The reclusive, yet highly acclaimed Polish writer Andrzej Stasiuk is a winner of numerous prizes for his books showing the darker sides of life in Eastern Europe. Hear extracts from his first novel, White Raven

"Live or die. If you want to die, die."

That's the kind of shit Bandurko was selling to us in a bar called Crossroads, late autumn of last year. It was evening. Down the concrete gutter of Lazienkowska thoroughfare foamed a colourful sewage of cars, a stream of glistening vomit flowing from east to west and from west to east, while we sat in what felt like a terrarium, among people with dead faces and slow-motion gestures. There were five of us and each drank his favourite.

Bandurko drank red wine, Shorty sipped vodka, Goosy was on beer because he was driving. Kostek also drank beer, while I savoured cheap brandy. It was raining. We sat by the glass wall. The glass was wet, and people in the street looked like black kites struck down from the sky and blown by the wind towards the gaping entry of the subway, or towards the iron banisters leading down to the bottom of the concrete ravine. Articulated buses packed to bursting crawled towards Ursynów, passing the returning half-empty ones. Everything shook. The earth and the glasses on the table. Only cigarette smoke seemed to withstand the tremor.

Born in Warsaw in 1960, Andrzej Stasiuk is a novelist, an essayist, a poet as well as a literary critic. He has had one of the most spectacular literary careers of recent years. The winner of many prizes (including the 1995 Koscielski Prize and 2005 Nike Prize), he was expelled from school and worked at various jobs. He has an unusual biography: he was engaged in the pacifist movement in the early 1980s, deserted from the army in a tank, and consequently spent a year and a half in prison. He wrote for "underground" magazines. With little tolerance for literary salons and officialdom, in 1987 he moved from Warsaw to an isolated hamlet Czarne in the Carpathian Mountains. He keeps there a herd of goats, breeds llamas and writes for Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland's leading daily newspaper, and for prestigious magazines such as Tygodnik Powszechny. From here he and his wife run the independent publishing house Czarne, which they founded in 1996.

"Socialism or death. Socialism, Bandurko. That's what Commendante Castro said, and that's what we say." Kostek's face was motionless, as if it wasn't him who uttered these words. Black-haired, thin and swarthy, he looked like a Gypsy, or at least like someone who was there merely by accident. He always looked as if he was with us only because he'd just taken a spare seat at the table. He thought, jeered and got bored, all off his own bat.

Vasyl talked crap, but no one minded. Perhaps the crap was simply too great, too interesting in its crappiness, like an article in Hello!.

"You're talking crap, Bandurko, because you're a bourgeoisie."
"Typical class bias. I'm not a bourgeoisie: merely a receiver of private scholarship, and you're a tramp."

"Yes, I'm a tramp. That's why I demand you buy me another beer. And a round of what they like for the rest. I assume you do want us to hear you out."

"I got money," piped up Goosy.

"We all know that. Wait your turn, it'll come," muttered Kostek and straightened up in his chair to call the waitress. Bandurko sat looking into his wine glass, probably offended by the silly jokes that interrupted his flow, unable to pick up the thread anew, or rather unable to muster the emotion that allowed him to be carried away and talk for half an hour at a stretch. It was a matter of inspiration. Bandurko was a man of vision. Everyone knew that. And a proselytiser. A keen but sensitive soul, easily wounded. Which is why we sat listening to him in silence until Kostek took out a pin and let some air out of Vasyl's balloon.

His first book, The Walls of Hebron, a collection of twelve stories based on his prison experience published in 1992, achieved cult status. The book contained descriptions of his prison experiences: images from life in a cell and a record of a naked, dehumanized existence in a world ruled by force and cunning. Shocking accounts of humiliation and brutality combined with a pathos bordering on the lyrical, with sarcasm, artfulness, linguistic refinement and a flair for poetic shortcuts this is Stasiuk's prose.

Goosy started to jabber on about his latest business scheme, his car, his latest business scheme, his car, and he was getting excited just like Bandurko, except that in his case the excitement manifested itself through stammer and beads of sweat on his forehead.

"Shit! I forgot I'm driving." He'd push away his freshly started beer, take his glasses off and clean them with his jacket, ready to resume where he left off. But Shorty was already talking to Vasyl, trying to persuade him about something in a slow, measured voice, his hand cutting the air into thick juicy slices. Kostek sat quietly as before, sipping his beer, giving no sign that in a minute he'd put the empty glass on the table, say "See ya" and leave, which I would follow with "I'll be off too" and rush after him. I caught up with him in the cloakroom, looking at the glass box with various brands of cigarettes, finally asking the cloakroom granny for a packet of extra strong. I didn't stop him, he didn't look back. I waited for a bit and walked out on to the wet street to think about Vasyl Bandurko.

