The rough equivalent of the “clerk” as creator of symbolic language and learned interpreter of reality is the cultural intellectual, restricting himself in collective life to the defence of autonomous values of literature
78 M. Wyka, Szkice z epoki powinności, Kraków 1992, p. 86. Magnus J. Kryński and Robert A. Maguire also wrote on the Różewicz formula of “involvement”, noting that even though Różewicz is convinced that the poet should get involved in current affairs, he suspects that his voice might not be heard, being thus unable to effect any changes in the world. Viewed from such a perspective, the poet’s role is much like that of a tape recorder, hardly capable of recording the flow of life. Cf. M.J. Kryński, R.A. Maguire, The Poetics of Tadeusz Różewicz, New York 1971 (qtd in: M. Or. [M. Orski], Poetics of Różewicz, “Odra” 1973, no. 6, p. 110.
79 I do not juxtapose modern consciousness against Romanticism as such, agreeing with Agata Bielik-Robson that Romanticism combines “emotions, political passions and all sorts of strong affections with typically modern rational persuasion”, while modernist revisions of Romanti-cism – S. Brzozowski’s, for example – discover in it sources of the modern condition of the individual. Here I would see the connection between Różewicz’s man-as-subject, experiencing the disintegration of the world’s image and the resultant need for a new totality, and Romantic identity. In the sense proposed by Bielik-Robson, Romantic identity is the identity of “lack”
(a disintegration of spiritual totality and of life’s purpose), which – once acknowledged – be-comes a drive towards its compensation with a holistic vision of man’s essence, going beyond the Enlightenment limits of the rational and secular worldview. Although, the philosopher ar-gues, the Romantic concept of human nature does not allow for a philosophically credible description of the human condition, it has a pragmatic value, enabling humans to “strengthen their ever fragile and uncertain identity.” A. Bielik-Robson, Romantyzm, niedokończony projekt.
Eseje, Kraków 2008, pp. 6–7, 24–34 and 85. The links of Romantic attitudes to modernity and radical Enlightenment is discussed by Bielik-Robson in her study Inna nowoczesność. Pytania o współczesną formułę duchowości, Kraków 2000, p. 296 and passim.
Between Romanticism and Modern Consciousness | 61
or philosophy. The political intellectual, or the “time server”, in turn, consciously yields to ideological passions, serving particular vested inter-ests, and group or national goals.80 It does not follow that intellectuals cannot go into politics or discuss public morality, or that, while doing that, they have to give up their autonomy and creative pursuits. As Pierre Bourdieu argues, the modern “intellectual was born transcending that opposition and as a result of it”.81 Writers and scholars alike
confirmed their being for the first time the moment when, because of the Dreyfus affair, they intervened in political life as writers and scholars, that is basing on their particular authority grounded in their belonging to a relatively autonomous world of art, science, and litera-ture as well as on all the values related to that autonomy – disinterest-edness, competence, etc.82
Szacki claims that
Culture’s total isolation from politics is inconceivable in the modern world […] the cultural intellectual enters politics fully aware that by doing so he changes his social role […] he feels responsible for his area of expertise, being concerned with other fields only if they have direct consequences for the realm of cultural values.83
The intellectual foregoes his calling, the sociologist adds, when, apart from creating pure ideas, he supports a “material force” that
instrumen-80 See J. Szacki, op. cit.
81 P. Bourdieu, Reguły sztuki. Geneza i struktura pola literackiego, trans. A. Zawadzki, Kraków 2001, p. 508.
82 Ibid., p. 508.
83 J. Szacki, op. cit., pp. 388–389.
62 | The adventures of an ideologist
tally exploits them in public life. One can also imagine an intellectual siding with a social group that, instead of implementing its own ideology, combats somebody else’s. Any of the above attitudes, however, make the intellectual more of a “time server”, even if he still pursues his scholarly or artistic vocation. That is, for example, how Bolesław Drobner, a member of the Polish Socialist Party and the first mayor of post-war Wrocław, perceived “ideologists”, using the term to describe the early 20th-century leftist Polish intelligentsia engaged in the struggle for national independ-ence and social justice.84
The identity and biography of the Polish ideologist, at least in some periods of the past two centuries, did not always match the ideal of the cultural intellectual, being closer instead to the ethos of the socially in-volved intelligentsia. The “clerical” model in a country occupied by foreign powers or ruled by authoritarian regimes, totally or partly subjugated and threatened by civilizational stagnation (marginalization), did not meet the requirements resulting from the social and civic obligations of a “thinking man”. As a rule, the Polish intellectual had to protect both his independ-ent thought and the most important collective good – the homeland and national cultural heritage. He had to combine, sometimes even identify, his own biography with the history of the collective, consciously carrying out his own tasks in the latter’s name.85 The necessity of such identification was symbolically expressed in the national “Romantic heroism – that wonder-ful dream of the collective dreaming about itself”.86
84 B. Drobner, Wspominki…, Kraków 1965, p. 23 and passim.
85 Alasdair MacIntyre distinguishes between two types of link between patriotism and person-al identity: (1) patriotism as the individuperson-al’s attitude to the collective, in which the meaning of one’s biography emerges from the history of one’s community; (2) patriotism as a moral value acknowledged in biographical narratives. See A. MacIntyre, Dziedzictwo cnoty, trans.
