NONFICTION - Jan. 7, 1996

HIGHCASTLE: A Remembrance by Stanislaw Lem, translated from the Polish by Michael Kandel (Harcourt Brace: $22; 146 pp). When Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem was a student in Lvov between the world wars, a canceled class meant an enchanted hour of “legal idleness” at Highcastle, a nearby ruin on a hill that offered a splendid view of the city. This brief, unconventional memoir is like one of those interludes. Disaster is coming--”killed by the Germans” is Lem’s laconic epitaph for many of his schoolmates; Lvov will be swallowed by the Soviet Union--but he sticks as much as possible to the perceptions of the child he was. A plump, imaginative boy with a penchant for destroying his toys, Lem was fascinated by his doctor father’s anatomy books, French pornography, organ grinders, halvah stands, the workings of machinery and the eternal war between educators and kids. He “documented” a vast, imaginary bureaucracy--an effort that prefigured his fiction, including the “Pirx the Pilot” stories, “Microworlds” and “The Futurological Congress.”