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Aleksander Smolar - Reflecting on my life story (4/201)

261 views · Published 17 December 2018 · 1:58 · Indexed 23 October 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2018 · News & Politics

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To listen to more of Aleksander Smolar’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFwlxPLurqAOCrabBgGrqLA7

Aleksander Smolar (b. 1940) is a Polish writer, political activist and adviser, vice-president of the Institute for Human Sciences and president of the Stefan Batory Foundation. [Listener: Vitek Tracz]

TRANSCRIPT: Once we’d arranged to meet, I asked myself: what exactly do I want to talk about? I mean, that was clear: firstly, in some elementary plan, and this will matter the most in all of the things that I’ll talk about, there will simply be facts from my life. But at the same time, I didn’t want it to just be an autobiography, elements taken from my autobiography or CV: I was born, I went to school, I left, I came back…This gave me an excuse to stop and reflect for a while. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much time with my life divided between Warsaw and Paris and my many and frequent trips to various places, in other words, being permanently in motion and also with a certain unwillingness, as I’ve already mentioned, to engage in introspection and to reminisce – I didn’t have much time or even the patience nor the will. Nevertheless, I asked myself the question: what are the fundamentals that I could mark out and which would somehow define my life story? The kind of person I was, how I lived, what I thought about. Fundamental tracks. This would include those which were independent of me but had been determined by external factors as well as those which were the result of considered thought, passion, choice. And so I can see a couple of these tracks.

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