh, which consists of two series of letters. One series is from Chesroes, a Parthian prince held by Romans as a hostage in Alexandria, to his childhood’s unrequited love, turned by years of yearning into the love of his life, Marcia, the former mistress of the Roman Emperor Commodus, and – probably – instigator of the Emperor’s assassination; whom he tries by turns to convince, compel, and blackmail into eloping with him. The other series of letters, the novel’s volume 2, is from Marcia to the Roman chief of Egyptian security services with whom she is negotiating for her acquittal in return for state secrets she is deftly extracting from Chesroes.
Parnicki’s heroes and heroines are intelligent, educated people of their times with a lively interest in the intellectual currents of their epoch, and significant participation in the intellectual and political events of their times, with the effect that a great deal of scholarship and historical research informs his novels. (In this they are also the sort of people one always dreams of associating with and the novels make this possible).
There is a strong fantastic and counter-factual current in his literature. One of the novels, for example, assumes that Julian the Apostate did not die in AD302 AD363, but continued to live and rule for another 20 years. It investigates ways in which already numerically dominant Christianity may have interacted with a hostile ruler.
Through several other of his novels there meanders a kind of conspiracy theory of history which claims that the existence of America was well known to European elites since the 9th century, and kept a secret against some future time when the world was “ready”. The purpose here is, I think, to investigate how the idea of a promised land plays out in our minds.
Another novel reveals that the defeat of the Arab invasion by Charles Martel at the battle of Tours (a victory credited with the “salvation” of Europe) was really a result of a plot by an economic consortium who controlled the production of parchment (and felt threatened by Chinese paper, used by the Arabs). The novel is a transcript of a secret conference of the plotters, set in a secret location somewhere in the Caucasus, in which various members of the imagined consortium, concealed behind masks and ciphers in a setting reminiscent of the black mass scene in Eyes Wide Shut (or Mozart’s Magic Flute), conduct their debates regarding the pros and cons of the great religious conflict between Christianity and Islam. (This was several decades before the present hoopla regarding the supposed war between civilizations, and significantly more sophisticated).
Gradually, his novels become interconnected – with various heroes of some turning out to be the ancestors of heroes of others, or the object of their investigation, or discussion, or envy. Later, heroes and heroines of other novels – by Sienkiewicz and Dumas for example – enter and interact with Parnicki’s creations – and each other.
Parnicki uses novel and surprising literary structures: interview (or rather, and almost always, interrogation), informer’s reports, police reports, confessions, dream-journals, and letters (often fragmentary). He writes in extraordinarily long, dense, complicated sentences using odd grammatical constructions (past perfect, for example, the use of which in Polish he single-handedly revives) and unusual vocabulary. He adds intentionally to the confusion of the text by referring to certain individuals by a number of different names or to different individuals by the same name. Often, not all clues to the mystery of the particular novel can be found in it – one has to turn to encyclopedias and scholarly works to understand some aspects of the plot or some of the ideas of the heroes. With each successive novel, the complexity and opacity of the text is increased. The novels become elaborate labyrinths in which the reader is constantly searching for clues and interpretations. For all his novels following The Word and the Flesh, I find myself having to take notes and make sketches to keep track of all the questions raised and clues offered. Perhaps it was inevitable that Stefan Szymutko, in his book on Parnicki, should ask the inevitable question: “Parnicki: a madman or a genius?”
Small wonder his readership remains limited to a small circle of his worshippers.
In exile, Parnicki married a Polish woman 18 years his junior. They had a very close, perhaps because childless, marriage, in which they shared a great deal of intellectual and artistic interests as well as several languages. It is reported that Parnicki’s touch with reality was not all that great, that he often forgot things and became lost and that his survival in the world much depended on his wife’s dedicated care of him. An officer of a ship on which Parnicki once traveled reports how alarmed Parnicki would grow if his wife ever left him while he was writing. Suddenly he would notice that she was gone from the cabin and set out on a frantic search for her all over the ship, alarming the entire crew by his insistence that she must have fallen overboard. She made the publication of his novels possible by typing up his illegible manuscripts.
In 1967 Parnicki confessed to the same naval officer: “I will never find what I am looking for. It keeps slipping out of my hands. I don’t know myself what it is. It has no color and no shape, it has no known dimensions. I only know that it is somewhere very near, here, within arm’s reach. That’s why all my moves are illusory. And all my novels also.” That is very much the sensation one gets from reading his novels: a sense of unattainable mystery, unsolvable problem, like the search for personal identity, something incredibly important, yet – if we are truly honest with ourselves – hopelessly out of reach.
I have found it impossible to read any Parnicki novel (except his Aetius, the Last Roman, written when Parnicki was just getting started) from cover to cover. The linguistic, structural, semantic and psychological complexity is simply too overwhelming for even the most determined reader. But it is possible to read in any one of his novels endlessly. I do this with several of them, which have lived in my suitcase, and on the night stand, for over two decades now.
Perhaps my most favorite is The Word And The Flesh which always lies within reach. Every now and then I pick up the book and read a few pages in it, now here now there. I have read everything in this book several times already, but have never been able to get from beginning to end without putting it down for some time – days, or weeks, or months — to digest it, and to let it put out delicate and transparent, but strangely durable sprouts in my heart.
Ron Shuler’s post on Tomas Pynchon encouraged me to write this post on Teodor Parnicki, for I espy a certain similarity between the two authors: a certain arcane density, a labyrinthine structure, a penchant for intellectual mystery. I like Parnicki better not only because I enjoy the language more, but also because I prefer his old world mind-set, because I love his historical settings and the obscure, recondite, arcane subject matter, and perhaps also because I, too, am in love with an intelligent and strong-headed woman who manipulates me to her own purposes.
*
Perhaps there is room in this essay for a coda: six sentences on the ways in which Parnicki’s work has affected my life. There is something one learns from minute investigation of historical events, and it is that they invariably escape simple characterizations. Our school textbooks – invariably part of an apparatus of ideological indoctrination, whether intended to say that we Poles were always just or we Americans were always fair – teach us that an event – a war, a revolution, a promulgation of new laws – was just or noble or at any rate good, or else, on the contrary, ignoble and selfish and on the whole bad. But closer inspection always reveals how incredibly complex these events are, how they are the outcome of millions of decisions made by millions of individuals, each for his own reasons. And a closer inspection of individual actions reveals how complex, and often confused, or unaware, our individual reasons are and how often we ourselves are in the dark as to just why we do what we do. The upshot of a closer look at the whys and wherefores often leads to the Parnicki condition: the sense that the exact shape of things somehow escapes us; and that learning more often amounts to learning just how little we really understand.
And there is another thought: that we love in order to love and that whether our lovers really love us back or simply use us for their ends is really neither here nor there.
- https://heaventree.wordpress.com/2006/09/01/teodor-parnicki/

