 Literary historians believe that the book inspired the 1971 novel "Being There" by Jerzy Kosiński who sparked considerable controversy in the West.Tadeusz Mostowicz, the son of a wealthy Polish lawyer in the age of partitions, was born on 10 August 1898 at his family's village of Okuniewo near Vitebsk in the Russian Empire (now Belarus).After graduating from "gimnazjum" (high school) in Vilna (now Vilnius, Lithuania), then also in the Russian Empire, in 1915 Tadeusz embarked upon law studies at the University of Kiev while the First World War raged on in Central Europe.