Toymaker Lego has created a tribute to Polish Nobel Prize-winning poet Wisława Szymborska to mark the 100th anniversary of her birth.
The scene, made up of around 21,000 bricks and displayed at the Małopolska Garden of Arts (MOS) in Szymborska’s home city of Kraków, depicts the moment she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996.
The model was designed and constructed by Mateusz Kustra, Poland’s first Lego-certified professional builder, and was unveiled by Sebastian Szwaczka of Lego Polska as well as the Michał Rusinek, head of the Wisława Szymborska Foundation, and Krzysztof Głuchowski, representing the city of Kraków.
“Wisława Szymborska hated pathos, not only in poetry, but also in her private life,” Rusiniak told Onet. “So how to recall the Nobel Prize ceremony, but to disarm its pathos? Recreate it with Lego bricks, of course!”
Polish poet Wisława Szymborska was announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature on this day in 1996. A very private person, she disliked the attention that followed, and would later have her achievement ironically described by friends as "the Stockholm tragedy". pic.twitter.com/8UKHpwpIuy
— Stanley Bill (@StanleySBill) October 3, 2019
“Building this model was a personal experience for me,” Kustra, who spent half a year designing and building it, told news website Onet. “As a young Cracovian, I met Mrs Szymborska on the street. It was a great experience for me and it remains in my memory to this day.”
The scene, which is 113 centimetres wide and weighs almost 30 kilograms, features over 380 figures. At the centre is Szymborska herself: earlier this year, Lego launched a special model of the author to mark International Day of Poetry on 21 March.
Kustra has hidden a few coded messages among the blocks, including a cat, in reference to Szymborska’s poem Kot w pustym mieszkaniu (Cat in an Empty Apartment), as well as an onion and a map, also referring to the titles of two of the poets works.
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The Lego tribute is one of a number taking place in Kraków today to mark the 100th anniversary of Szymborska’s birth, including the opening of a new park named after her. The Senate, the upper house of Poland’s parliament, has declared 2023 to be the Year of Szymborska
Though she was born in what is now Kórnik, a town in western Poland, her family moved to Kraków in 1929 when she was aged six and she remained associated with the city until her death in 2012.
She published her first poem, Szukam słowa (Looking for words) in Kraków’s Dziennik Polski newspaper in 1945, followed by her first volume of poetry, Dlatego żyjemy (That is Why We Live), in 1952.
Awarding Szymborska the Nobel Prize in 1996, the Swedish Academy noted that her “slim but powerful collections of poems…with ironic precision allow the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality”.
Today we're celebrating 100 years since the birth of the "Mozart of poetry": Wisława Szymborska. She wrote around 400 poems during her lifetime, using common everyday images to reflect on larger truths about love, death and passing time.
Read her lecture: https://t.co/BRyX25WlTg pic.twitter.com/618BH3qmRO
— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) July 2, 2023
During her early professional life in the postwar period, Szymborska was a member of Poland’s ruling communist party and used her work to support socialist themes. She was among the writers who signed an infamous 1953 letter condemning members of the clergy convicted of espionage in a show trial.
Later, however, the poet became disillusioned with the communists, leaving the party in the 1960s and becoming increasingly associated with dissidents against the regime.
She is one of six Polish-born authors to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, alongside Henryk Sienkiewicz (1905), Władysław Reymont (1924), Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978), Czesław Miłosz (1980) and Olga Tokarczuk (2018).
In response to a list of "nine Polish books you must read before you die", all written by men, @Kasia_Lech presents a selection of female authors.
Encompassing a variety of genres, they offer snapshots of women’s voices throughout Poland’s complex historyhttps://t.co/3KBDsqkK2K
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) April 10, 2022
Main image credit: Beata Zawrzel / Lego
Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.
