Your first and last impression of Poland, as of all Eastern Europe, is of a shifting but utterly pervasive sense of trouble. It is as though history had been too much for the place. The continual invasions, divisions, partitions, and rape from the East and the West seem to have worn down the national identity and at the same time to have exacerbated it. It is as though the country had survived only by an act of will and the accident of a separate language, almost like a hand-down from the tribal system. Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and the rest are all fiercely, clannishly separate and yet constantly absorbed, disappearing into the belly of one vast Empire or another: Russian, German, Hapsburg, Ottoman. It is no wonder that their precarious, passionate national self-awareness began to reassert itself in its modern form at the height of the Romantic movement.

Nationalism in Poland is a peculiarly literary affair; at times it seems a function or by-product of the Romantic style. It has about it, that is, a continual dramatic urgency, involvement, and excessiveness. During the Nazi occupation, for example, when not only was the cultural life wrenched to a complete halt but the nation itself seemed in danger of being made extinct, the presses of the underground resistance continued to print, along with the political leaflets and the fighting handbills, poems and short stories, often of considerable subtlety. In the Polish context they seemed as rousing as direct propaganda.

Not that there was anything particularly new in that situation. Literature had been central to the political life of the country at least for the one-hundred-and-fifty years or so of the Partition, when the country was split up between Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Then the three forced divisions held together only by the fact that they all used the same language. So literature took on a special function: it became the only public means of preserving the country's identity, its national life, culture, and integrity. Henryk Krzeczowski, a critic and translator, put it this way:

It was a literature with a special aim of educating people, a literature which had to fulfill all the tasks which are normally fulfilled by the State. It was patriotic, pedagogic, moralistic. Its scope was much wider than the scope of literature of normal countries with a normal historical development.

So the Polish writer, whether he wanted it or not, found himself forced into a kind of extreme Leavisite position: the very act of writing made him responsible for the spiritual and political health of his country. But it was a Leavisite position with a difference, as Z. Najder, another literary critic, explains:

Talking about Polish literature and Polish culture in general, one has constantly to repeat that it is almost devoid of the so-called bourgeois element. It is traditionally a gentry culture. The origins of this phenomenon, are very, very complex but most important is that the Polish intelligentsia originated mainly in the uprooted gentlemen who were losing their privileges and property and coming to the towns in the second half of the nineteenth century. They were the core of the future Polish intelligentsia. When you talk about culture and cultural values in Poland, these values are always connected with the typical gentry code of behavior, a code of honor, in which the most important notions are those of duty, of honor, of loyalty to your nation, loyalty to your group. Much less important, sometimes virtually non-existent, are the notions of maintaining an economic standard, of preserving life for the sake of preserving life itself.

If this is a peculiarly difficult cultural idea for an Englishman—or any Westerner—to understand, it is less because the principles are foreign than because they don't usually impinge on literature. In England, the gentry values of the squirearchy were, I suppose, taken over in the 19th century by the Public Schools, where they became the basic morality for generations of Empire builders. Now, however admirable this training may or may not have been, it never had much significant influence on serious creative work. But in Poland these values of national duty, responsibility, and self-sacrifice were not only behind the fantastic heroism, which became almost a national habit; they were also the basis of some of the best literature. It is as though the finest flower of the Great Tradition were Rudyard Kipling.

Granted this brand of nostalgic conservatism is only one force at work in Polish cultural life. Since the country regained its independence in 1919, literary chauvinism has been offset by equally vigorous irritation, a desire to have done with local issues and take part once again in the larger European cultural explosion. Hence the fetish of nation is, in times of relative political ease, balanced by a fetish of experiment. The Poles pride themselves on being the Eastern outpost of Western Europe, prime defenders of the avant-garde, “the French of the East.” Yet however far out the fashions, Polish artists have never quite shed the inheritance of a time when, in Naider's words, “All political discussions happened in novels and poems. There were no parties, but there were writers.”

