“He was born in 1930 in Borzęcin, but his family moved to Kraków soon afterward, where Mrożek's father, Stanisław, held a position at the post office. After the war, which Mrożek spent in the countryside, the future playwright attended grammar school in Kraków and then enrolled at the university. He was not very happy with any of the three subjects he studied (architecture, Oriental studies, art history), and began his artistic career as a draughtsman and journalist. He began working as a draughtsman in 1950 and soon became popular for the satirical sketches he made for the magazines Przekrój and Szpilki. From 1950 to 1954 he worked at the editorial office of Dziennik Polski, writing articles in support of the "building of Socialism" that zealously conformed to the demands of ideologically correct journalism. This youthful fascination with communism passed quite quickly, his ideas changed radically, and Mrożek never denied his past. He wrote:
Being twenty years old, I was ready to accept any ideological proposition without checking it too carefully – the only thing that mattered was that it was revolutionary. [...] It was from among people like me that they once recruited for the Hitler Youth or the Komsomol [...]. Frustrated, errant and rebellious youths are present in every generation, but what they do with their rebelliousness depends only on circumstance.
– Baltazar. Autobiografia / Balthazar. An Autobiography, 2006
The young writer's journey from belief in the communist system to scepticism and eventual rejection of it gave him experience of the way social mechanisms operate. As the critic and literary historian Jan Błoński writes:
Stalinism often broke or at least derailed artists. Mrożek, paradoxically, was strengthened by it, because it revealed to him de visu the power of the stereotype, the imposed code and the interpersonal mould, which, by escalating and swelling, destroys itself in the end. […] In doing so, however, it often litters the society with bodies.
– Wszystkie sztuki Sławomira Mrożka / All the Plays by Sławomir Mrożek, 1995
According to Tadeusz Nyczek,
The four-fold salto mortale (the pre-war petit bourgeois) – rural stabilisation, the devastating war, the revolutionary inspiration of communism and finally the escape from the hell of naivety – all of this had a decisive influence on the nature of Mrożek's creativity. Feeling shattered himself, he decided to become a broken mirror for the fractured reality of socialism in Poland. This broken mirror began to reflect Polish life in its dozens of fragmented forms, in its ridiculous language, its topsy-turvy behaviour and the whole absurdity of living in a dustbin that propaganda defines as the joy of building a socialist homeland.
– Tango with Mrożek”
Some random site
