Andrzejewski, Jerzy - Darkness Covers the Earth

Darkness Covers the Earth (Polish: Ciemności kryją ziemię), published in 1957 and also known in English as The Inquisitors, is a historical novel by Polish writer Jerzy Andrzejewski (1909-1983). Set in 15th-century Spain, it is a philosophical parable analyzing the mechanics of totalitarian power, the corruption of ideology, and the sacrifice of human morality for the sake of an abstract, absolute cause.

Vasil Siomucha: "Sometime around 1958, when I was a student and, it seems, much wiser than today, I had the good fortune to earn some money “through youth tourism.” I accompanied a group of students and postgraduate researchers from Warsaw on a trip along the route Brest – Moscow – Lazarevskoye (the Black Sea). Ten days of unforgettable impressions, conversations, encounters, discussions, the nature of the Caucasus, the sea. To the marrow of my bones I was Soviet, while my Polish peers were Polish—and therefore very difficult for me to understand.

Among the students there was a small group (three or four people) who kept somewhat apart; they did not argue with others, but debated only among themselves. “This is our future cinema,” I was told. “This is one, that is another—and this is Krzysztof Zanussi.” Now I can confidently repeat: oh, that was cinema! But at that time we hardly even managed to talk properly, we only got acquainted. And Krzysztof asked me to agree to accept a book as a gift, which he would send me upon returning to Warsaw. We exchanged several letters. The book arrived.

It was the novella by Jerzy Andrzejewski “Ciemności kryją ziemię” (Darkness Covers the Earth, 1957), about the time of the Spanish Inquisition and the Grand Inquisitor Torquemada. I read it. And it was the first blow to my “Sovietness.” Later there were other blows, but this was the very first, the most tangible—and perhaps it was from this that a serious, conscious analysis of our Soviet life, of our dear Stalinism, began. In 1961 I translated the book into Belarusian and gave it to friends to read. “Are you a child—who would publish this!?” they told me. But it was published—though only in 1994, in a collection of foreign novellas with the strange title “A Love Story” (Minsk, Mastatskaya Literatura, 1994), where it was effectively buried in a common coffin, unnoticed and unmourned.

In the years between those dates, I followed the writer’s creative and public life. There was much of everything there, but most of all persecution—until, finally, the author was completely expelled from Poland, where he later died, leaving behind in the Mała Encyklopedia Powszechna PWN only this brief entry: “Andrzejewski, Jerzy (b. 1909), writer; novellas The Unavoidable Roads, the morally focused novel The Order of the Heart, a collection of stories about the occupation Night, the novel Ashes and Diamonds about the fate of AK youth and the formation of a new socio-political order in liberated Poland, the metaphorical novels Darkness Covers the Earth, The Gates of Paradise, the grotesque novel He Comes, Leaps over the Mountains.”

Allow me to add “Holy Week” (Wielki Tydzień), about the tragic events during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The role of the individual in history is vividly illuminated by the author in the story collections “The Golden Fox” and “As If a Grove.” But better—read the translation…"