A. Chmielewski, Warszawa 1996.
86 M. Janion, “Czy będziesz wiedział, co przeżyłeś”, Warszawa 1996, p. 15. Janion writes: “Gener-ally speaking, over the past two hundred years – beginning with the post-partition era and
Between Romanticism and Modern Consciousness | 63
The nation apprehends itself and finds its own way through the ac-tions of its heroes, the condition for and the measure of the indi-vidual’s greatness being his connection with the feelings, dreams, and aspirations of the community, with the “people’s thought”, with the nation’s consciousness and memory. The Romantic Self is rooted in the community’s historical existence. The passage of existential time merges in it with the passage of historical time.87
The “Romantic system” of the 19th century was a catalyst for the con-cept of the intelligentsia, also understood as a peculiar type of collective identity. The term was used already in the 1840s by the messianic philos-opher Karol Libelt.88 This type of identity was grounded in the Romantic mythology of leadership, of historical mission and service to the nation, one that combined intellectual authority with avant-garde, progressivist aspirations and classless social solidarity.89 That is why the background for the “adventures of a thinking man” – to use the title of a popular novel by Maria Dąbrowska – was that of ideological-political history af-fecting also the history of national identity (ideology).90 Modern,
bour-ending with Martial Law and the period that followed – there was actually one dominant type of culture in Poland which I call symbolic-romantic. It was primarily Romanticism – as an all-encompassing style – an idea of culture and its praxis – that built national identity and defended the symbols of that identity.” Ibid., p. 9.
87 M. Janion, M. Żmigrodzka, Romantyzm i historia, Gdańsk 2001, p. 17.
88 See Społeczeństwo bez mózgu i sumienia, op. cit.
89 Szacki notices in this mythology “the myth of the avant-garde that, thanks to its education, is capbable of recognizing collective needs and shows its compatriots the adequate course of action;
the myth of [social] service, through which the intelligentsia, by giving all its energy to the people, redeems – to the point of losing its cultural identity – its guilt of affiliation with privileged groups, and the myth of the [neutral] arbiter whose social role is to stay maximally independent and give objective evaluation of all the social forces currently at play”. J. Szacki, op. cit., p. 374. A similar definition of the Polish intelligentsia’s internal, post-Romantic mythology is offered by Janaszek-Ivaničková, who calls it “the intelligentsia ideology”. H. Janaszek-Janaszek-Ivaničková, op. cit., p. 144.
90 Following Stanisław Ossowski, I define the modern nation and its attendant ideological iden-tity (the individual’s identification with national ideology) through national ideology. For
Os-64 | The adventures of an ideologist
geois, individualist values that could have contributed to a change of that identity, for example in the liberal direction, were confronted in the pub-lic space with the principles of post-partition patriotism. As a rule, the post-aristocratic intelligentsia of Eastern Europe defined itself as a polar opposite of the bourgeoisie.91 Its ethical and patriotic code included the republican heritage of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as well as the Romantic philosophy of nation, civic customs of the landed gentry, and the tradition of armed struggle for independence. There was also room in that code for social and positivist ideas, or even for pragmatic ap-peasement policies towards the partitioning powers as long as they were justifiable by national interests.92 Andrzej Walicki rightly argues that, in
sowski a nation is “an ideological group” or a “national-ideology community”. Members of the modern nation “are not bound together by shared personal experience but by a conviction that they are all attached in the same way to certain values shared by the whole group […] which generates among them certain shared aspirations and shared emotional attitudes”. S. Ossowski, O ojczyźnie i narodzie, Warszawa 1984, pp. 11, 34, 50, 62–63. Joanna Kurczewska, in turn, holds that modern national experience emerges when “common ethnocentric experience” and
“being in national culture” are codified in a system of national ideology. J. Kurczewska, Nowoc-zesne doświadczenie narodowe (z różnorodnością teraźniejszości w tle), in: eds R. Nycz, A. Zeidler-Janiszewska, Nowoczesność jako doświadczenie, Kraków 2006, p. 227 and passim. This reasoning results from harmonizing constructivist thought, according to which nations are ideological constructs, with the essentialist stance, which holds that nations are natural phenomena. The re-alistic position, adopted in this book, is based on the assumption that nations are historical con-structs – emerging, however, as a result of ideological codification of cultural-ethnic traditions and natural social bonds. See A. Mencwel, Rodzinna Europa po raz pierwszy, op. cit., pp. 17–19.