_____________

That is more or less their position now, as it is also the position of writers in Russia and the rest of Eastern Europe. Under any one-party system which is not totally repressive, the arts become the most efficient way of airing protest and exposing abuses which are not officially recognized. Witness, for example, the work of Solzhenitsyn and Yevtushenko, which is often more interesting to the Kremlinologist than to the literary critic. In Poland, of course, the arts are by no means the only safety valve. It is a nation of chronic grumblers. They seem to regard Russian dogmatism and acquiescence as just another proof of the Russian lack of humor, imagination, and fire; in contrast, the endless complaining of the Poles is a source of national pride.

But the marriage of the arts and politics in Poland goes beyond any accident of the present political setup or any Marxist theory of social awareness. It is a habit of mind which neither writers nor audience can shed, however politically indifferent, irresponsible, apathetic, or plain ignorant they feel themselves to be. Just as in the West anyone will give you a quick, psychoanalytic breakdown of anything, so in Poland it is impossible to write even about the birds and the bees without someone reading into it a political metaphor or allusion. Polish art runs instinctively to allegory. It is all, whatever its appearance, written in what they call “Aesopian language,” in which each detail can always be translated into some other terms—something relevant to the immediate Polish situation. Hence when a scholar like Jan Kott writes about Shakespeare's Histories, in the West it is hailed as a revolution in Shakespearean criticism, while in Poland it is treated as political comment—as though there were an implied erratum: “For ‘Tudor’ read ‘Polish’ throughout.”

Or consider a film like Roman Polanski's Knife in the Water. On this side of the Iron Curtain it was regarded as a masterpiece of hip alienation, the final cool analysis of the failure of any member of the classic Oedipal triangle—successful husband, young wife, younger interloper—to break through his own self-enclosing indifference. With less formal chastity and more invention, Godard might have directed it; with more formality still and no humor at all, Antonioni. But in Poland it was interpreted as a parable of the generations: the husband a successful party man, worldly, accommodating, faintly corrupt, versus the disengaged, cynical, footloose, be-jeaned youth, representative of a political generation which had not been in the war; both competing for the favors of the young wife—the new, postwar Poland?—who swayed poignantly between them.

_____________

This perennial Polish game of Hunt-the-Symbol may at times be all very intriguing, but it is equally often irritating and sometimes debilitating. For it means that the arts flourish only in a context of continual double-take, their energies, like their statements, invariably qualified and mostly undercut by a kind of nagging sophistication. No doubt this is a necessary antidote to the provincialism and narrowness of official Soviet art; sophistication becomes a token of independence. But it can often be cultivated with an intensity which seems almost naïve. Avoiding the hack positions of the party, they parody a Western chic which is, in the context, equally meaningless. Their endlessly talkative energy gets frittered away in deviousness.

But all these intricacies and allegories are valuable for one thing: they are a kind of Polish Declaration of Independence. Politics may be inescapable—however nominally escapist the art may seem—but the dogmas are never taken seriously, for the simple reason that they are never accepted single-mindedly. Despite their patriotic idealism and their intense awareness of the political reverberations of their every word, the Poles remain curiously resistant to ideology. Outside official circles you find socialism without Marxism, or Marxism only as a starting point for systems more idiosyncratic, undogmatic, and usually existential. When I remarked on this to a philosopher in Warsaw, he replied, “Socialism in Poland is a thing, a fact like bread and stones and houses. You cannot make an ideology, a philosophy out of a thing.” So in place of any clear system of beliefs, the Poles, who are the least easily led of all Eastern European nations, derive from the prevailing dogma a certain sense of resistance, a limiting edge on which to test their personal interpretation of things.

