Violetta Szostak: I'm rather nervous about this interview…

Paweł Huelle: Why should you be nervous, I should be nervous, it's me they would like to kill…

Because of this book?

It's not as bad as that!

The worst that could happen to a book written with such – as I see it – angry and taunting passion, would be if it were not taken seriously.

I agree, yes.

This hasn't happened to 'The Last Supper', the book has resulted in heated discussion and diverging evaluations. I also have problems with it, which is why I was talking about nerves…

I'm very happy to hear it. Because if some are driven into a fury by the book, and for others it's enigmatic, that there's something within it that attracts them but they don't understand, and when they go back to it, they see something new – you can't have a better situation for a writer.

The strongest reactions were regarding what you have done with your contemporaries, the elements of gossip, pamphleteering, satire – the villain of the piece is the priest Monsignore, in whom we recognise a well-known Prelate from Gdansk, the main characters of the book walk along Kaczynski Avenue – some are delighted that you are engaging with contemporary life, while others consider it to be courting controversy, cheap, even below the belt.

I have written a contemporary novel. Maybe partly because critics were always saying that my novels are escapist, I thought: OK, now I will present you with a contemporary novel 'par excellence'.
And references to living people? This is an approach that to different degrees has been used by many writers before me. One can give as an example 'The Wedding' by Wyspianski - which doesn't mean I am comparing myself to Wyspianski!
The book is written fairly bluntly, because I think that we find ourselves in a moment of crisis, linked with postmodernism. We've lost our goals, our centre; we have fallen off the right track, and can't create a new one. I didn't originate this diagnosis, but I'm a participant in this crisis, it's happened to me, so I am reacting and asking some questions. My book is fairly pessimistic, it doesn't give a recipe to overcome this situation. I think that it is necessary to make oneself conscious of it, because a large number of us don't realise that we are in such a difficult, strange situation.

The different threads running through the novel are brought
together around the painting of "The Last Supper" which the artist Mateusz wants to paint, posing his acquaintances in the roles of the apostles. In reality the painter was Maciej Swieszewski, and you were one of the models.

Yes, and I immediately realised, that it was an excellent pretext for writing a contemporary novel. Choose a few characters who are heading to the sitting with the painter, to show them and their different lives, but to also put a mirror up to our religious attitudes, because if someone has to pose for "The Last Supper" they will inevitably think of what that "picture" might say about their own lives.

This mirror shows some very unpleasant things. We pose for religious paintings, but Jesus has been lost somewhere.

Things aren't going brilliantly for us. We are an ultra-catholic country, religion is present everywhere in terms of symbols, but is a deeper spirituality also present? It happened that I criticised Father Jankowski and was immediately called a Jew by his allies, I was jostled in court, spat on, and the crowd shouted: "Treblinka! To the gas chamber!". So I ask you, what kind of Christianity are we supposed to be dealing with?

You also mercilessly chastise avant-garde artists.

It isn't that I am an enemy of avant-garde art, or contemporary art, this is a caricature that has been thrust upon me. I am only saying that a large part of this art is running in circles. It's repeating what the avant-garde created in the 1920s and 30s. This is impotence, tedium, it's not any kind of novelty…

Is the kind of art Mateusz creates any better? Is he in a better position? Isn't he running in circles?

Mateusz takes great risks. He's attempting something Quixotic: He wants to paint a representational picture, on a religious theme, making reference to the old masters…

And what results from this link with the old masters?

The narrator asks the same question and has an ambiguous view on it. What annoyed me the most was the fury with which the avant-garde community attacked Świeszewski's painting, they denied him his right to be heard. It's exactly this revolutionary-dictatorial pose which I don't like in the avant-garde: only one form of art is important, because it's contemporary, and the rest should be destroyed and mocked. This is where I start to ask: "hang on, what kind of 'contemporary' are we talking about?"

But didn't you hesitate when the artist asked you to pose as an apostle?

I joked, that of course I would be Judas. I came to the conclusion that historically they also posed people they knew in religious pictures, and not only saints.