Address by Gregory Claeys — USSE Conference, Valencia, July 2025
It is indeed a great pleasure, but one interwoven with deep sadness, to present the Utopian Studies Lifetime Achievement Award for 2025 to the late Professor Dr Artur Blaim, who died on April 20 this year. Artur was a longstanding member of the Society and was well known, indeed a close personal friend, to many of us.
Born in 1950, Artur received his PhD in 1979 and was active in our field for more than forty years. A Fellow of the Academy of Europe, and the author of some ten monographs in utopian studies and of countless articles, he became an outstanding figure in the field. He was also extremely active in promoting and editing the work of others, and bringing many new authors into the fold. He accordingly guided and inspired a generation of utopian scholarship in Poland. Artur’s long-time specialty was Robinson Crusoe – I have often wondered if he kept a goat-skin umbrella secreted for special occasions. But he also wrote at length on the wider eighteenth century, on Robinsonades, on Thomas More, and on utopian and dystopian theory.
Most recently he took up the leadership of the Centre for Utopian Studies at the University of Gdansk, a city which then awarded him an esteemed civic commendation. He was also honoured in 2021 with a festschrift entitled Opalescent Worlds.
We remember him as a stalwart friend of the Society, who hosted our meetings on several occasions and who always brought his erudition and enthusiasm to our gatherings over many years. We will greatly miss his irrepressible warmth and companionship, his ready wit and penetrating intelligence, his enduring tact and diplomacy, and his critical love of our common subject. “When I think of him, I smile”, wrote one colleague. We have lost a master in our field. Thank you, dear Artur, belatedly, for all your efforts on behalf of the Society, and for being such a fine human being!
There will be an Artur Blaim memorial lecture at our next meeting in Bucharest in July 2026, to be delivered by Justyna Galant.
This award is being accepted by Artur’s wife, Prof. Ludmilla Gruszewska-Blaim, for whose presence here I am also very grateful.