Marxism as theory, allegory as nervous tic, and an overdeveloped political self-awareness—all guarantee that the sense of trouble which dominates Polish intellectual life should define itself steadily in terms of objective, and usually intrusive, social realities. This is not quite such an obvious process as it sounds. For the whole movement of avant-garde Western art during the last half-century has been one of a steady internal migration. Even our most politically minded writers seem to recreate society in terms of their own selves, from the outside in, as though their environment were a wide-screen projection of their inner tensions. In Poland, despite its Western bias in artistic styles and preoccupations, precisely the reverse happens: the artists recreate themselves in terms of the public world; social facts become the equivalent of psychic phenomena, with the same inwardly reverberating power and inescapability. If there is a radical difference between the arts on either side of the Iron Curtain it is less in the kinds of pressure which impel the artists than in the direction in which that pressure forces them.

_____________

For the casual visitor the first glimmerings of the Polish sense of trouble come from the mere look of the place: the hopeless, deep-rooted drabness of everything. In many ways, Warsaw is one of the liveliest capitals in Europe: theaters, cinemas, and art galleries teem with dissidence and life; the jazz is excellent, the dancing modish, the young people uninhibited, quarrelsome, bloody-minded; the university seethes with arguments, the artists’ cafés with gossip. Yet if this talkative city of beautiful girls is spiritually like Paris in the 20's, physically it is like nothing so much as London in 1945. Drabness is all: in the food, the clothes, the discomforts. There are still wastelands of cleared devastation, rebuilding is slow and shoddy, there are few cars on the streets, fighters instead of airliners fly overhead, the shops are poorly stocked, the restaurants awful, and life generally hard (this, anyway, was my impression in 1961 and ‘62).

Part of this shoddiness, no doubt, is due to the strain of converting what had been before the war a more or less 18th-century society into a modern industrial economy. But a greater part still is a survival of the utter devastation of the Nazi occupation. There is no need to set out here the details of the total brutality of those five years.¹ The barest recital of the facts will do: one person in five—six million out of the thirty million population—was killed; dozens of villages were completely destroyed and their inhabitants massacred, in the style of Lidice and Oradour; Warsaw itself was razed and emptied of its million inhabitants, the Nazis boasting that they would make it into “a second Carthage”; in 1940 the Governor General Hans Frank initiated “Operation AB” which aimed at the total elimination of the country's intelligentsia; most of the Nazi concentration and extermination camps were situated in Poland; and so on. Perhaps the clearest distinction between the savagery of the Nazi rule in Poland and that in other occupied countries was made by Frank himself when, in a press interview in February 1940, he boasted about the difference between his system and that which obtained in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia:

In Prague, for instance—he said—large red posters were put up announcing that 7 Czechs had been shot today. Whereupon I said to myself: If I wanted to have a poster put up for every 7 Poles who were shot, the forests of Poland would not suffice for producing the paper for such posters. Yes, we had to act harshly.²

So if Poland still seems under the shadow of war twenty years after its end, this is not just because the party has kept the wounds open for its own anti-German ends, nor is it because Poland, being scarcely industrialized before 1939, found the devastation too much for it economically.³ The reason lies, instead, in the quality and universal scope of the outrage. A young poet, Leszek Elektorowicz, remarked to me without a trace of drama or self-pity:

I think almost every family in Poland was touched by these misfortunes. For instance, my father was killed in the concentration camp in Grossrosen, my mother was in Ravensbrück and came back after 1945. And I think my position was the same as every young person in Poland.

What, in short, occurred in Poland between 1939 and 1945 has survived and pervades the country still as a kind of collective trauma. It is as though some psychic change had taken place in the nation itself, a curious deadening in some areas, hardening and avoidance in others. If the return to health after the crack-up has been tentative, painful, and far slower than anyone could ever have believed, it has also left a shadowy area of shock, disbelief, and alteration.

The truth is that the Nazi crimes were on such a scale and at such a remove from sanity that something rather odd occurred: even the people who directly suffered from them were unable, when it was all over, quite to believe what had happened. Those freed from the concentration camps came, after a while, to disbelieve even their own agony; in the context of relative normality it all began to seem a hallucination. So the Poles have continually to remind themselves of the appalling, almost grotesque realities.

