On 26 June 1961, the ‘Hooligan of Freedom’ Andrzej Bobkowski Died in Guatemala

This character is worth remembering. Reading in Feather sketches Report on the fall of France in the summer of 1940 from the perspective of a cyclist, it is much easier to free yourself from the patriotic and cliché evaluation of many strange characters who, instead of "defending their homeland", fighting, are wandering around Europe today.

Bobkowski, the son of a general, was one of the first to volunteer for the Polish army in France. He was not accepted. The importance of the literary work of this economist, Guatemalan modeler, man desperately trying to remain independent of the circumstances for Polish culture is comparable to the importance of Gombrowicz. 

He had simple views: "A free man, an intellectual, a writer and a truly free poet, who wants to be free, will have something of a hooligan until the end of this world". 

At the end of the 1950s, at the request of the Editor Giedroyc, Bobkowski wrote a slightly humorous biography in the third person. The episode related to staying in France before the Germans entered reads like this:

"Waiting for conscription into the army and not wanting to use social assistance, he makes a living from washing clothes, having founded a Polish laundry for refugees under the name "Monsieur Sans-Gêne, Chlorcio and Company", in which, next to the abundantly used chloride, i.e. jawel, he was the only employee (...) Unable to continue his interesting work activity, he joined a French ammunition factory".

Someone who sets up a laundry under the banner Holy Spirit. Chlorcio and company And works in it as the only worker (well, unless it's getting really cold: "As a result of these frosts, I had to stop my laundry from the 10th b.m., because my joints in my fingers and elbows started to swell and hurt so much that I couldn't work. It depressed me a lot, but what to do. As soon as it gets warmer and at least a little warmer, I will start again, especially since the clientele is constantly asking insistently about the health of "that little work". Meanwhile, I'm getting a little bit immortal with our family antiphlogestin and I'm curing "my washing machine". These frosts reaching minus sixteen degrees we survived in our dovecote quite well despite the lack of any heating. The ice was on the window, the water was frozing in the pelvis." - it's from a letter from January 1940 to my uncle in Switzerland), it is worth a constant reminder. 

Józef Czapski recalled in an interview with Andrzej Mietkowski for Bobkowski's II PR as follows: "We saw each other, I did not have such a close relationship with him, I did not have, only so that I liked him heartily. He was a wonderfully friendly man and at the same time accentuating that he hates intellectuals who can't swim and can't play football. (...) A detached thought was always suspicious of him."

Bicycle, chlorcio, swimming, Basia, football, airplane models, holy spirit - the points through which the literary interesting definition of freedom passes are not obvious.