Stanisław Jerzy Lec (; 6 March 1909 – 7 May 1966), born Baron Stanisław Jerzy de Tusch-Letz, was a Polish aphorist and poet. Often mentioned among the greatest writers of post-war Poland, he was one of the most influential aphorists of the 20th century, known for lyric poetry and skeptical philosophical-moral aphorisms, often with a political subtext. Biography Son of the Baron Benon de Tusch-Letz and Adela Safrin, he was born on 6 March 1909 in Lwów (then Lemberg, Austro-Hungarian Empire, now Lviv) to a Jewish nobilitated family. The family moved to Vienna at the onset of First World War, and Lec received his early education there. After the war the family returned to Lwów in the Second Polish Republic. Lec attended the Lemberg Evangelical School. In 1927 he matriculated at Lwów's Jan Kazimierz University in Polish language and law. His literary debut was in 1929. Much of his early work was lyric poetry appearing in left-wing and communist magazines. He collaborated with the communist “Dziennik Popularny" between 1933 and 1936. In 1935 he co-founded the satirical magazine Szpilki (Pins). A "literary cabaret" he founded in Lwów in collaboration with Leon Pasternak in 1936 was closed by the authorities after several performances. Nor did his law-abiding image improve after he took part in the Convention of Culture Workers, a radical congress initiated by the international communist movement Popular Front in the same year. Later that year he spent a few months in Romania, afraid that his activism could lead to his arrest in Poland. He spent the next two years in Warsaw, where he was involved with a number of other left-leaning publications. Following the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, Lec fled Warsaw, returning to his hometown, Lwów. Lec spent the years 19391941 there, while the city along with the rest of Polish Eastern Borderlands was occupied by the Soviet Union after the Soviet invasion of Poland on 17 September 1939. While in the Soviet Union, Lec joined in the literary life under the auspices of Ukrainian SSR authorities. He contributed to the magazine “New Horizons”. His poems, satires, articles, and translations from Russian were published in ”Krasnoe Znamya” magazine. In 1940 he joined the Union of Soviet Writers of Ukraine and became a member of the editorial board of “The Literary Almanac” in Lwów. Through this and similar activities he became one of the most prolific