Heroic Fictions - Tadeusz Różewicz

Tadeusz Różewicz, nom de guerre “Satyr”, was assigned, having been given the rank of corporal, to a unit of Home Army partisans based in the forest (Radomsko county) on 14 or 15 August 1943.¹¹⁰ He had gone through a six-month boot-camp training course at an underground mili-tary academy (W 429). Tadeusz Drewnowski, in turn, based on a “docu-ment issued after [Różewicz’s] coming forward [as a Home Army parti-san]”, claims that Różewicz got his call-up papers for the forest guerrilla unit in the early summer of 1943.¹¹¹ According to the document, “Satyr”

took part in armed combat from 26 June 1943 until 3 November 1944 on various terrain in the counties of Radomsko, Końskie, Włoszczowa, Opoczno, and Częstochowa. Zbigniew Majchrowski tells us that Różewicz held the post of a non-commissioned officer for cultural and educational affairs. His duties included preparing occasional bulletins and regular sum-mary reports on propaganda and frontline communiques based on radio interceptions.¹¹² In the spring of 1944, Różewicz’s debut poetry volume,

110 T. Różewicz explained in the film Tadeusz Różewicz: twarze that his code name “Satyr” was connected with the work of J. Kochanowski but also with the figure of one of the officers of J. Piłsudski’s legions (probably that of Major Albin Fleszar) that served under that pseudonym.

The writer added that in his guerrilla unit nobody, except for the commander, understood the code name, which resulted from the low level of education among the soldiers. Tadeusz Różewicz: twarze, dir. P. Lachmann, 2012.

111 T. Drewnowski, Walka o oddech – bio-poetyka. O pisarstwie Tadeusza Różewicza, op. cit., p. 48.

A facsimile of the document can be found in Majchrowski’s book (p. 87) who, however, sets the date of Różewicz’s joining the guerrillas for “the middle of August 1943”. Z. Majchrowski, Różewicz, Wrocław 2002, p. 67.

112 Ibid., pp. 70, 74. Majchrowski and Drewnowski also hold that on 3 November 1944, following the charges of “propagandistic sabotage”, Różewicz left his unit. The political charges levelled against “Satyr” by the Home Army Regional Command pertained to his article published in

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Echa leśne, came out in Częstochowa following the printing of one hun-dred copies on a mimeograph and featuring small pieces of prose, poetry, and humoresques. (The text was reprinted in 1985.) Marian Kisiel called this volume the writer’s “real debut”, undermining the popular (mis)con-ception that the proper beginning of Różewicz’s literary career is marked by Unease (1947).¹¹³ In fact, Unease can be considered the writer’s opus secundus, a polemic with his own debut, questioning the concept of na-tional literature taken up in Echa leśne. Subsequent post-war ficna-tional texts featuring German occupation and guerrilla experience were collected by Tadeusz Różewicz in Opadły liście z drzew and Przerwany egzamin [Inter-rupted Exam], published in 1955 and 1960, respectively.

These narratives are connected with the political discourses of the war and the post-war years, for instance with the cited decisions of the German administration or news from the front, whereas the rhetorical justification of the Różewicz characters’ ideological stances comes from the patriotic-civic, nationalist, or Communist argument. The titular short story of the collection (“The Leaves Have Fallen”) begins with the monologue of a partisan – bored with, and bitter about, his mundane life in a forest hut, mocking the West’s promises of military help scheduled to arrive “when the leaves fall down …” (I 44) and scornful of his orders to “stand by with his weapons ready”.¹¹⁴ Already in Echa leśne it says that “even the echo of those words, spoken in far away, misty Albion, has faded” (E 18). The short story

“Czyn Zbrojny” containing socialist accents. Ibid., p. 72; T. Drewnowski, Walka o oddech – bio-poetyka. O pisarstwie Tadeusza Różewicza, op. cit., p. 56.

113 See M. Kisiel, Przypisy do współczesności, Katowice 2006, p. 64.

114 That was a propagandist slogan of the Polish Workers’ Party (PPR), falsely accusing the Home Army of “standing by with their weapons ready”, that is remaining militarily passive in the face of the German-Soviet conflict. Polish nationalist formations, by contrast, decided indeed not to interfere with this samo-zbójstwo, or “sons-of-bitches-cide” (a pun based on samobójstwo, the Polish word for “suicide”). See G. Kucharczyk, Polska myśl polityczna po roku 1939, Dębogóra 2009, pp. 26–27.

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Spowiedź [Confession], from the Przerwany egzamin collection, features a motivational dictionary of two strong ideological identities. Unidenti-fied partisans, questioning a peasant who is hiding weapons, call upon his patriotic sentiments, warning and threatening him, sometimes acting like occupiers. Their argument is clearly grounded in the Romantic-nationalist metalanguage of the “blood and steel” community: “We are ready to spill our blood”; “enemy and traitor of the Polish nation”; “bad Pole”; “the legit-imate army”; “one army and one nation” (I 54-62).¹¹⁵ The counterpoint to this persuasion is the commentary of the villager who interprets the letters

“WP” [Polish: Wojsko Polskie, meaning the “Polish Army”] on the white-and-red armbands as Wojsko Pańskie [the “Masters’ Army”]. Arguably, the caricatural picture of the “legitimate army” referred to the nationalist forc-es, whose military and ideological activity under the occupation Różewicz criticized after the war. The author of Drewniany karabin [A Wooden Gun]

wrote: “The National Armed Forces men, ‘drafted’ into the Home Army, often claim to be Home Army soldiers … Not only under the occupa-tion did they anarchize the AK [Home Army] ranks, imposing their own ways and often taking up actions unworthy of the Polish soldier” (II 225).

