Two Cities: On Exile, History, and the Imagination

by Adam Zagajewski

Book Overview

In this varied collection of deeply personal, lyrical essays and short literary sketches, leading contemporary Polish poet Adam Zagajewski contends with the effects of coming of age, both artistically... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374280169
• ISBN13: 9780374280161
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
• Length: 262 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.8" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Wonderful Stuff

This guy knows how to write, how to live, how to be a poet.

Masterpiece

An outstanding portrayal of the immigrants' dilemmas. But the immigrants in "Two Cities" have nothing to do with the United States. They are exiled from Lvov, an ancient Polish town incorporated to the Soviet Union as a result of World War II, and sent to the post-German city of Gliwice in southern Poland. Everything that comes from Lvov or reminds them of Lvov is sacred while everything else is worthless. A child growing in the dual world of imaginary Lvov and real Gliwice has trouble finding his identity. He returns to the past, examines and questions the drama of the war, and struggles to reconcile his life with the semi-imaginative world that surrounds him. Two Cities as well as other short stories included in this book are true masterpieces but must be read with some minimum background on post-war Poland.