His next books reinforced his reputation. Tales of GALICIA, published in 1994, presents semi-fictionalized, semi-journalistic accounts of the lives of the residents of a village in the provincial foothills. The stories are full of keenly observed details of the manners and morals of the period of political transformation, clearly drawn characters, and a climate in which poetical lyricism coexists with brutality. The stories in Across the River from 1996, are a continuation of similar narrations in a similar setting. Stasiuk's later books DUKLA from 1997 and Winter and other stories published in 2001 were both nominated for the NIKE PRIZE. Stasiuk is also the author of a number of non-fiction books such as How I Became a Writer. An Attemp at an Intellectual Biography from 1998.

And now I was looking at his still, quiet face and I swear I could see a smile lurking in the corner of his lips. It wasn't playing shadows or shimmering specks of golden red glow. It was a triumphant smile. It radiated even through the mask of sleep. For Bandurko triumphed, he convinced us that our lives were shit and so we should do something. He was the one to tell us what.

That speech he made in the bar, although it shocked us, was merely a beginning. After that he worked on us individually He must have been spying too, for we tended to bump into him in the street, on buses, in bars. He never tried to catch us at home, as if he knew we would be more resistant there, that a more ordered world would protect us from madness.

So it was streets, bridges, laying traps. Once he dived after me into a taxi only to tumble out ten minutes later in some useless place, Industrial Sluzewiec or something. On a Sunday there was no living soul in sight. He must have wandered among the huge glass and steel cubes, halls and hangars perfecting the art of rhetoric, fasting in the desert, receiving visions and prophesying to the Jerusalem of corrugated iron.

I can't remember who it was he converted first. We continued our meetings, but every time he tried we invariably concluded Vasyl was still off his rocker.

The novel, White Raven from 1993, is a story about a group of men, led by a struggling writer, who escape to the mountains to rediscover a purpose to their lives but end up recreating the rebellious days of drinking and whoring under the Russians. Several critics have nominated Stasiuk as the Polish Jack Kerouac, and his rugged good looks, heavy smoking and whisky-drinking certainly fit the bill.

In an interview Stasiuk confirmed that he was an admirer of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. As he said: I always wanted to write a Slavonic On the Road and place it in a quite geographically limited and historically complicated space. I think, that something of my former sensitivity of a seventeen year old, who goes hitch-hiking, sleeps in ditches and generally is delighted by the world has remained in the novel. In this sense the book is a Buddhist or Franciscan book – it says ‘yes’ to the world.

Stasiuk denies that White Raven is a macho survival tale. Instead, the novel is a light allegory of Poland's faltering first steps as a republic, the clash between the restrictions of the past and the dizzying choices of an increased freedom. Yet it's also about the journey from adolescence to maturity. "Back then," says Stasiuk, referring to the early 1980s, "I was both an irresponsible boy and a grown-up man with responsibilities. And White Raven is also about Poland as an infantile country, and a very grown-up one as well."

Who was first, then? Shorty? Kostek? Goosy? Funny little game. I didn't have to play it but the night was long. So - Shorty? Or Goosy? Goosy certainly not. He had the most to lose and wouldn't have the balls. On the other hand he was sentimental and could, at the last moment, summon the courage to shout, "Guys, I'm coming with you!" Just as the guys were disappearing round the corner of a narrow street of wooden huts, similar to the station hut but never painted. "Guys! I'm coming with you!”, - although he knew we were going for one of those dangerous excursions that usually ended in a crazy run with some mad bastard charging stark-naked behind us, courtesy of Ginger Grisha who, bored with open-air porn, was stepping out of the bushes with a line: "Excuse me, do you have the time?" or "Shut up, baby, fucking doesn't kill."
Shit, did we run. Not out of fear, for there are natural limits to the speed even the maddest bare-assed fucker can develop in pine wood undergrowth or a wild rose thicket. Normally they didn't bother. So we ran like the stealers of forbidden fruit, bewinged, cursed and free. The youngest didn't have a clue as to what really happened in paradise. They felt fear, the breeze of the unknown. The oldest, like Ginger Grisha, would spit with a special, masculine contempt, turning their eyes away in order to give their friends - and themselves - to understand that it was no hypnosis.

So, Goosy was probably the last. But then he could be just as well the first, caught in Vasyl's Machiavellian snares. The order didn't matter. Each of us could be first or last, and all deceived.

