Stanislaw Lem
The late great Stanislaw Lem has such a towering reputation for social criticism that we forget that, for most of his career, he had to be extraordinarily careful about how he used it. If he got too comical about the wrong people, his career could easily have come to a quick end in the gulag.
All the same, he couldn’t help himself. In the 1940s, while Lem was still a medical student, he found Josef Stalin too tempting a target to ignore and wrote a satirical opera about (says the “Feedback” columnist in the 18 December 2008 issue of New Scientist) a Soviet secret policeman and the “superhumanly intelligent and inhumanly smiling Josef Stalin.” Then, having written it, he did what any sensible person of that time and place would do. He hid it where it would never be found.
Only that was then. But this is now, and now it has been found — at last, after sixty years of dogged searching. Which American publisher is going to be the first one to translate it into English and publish it for me to read?
