A bilingual album of drawings by Andrzej Krauze from the years 1970-1989, with the author's autobiographical comments. Introduction by Andrzej Paczkowski, a reminiscent essay by Grzegorz Małkiewicz and a biographical note on Andrzej Krauze. “A Lesson in Flying" (1973, directed by Andrzej Krauze) from the Miniature Film Studio attached on a DVD.
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The world depicted by Krauze is remote from the one now often presented as a land of Polish People's Republic: the country of milk bars, small tacky cars, sound postcards of squeaky Polish pop bands like Czerwone Gitary, monochrome portraits of party leaders, infantile monuments, empty butchers’ shops, little Gomułkas banging their fists on the pulpits, Gierekites mixing with milkmaids and coalface miners. It may well be ugly, but "then again" funny. Krauze’s Poland is first and foremost the land of the lout who lords it over others, terrorizing them, and who has a Big Brother looking after him from his residence in the Kremlin. The difference between these countries surely stems not only form the fact that his works were created “on the hoof”, they are the systematic registration of evil in all its manifestations: from the truncheon attacks by the riot police, to the humiliating jostling in queues. They are capsules showing fragments but in fact each one of them depicts the whole. Certainly, the history lesson given by Andrzej Krauze is not the only one possible, but it is convincing. And surely that is what it is all about: if we cannot know everything, then at least we get to know the essence.
