Marc Fumaroli, describing the European cultural state as the “reli-gion of modernity”, referred, by way of examples, to Kulturkampf Ger-many, post-revolutionary Russia, and France of the 1960s.268 Notably, in all these cases the official cultural discourse served the political and edu-cational interests of the state apparatus. Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, by making “cultural persuasion” an official obligation, aimed to create the supra-regional German nation understood as a cultural community bound together by the dominant religion. This model of national iden-tity was, with some modifications, adopted in the interwar years by the Polish Falanga. The idea of the cultural state, pursued in Soviet Russia by the People’s Commissariat for Education (Narkompros) under the lead-ership of Anatoly Lunacharsky, was grounded in the ideological premise that creative work is part of the Communist system of persuasion and thus should be subject to institutional control. As Andrzej Walicki noted, the Soviet public discourse of that day made the most of the pre-revo-lutionary Russian idea of democracy understood not as the opposite of political authoritarianism – like in the Polish tradition – but of cultural
268 M. Fumaroli, Państwo kulturalne. Religia nowoczesności, trans. H. Abramowicz, J.M. Kłoczow-ski, Kraków 2008. Fumaroli claims that the “religion of modernity” flourished in most of those European states that had cultural policy programmes of their own run by the politico-adminis-trative oligarchy.
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elitism (the privileged status) of the upper classes.269 The “progressive”
programme of society’s democratization, conceived as a process of mak-ing cultural works and education increasmak-ingly accessible to the masses and extending state patronage over their participation in culture, was based precisely on that idea.270 The third model of the cultural state, pursued in France in the 1960s by André Malraux, among others, combined the idea of culture democratization with the vision of “refining” the national community based on the common partaking of the citizens of the Fifth Republic in the European spiritual and artistic heritage. The project was supposed to restore to the masses the sense of dignity and civilizational and cultural order disrupted by poignant memories of Vichy and Algeria.
Communist Poland can also be viewed as a modern cultural state.271 The linchpin of the post-war transformation of culture and
269 A. Walicki, Zniewolony umysł po latach, op. cit., p. 116.
270 Such an understanding of democracy was also popularized by the Polish interwar artistic avant-garde (see A.K. Waśkiewicz, W kręgu futuryzmu i awangardy. Studia i szkice, Wrocław 2003, pp. 250–251). In a broader sense, Ksawery Pruszyński referred to democratization, in the 1930s, as the struggle of the peasant class for political and social rights (see K. Pruszyński, Podróż po Polsce, Warszawa 2000, p. 97).
271 As a cultural state, after 1948 Communist Poland began to emulate– following the precious few years of relative cultural variety – the Soviet model based on the dogmas of Socialist Realism and total ideological control of public communication. The model cultural individual in that system was to be open to the entire progressive heritage of world art and science, but in practice the accessible canon was dominated by the productions of contemporaneous Soviet artists and few Western ones, decidedly leftist. There was also room in the canon for pre-revolutionary works – on condition that they had been deemed aesthetically and politically correct in the world of Socialist Realism. The Communist cultural environment was meagre and nondiversified, being in addition subject to doctrinal reinterpretation. The tasks of forming cultural opinion and selecting key tradi-tions (aesthetic and intellectual) were ceded to administration officials and loyal intellectuals active mostly in newspaper offices, writers’ unions, professional organizations, academic and educational institutions. The control over their political loyalty was exerted by high-ranking ideologues of the Communist mono-party. Stefan Żółkiewski, for instance, the chief ideologue and editor-in-chief of “Kuźnica”, listed the following among the tasks of state cultural policy: “abolishing the rift between the aristocratic culture of the privileged classes (and the intelligentsia at their disposal) and the culture of the masses. Secondly, he called for emancipation and promotion of the class elements of cultural life of workers and peasants. Thirdly, he demanded that immature forms of
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education in Poland were not only the systemic changes imposed by the Communist Party, organically tied to the sovietization of the Polish po-litical-economic system, but also the ideological indoctrination of so-ciety accompanied by the country’s industrialization and urbanization, migrations to the cities and to the Western Territories, the expansion of education (e.g. the reform of school education and public libraries) and of social welfare programmes. The new cultural space, which was growing alongside the Communist state, was gradually being developed ideologically to become the stage for propaganda activities. Education and pedagogical traditions, open lectures in workers’ clubs (operating on company premises) or village cultural centres, publishing houses specializing in popularizing science, literature, the press, theatre and film, radio and television – all of these were subject to political and administrative control by the ruling party and other institutions, as well as to the dogmas of Socialist Realism during the Stalinist period, which ended around 1955. Teresa Walas noted that, in the ideological lexicon used to justify the goals of Communist Poland as the cultural state there were, among others, such phrases as “education and culture”,
“cultural promotion”, “popularization of reading”, and “access to cul-tural goods”.272
One of the goals of the new state was the democratization of nation-al culture, which was deemed synonymous with popularizing it among
folk culture be replaced in the lives of peripheral masses with mature culture organically linked to the entire tradition of top achievements of European culture” (S. Siekierski, op. cit., p. 41). Not all the ideologues and journalists involved in creating the cultural state immediately after 1945 followed exclusively Soviet models. “Jan Kott, and even more so Paweł Hertz, would refer mostly to those artistic values that had been formed and verified by previous generations and past political systems.” It was only the years 1948–1949 that witnessed the official implementation of the prin-ciple that “anything not fitting those [Soviet] models was to be considered nationalistic or hostile to socialist culture”. Ibid., pp. 45 and 51.
