was born on April 2, 1931. She was a woman of many talents, on the one hand, she was fascinated by literature, and on the other, her parents encouraged her to become a doctor. She didn’t listen, she went to study architecture. In the meantime, she married Stanisław Kuhn and gave birth to a son, Jerzy. The second boy was born only after Joanna Chmielewska received her university diploma.
She felt she had to write
Later, she was employed in the construction of the Peasant’s House, but her great writing talent still appealed to her. So she went to the construction site in the morning, took care of the children in the afternoon, and in the evenings she sat down to write her first book titled “Klin”. Meanwhile, Joanna’s marriage to her high school sweetheart turned out to be not the best idea. Her relationship with Kuhn collapsed like a house of cards, which the author of the novel paid for with a nervous breakdown. She even admitted that suicide was on her mind, but the thoughts quickly passed and the bad mood was replaced by determination and the writer’s slowly developing dark humor.
After the divorce, Joanna Chmielewska, whose real name was Irena Barbara Kuhn, published her first book. However, the ex-husband did not want his name to appear on the cover, so the author adopted a pseudonym, which stuck with her permanently and even appeared in the tax office. “Klin” was a hit among readers, even one of the leading editors of the weekly “Przekrój” liked it.
In 1973, she published a novel titled “Lesio”. Readers loved it for its well-written criminal plot and the accompanying dark humor. In this way, the author developed her own individual writing style. Joanna Chmielewska is used to casting people she knows from everyday life as the main characters. For example, the prototype of the title Leś was none other than Lech Jakubiak, a Warsaw painter and architect. Chmielewska cast most of her friends in her books, and even her former cohabitant, who constantly cheated on her with other women.
With maniacal persistence, Joanna Chmielewska strived to make her novels painfully realistic. Apparently one night she went by boat to the middle of the lake, where she checked how far people’s voices carried. The popularity of her works grew from year to year, and Chmielewska was hailed as one of the most widely read authors of that time. In Poland, 6 million copies of her books were published, and in Russia – 8 million.
Unfortunately, its popularity and the income derived from it were not in line with the actual state of the author’s finances. Joanna Chmielewska had two weaknesses: one was for cigarettes, to which she was addicted to such an extent that she could not survive a several-hour flight, and the other was for gambling, in which she invested huge sums of money. She often attended horse races in Służewiec, and in the late 1980s she even won the main prize of PLN 274,000. She also visited casinos, where she played roulette and one-armed bandits.
Although Joanna Chmielewska undoubtedly managed to achieve great success, she did not consider herself too ambitious. In one of the interviews she even said: Apart from the deep belief that I should win the Nobel Prize for cheering up society, I have no other ambitions. The writer died on October 7, 2013.
Source: Gazeta
Bruce is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment . He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established himself as a respected voice in the industry.