In 2004 Stasiuk published GOING TO BABADAG, a book which is a fictionalised report of the author's travels through Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, Moldova, the countries of the former Yugoslavia and the Hungarian provinces. From this travel journal emerges a treatise about half a continent, its cultures and inhabitants. The protagonists are landscapes that have not changed in years and people who, like the landscapes, have not changed in generations.
Stasiuk writes: "I should write the story of Gypsy eternity, because I sense that in some way it is more enduring and wise than our states and cities and our entire world, which trembles lest it be eradicated. The book came into being just like ‘Tales of Galicia’ and ‘Dukla’; from unconnected texts, which started to make a whole with time. I think I never get down to writing with the thought of a book. It usually comes out afterwards, when you cannot escape a topic; when I see that the subject cannot be described in a short text. ‘Babadag’ began as quite a small description of a few journeys.”

Warsaw Central, Warsaw West, and then the black screen of the window with the blurred beads of the light of passing stations, cigarettes, and no vodka. I fell asleep before Radom. We didn't feel like talking. We had talked ourselves out. I curled up in the corner and lost Vasyl from my sight. Some time after Sandomierz I was awakened by his voice.

"They nicked our rucksacks." He stood with his hand on the lightswitch, looking around the compartment as if that barren, empty cube of space could hide two massive canvas bags.

"They fucking nicked them…” as if it were something beyond human comprehension, something supernatural.

We had thrown them on the seats as if we didn't care, like they do in the movies, like old troopers, those who have nothing to lose. And on top of that it was so hot inside the carriage we had to sleep with the door open. Well, I couldn't care less. Sleeping-bags, longjohns, food, the stove, a bottle of meths.

"The map! We lost the fucking map!" moaned Vasyl. "Half a year of work. A tourist map but with lots of notes, corrections, every hole in the ground marked, bus timetables. .

"It's not Siberia. We'll manage."

"What do you know?"

"I do. I was there."

"Not there. You were more to the east. And it was summer."

"Money?"

"I got it on me."

"We'll buy the necessary stuff when we get there."

"We will - condoms in a bar. It's a Sunday."

Stasiuk achieved certain fame and following not only in Poland but also in Germany where nine of his books have been published so far. He became an ambassador of Polish culture across our western border, he regularly meets his German readers and participates in book fairs. Two of his books Tales of Galicia and White Raven, are currently available in English translations, The Walls of Hebron should be published shortly. Three of Stasiuk’s books have been published in Italian. They were also translated into Finnish, Dutch and most recently Norwegian.

When we got off in Grobow it was dawn. The street from the station was clean and quiet. Wooden villas with gardens, old-fashioned signs recommending homecooked dinners, glass display cases with saints. Above the white roofs the sky was getting pinker. It was a terrible colour, bright and ice-hard. Even a stone would bounce off a sky like that, I thought. On the hill in front of us, a coal wagon loaded to the brim was coming down the road. A skinny white horse was practically sat on its rear while the bridle cut into its mouth so deep we could see its red tongue and gums.

"On a Sunday?"

"Maybe he's been going since Saturday, maybe Thursday?"

On a slanted, cobblestone town square we found the bus stop.

The bus arrived not too long after. Seeing us, it skidded and stopped sideways. We hopped into the empty coach as the driver was sending everything to fucking hell - icy roads, sand-sprayers, capitalism and quite possibly us, but we hid right at the back.

Here is how Andrzej Stasiuk commented upon his choice of subjects in an interview for Gazeta Wyborcza: I describe a marginal reality, because my life was shaped in these kind of outskirts. I lived in Choszczówka near Warsaw in childhood, almost in the countryside, away from the city centre. Now I live on the edge of Poland and on the edge of Europe, moreover – a ‘second rank’ Europe. I am spinning the tale of a provincial.

I took photos until recently, but I observed that it is harmful to writing. Once I told myself: oh, remember. And now I take a picture and I think: I have a picture so I’ll remind myself easily. In the end I am not as perceptive as I once was.

I do not visit museums. I rather wander around the town, drink in the pubs and I try to have my eyes wide open. Learning the country, getting to know it from books makes sense only after returning. Then I know, what I am reading about, I know what I miss. Sometimes it seems to me that the real journey starts after coming back home. In the mind, in dreams.

And then we travelled south-east. The sun was rising a bit to the left. On the right spread a wide, flat valley. Well-trodden paths and sleigh-tracks led off the main road to huts and sheds, barns and pigsties. Over the whole vista, a blue veil of morning chimney smoke hung on the black-green mountain line. The light was so bright, so translucent, as if we were heading not for the geographical but some mythical, ideal south-east.

The driver put on a pair of shades and switched on the radio. It crackled like hell, but he must have liked it for he turned it up. Through the electric storm came scraps of Warsaw news. Like a hue and cry, like a memento, or an exhortation.

And then we got on another coach, together with a big family and three sober citizens. Half an hour into the journey Bandurko remarked: "So, to all intents and purposes we're in a different country now."

Excerpts from Andrzej Stasiuk’s novel White Raven translated by Wiesek Powaga