91 See Społeczeństwo bez mózgu i sumienia, op. cit., p. 59.
92 As Andrzej Walicki tells us, “That elite remained faithful to aristocratic values such as honour, valour in open combat (as a rule not accompanied by civic courage), liberty understood as par-ticipation in collective sovereignty, not as protection of the individual’s rights to carry out his/
her own individual life plans; [that elite] never internalized any legal culture, especially when it comes to respect for private rights. […] Democratic ideologies of the Polish intelligentsia were consistent with the aristocratic ethos in their emphasis on disinterestedness, dedication and heroism; even ‘organic work’, to be considered socially acceptable in those days, had to resemble as much as possible disinterested volunteer work performed in the name of patriotic duty.”
A. Walicki, Trzy patriotyzmy. Trzy tradycje polskiego patriotyzmu i ich znaczenie współczesne, War-szawa 1991, p. 32.
Between Romanticism and Modern Consciousness | 65
the long run, this upset the balance between social respect for democratic freedom, guaranteeing collective political rights to citizens, and recogni-tion of modern freedom, i.e. both private and liberal, which guarantees cultural, social, and economic rights to the individual, including the opportunity for spiritual self-development.93 The imbalance described by Walicki favoured the collectivist idea of identity which proved more lasting than the historical situation justifying it.94 The historian of ideas argues that the unpreparedness or reluctance of the public in Poland to differentiate between morality in politics and morality in other areas – for example, in art – was in the 20th century an effect of the Romantic con-cept of patriotism created in the times of national bondage.95
Maria Janion adds that “Romanticism in Poland, unlike in most European countries, by no means ended with the end of the 19th century.
Its rule extended into the entire 20th century wherein it had three culmi-nating points”, namely the revolution of 1905, the Warsaw Uprising and the Martial Law as the last Romantic breakthrough.96 The Romantic-symbolic identity became in that period a flagship identity of the Polish intelligentsia, a moral ideal that over time was internalized also by other
93 Ibid., p. 15 and passim. What confirms the existence of such imbalance is the lack of works fea-turing a decisive rebellion of the individual against their community in Polish Romanticism. See M. Piwińska, Legenda romantyczna i szydercy, Warszawa 1973, p. 363. Similarly, Maria Janion, noting the scarcity and indirectness of Polish ‘black Romanticism’, holds, that the Romantic rebellion was as a rule directed against contemporaneous reality, one in which the collective had degraded itself. See M. Janion, M. Żmigrodzka, Romantyzm i historia, op. cit., p. 17.
94 Andrzej Walicki and Maria Janion both hold that this paradigm of Polishness lasted until the second half of the 20th century. See A. Walicki, Trzy patriotyzmy, op. cit.; M. Janion, “Czy będziesz wiedział, co przeżyłeś”, op. cit.
95 Walicki views this lack of distinction as one of the Romantic premises of modern Polish patriot-ism. See A. Walicki, Trzy patriotyzmy, op. cit., p. 56. Mencwel lists several other “mental stigmas of [partition-time] bondage” that remained in the Polish thought until the 20th century. See A. Mencwel, Przedwiośnie czy potop. Studium postaw polskich w XX wieku, op. cit., – Rodzinna Europa po raz pierwszy, op. cit.
96 M. Janion, “Czy będziesz wiedział, co przeżyłeś”, op. cit., p. 10.
66 | The adventures of an ideologist
social groups, which, of course, led to all kinds of changes and simplifi-cations.97 An ideologist thus construed denoted someone capable of in-dependent, creative thought who is at the same time subject – especially at moments of historic culminating points – to moral rigours of the Ro-mantic ethos. The heroization of the ideologist’s biography came in two varieties: the military one, featuring a defender of the homeland, and the artistic-intellectual one, reserved for the “servant” of the truth or of art, or for the spiritual leader who is also an embodiment of the collective conscience of the nation.
The individual’s identity in the post-Romantic paradigm was not es-tablished once and for all in an automatic, “mechanical” manner. Nikodem Bończa Tomaszewski, analysing the state of Polish national awareness at the end of the 19th century, concludes that although “modernity elevated the nation to the rank of a suprahuman metabeing” and “defined what con-stitutes a human in a total sense”, identity for the late 19th-century intel-lectual was still a matter of individual reflection connected, of course, with social, familial, and professional circumstances.98 National awareness, adds Tomaszewski, would never have emerged if selfhood had not been born earlier. “Discovering man’s selfhood is a necessary prerequisite for the birth of national awareness. There is no nationhood without selfhood.”99 A typi-cal representative of the Central European intelligentsia at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, sometimes even a co-author of national awareness,
97 According to Hanna Gosk, the intellectual as a role model in the second half of the 20th cen-tury “actualizes the semantic field of such labels, slogans, appraisals, and allegations as cavalier conceit, honour and bravado, Romantic gesture and positivist volunteer work, intellect and snobbery, megalomania and clownery, action and garrulity, mentorship and opportunism, sub-versiveness and ‘service to the state’, anti-governmental rebellion and loyalism, careerism and selfless sacrifice, softness and pluckiness”. H. Gosk, Bohater swoich czasów, op. cit., p. 33.
