Kosinski Interview

In an interview with the Paris Review, Kosinski says a lot of interesting things that can be applied to The Painted Bird and perhaps help us understand it more. When the interview mentions that many people believe that his stories are autobiographical or at least some form of it, Kosinski gives a kind of roundabout answer. He says that people create "little fictions" and that an event is "a highly compressed dramatic unit that mixes memory and emotion, a structure made to accommodate certain feelings" and if it wasn't for that then art would be "too personal for the artist to create". It is interesting how Kosinski say this, never really confirming or denying how much truth is actually placed into his stories. Are they merely just elaborated emotions from traumatic events or did he create the events in The Painted Bird in such a way that they were more horrible than what really happened to anyone he knew/himself in order to make himself feel as if he got off well?

At one point he talks about he does not measure events as being less brutal and extremely brutal because horrible things can happened regardless if you were in a war or not, it is all a matter of perspective. This causes me to wonder why he made many of the events in the story so horrific. Is he trying to show the grotesque, crude nature of war and its effects for those who aren't directly involved or is he trying to show that no matter whether you're the boy, Ludmila, the farmhand, Ewka, and so on, that the horrors that you experience are no more or no less worse than those experiences of others in and out of the war.

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4036/the-art-of-fiction-no-46-jerzy-kosinski