The Historical SF of Teodor Parnicki

The Polish novelist Teodor Parnicki has for a long time been developing the practice and concept of the "historical fantasy" or historical SF novel. This seems to be an important literary innovation, and it is amazing that Polish literary critics have not shown much comprehension of it, treating it mainly as a formal experiment of no general consequence, or stubbornly claiming Parnicki's works for the literature of the absurd — a classification which he himself staunchly opposes. In this short overview I merely wish to indicate that Parnicki's novels belong to the genre of "possible fantasy" or SF, that they have a significant inner consistency and logic that should eventually earn this author a rightful recognition, and that the notion of "historical SF" should be introduced into the theory and history of literature.

The consistency and logic probably began when Parnicki made his first choice — which was to become a Polish writer. Born in 1908 in Berlin as the son of a Polish couple, brought up from the age of three in Russia, where his engineer father had moved, Parnicki entered the military school at Monsk during the First World War, and was evacuated with it to Vladivostok. In 1920 he ran away from the military school and traveled to Harbin in Manchuria, where he began to study at the local Polish high school. At the age of 12 he first began to speak Polish. In 1928, after graduating from the high school, he went to Poland and entered Lwow University, where he took English and Polish Philology, and also a course in Oriental studies. Thus he was almost 20 when he first came to Poland; it is here that I would seek for the origin of his objective and analytical attitude to Polish history and language, which provides the basis for his intellectually subtle historical SF. He began writing before the Second World War as a columnist and author of short stories published in the daily press. This apprentice phase ended with his first novel, AETIUS, THE LAST ROMAN1 (1937), for which he was awarded a travel scholarship to the Mediterranean by the Polish Academy of Literature. He returned to Poland a few days before the German invasion, and in 1941 worked in the Polish embassy in the USSR as cultural attaché. In 1942, together with other embassy employees, he was evacuated first to Teheran and then to Jerusalem, where he published THE SILVER EAGLES2 (1943). This second novel treats the rise of the Polish state within the context of a medieval Europe divided between the Greco-Roman and a German civilization. AETIUS was already written with the understanding (as Parnicki later formulated it) that historical fiction must simultaneously treat its characters as simply people, and as people who are under specific influences from their surrounding conditions. THE SILVER EAGLES goes one step further. In this novel Parnicki is interested not only in facts, but even more in possibilities. To what was is added what could have been — in this case the possibility of a Slavic Hegemony in 10th-century Christian Europe. (Parnicki's concept was later discussed by historians and it was acknowledged that such a possibility had indeed existed.)