Since there are obvious political ends to be served by this, there is even a Department of Martyrology devoted specifically to the job. Auschwitz, for example, has been transformed, with great tact, into a museum. On Sundays excursion buses full of workers, tourists, and their children, file through the blocks and the crematorium, pass the cells and reconstructed dormitories; they peer through plate glass at mountains of hair, suitcases, shoes, artificial limbs, spectacles, babies’ clothes, children's toys. They shuffle and stare and whisper and, by assuring themselves that the brute facts do exist, they are taught a violent lesson in politics.

But the facts themselves represent an experience, or a violation of experience, which is be-yond artistic expression. Only Tadeusz Borowski managed to cope directly with the concentration camps and yet make artistic sense of them. And his method was that of total moral nihilism. Although he is said to have behaved with considerable heroism in Auschwitz he seemed able to accept his experience there only by a form of artistic self-destruction. He, the narrator, is presented as a bastard among bastards, greedy, ruthless, unprincipled, and defended against the suffering around him by a hard shell of anger and contempt. Borowski's almost toneless recording of the facts manages to imply, by its very blankness and acceptance, a level of horror which a more sensational method could not begin to touch. I have written in another essay that “around Borowski's stories there is a kind of moral silence, like the pause which follows a scream.”⁴ It is precisely that silence, shock, and lingering awareness of what was recently intolerable that concerns the most serious and imaginatively ambitious artists in Poland now.

_____________

Over the last few years in the West, particularly in America, the arts have become more and more concerned with breakdown. Poets like Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Ann Sexton, painters like the abstract expressionists, are attempting to give coherent artistic form to great reservoirs of feeling—destructive, manic, paranoid—which are shut off from more or less normal life and more or less traditional art forms but are released in breakdown, or even in psychoanalysis. The Poles, in contrast, are approaching the same problem from the opposite direction. There the psychic explosion took place within the nation itself. It was a factual breakdown, deliberately induced by another nation, historically documented, politically explicable and, for a large part, ethnically motivated. But the violence and horror of the experience is no less extreme for being objectively there, outside. The artists have to come to terms with it, contain it, and in some degree regulate their own understanding of ordinary life by it.

So there is, I think, in the best Polish art, the same inwardness and sense of complexity, the same tanglement, unease, and probing individuality as you find in the best modern Western art. But with one major difference: it is directed outward. Zbigniew Herbert who is, in my opinion, one of the most talented poets in Europe, East or West, summed this up in his poem “Our Fear”:

Our fear
does not wear a night shirt
does not have an owl's eyes
does not lift a casket lid
does not extinguish a candle
does not have a dead man's face either
our fear
is a scrap of paper
found in a pocket
“warn Wojcik
the place on Dluga Street is hot”

our fear
does not rise on the wings of the tempest
does not sit on a church tower
is earthy

it has the shape
of a bundle made in haste
with warm clothes
provisions
and arms

our fear
does not have the face of a dead man
the dead are gentle to us
we carry them on our shoulders
sleep under the same blanket
close their eyes
adjust their lips
pick a dry spot
and bury them

not too deep
not too shallow

The implication of this poem is that madness and disintegration are all on the outside, in war, society, political intrigue. Human beings themselves are oases of ironic sanity and mutual tenderness. This has been Herbert's theme from the start when, at the age of fifteen, he wrote a very beautiful poem about a couple making, love as the bombs fall. And that ultimate existential gesture—as though a kiss could annihilate annihilation—is the clue to all his work: war and the human thing are poised equally and unresolvably. But as he has matured as a writer, that outer frame of social reference has become more insistent, inescapable, and accepted:

Fortinbras's Elegy

Now that we're alone we can talk Prince man
    to man
though you lie on the stairs and see no more
    than a dead ant
nothing but black sun with broken rays
I could never think of your hands without
    smiling
and now when they lie on the stone like fallen
    nests
they are defenseless as before The end is exactly
    this
The hands lie apart The sword lies apart The
    head apart
and the knight's feet in soft slippers

