Stanisław Jerzy Lec

Stanisław Jerzy Lec (Polish pronunciation: [staˈɲiswaf ˈjɛʐɨ lɛts]; 6 March 1909 – 7 May 1966), born Baron Stanisław Jerzy de Tusch-Letz, was a Polish aphorist and poet. Often mentioned among the greatest writers of post-war Poland, he was one of the more influential aphorists on the 20th century, known for lyrical poetry and skeptical philosophical-moral aphorisms, often with a political subtext.

Son of the Baron Benon de Tusch-Letz and Adela Safrin, he was born on 6 March 1909 in Lviv (then Lemberg, Austro-Hungarian Empire) to a Galician-Jewish nobilitated family. The family moved to Vienna at the onset of First World War, and Lec received his early education there. After the war the family returned to Lviv (then Lwów in the Second Polish Republic) to continue his schooling at the Lemberg Evangelical School. In 1927 he matriculated at Lwów's Jan Kazimierz University in Polish language and law.

His literary debut was in 1929. Much of his early work was lyric poetry appearing in left-wing and communist magazines. He collaborated with the communist “Dziennik Popularny" between 1933 and 1936. In 1935 he co-founded the satirical magazine Szpilki (Pins). A "literary cabaret" he founded in Lwow in collaboration with Leon Pasternak in 1936 was closed by the authorities after several performances. Nor did his law-abiding image improve after he took part in the Convention of Culture Workers, a radical congress initiated by the international communist movement Popular Front in the same year. Later that year he spent a few months in Romania, afraid that his activism could lead to his arrest in Poland. He spent the next two years in Warsaw, where he was involved with a number of other left-leaning publications.

...
Wikipedia