Writing in Polish

People sometimes ask me: "Why don't you write in English?" Or-if I'm in France-why not in French? They clearly assume that I'd benefit, that I'd do better using some universal language instead of my provincial Polish. And I agree in principle; it would certainly be easier to write in some more important language (if I could pull it off!). It reminds me of a story about George Bernard Shaw, who supposedly confessed in a letter to Henryk Sienkiewicz that he couldn't understand why the Poles didn't simply switch to Russian. The Irish had, after all, mastered English and were managing beautifully! Really.

Writing in Polish-in the nineteenth century, after the partitions-was an act of patriotism. The Polish language was in grave danger, especially in the Russian sector. Today it's no longer a question. Even if he remembers his city's past-and such remembrance is in fashion these days-a young poet born in Gdansk won't hesitate in choosing which language to use. He only knows one, after all. Only someone like myself, who's lived abroad for years, meets up with the-naive?-question of picking his language.

Writing in Polish also means accepting the complex legacy of Polish history. Someone who writes French with irony, elegance, and a pinch of poetry inherits, willy-nilly, not just Montaigne and Pascal but also Louis XIV, or at least the atmosphere of his court, with its mocking conversations, murderous bons mots, anxious moralists, and revolutionary demagogues. The Polish writer has different genes in his blood and ink: the state's collapse in the eighteenth century, the defeat inflicted by the partitions, the failed uprisings, and the frailty of our country's long, theatrical existence. Since Poland did not exist in a palpable, pragmatic sense, it became a chimera, subject alternately to admiration (Polenlieder in the 1830s, French enthusiasm) and disdain (Bismarck, the German and Russian nationalists). Poland vegetated in the European imagination rather like the charming Tadzio in Mann's Death in Venice-beautiful, elusive, ethereal, and childlike. Or just the opposite-it was a dirty, drunken backwater (see, for example, Goethe's description of his brief visit to Poland, commemorated by a plaque in Krakow's main square) to be vanquished as quickly as possible. Beauty or the beast, nothing in between. Poles still listen mistrustfully, but with great curiosity, to the opinions expressed about them in the West's great cities.

Now we come to another key issue-are the Poles the heroes of World War II, splendid uhlans fighting tanks on horse-back, bold pilots over England, peerless, patient conspirators, fearless soldiers tackling Monte Cassino? Or are they the primitive anti-Semites with low foreheads portrayed as pigs in a well-known American comic book? Beauty or the beast? Gentlemen or swine? And finally: Did they emerge spotless from communism, rebelling, sabotaging the system forced on them by Moscow? That's how they like to see themselves, at any rate. Or did they also submissively collaborate like all the other captive nations? Poles disagree to this day on the nature of the purgatory they've passed through. One well-known historian published a book a while back called The Poles' Great Century. She has in mind precisely the period of political nonexistence, the nineteenth century; and she works from the assumption that the frenetic intellectual activity of the émigrés scattered throughout Europe, poets, thinkers, historians, politicians, more than compensates for our lack of national sovereignty. Can this be true? Readers scour the scores of memoirs recalling the wartime and postwar years, looking not just for individual fates but for an answer to the question: Who are we? And writers share their anxiety-not just the memoirists but also great literary talents. All Witold Gombrowicz's work fairly vibrates with, among other things, this very worry. A  Western European can imagine the abyss of modern Polish history only with difficulty. There is, for example, the moment-captured on film, no doubt, by some well-fed Wehrmacht cameraman-when Warsaw's surviving population marches in a single resigned, irregular, and endless column made up of men, women, children, and the aged, all abandoning their ruined city in the fall of 1944, after the failed uprising. This scene surely has its place in the all-too-rich collection of the past century's most horrific images. A civilian population meekly deserts its razed city, the capital of a European nation: what could be worse? (Only the camps and crematoria, and the horror of an even more hopeless uprising in the same city's Jewish ghetto in 1943.)

This same moment also became, though, a point of reference for an invisible debate initiated by Polish writers just after the war. Obviously they didn't conduct this discussion like professional historians. They didn't debate the issue of blame and responsibility for the Warsaw Uprising; they didn't analyze the military and political situation. But that zero degree of literature (far more painful here than in Roland Barthes's academic essay), the nothingness that Warsaw, and with it all of Poland, had endured, would color the imagination of Polish writers for years to come. Not just color it; this nothingness became one of its chief ingredients. The Polish literary imagination assimilated the abyss.

It goes without saying that the years of Stalinism brought no fundamental improvement. Of course, the terror was less horrific than it had been under Hitler, and a fair number of Poles shared the conviction that rebuilding the country, even under the Communist Party's brutal direction, was a praiseworthy undertaking that couldn't wait for better days. But few were free of deep bitterness. The communist economy's grotesque wastefulness and the ubiquitous secret police were a constant reminder that this enterprise was closer to the theater of the absurd than to rational government policy.

Time's relentless, redemptive frivolity means that the present young generation, well versed in postmodern theory and the pitfalls of the text, has already forgotten that horror. But the radicality of postwar Polish literature owes much to the energetic response to that moment, the moment when Warsaw's population abandoned its devastated city. Today's literary debutants can of course remember nothing, but even for me and my contemporaries, born just after the war, the shattered buildings overgrown with grass were as seductive as the ruins of a Gothic abbey had been for the first generation of Romantics. They concealed both treasures and dangers; they were the natural, cherished landscape of our childhood, our first inspiration.

