Strug, Andrzej

(pen name of Tadeusz Galecki). Born Nov. 28, 1871, in Lublin; died Dec. 9,1937, in Warsaw. Polish writer.

Strug studied at an agricultural institute in Puławy and later in the faculty of philosophy at Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Beginning in 1893, he did underground work for the Polish Socialist Party, for which he was exiled to Archange’lsk Province in 1897. In 1900 he returned to Poland. Revolutionary struggle and the tragedy and self-sacrifice of the revolutionary intelligentsia are prominent themes in Strug’s early works, for example, his collections of novellas Underground People (1908; Russian translation, 1924) and From the Remembrances of a Sympathetic Old Man (1909; Russian translation, 1925) and his novel The Story of a Bomb (1910; Russian translation, 1924). In these works, Strug was influenced by S. Zeromski.

From 1914 to 1916, Strug served in J. Piłsudski’s legions. After 1926 he moved closer to the left wing of the Polish Socialist Party and participated in the antifascist movement. His later novels, which are devoted to exposing postwar bourgeois reality, include The Generation of Mark Swida (1925; Russian translation, 1926), Money (1921; Russian translation, 1923), and The Career of the Cashier Śpiewankiewicz (1928). In his trilogy The Yellow Cross (1933), Strug reveals the criminality of imperialist war.