Tadeusz Konwicki in 1971, on the film set of 'How Far, How Near'. Photo: PAP//CAF/Witold Rozmysłowicz
Konwicki was one of the last in a pantheon of writers whose formative years were amid the trauma of World War II.
Born in 1926 in lands that are currently in Lithuania, Konwicki became a member of Poland's underground Home Army (AK) in 1944, taking part in Operation Tempest, the bid to throw off the shackles of Nazi German occupation, an action held in uneasy cooperation with the Red Army.
His unit later fought with the Soviets after the liberation, but the region was absorbed into the Soviet Union as a result of the Yalta Conference, and Konwicki resettled in Krakow, where he studied at the Jagiellonian University.
Despite the bitterness of the Polish-Soviet experience during World War II, he fell in with the communist cause, extolling the virtues of the regime's plans for industrialisation, and from 1952 to 1966 he was a member of the communist party.
However, Konwicki ultimately became disillusioned with the party, and fell out of favour with the authorities.
His two most celebrated novels, The Polish Complex (1977) and A Minor Apocalypse (1979), were published by the underground press. The latter is considered one of the finest Central European satires on life in a totalitarian state.
Konwicki was also an acclaimed figure in the film world. As a screenwriter, he is noted for adapting Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz's novella Mother Joan of the Angels for Jerzy Kawalerowicz's cult 1961 film, which deals with possession in a 17th century nunnery. Among many other scripts, he also worked with Kawalerowicz on the epic adaptation of Boleslaw Prus's novel Pharoah.
Konwicki likewise achieved success as a director with such films as Jump (Salto), the 1965 movie that became a favourite of Martin Scorsese. He also directed his own adaptation of Nobel Prize-winner Czeslaw Milosz's novel The Issa Valley, returning to the Lithuanian countryside of his youth.
''As a writer he was shaped by its landscapes and people,'' Milosz wrote, ''as well as by his adventures in the forests during his guerrilla activities.'' (nh)