Читать онлайн «The Painted Bird»

Автор Ежи Косинский

Summary:

Semiautobiographical novel by Jerzy Kosinski, published in 1965 and revised in 1976. The ordeals of the central character parallel Kosinski's own experiences during World War II. A dark-haired Polish child who is taken for either a Gypsy or a Jew loses his parents in the mayhem of war and wanders through the countryside at the mercy of the brutal, thickheaded peasants he meets in the villages. He learns how to stay alive at any cost, turning survival into a moral imperative. Full of graphic scenes depicting rape, torture, and bestiality, the novel portrays evil in all its manifestations and speaks of human isolation as inevitable.

BOOKS BY JERZY KOSINSKI

NOVELS

The Painted Bird

Steps

Being There

The Devil Tree

Cockpit

Blind Date

Passion Play

Pinball

The Hermit of 69th Street

ESSAYS

Passing By

Notes of the Author

The Art of the Self

NONFICTION

(Under the pen name Joseph Novak)

The Future Is Ours, Comrade

No Third Path

To the memory of my wife Mary Hayward Weir

without whom even the past would

lose its meaning

First published in the United States of America in 1976 by Houghton Mifflin Company

Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The painted bird/Jerzy Kosinski; with an introduction by the author. —2nd ed.

eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9575-3

1. Poland—History—Occupation, 1939-1945—Fiction. 2. World War, 1939-1945—Europe, Eastern—Fiction. 3.

Abandoned children—Europe, Eastern—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3561. O8P3 1995 813’. 54—dc20 95-19520

Grove Press

an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

841 Broadway

New York, NY 10003

Distributed by Publishers Group West

and only God,

omnipotent indeed,

knew they were mammals

of a different breed.

MAYAKOVSKY

This new edition of The Painted Bird incorporates some

material that did not appear in the first edition.

AFTERWARD

In the spring of 1963, I visited Switzerland with my American-born wife, Mary. We had vacationed there before, but were now in the country for a different purpose: my wife had been battling a supposedly incurable illness for months and had come to Switzerland to consult yet another group of specialists. Since we expected to remain for some time, we had taken a suite in a palatial hotel that dominated the lake-front of a fashionable old resort.