272 T. Walas, op. cit., pp. 258–259.
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workers and peasants, as well as extending the state’s protection over their cultural activities. As Stanisław Siekierski tells us,
A strong emphasis was put on publishing and insuring the availabil-ity of cheap books and on democratization of access to the theatre.
Creating programmes for the new potential audience was postulated, not only those for elitist spectators. In sum, the programme assumed a rapid acceleration of cultural impact.273
Culture was not, however, viewed as self-existent, autonomous space, but, to the contrary, as a tool serving the party’s interests, with the party aiming to subjugate society itself.274 The fundamental goal of Com-munist Poland as the cultural state was, firstly, to appropriate the entire public space; secondly, to blur the lines of political divisions generated by the civil war and the post-1944 revolutionary social changes; thirdly, to create a coherent collective identity motivated by Marxist ideology and the universal, international community of humankind, and, fourthly, to encourage as many social groups as possible to warm to the new political system. Only the first of the above goals ever came close to being fully realized. The others were either never attained or the process of their re-alization got out of the ruling party’s control, which led to results incon-sistent with the original intentions. The Communists never managed to appropriate the Polish memory completely as, for example, the inconven-ient truth about the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact or the Katyń massacre
re-273 S. Siekierski, op. cit., p. 43.
274 Jan Prokop writes: “The beginnings of Communist Poland are marked by the plan to transform completely the consciousness of the country’s inhabitants. This ambitious project was soon joined by numerous writers and journalists working side by side with [Communist] activists and the state administration.” J. Prokop, Universum polskie. Literatura – wyobraźnia zbiorowa – mity polityczne, Kraków 1993, p. 17.
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mained common knowledge in Poland.275 They also failed in their goal to effect a total transformation of the collective identity. Admittedly, in the 1970s and 1980s a homogeneous national identity incorporating most of society became consolidated in Poland – which, among other factors, resulted from the influence of such media as film and television – but this identity had been based on the idea of the conservative ethnic-cultural community rather than the Soviet models.276
The transformation of the country’s political system in the mid-1950s also affected the cultural state. Social communication and public institutions continued to operate under the auspices of the Communist Party and remained subject to censorship, but intellectuals and writers were now allowed again to touch upon previously banned thematic are-as such are-as tradition, to engage in experiments, to search for new artistic forms, to discuss artworks and artistic phenomena, philosophical texts, or pop culture artefacts created at that time in the West. A critical revi-sion of the Polish symbolic universe, especially the Romantic tradition, was back then one of the currents of the debate over national identity and collective memory.277 The (obviously limited) independence of the creative and scholarly realms from state-orchestrated ideological inter-ference did not extend to systemic solutions (e.g. law-making rules, economic principles, and public order) or foreign policy. The Gomułka
275 See P. Babiracki, Co się Sowietom nie udało: kultura polska a imperium Stalina, “Res Publica Nova” 2010, no. 11.
276 Romuald Cudak maintains that a homogeneous (nationwide) culture was created back then, as a result of the emergence of mass culture and mass social communication. See R. Cudak, Notatki do “analizy tekstu kultury”. Na przykładzie pogrzebu, in: Sztuka czy rzemiosło? Nauczyć Polski i polskiego, eds A. Achtelik, J. Tambor, Katowice 2007.
