Jerzy Peterkiewicz

Who was Jerzy Peterkiewicz?

Jerzy Pietrkiewicz or Peterkiewicz was a Polish poet, novelist, translator, and literary critic who spent much of his life in British exile.

He was born in Fabianki, Poland, the son of a well-read peasant, Jan Pietrkiewicz, and a woman of aristocratic descent, Antonina Politowska, who was about fifty years old at his birth. Both his parents died while he was still a child, his mother of cancer when he was twelve, and his father two years later. He attended the Jan Długosz Catholic School in Włocławek, and then went to Warsaw to study journalism. His first published writing was poetry in Okolica Poetów in 1934. He also contributed articles to ultra-nationalist newspapers. Pietrkiewicz was the author of antisemitic and homophobic pasquinades published in the periodical Myśl Narodowa and subsequently reprinted in some other Polish periodicals in 1937 against Franciszka Arnsztajnowa and other distinguished Polish writers, critics and poets of Jewish descent. Many of the writers attacked in Pietrkiewicz's racist and homophobic lampoons were associated with the literary magazine Pion: Stanisław Piasecki, the publisher and editor of Prosto z mostu, a periodical that supported, reprinted, and attempted to justify Pietrkiewicz's attacks on Arnsztajnowa and others, explained that Pietrkiewicz was originally motivated by the severe criticism that his own poetry had met with in Pion.