Tadeusz Konwicki is one of the best-known living Polish novelists. Mała apokalipsa [published in the United States as A Minor Apocalypse] … is his ninth novel and his second one published in samizdat [an "underground" system for circulating dissident literature]…. His previous book in samizdat, Kompleks polski (1977), was an amusing though somewhat chaotic account of a day and night of encounters in the Warsaw of the seventies. His new novel goes further: it is Konwicki's first attempt to portray an anti-utopia that takes place in a vaguely defined future.

And a very grim future it is: Poland is on the verge of being incorporated (with the consent of the Polish Communist Party, of course) into the Soviet Union; it is a seedy, forlorn, half-awake land steeped in drunkenness where shadows from the past live on in a social and cultural vacuum. Technology and services are breaking down, but...