In 1939 Poland was effectively partitioned by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union following the Hitler-Stalin pact and Hitler's invasion of Poland. His father was a wealthy laryngologist, and young Stanislaw followed him into medicine. Lem was born in Lwów, a city then in Poland, later Lvov in the Soviet Union and now Lviv, in Ukraine. Although he moved with his family to Vienna for a few years, during the time of the crackdown against the Polish trade union Solidarity, he never showed any wish to relocate permanently in the west.
By the standards of the Soviet bloc, he was financially well off for most of his life. From the mid-1960s onwards he was therefore accorded an unusual amount of freedom of movement and speech.
For these reasons, his books struck a chord in Europe and the Soviet Union, and he became extremely popular. He was once described as the modern Voltaire. By contrast, Lem's writing was largely allegorical, wryly comic, humanistic, anti-military, satirical. The western tradition of science fiction, largely the product of rightwing American writers, is high on individualism, expansionist politics and engineering or military solutions to intransigent problems. He felt it tried to be a romantic story: one tributary in the river basin of the book, as he put it. As for the American remake of Solaris (2002) with George Clooney and Natascha McElhone, he had no discussions with the latter film's director, Steven Soderbergh, at all. This was also true, he thought, of the Russian film which starred Donatas Banionis and Natalya Bondarchuk, and he had many arguments with Tarkovsky. Lem felt the novel was therefore seriously misunderstood. The novel had been translated into English from what Lem described as a poor French edition, and that is the version we still have. This mysterious planet possesses a single life form with the power - when challenged - to draw out physical phenomena, simulacrum of human beings from the crew members' unconscious into what appears to be reality. The story is set on a research station in orbit around Solaris.
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