I will never forget a late-night conversation I had seven years ago, around the table of a modest kitchen in a small town in southern Poland, when an impressively inebriated man—a distant relative—implored me with tear-filled eyes to get the message to Obama, as quickly as possible, that a missile shield pointed east, at Moscow, was a dire necessity. Every morning, this man told me, he looked to the east and expected to see Russian hordes cresting the hill just beyond the outskirts of his defenseless town. Then he pointed his finger at the window. We both looked out warily into the night.

There is a special mix of vindictiveness, paranoia, and persecution complex that can bubble to the surface in countries that have been betrayed too often. The opening line to the Polish National Anthem—“Poland has not yet perished”—gives you a good impression of the national disposition. Many Poles, even twenty years after the fall of Communism, live in a state of fatalistic, half-amused anticipation, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Historically, it’s been the Russians who come to administer the boot. This happened, for instance and notoriously, in the January uprising of 1863, when Poles started a rebellion against forced conscription into the Imperial Russian Army. The rebellion ended, as many did, in misery and mass executions. And don’t even get a Pole started about the partitions of the late eighteenth century, in which Russia, Prussia, and Austria carved Poland up into so many pieces that there was no independent state left.

Tadeusz Konwicki, who died last month, wrote fiction that is steeped in this history, in these agonies and conundrums. His great novel “The Polish Complex” begins like this: “I was standing in line in front of a state-owned liquor store. I was twenty-third in line.” The book was written in the late nineteen-seventies, in a Poland behind the Iron Curtain and two decades removed from the brave, foolish, and short-lived Poznan Uprising against Soviet domination, in 1956. The entire novel takes place in line on Christmas Eve. Standing in that line, waiting to buy goods that never arrive, is Konwicki himself. Just behind him is a Polish man who has been waiting for an opportunity to kill Konwicki since the Second World War. “I owe you a bullet,” the man says to Konwicki. “A slug in the back of the head.” “I know,” responds Konwicki. “I betrayed the old faith for the new one. Then the new one for the old. But I never wanted to betray anything or anybody.”

The end of the Second World War replayed the ongoing tragedy of Polish independence—or, rather, the lack thereof: having painfully thrown off the yoke of Nazi occupation, Poles watched as the Soviets marched in to fill the power vacuum and set up shop. Konwicki himself was a party to these events. As a young man, he’d joined the Home Army and was involved in the double-jeopardy game of armed resistance both to the Wehrmacht and the R.K.K.A. (Red Army). Konwicki was a soldier fighting in the forests around his home town of Wilno (now Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania). Somehow, he survived. He moved to Warsaw and began a career as a writer within the indirectly Moscow-directed new Poland of the Cold War era.

And that is why the man in line outside the state-owned liquor store in “The Polish Complex” wants to kill Konwicki: he sees him as a traitor to the true cause of absolute freedom for Poland. He sees Konwicki’s writing as veiled excuses for Konwicki’s “collaboration” in a compromised Poland that was unable to throw off Russian domination in the aftermath of the Second World War. The man in line is, you guessed it, Konwicki’s own conscience, which vexes him day and night.

Konwicki and his conscience step away from the line to drink vodka and talk about the bad old times. On several occasions, Konwicki falls into a swoon, from drink and a bad heart, and dreams about failed uprisings from Poland’s past, or about amorous adventures with the bored young woman sitting behind the desk at the store. Always, he awakens surrounded by his countrymen, freezing cold, waiting in line to buy something for Christmas. Finally, at the end of the novel . . . well, I won’t spoil it.

Perhaps the most moving aspect of “The Polish Complex” is the degree to which Konwicki struggles not to have to struggle with the heavy burden of Polish history. Konwicki didn’t want to be faced with the daily moral dilemmas that confront a person who lives in a country ruled by a rotten regime. Who does? He realizes that an obsession with historical resentments is poisonous and corrosive to the soul. “How did it happen?” Konwicki asks himself,

that I am the author of Polish books, good or bad, but Polish? Why did I accept the role which I had renounced forever? Who turned me, a European, no, a citizen of the world, an Esperantist, a cosmopolitan, an agent of universalism, who turned me, as in some wicked fairytale, into a stubborn, ignorant, furious Pole?

Konwicki has no answer to these questions. The novel simply breaks here and begins a new section in which Konwicki and his friends are back in line, waiting endlessly for a shipment of goods and knowing that word of the shipment is probably just a rumor.

Soon enough, “The Polish Complex” returns to its central questions: What is it to be alive? Worse, what is it to be alive and Polish? Worse yet, what is it to be alive and a Polish writer? The book’s creeping realization is that history can’t be wished away. The memories, the moral dilemmas, do not disappear. The wounds of the 20th century were too many and too powerful, and Konwicki was never able to turn his back on those traumas. Instead, he returned to the scarring events of his past again and again in his writings (and in the movies he wrote and directed, including “The Last Day of Summer” and “Salto”). This was his modest act of literary heroism.

Konwicki never spared himself. He says in “The Polish Complex” that he was “molded from three different clays. And then fired in the temperature inferno of three elements. The clays were Polish, Lithuanian, and Belorussian, and the elements were Polish, Russianness, and Judaism, or, more precisely, Jewishness.” He used his own battered psyche as a testing ground for the potential survival of the Polish soul.

Somewhere in the middle of “The Polish Complex,” Konwicki’s conscience directs at him the following lines:

I am your judge. I’ve read everything you ever dished up. I have a bookshelf where I keep you under lock and key, because your work is such a fleeting thing. It hangs on the thread of the moment. You are a temporary writer. Your books will die with you.

This, no doubt, is what Konwicki often felt about himself as a writer. But in writing those thoughts down so honestly he overcame them. Tadeusz Konwicki, a Polish writer, died last month. But his books did not die with him.