98 N. Bończa Tomaszewski, Źródła narodowości. Powstanie i rozwój polskiej świadomości w II połowie XIX i na początku XX wieku, Wrocław 2006, pp. 52–53, 135.
99 Ibid., p. 63.
Between Romanticism and Modern Consciousness | 67
perceived his bond with the nation as a relation that was necessary, irreduc-ible, but also one that involved agency and corroborated his self-efficacy, as well as his personal ethical and political sensibility. He would stress his group loyalties, aspiring at the same time to the role of an independent creator of collective identity. That is why interpretations of the national me-tabeing would take on diverse philosophical, ideological, or artistic forms, while the relation between the ideologist and his native community did not necessarily fit in the framework of “national charisma” (in Maria Janion’s terms); when it did, the match may have been incomplete or may have operated in dissimilar ways. Comparing, for example, the writings of Stefan Żeromski and Stanisław Brzozowski, one cannot but conclude that similar social premises of the thinking man’s actions, especially the ideas of democ-racy and modernization, could have resulted in different historiosophies or ideological programmes.100 They might have even been conducive to the emergence of diverse moral criteria for evaluating the individual’s attitude to national principles or the compatibility of his/her existential decisions with higher causes.
The crisis of the Romantic model of the nation in Poland, noticeable earlier but escalated at the moment of regaining independence in 1918, also affected the intelligentsia’s identity.101 The major challenges of the day involved revolutionary movements in Central Europe, the emergence
100 Mencwel writes: “History is, in Żeromski’s view, always a history of nations, nations being his-tory’s only agents; Poland’s history is the story of national articulation […]. Brzozowski uses the vision of universal history; nations do exist there, of course, and play different roles, but they are not its major agents. True agency belongs to humankind understood as a receptacle in which good – liberty, equality, brotherhood – is to materialize.” A. Mencwel, Rodzinna Europa po raz pierwszy, op. cit., p. 157. S. Brzozowski’s and S. Żeromski’s historiosophical concepts are also compared by H. Janaszek-Ivaničková (Świat jako zadanie inteligencji, op. cit., p. 148 and pas-sim), who argues that they both viewed social reality not as a “ready-made world”, since that one had already succumbed to modernist disintegration, but as a creative project, one that requires intellectual action of the ideologist.
101 See J. Szacki, op. cit., p. 367.
68 | The adventures of an ideologist
of new nation-states, the arrival of avant-garde ideas, and civilizational changes.102 Błoński noted that “In the interwar period it was felt acutely that the signs and symbols of Polishness formed prior to the year 1914 had faded away or become obsolete.”103 The creative elite, hitherto shap-ing national awareness, had begun to give way to the professional intel-ligentsia, the relatively numerous and educated middle class (of varied material status), carrying out specific cultural, scientific, economic, and administrative tasks,104 who felt, at least temporarily, relieved from their missionary duties and the role of spiritual leaders. This does not mean that they had given up on their intellectual or cultural aspirations – far from it; they still constituted the social base of literary, theatrical, and cabaret audiences, of the academic, educational, or clerk communities, etc. What had changed, however, was their collective founding myth that defined the intellectual’s identity. This identity was now increasingly de-fined not only in terms of its relations with the national community and political history, but also in relation to the ideal of the modern, active individual. The literary embodiment of this group’s representative was the Skamander Group protagonist of the 1920s – urbane and
of new nation-states, the arrival of avant-garde ideas, and civilizational changes.102 Błoński noted that “In the interwar period it was felt acutely that the signs and symbols of Polishness formed prior to the year 1914 had faded away or become obsolete.”103 The creative elite, hitherto shap-ing national awareness, had begun to give way to the professional intel-ligentsia, the relatively numerous and educated middle class (of varied material status), carrying out specific cultural, scientific, economic, and administrative tasks,104 who felt, at least temporarily, relieved from their missionary duties and the role of spiritual leaders. This does not mean that they had given up on their intellectual or cultural aspirations – far from it; they still constituted the social base of literary, theatrical, and cabaret audiences, of the academic, educational, or clerk communities, etc. What had changed, however, was their collective founding myth that defined the intellectual’s identity. This identity was now increasingly de-fined not only in terms of its relations with the national community and political history, but also in relation to the ideal of the modern, active individual. The literary embodiment of this group’s representative was the Skamander Group protagonist of the 1920s – urbane and