Stanislaw Lem’s unpublished works discovered

Newspaper’s idea to publish a collection of the greatest works by a science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lem helped to discover his unpublished opera on Stalin.

Stanislaw Lem was 85 when he died in 2006. His books — like Solaris, Tales of Prix the Pilot, Fiasko, or The Star Diaries — have been translated into 41 languages and have sold over 27 million copies all over the world.

Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza started to publish a collection of his works in October this year. Several months earlier Lem’s secretary discovered a piece which the author himself for half a century thought missing.

As Gazeta Wyborcza informed, it was written in the late 1940s, at the height of Stalinism, when people were being imprisoned or even executed for satires about the communist Soviet Union leader.

It is a quasi-opera about the brilliant future of communism and Stalin’s genius. The main characters are: an uncompromising NKVD man named Utterly Inadvisabiladze, a brave Soviet spy Dementiy Dogsonov, who’s lost his eye trying to spy on the imperialists through the keyhole, an ideological communist Avdotia Niedoganina, brilliant academician Michurenko (student of Lysurin), and above all Stalin - as always superhumanly intelligent and inhumanly smiling.

Stanislaw Lem read it only for his closest friends that time, hid it so well that he could not find it for years.

The writer mentioned the piece in several interviews: “We’ve turned everything upside down here. I still hope it surfaces somewhere”.

It has now turned out he simply slid the Stalin opera between the pages of an unfinished Raymond Chandler-style crime novel that Lem started writing in the mid-1950s.

The writer’s secretary, Wojciech Zemek, who found the opera told Gazeta Wyborcza: “I held the folder containing it so many times in my hands!”

Gazeta published Lem’s newly discovered piece in the newspaper starting a week-long series on the writer, his works and science-fiction in general (see below).

Collection of Lem’s works

The editorial series introduced readers to the collection of Stanislaw Lem’s books.

It consists of 16 volumes. Lem’s major works are accompanied by this unfinished crime novel, a dictionary of Lem’s terms, essays and interviews about the writer, a science in general and science-fiction with an astronomer Aleksander Wolszczan, a science-fiction writer Borys Strugacki and others.

The 1st volume was sold at a promotional price of 9,99 PLN (2,6 EUR). The next volumes are sold for 19,99 PLN (5,2 EUR).

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