The Man in the Shadow is an appealing modern novel set in Warsaw in the early 1990s. The story also returns to much earlier times in flashbacks. The main character is a thirty-year-old Warsaw notary called Aleksander Rański. He is the grandson of a White Army Russian general, and the son of a Russian woman who is obsessed with Chekhov and has lived in Poland since the age of 13. The complicated history of Rański’s Russian ancestors forms a whole separate plot going back into the past. Eustachy Rylski is a writer whose special subject is Russia. This time he has developed it in an extremely interesting way. The Polish lawyer, who knows the Russian language and way of life extremely well, is approached by some Russian Mafiosi, in connection with a routine legal service to do with some more or less legal business matters. But soon the gangsters make the lawyer dependent on them and draw him into a circle of macabre, perverse attractions. A strange psychological game starts up between Rański and the gloomy Mafioso Paslavsky, leading to a mournful finale. And so the novel consists of three separate, superbly interwoven stories: the historical one about Russian émigrés who settled in Warsaw in the 1920s, the thriller, and the “novel of manners”, including a lot of valuable comments on the revival of capitalism in Poland after 1989.
Dariusz Nowacki
Eustachy Rylski (b. 1944), writes fiction, plays and screenplays. He had a successful debut in 1984 with Stankiewicz and The Return, two novels in one volume. Three years later he published Only the Cold, a set of short stories, before concentrating on stage plays. He has also written a number of television and film scripts.
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