A novel of such artistic and philosophical calibre can only be the work of an “old master,” a man burdened with memories of painful historical events, with a wealth of experience and wisdom, but also an unerring writer’s instinct allowing him to transform the things he heard and reflected on and lived through into what is unquestionably a literary masterpiece.
In a monologue to his mysterious visitor, the protagonist of Myśliwski’s novel sums up his whole life in one day, as he shells beans. The intricately crafted story with its varying temporal planes offers an insight into hidden senses of human destiny, the relation of chance and fate, the difference between the authentic and the sham, or normality and madness. The great historical fresco encompasses the protagonist’s childhood marred by the trauma of war, his youth with its delusions and lies, and the everyday life in a country on which “the best system in the world” is imposed, the ensuing Wander- and Bildungsjahre, a stint of earning a living abroad, and finally the time of summing up the bitter knowledge, the harvest of a long life.
A Treatise on Bean-Shelling is not only a huge epic panorama, but first and foremost a great metaphysical novel. Probing into the Mystery, posing fundamental existential questions, tapping the wall of darkness, Myśliwski offers no easy answers or cheap consolations. He never deceives us that the Mystery can be known; on the contrary, he insists on the need to ask the questions again and again despite the acute awareness that nothing but darkness lies ahead.

Wiesław Myśliwski is the author of novels and plays which are usually discussed in the context of “peasant literature”, dealing with the problems of the identities of villages and their inhabitants in times of historical change. However, his work transcends this literary category thanks to its philosophical and anthropological importance. Myśliwski’s first novel, Naked Orchard (1967), surprised the critics with its maturity, substantiality and an exceptionally loving portrait by a son of his father. The play The Steward (1978) and the novel The Palace (1970) analyse a conflict between inherited and desired destiny. Myśliwski’s broadest epic of the peasant fate is the novel Stone upon Stone (1984), a masterpiece of postwar Polish literature, the apotheosis of the peasant tradition. His novel The Horizon (1996) won the 1997 Nike prize for the best book of the year.