You will have a soldier's funeral without having
    been a soldier
The only ritual I am acquainted with a little
There will be no candles no singing only can-
    non-fuses and bursts
Crepe dragged on the pavement helmets boots
    artillery horses
    drums I know nothing exquisite
those will be my maneuvers before I start to rule
one has to take the city by the neck and shake
    it a bit
Anyway you had to perish Hamlet you were not
    for life
you believed in crystal notions not in human
    clay
Always in spasm asleep you hunted chimeras
wolfishly you crunched the air only to vomit
you knew no human thing you did not know
    even how to breathe

Now you have peace Hamlet you accomplished
    what you had to do
and you have peace The rest is not silence but
    belongs to me
you chose the easier part an elegant thrust
But what is heroic death compared with eternal
      watching
with a cold apple in one's hand on a narrow
      chair
with a view of the ant-hill and the clock's dial

Adieu Prince I have tasks a sewer project
and a decree on prostitutes and beggars
I must also elaborate a better system of prisons
since as you justly said Denmark is a prison
I go to my affairs This night was born
a star named Hamlet We shall never meet
what I will leave will not deserve tragedy
It is not for us to greet each other nor bid
    farewell
                We live on islands
and that water these words what can they do
    What can they do Prince.

The debate between Fortinbras and Hamlet—between the man of action and political sense and the romantic idealist, ineffectual dreamer, and tragic hero—is perhaps the dialectical center of contemporary Polish art. The more Fortinbras seems to be the necessary spokesman for the situation, the more urgent is his own need of Hamlet, and the more poignant his understanding of their utter separateness.

Herbert's steadily detached, ironic, and historically minded style represents, I suppose, a form of classicism. But it is a one-sided classicism, based not on order matching order, a regulated style displaying the regularity of the world, but on a strict and wary attitude to a situation which is at best prone to Romanticism and at worst a violation of all sanity. It is a way of coping coolly with facts which could easily slide out of control; it is also a viable personal alternative to the dogmatic or theoretical answers of orthodox Communist literature. In a way, Herbert's poetry is typical of the whole Polish attitude to their position within the Communist bloc; independent, brilliant, ironic, wary, a bit contemptuous, pained.

¹ There is an excellent short history by two Polish professors of law, based mostly on evidence produced at the Nuremberg trials, Nazi Rule in Poland 1939-1945 by Tadeusz Cyprian and Jerzy Sawicki, Warsaw, 1961. For those with strong stomachs there is also a pictorial record of the occupation and the concentration camps, We Have Not Forgotten, Warsaw, 1960.

² Nazi Rule in Poland 1939-1945, p. 100.

³ The reverse is true of Germany, as Hannah Arendt has pointed out in The Human Condition: “The so-called ‘economic miracle’ of postwar Germany [is] a miracle only if seen in an outdated frame of reference. The German example shows very clearly that under modern conditions the expropriation of people, the destruction of objects, and the devastation of cities will turn out to be a radical stimulant for a process, not of mere recovery, but of quicker and more efficient accumulation of wealth—if only the country is modern enough to respond in terms of the production process. In Germany, outright destruction took the place of the relentless process of depreciation of all worldly things, which is the hallmark of the waste economy in which we now live. The result is almost the same: a booming prosperity which, as postwar Germany illustrates, feeds not on the abundance of material goods or on anything stable and given but on the process of production and consumption itself. Under modern conditions, not destruction but conservation spells ruin because the very durability of conserved objects is the greatest impediment to the turnover process, whose constant gain in speed is the only constancy left wherever it has taken hold.”

⁴ “The Literature of the Holocaust,” COMMENTARY, November 1964. I was trying to analyze in detail the various ways in which the concentration camp experience has been coped with in imaginative terms. My theories are slightly beyond the scope of this essay but very much relevant to it.