Background
Julian Stryjkowski was born on April 27, 1905 in Stryi, Stryi Raion, Ukraine.
Julian Stryjkowski was born on April 27, 1905 in Stryi, Stryi Raion, Ukraine.
Julian graduated from the Faculty of Polish Studies and literature of Jan Kazimierz University in Lviv.
In 1932 Julian started working as a teacher of the Polish language in a gymnasium in Płock in central Poland. In Warsaw Julian started working as a journalist for various newspapers, and as a library clerk. About that time he also started his work on the Polish translation of Céline's "Death on the Installment Plan."
After the war he moved to Uzbekistan, where he started working in a factory. On insistence of Wanda Wasilewska he was allowed by the Soviet authorities to move to Moscow, where he started working for the Wolna Polska weekly, the organ of Society of Polish Patriots, a communist and Soviet-backed shadow government of Poland. There he adopted the pen name of Julian Stryjkowski, which after World War II became his official surname.
Julian returned to Poland in 1946 and became the head of Katowice branch of the Polish Press Agency. Between 1949 and 1952 he headed that agency's bureau in Rome. However, he was deported from Italy after having published a strongly anti-capitalist novel on the fate of Italian landless peasants. Upon his return to Poland he started working as the head of prose division of the Tworczosc weekly devoted to modern literature. He held that post until his retirement in 1978.
Stryjkowski followed a variety of political ideologies during his life, from Zionism, to Communism and Solidarity. Initially strongly devoted to Communism, in 1966 he quit the Polish United Workers' Party as a protest against the Communist suppression of art, science and culture, along with other notable Polish writers of the epoch.
Julian was an open homosexual.