Krakow: Zbigniew Mentzel is the laureate of the Jan Długosz
Zbigniew Mentzel became the laureate of the Jan Długosz for a book in the humanities book, it was published in 2020. He was honored for Leszek Kołakowski’s biography published by Znak.
The competition accompanies the International Book Fair in Krakow.
Speaking to a member of the jury, Prof. Piotr Sztompka said that we live in a time when intellectual authorities are denied and removed from monuments, and that is why authentic authorities should be reminded. “Today, one of the most outstanding thinkers of post-war Poland, Leszek Kołakowski, was like that today. And the biography of Zbigniew Mentzel published about him” – prof. Sztompki.
Reference was made to the book “Kołakowski because of. Reading the world”, he said that it could be titled “Mentzel. Kołakowski Reading” and that the success of a biographer also means the choice of characters, about thoughts, and Leszek Kołakowski is the title of the title due to the topicality of his work. “This is more than many others – a thinker for today” – says Sztompka.
His life, the topicality of Kołakowski’s work results from some of the common list of questions that he has: about the existence of God, religion as the role of myth, meaning, death, his reflections on themes have already entered the world philosophical heritage. “But the distraction of thought when it revolved around the world of enlightenment, metaphysics, and despite the distance of the soul, when the last forty years of his life in Oxford, in his – if you can say always – was Polish” – said jur.
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Prof. Sztompka said that Zbigniew Mentzel combined in his book “two dimensions of biography – biography sensu stricto, that is the history of life, and intellectual biography as a path of thought”. “In the same dimensions, in life and in thought, the author adopts a dynamic perspective, he shows himself as changeable, evolving, as the path that the thinker traverses” – according to the assessment.
“The path of life from the party community to the gurul and the Mentzel benefits reproduced in a balanced, determined, objective way – avoiding two extremes of other popular biographies: justifying and whitening sins, more repeated circumstances than in the case of Kołakowski, e.g. a case, someone whom Artur Domosławski built recently, a hagiographic monument, or – on the other hand – absolutizing and emphasizing conformist or conformist past behaviors that are characterized by seasonal big stars, as in the right-wing + disconnection + narrative, e.g. about Lech Wałęsa – assessed by Prof.
He added that “in the initial way, it shows how easy it is to enable Kołakowski’s communication”, and the value of the biography is “a contextual approach when the author shows that both thought and thought are not suspended in a vacuum”.
Zbigniew Mentzel, thanking for the award, said that the laudation by prof. Sztompki was “very understanding”. He added, friends from the Znak publishing house convinced him that writing the biography “And then, when I followed their suggestive persuasions, they surrounded me with comprehensive protection, without which the book awarded today could not be created so that it could not be created” – said Mentzel.