Home

Lem Stanislaw 1921 - 2006 (85)

You climb to reach the summit, but once there, discover that all roads lead down.


QUOTES

Solaris

Stanislaw Lem was a Polish science-fiction writer best known for his novel Solaris. Stanislav was born in Lvov, Poland (now part of Ukraine) on September 12, 1921, the son of a wealthy Jewish family with his father being a distinguished physician. In his youth, after the occupation of eastern Poland by the Soviet Union, he was barred from attending the Polytechnic because he came from a bourgeois family. Eventually, through his father's acquaintances, he was accepted and studied medicine in Lviv. During the German occupation his family survived with fake papers and in 1946 they settled in Krakow. Stanislav published his first novel in the same year and in the following decades he wrote poems, short stories, essays and mainly science fiction novels, most notably 'Solaris' (1961), 'Government' (1965) and 'The Voice of the Lord'. (1968).

From 1970 the Polish state honored him for promoting Polish culture, while in 1972 he was declared an academic. Lem was an international success, his works were translated into more than 41 languages ​​and some of them, such as Solaris, were also very successful as films. He has been married since 1953 and had one child. In 1982 he was forced to leave Poland, where martial law had been declared, worked in West Berlin and then in Vienna, returned to his homeland in 1988. He died after a long illness on March 27, 2006 at a clinic in Krakow.