Highcastle: A Remembrance (Polish: Wysoki Zamek) is a coming-of-age autobiographical novel by Polish science fiction writer Stanisław Lem.[1] Written in 1965, it was first published in 1966 by Wydawnictwo MON.
It is a memoir of Lem's childhood and youth years spent in the interwar Lwów (then a Polish city, present-day Lviv in Ukraine), with a good deal of philosophical musing on memory, imagination, and the impact of earlier years on later life.[1] The novel title is a reference to the ruins of Lviv High Castle.[1]
Lem (as well as many critics) stated that the work is not a novel, in the sense that it does not have any fictional elements.[2]
It was translated into English by Michael Kandel in 1995. In 2000, MIT Press reprinted it on the occasion of the upcoming 100th anniversary of the writer's birth in 1921.[3] [4]
It was also translated into Russian (1969), Bulgarian (1985) and Ukrainian (2002).[5]