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).

Ongoing occasional skirmishes between Georgians and separatists from South Ossetia escalated to a war early in the morning of 8 August 2008, when Georgia launched a large-scale attack against South Ossetia.

This was followed by a Russian counter-attack into Georgian territory. In five days of fighting, Georgian forces were ousted from both South Ossetia and Abkhazia, another break-away region. Moscow recognised an indepdence of these two regions and its troops are still occupying parts of Georgian territory.

Western countries, including Poland, criticized Russia. The European Union’s leaders gathered today in Brussels for an emergency summit on the crisis.

Also today a new series has started in Gazeta Wyborcza. Our best foreign correspondents and reporters have looked behind doors of those in power and are going to tell this war’s stories from different perspectives:

• Wojciech Jagielski wrote about Georgian president Micheil Saakashvili: why did he started this war? What did he want to win? What did he loose? What is he going to do now? We published this feature story on Monday.
• Waclaw Radziwinowicz wrote about Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin and president Dmitry Medvedev: how they dragged Saakashvili to the trap. We will run this story on Tuesday.
• Marcin Gadzinski wrote about American president George Bush: what was the role of his holidays in this war? We are going to publish this story on Wednesday.
• Miroslaw Czech is writing about Polish president Lech Kaczynski: why did he go to Tbilisi during the war and blustered Russia when speaking on streets? This is a story for Thursday.
• Jacek Pawlicki is writing about French president Nicolas Sarkozy and German chancelor Angela Merkel: what are they fighting for? We will publish it on Friday.
• And on Saturday we are going to tell the stories of Ukranian leader Viktor Yushchenko and Belarussian one – Alexander Lukashenko: what are they afraid of?

These long narratives are accompanied by:

• personal diaries of a Russian journalist who was embedded to Russian troops that entered South Ossetia and a Georgian blogger who was simply trying to survive;
• background stories about ones of the real reasons of this war: oil and gas supplies;
• interviews with analysts and commentators like Moscow’s sociologist Viacheslav Igrunov;
• infographics showing a calendar of war, the major pipelines in the region etc.

Here you see the first part of this series:

The series was promoted in the newspaper and on TV. Here is an example of the in-paper promo published last Friday:

Translation: World on the brink of a cold war.

What’s the game of Putin, Medvedev and Bush? What’s the fight of Saakashvili, Kaczynski, Sarkozy, Merkel, Yushchenko and Lukashenko?

Features by foreign correspondents of Gazeta, opinions and comments.

What’s going to happen after this war in Georgia? Will the world fall into another cold war? What would it mean for Poland?

Read from this Monday in Gazeta Wyborcza and on Wyborcza.pl

In June 2008 two historians claimed in a new book that Mr. Walesa, a legendary leader of Solidarity, informed to the SB, the communist secret service, in the 70s, and after becoming president destroyed the evidence.

Mr. Walesa (now 65-years-old) co-founded and led Solidarity in 1980, the Soviet bloc’s first independent trade union, and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983. After the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989 he served as the President of Poland (1990-1995).

The book has been published by the state-financed custodian of Poland’s surviving communist-era archives – the National Remembrance Institute - and is based on the Communist secret service’s file.

The Institute’s director and the two historians are allied with Poland’s conservative President Lech Kaczynski and his identical twin Jaroslaw Kaczynski, an ex-prime minister, both of whom fell out with Mr. Walesa in the 90s.

Mr. Walesa replied to historians’ claims: ”That’s a lie. The documents suggesting my collaboration are all fakes!”.

Polish intellectuals and former Solidarity activists have launched vocal protests over the book’s “smear campaign” against Mr. Walesa.

Jan Litynski, opposition activist in 70-80s, said:

[Historians] have set out to destroy the Lech Walesa legend. They want to prove that independent Poland couldn’t be an authentic creation. But they won’t succeed in proving to millions of Poles and billions of people in the world that the Polish independence movement wasn’t authentic and that the III Republic was created by the SB [the Communist secret service].

Andrzej Milczanowski, who as an interior minister in 90s read the Communist secret service’s file on Walesa, added:

The file contained no originals. Nor did it contain any document handwritten or signed by Mr Walesa. There is no evidence to suggest that Mr Walesa was an SB agent at any time in his life.

Gazeta Wyborcza’s editors felt that it was their mission to tell their story about Walesa. Gazeta was founded in 1989 by a group of journalists and activists of the underground press as the platform for the first democratic parliamentary elections. The first issue of Gazeta held Solidarity logo on the front page and featured Walesa’s greetings to readers.

1. Commentary: We defend Lech Walesa

”We defend Lech Walesa,” was a headline of the front page commentary written by the first deputy editor-in-chief Jaroslaw Kurski. “So, we learn that Walesa talked to the SB. But does this mean he crossed the red line?

That’s far from certain,” wrote Kurski. “Walesa is like one of Shakespeare’s characters. He’s a tragic character but also a great one. That’s how he’s always been, a combination of pettiness and greatness. That’s the Walesa we know and love.”

Mr. Kurski was Lech Walesa’s spokesman during Poland’s transition from communism to democracy in 1989/90. He wrote the first critical biography of Walesa ”Wodz” (”The leader”).

Additionaly, Mr. Kurski and Adam Michnik, Gazeta’s editor-in-chief, both wrote long opinion articles about Walesa in Gazeta’s weekly literary supplement Gazeta Swiateczna.

Mr. Michnik was a prominent member of democratic opposition in the 60-80s and an advisor to Walesa during 80s. So he wrote very emotionally: “Hands off Lech Walesa!”

Although he, too, has criticised Walesa for his presidency, he cannot accept that the Polish Transformation should be dragged through the mud:

I cannot write about this from a purely political point of view. I am simply appalled, I feel bitterness and resentment. I would never have thought that Poland would do such a thing on the 25th anniversary of the Nobel Peace Prize for its national hero. Don’t say that you are uncovering things and want to reveal the truth that others (the establishment?) want to hide. You are lying.

2. Series: Seven choices of Lech Walesa

Gazeta decided to tell the full story of Mr. Walesa’s life in a series of features about his seven most dramatic choices from 1970 to today.

These stories were accompanied by archive photos, excerpts from Mr. Wales’s speeches, interviews and writings, articles of the official and underground press, and a historical column telling younger readers the background about living in the Communist Poland.

Gazeta published their work for seven consecutive days (one choice per day) in a special 4-page section in the newspaper. Look at the first section and the collection of all seven section’s front pages:

This editorial project involved a team of 26 people from editorial and marketing departments of Gazeta.
There were 9 reporters working on stories and backgrounds, 1 video reporter, 6 editors (1 responsible only for letters from readers), 3 photo editors, 4 designers and graphicians, 1 webmaster, 2 promoters.

They all produced a new biography about Mr. Walesa in less than five days! We made a ”go” decision on Wednesday evening, the first ads appeared in the newspaper on Friday and the first part of the series run in the Monday issue.

3. Letters: My Lech Walesa

Gazeta invited readers to collect their memories on Mr. Walesa and write essays for Gazeta: about their meetings, his role in their lives, their opinion on him and how these opinions changed over time.

We got hundreds of such letters and we managed to publish only small selection in print. We could put much more letters online.

4. Online features

Gazeta’s online edition – Wyborcza.pl – created a special section on the net with all the stories about Walesa and readers’ letters.

It was used as a promotional tool for the printed newspaper: the website’s layout familiarised readers with an idea of the series and introduced the next parts before they were published.

A video reporter added interviews with Mr. Walesa who commented on all the choices that Gazeta’s editors were describing in their features.