In the Poland of the last sixty years-in Poland itself, but also in emigration since, as every schoolchild in Krakow knows, Polish literature took shape in Paris, Argentina, California as much as at home-writing was rarely an academic, cerebral, bloodless, marginal occupation. It seldom led to a personal quest for Beauty, to Flaubertian tussles with language, to the scrupulous recording of a single, singular life story. It was more like a blazing, roaring kiln in which-at high temperatures and before the eyes of eager witnesses, inquisitive members of the polis-the vessels of poetry and prose were fired. Writing carried enormous weight, it was a great and serious debate in which existential worries met with problems touching the whole society, the whole polis. At the same time, paradoxically, the participants in this debate-Witold Gombrowicz, Jerzy Stempowski, Czeslaw Milosz, Aleksander Wat, Jozef Czapski, Zbigniew Herbert, Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski, to name just a few titans-rebelled, rejected it. They hungered for the great, universal subjects and ideas, they yearned for metaphysics-but they could achieve these only by laboriously hacking a path through the jungle of questions springing from the social and political terrain. They all wrote wonderfully, needless to say: we're dealing not with a group of ideologues but with great writers, masters of the word.

Polish literature can only be understood against this background. This obviously wasn't the literature of noblemen, as in previous ages, sitting comfortably on their estates or at court, reading Plutarch and Virgil and then, after successfully gathering the fruits of their labors, sitting down to unhurried literary creation. The generation whose maturity coincided with the moment of the great crisis, the great Nothing, was scattered across the globe and fought to survive in circumstances that were unimaginably difficult, both materially and spiritually; they were despised by the leftists, Parisian and otherwise. But they managed to create the basis for a new literary sensibility in Poland They forged a literature that answered history's menace in universal, not provincial, ways. And they touched profound hope while shunning easy consolations. The dilemma of writers from behind the Iron Curtain is well illustrated by a quote from the recently, posthumously published diaries of the writer and composer Zygmunt Mycielski (Diary, 1950-59): "In the West I would doubtlessly have been a ‘dark writer,' someone whose puffings on the tuba of pessimism would have foretold the fall of Europe and the world and preached the absurdity of human progress and our species' evolution. Over here, on the ragheap of economies and ideas, I blow the trumpet of morality and the meaning of existence."

The major role Polish poets play in matters usually consigned to novelists or even philosophers is conspicuous. Polish poets never accepted modernism's ascetic dictates; they refused to retreat to a sanctuary of hermetic metaphors. They chose instead to study the world's ailments with great vigor; and judging by the interest their work inspired, it was a good choice. Students read Milosz's Treatise on Poetry beneath their desktops during Stalinism's worst years. Adam Wazyk's Poem for Grownups, published in 1955, sparked a nationwide discussion and led to the success of the post-Stalinist political thaw. Zbigniew Herbert wrote his poem "The Envoy of Mr. Cogito" in despair; he foresaw no hope of change, no end to despotism. But the poem itself became something of an anthem, recited by the opposition throughout the seventies and eighties. And these poets managed to reach a wider public with their artistic standards intact!

I'm convinced that writing in Polish would be far more difficult today without this generation of titans. Their very greatness and nobility may have created another problem, though. Their literary inheritors have been unable to play out the customary Oedipal comedy, the comic war of generations, the ritual burning of the father's portrait. How do you rebel against truth's martyrs, the magnificent, gifted witnesses to their age? There's yet another problem. That generation wrote in some sense "from ideas," quarreling and contending with ideology, desperately defending endangered humanity. It was thus forced to focus on the intellectual articulation of reality and ignored the potentially endless number of human situations created not by hostile outside forces, but by the innate, implacable mutability of the world itself. And there's a third problem. Its furious polemics with recent history meant that Polish literature couldn't do justice to something we might call the "pure," "ahistorical" imagination. It's true that some writers of that generation, Aleksander Wat or Czeslaw Milosz, recognized this difficulty and spoke more than once of poetry's need to strive for the ontological strata of being, or, more simply put, the now-unfashionable (and essential) question of religion.

Writing in Polish: ever-changing threats confront anyone who risks it. The celebrated "normalcy," so difficult to define, that Eastern Europe's inhabitants had longed for, finally prevailed in literature as well as life. Frivolity is now permitted; you may now write easily, superficially, and rather gracefully about yourself and others (most often yourself). The great, rather haphazard victory of democracy over totalitarianism may also appear to be the triumph of banality over lies: lies are the heart of totalitarianism, while democracy shields no one from vulgarity.

Although they may not realize it, Polish writers of the middle and younger generation still walk beneath the umbrella raised for them by the titans. In literature, though, this umbrella not only fends off rain; it also screens the starry sky. It's not clear how long such protection will suffice. Writing in Polish-but does it finally matter what language we write in? Can't any language, properly used, open the road to poetry, the world? The writer ordinarily sits alone with a blank piece of paper or a pale computer screen staring boldly and intently back at him. He's alone although he doesn't write for himself, but for others. Inspired and impeded by tradition, that great tumult of dead voices, he struggles to see into the future, which is always mute. The thoughts he hopes to express seem at times not to be part of any language; they roar within him like another element, alongside air, water, and fire.

He's alone; he voices joy or sorrow. His quest's witnesses are neither passport offices nor university grammarians, but sun and death, two forces, as La Rochefoucauld said, we can't look in the face.

Adam Zagajewski: A Defense of  Ardor