277 Prokop writes: “The post-October years will witness again the debates over the ‘national myths’.
The ‘Bim-Bom’ generation, raised on Gałczyński (Zielona Gęś), who ridiculed all kinds of tra-ditionalists, religion-mongers, and reactionaries embodied by the repulsive character of August Count Bęc-Walski, will also get started with its own project of sweeping the rubble of the God-fearing, patriotic past.” J. Prokop, op. cit., p. 17.
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regime, in power after 1956, also claimed the right to exercise absolute rule over the nationwide symbolic space covering information media, institutions, and public rituals. Before the plentiful and well-organized political opposition entered the stage in the second half of the 1970s, the major rival of the regime in that area was the Catholic Church.278 There was a Kulturkampf of sorts going on between the two institu-tions. At stake was a definition of the Polish national community that would come closest to the concept of identity propagated by either camp, thus incorporating as big a chunk of the society as possible.279 That is why the ideology of the Communist state, regarded by most Poles as alien, imposed by a foreign power, and brought into utter dis-repute during the Stalinist period, had to yield to the 19th-century vi-sion of the ethnic-cultural nation. As it happened, other community
278 G. Kepel notes that communism in Poland “was opposed by only one organized group repre-senting values alien to socialism [and, first of all, to Marxism as an atheistic ideology – W.B.]
and consistently referring to them – it was the Catholic clergy”. After 1956 “the political leader-ship was bent on working out a compromise with the society”, the church remaining an indis-pensable partner for the pact aimed at maintaining social order. As Kepel writes, “The church, being a representative of the society and a depositary of ‘the constitutive traits of Polish identity’,
‘began to think of Poland in terms of a re-Christianization laboratory. From now on, it would look into the future, imagining the society after communism […]. The idea back then seemed all the more credible because of the lack of any organized centre of resistance that might provide the populace with values alternative to totalitarianism.” G. Kepel, op. cit., pp. 136–137. The idea of “grassroots” re-Christianization was implemented by the church primarily in the form of a mass-scale educational project which offered not only an alternative vision of society but also took care of religious socialization of the youth and prompted believers to participate in collec-tive religious rituals. Crucial for this form of social action was “experiencing one’s faith in a mass environment” (Patrick Michel). Ibid., p. 138. As a result of the convergence, in the 1970s, of
“two factors – the role of Catholicism in defining national identity and the church’s monopoly on representing society”, the Catholic church in Poland proceeded from the “grassroots” phase of re-Christianization to the “top-down” one, “demanding for itself a number of concessions, including the status of a de-facto public institution”. Ibid., pp. 138–140.
279 See e.g. D. Thiriet, Marks czy Maryja? Komuniści i Jasna Góra w apogeum stalinizmu (1950–
1956), trans. J. Pysiak, Warszawa 2002; J. Jaworska, Świeckie święta, in: Obyczaje polskie. Wiek XX w krótkich hasłach, ed. M. Szpakowska, Warszawa 2008.
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(or collective bond) formulas had either not been fully formed (e.g.
the modern republican identity) or had not resonated with the masses (e.g. Marxism or the bourgeois liberal tradition), or had to confront the “social vacuum” of Communist Poland. As social psychologists tell us, “the uncertainty about the future makes people think in terms of time-tested categories”.280 The days of “small stabilization” witnessed the elevation and popularization of (among others) the post-Romantic models of Polish identity, rooted in collective memory and the canon of national literature and symbolism.281
As Przemysław Czapliński writes, the civilizational and politi-cal transformations of the post-war decade led to the disintegration of pre-existing social classes, thus creating an increasing demand for new, authentic identity models. However, “the 1960s in Polish cul-ture witnessed a poignant disappearance of collective patterns and role models – acceptable, respectable, and inspirational”.282 Already in the mid-1950s the Communist Brave-New-World-style utopia began to
