Sex (heterosexual and homosexual). Money (unpaid debts). Corruption (a writer nominated for a prize is apparently living with the secretary of the prize’s selection committee). Increasingly unhinged emails between the two combatants.
The ongoing story of Kinga Dunin (well-known literary journalist and Medical University of Warsaw professor) and Ignacy Karpowicz (hot young – significantly younger than Dunin – novelist) hasn’t jumped to to the English language press yet.
Basic narrative, however, is this: Dunin suddenly posted on her Facebook page a complaint that Karpowicz hadn’t repaid the $4,000 loan she’d given him; she wrote that maybe by publicizing the matter she could shame him into it.
Karpowicz responded that for some time Dunin had been allowing him to use her apartment when he was in Warsaw, and recently when she was also in the apartment she invited him to share her bed. Not wanting to make her angry, he writes, he agreed to do so. (He’s either a liar or a fool.) Eventually he fell in love with someone else and broke off the relationship with Dunin. He claims that on their last night together in her apartment, when he told her he was leaving her, she raped him.
Dunin then came back with the claim that Karpowicz threw her over for a man – a man who happens to be the secretary of the selection committee for a literary prize Karpowicz is up for.
It seems likely to UD that the story has enough intrinsic interest to show up, soon, in the New York Times. We’ll see.
Gory details here, if you happen to be fluent in Polish.
October 19th, 2014 at 3:15PM
This tale hits the Someone-Is-Pulling-My-Leg Zone at the mention of ‘Facebook’. Literary scandals just aren’t what they used to be.
October 19th, 2014 at 4:51PM
Strange carryings-on in Warsaw. So many bad choices. A lethal combination of self-regard and insecurity comes through from the Polish text.