After the Middle East, Parnicki went to London, and then to Mexico, where he settled and wrote many novels, which were subsequently published in Poland. He visited Poland in 1963 and 1965, and in 1967 settled in Warsaw. His major postwar works are THE END OF THE CONCORD OF NATIONS3 (1955), which takes place in Hellenistic Central Asia, in the Bactrian monarchy, and first presents Parnicki's hypothesis of the historical creative role of half-breeds; WORD AND FLESH4 (1959), a study of the creative functions of words, unfolding the history of Chrosroes (3rd century AD) and Markia, the concubine of the emperor Commodus; THE NEW FABLE (1962-70), a cycle of six novels5 located at various times and places around the world, which contains not only the "half-breed theory" but also SF elements, as when Parnicki in the second volume, following the suggestions of some historians that Joan of Arc did not perish at the stake, has her leave for America; ONLY BEATRICE6 (1962); STRANGE EVEN AMONG THE MIGHTY7 (1965); and LITURGY GENEALOGY8 (1974), a series of lectures at Warsaw University.

Since 1968 Parnicki has published seven novels with "historical SF" motifs: KILL CLEOPATRA9 (1968), CLEOPATRA'S OTHER LIFE10 (1969), IDENTITY,11 THE MUSE OF DISTANT JOURNEYS12 (1970), TRANSFORMATION13 (1973), WE BECAME LIKE UNTO TWO DREAMS14 (1973), and I SHALL LEAVE DEFENSELESS15 (1977). This is a sign of his increasing involvement in a conscious effort to revitalize the historical novel by these means. The first conscious or programmatic effort at such historical SF was already the second part of WORD AND FLESH, dealing as it does with an investigation into historical existence versus non-existence. In the 1960s Parnicki's cognitive pessimism, a lack of confidence in the truth and veridicity of his sources, was increasing. His heroes began to get entangled into commentaries, then commentaries on the commentaries, and even debates on the subtleties of language. Characteristically, the author's careful consideration of the authenticity of some protagonists does not differ in style from the protagonists' own attempts to find their identity (itself the title of a 1970 novel listed above).

It is becoming clear that already in his first works Parnicki was conscious that the code of the historical novel of the Scott or Sienkiewicz type had been used up. Some of the reasons that eventually turned Parnicki to historical SF are revealed in his later discussion of the success of the French novelist Jean d'Ormesson, who had among other novels published the popular La Glorie de l'Empire: "The field of historical SF is a challenge to what is called the historical novel... shouldn't we consider it as a mutiny against the tyranny of the historical novel?" And further:

We may call it either mutiny or tiredness. No doubt this occurs in my last books. One may say that my immediate reader-addressees do not feel this tiredness to the extent I do, since I have an impression that my readers prefer those novels of mine which are truly historical rather than those which are historical SF. And maybe it should be said about d'Ormesson's reading public that either it is itself tired of historical truth, or it has mutinied against the extent to which real history in fact gives so little. (Interview in Literature in świecie, No. 4, 1974]

In spite of Parnicki's reservations, his problems and the problems of his environment seem thus to be the same as those of d'Ormesson and his environment. The necessity of the revivification of the historical novel is a common one, and the difference lies in the height of the intellectual hurdles to be overcome by the readers of those two so different writers — hurdles that are much higher in Parnicki's case.

In 1965, in the introduction to his novel STRANGE EVEN AMONG THE MIGHTY, Parnicki revealed his plan of writing historical SF and gave a definition of this notion:

writing historical SF ... ought to have as its starting point a completely conscious attempt of the author to stand against indubitable historical truth, e.g. in a novel which would be based on a consciously fantastic assumption (of the "what would happen if" type) that the Roman emperor Julian did not die (as he really did) during the war with Persia in 363, but lived and ruled for the next 20 or 25 years. In a novel based on such an assumption the most important problem would be, of course, the vicissitudes of Christianity and the Roman Empire and, maybe, of the world as a whole (at least the world of Europe, Asia, and Africa) as the consequence of the prolonged reign of Emperor Julian.... A concept of this sort has tempted me for at least 25 years — but I have never had the courage to set to work on it, because it has always seemed to me that such an attempt would surpass my intellectual and creative abilities.