280 K. Koseła, op. cit., p. 302.
281 As Michał Masłowski explains, identity traits of the cultural nation, created in the 19th century, were activated in Poland and other Central European countries only after 1945. The scholar describes the identification pattern as follows: “The collective will of the community replaces [civic/state – WB] tradition; the bond is of an interpersonal, conscious, voluntaristic – not inborn – nature. It expresses the situation of a nation that has lost its statehood but retained the will to maintain its identity. […] The national bond was increasingly sustained by both romantic poetry and religious rituals (Christmas, Easter), but also by ceremonies linked to his-toric events […]. National identity had become definitely ‘transcendentalized’ in such a way as to become the object of para-religious worship.” Applying Antonina Kłoskowska’s term of
“cultural canon”, conceived as the totality of a given culture’s symbols, texts, and values that make up the very concept of national identity (the cultural nation), Masłowski includes in the “canonical core” of this identity Romantic literature (especially A. Mickiewicz’s Dziady and Pan Tadeusz), the “morally uplifting” novels by H. Sienkiewicz, historical painting (especially J. Matejko’s paintings and A. Grottger’s graphics), and such “memory sites” as Kraków, among others. M. Masłowski, Formowanie się narodu kulturowego w Polsce i Europie Środkowej, in: eds N. Dołowy-Rybińska et al., Sploty kultury, Warszawa 2010, pp. 383, 389, 390.
282 P. Czapliński, PRL i sarmatyzm, in: ed. H. Gosk, (Nie)ciekawa epoka? Literatura i PRL, Warsza-wa 2008, p. 159.
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disintegrate, supplanted by a sense of existential sterility and symbolic void.283 The anomy, typical of the “small stabilization” period, could be viewed as a result of the collapse of the totalitarian order and its legiti-mizing ideology on the one hand, and as a side-effect of disintegration, magnified by widespread uprootedness (resultant from increased social mobility) of norms and values on the other.284 At the level of individual experience, anomy translates into a sense of chaos, of being lost in soci-ety, a feeling of loneliness and lack of self-confidence, accompanied by one’s loss of faith in the purpose of life and of trust in others. As Tade-usz Różewicz wrote in his commentary to Moja córeczka when speaking of that period,
283 See B. Szulęcka, My ludzie z pustego obszaru. Kilka uwag o polskim flâneuryzmie, “Res Publica Nowa” 2011, no. 16, p. 86 and passim.
284 As S. Nowak, referring to works by R.K. Merton and J. Turner, explains: “Anomy is a state of collapse of the effectiveness of values and/or norms binding in a given realm of human action on the social scale; this means an emergence of some peculiar axiological-normative vacuum in a particular area of life. It is generated by the inadequacy – perceived or sensed by people – of the means and goals in a particular area of social action, which renders impossible any further use of the former in the implementation of the latter, while further endorsement of both the former and the latter makes little sense. In such a situation there is always a number of people who ‘withdraw their support’ either for the cultural values (which define the goals) or for the norms (defining the means involved), or simultaneously for both. On a social scale this translates into all sorts of ‘deviations’. Anomy is precisely the weakening or the collapse – revealed under different forms of deviation – of (more or less) extensive areas of axiological-normative ‘social fabric’ defining the form of human action and the form of particular aspects of the socio-cultural system.” As a subjective experience, anomy manifests itself in the indi-vidual’s conviction about the state authorities’ indifference towards his/her needs, in the belief that one’s personal life goals cannot be accomplished, the functioning of the society being
“unpredictable and chaotic”, in a “sense of meaninglessness” and in one’s loss of faith in the social and psychological support of others. The sociologist distinguishes between nine types of “individual adaptation” to the situation of anomy, e.g. conformism, “shying away from action in a particular sphere of activity”, ritualism and counterritualism, utopia, frustration, and rebellion. S. Nowak, op. cit., pp. 233–247. Viewed in terms of cultural sociology, anomy denotes a situation when culture, understood as a collection of “systems of meaning”, i.e.
“socially shared values, norms, symbols, and beliefs which tell groups, because they are owned by groups, what people should do with their lives, and why they should do it”, becomes insuf-ficient or incredible. K. Kosela, op. cit., p. 141.
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Life and education were becoming increasingly superficial and chaot-ic. Regrettably, neither the party nor the church had enough strength to create new moral, ethical, or aesthetic patterns for those young people who had been growing up in a vacuum of sorts, filled with formulaic “gas” and “yada yada”. Big-city dwellers in general, and the youth in particular, were looking for mentors, for sources of renewal, in vain (Ma 88).285
Anna Jakubiszyn wrote in 1956 in the “Kamena” monthly that the general “collapse of social morality”, observable in those days, resulted from wartime experiences, the emancipation of youth and women, and
Anna Jakubiszyn wrote in 1956 in the “Kamena” monthly that the general “collapse of social morality”, observable in those days, resulted from wartime experiences, the emancipation of youth and women, and