Born in Chorzow in 1943, a writer and critic, Skrzyposzek was once a legendary figure in Warsaw literary circles. He decided to leave Poland in 1969 and has lived in Berlin ever since. He commited suicide in 1999.

Publication of his first novel, The Buffoon was blocked for good when he emigrated. However, Skrzyposzek managed to smuggle out of Poland the first draft of a book on which he then worked for more than a dozen years. The Free Tribune was published in German in 1983 and saw a Dutch edition before being published in Polish in 1985 by an emigré press in West Berlin. Though numbered among the most important anti-communist books of the 1980s, it has still not been published in Poland. The Free Tribune is an innovative political fiction that weaves together the discourse of several characters who enter a special club, opened by the communists, where all are free to write whatever they want on the condition that they do not take their texts into the outside world. In 1996, after years of serious illness that made it difficult for him to move around or speak, Chrystian Skrzyposzek published his novel Mojra in Poland for the first time. It contains autobiographical elements - the protagonist, a writer living in Berlin, suffers from a disease that deprives him of the use of his legs. He seeks the aid of a faith healer who lives in a small mountain village... The book is a moral and psychoanalytical treatise, a prayerful and dramatic poem, a fairy tale and an enchantment.

What does Skrzyposzek write about? About a struggle against illness that is at times heroic and at times heartbreakingly lonely. He writes about terror, love, betrayal and revenge. His novel attempts to encompass the whole world, including both what is visible and what is invisible. It attempts to illustrate the defeat of reason and of the heart. It tries to be a romance and a horror novel, to be familiar and cosmically distant from the spheres of average human experiences. It is intended as a New Age encyclopedia in novel form.

– Piotr Sliwinski

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Wolna Trybuna, 1983.
• Mojra, Warszawa: W.A.B., 1996