The novel of the time of the emperor Julian, I SHALL LEAVE DEFENSELESS, has just been published. Its appearance was preceded and prepared for by two other novels, THE HATCHERY OF WONDERS16 and THE MUSE OF DISTANT JOURNEYS. The former is written as an apocryphal 17th-century fantasy on a 20th-century theme, an attempt to write an SF novel about the 20th century from the point of view of a man living in the 17th. In it, for the first time since THE SILVER EAGLES, Parnicki relies strongly on plot. Similarly, THE MUSE OF DISTANT JOURNEYS suggestively renders the vicissitudes of the imaginary "Fourth Polish Kingdom" in the 19th century, in which Mickiewicz is minister of education and faith, Krasinski is ambassador to Petersburg, and Slowacki is an emigré to Mexico. Such a transformation of history follows on Parnicki's old idea as to what would have happened if the (historically defeated) Polish November 18th Uprising had been victorious (that it could have been victorious we are told in a book by an historian, Jerzy Lojek, entitled THE CHANCES OF THE NOVEMBER UPRISING). Commenting on THE MUSE OF DISTANT JOURNEYS, the author said, "Out of the edifice of history I take one brick impressed with history's reliable seal; in its place I put another; and consider all the consequences of this operation." Parnicki also pointed to its didactic origin: "I should remind you that this 'if-ing' was the subject of rhetoric lessons in ancient times, lessons not only about logical, but also historic and dialectic reasoning. A pupil had to submit corrections to and various alternatives of the past utilizing his knowledge."

As for his latest novel, I SHALL LEAVE DEFENSELESS, it consists of three parts, of which the first describes a ship expedition beyond the Pillars of Hercules, sent by the emperor Julian. A group of people on board are bound to each other with complex ties; in the second part, these ties are revealed in all their ambiguity, as the action shifts to the Red Sea. In part three, the connectedness of the preceding action and the secret plans of "Julian the Apostate" are exposed. Furthermore, the author steps out in person and conducts a discussion with the protagonists on history and its cognitive limits. Parnicki's novels are sometimes called charades, and this seems to hold for the Julian novel. Over 600 pages, it focuses relentlessly on the mysteries of history. The imaginary premise that Julian did not die during his Persian campaign in 363 is treated as a game, a cognitive experiment which should expose the true nature of historical events. This is the method by which Parnicki strives to inform SF with high intellectual values.

NOTES

1. Aecjusz ostatni Rzymianin. The titles in the text in LARGE AND SMALL CAPS are literal English renderings of the titles of Polish books that have not been published in English and hence have no official English-language titles.

2. Srebrne orly.

3. Koniec Zgody Nadodów.

4. Slowo i cialo.

5. Nowa basn, with the volumes Robotnicy wezwani o jedenastej (WORKERS WERE SUMMONED AT 11 O'CLOCK), Czas siania i czas zbierania (A TIME FOR SOWING AND A TIME FOR REAPING), Labirynt (THE LABYRINTH), Gliniane dzbany (THE CLAY PITCHERS), Wylegarnia dziwow (THE HATCHERY OF WONDERS), and Palec zagrozenia (THE THREATENING FINGER).

6. Tylko Beatrycze.

7. I u moznych dziwny.

8. Rodowód literacki.

9. Zabij Kleopatre.

10. Inne zyzie Kleopatry.

11. Tozsamosc.

12. Muza dalekich podrózy.

13. Przeobrazenie.

14. Stalismy jak dwa sny.

15. Sam wyjde bezbronny.

16. See Note 5. 

ABSTRACT

The Polish novelist Teodore Parnicki has for some time been publishing novels best defined as historical SF. These include Kill Cleopatra (1968), Cleopatra's Other Life (1969), The Muse of Distant Journeys (1970), Transformation (1973), We Became Like Unto Two Dreams (1973), and, most recently, I Shall Leave Defenseless (1977). The premise of this last novel is that the Emperor Julian did not die during his Persian campaign in 363; the novel is a game, a cognitive experiment that undermines historical "fact" by denying it and constructing an alternative story. Polish literary critics have shown little comprehension of Parnicki's importance, claiming his works for the literature of the absurd, a classification that the author himself opposes. In this short overview, I argue that Parnicki's novels belong to the genre of SF, that they have a significant inner consistency and logic that should eventually earn this author a rightful recognition, and that the idea of "historical SF" should be introduced into the theory and study of science fiction. - Wojciech Jamroziak

https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/15/jamroziak15art.htm