Also, the utterances of the “vaudeville” Cavalryman, the protagonist of Do

115 This rhetoric is reminiscent of the Romantic national identity idiom, the “Polish mystique” dis-course (J. Strzelecki), which provides a basis for the idea of classless bonds of blood and history uniting the whole nation (the gentry and the commons). See N. Bończa Tomaszewski, op. cit.

p. 138. At this point, though, the soldiers’ arguments justify their pragmatic actions. The Par-tisan from Do piachu mockingly describes a similar situation presented as almost typical: “You don’t know the type? ‘Who is it? The Polish Army! Open up!’ Take the peasant’s pig and screw his woman to boot” (VI 167). The concept of the ideological army, permeated with the “spirit of creative aggression” found its expression in, among others, the programme of Konfederacja Narodu (The Nation’s Confederacy), Bolesław Piasecki’s underground political organization ac-tive under the occupation and postulating, among other things, about creating “the new Pole”

in accordance with the ideals of active nationalism. See G. Kucharczyk, op. cit., p. 16. This ideal functioned already in the political-ideological journalism of the 1930s. See M. Bednarc-zuk, Marzenie o męskości w polskich koncepcjach nacjonalistycznych, in: eds I. Kamieńska-Szmaj, T. Piekot, M. Poprawa, Ideologie codzienności, Wrocław 2009.

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piachu [Into the Sand], referred to in the drama as the “rightist-nationalist scum”, generally correspond to the social and political platform of Polish nationalist formations of the 1930s and 1940s – for example, the vision of a chauvinist, class-based, and hierarchical (elitist) ideological army. Nota-bly, the Cavalryman dismisses the realistic “interest politics”, fundamen-tal for the anti-Romantic premises of National Democracy’s Realpolitik, opting instead for the Romantic vision of a great historic nation at the

“moment of breakthrough”. The project of establishing Poland’s western borders on the Odra and Nysa Łużycka rivers, as he mentions twice, was, in turn, part of National Democracy’s geopolitical programme (for more on this, see the chapter “Place in the Narrative”).¹¹⁶

Spowiedź cannot be interpreted merely as a political polemic because ideological statements, invectives, and slogans featured in Różewicz’s prose of those days – for example, in the short story Borem, lasem... published in “Odrodzenie” in 1945 and included in the collection Opadły liście z drzew¹¹⁷ under the title Ciężar – are not only discursively confronted but also stylistically or gestically reduced to mundane experiences and idi-oms. The writer uses the same technique in Do piachu. “I got all this shit on my hands now”, the Commandant concludes in a comic scene with a guerrilla barber, “The Commies on my left flank, the Nationalists on my right, and I’m in between” (VI 162). It is, however, the mundane routine in the partisan shelter – the daily bookkeeping and counting of provisions:

“so many bulls, so many pigs, so many sheep” (I 44) – which jarringly contrasts with the stereotyped image of military “life”, that can get really afflictive. The nationalist narrative of national identity is thus shattered

116 On the subject of ideological and axiological differences between the romantic and “politi-cally realistic” (national democratic) concept of Polish nationalism in the interwar period, see U. Schrade, op. cit.

117 T. Różewicz, Borem, lasem…, “Odrodzenie” 1945, no. 43. The changes introduced by the writer in the book version are described by J. Waligóra, op. cit., pp. 27–28.

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in Spowiedź by inappropriate statements, undermined by colloquial and broad commentaries such as, for example, “Here we are, spilling our blood, and those motherfuckers are doing the simple folks”, or by executioners talking shop and cracking jokes at the same time (I 54-55). The soldiers finally yield to some form of collective bestialization, bellowing, snorting, growling, grunting, and screeching, while the interrogation of the peasant degenerates into a grotesque display of their feral instincts, grimaces, and aggression. Animalization as a way of presenting and accounting for inhu-man behaviour towards fellow huinhu-mans was characteristic of descriptions dealing with social and moral problems of World War Two and the days of occupation.¹¹⁸ The identity of the ideological army constructed in Spowiedź splits into mutually conflicting elements: authoritarian ideology, declara-tions of national solidarity, and instinctual behaviours stigmatized by the denigrating comparisons to animals.¹¹⁹ The nationalist discourse, legitimiz-ing primitive violence, is thus exposed on primarily aesthetic grounds.

The story cannot be interpreted as a critique of one political doctrine from the perspective of another either. While not dismissing any ideology explicitly, Różewicz looked sceptically at signs and images constituting the ideologist’s sociosphere. Admittedly, some ideological oppositions in his short stories from the collections Opadły liście z drzew and Przerwany eg-zamin do reflect, in a general way, the conflicts in the occupation and

post-118 See e.g. Z. Klukowski, Dziennik z lat okupacji Zamojszczyzny, Lublin 1958.

119 This imagery derives from the naturalistic vision of the social human being in which interper-sonal relations – especially physical or symbolic aggression – are manifestations of a struggle over political gains, with politics standing for “a form of rivalry for attaining the position enabling one to issue ‘authoritarian’ messages or orders to the rest of the society […]; just as the pecking order is in many animal populations communicated by means of gestures or through acknowl-edgement of one’s own position within that order, so do human groups express social and politi-cal status by means of verbal and nonverbal symbols regulating social interactions”. R.D. Mas-ters, Polityka jako zjawisko biologiczne, trans. by K. Nader, in: Człowiek, zwierzę społeczne, eds B. Szacka, J. Szacki, Warszawa 1991, pp. 144–145; R. Lynn, Socjobiologia nacjonalizmu, trans.

by B. Szacka, in: Człowiek, zwierzę społeczne, op. cit., p. 381 and passim.

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war periods, such as, for example, that between Communist propaganda and nationalist understanding of patriotism. The time when the former collection was written – the late 1940s and early 1950s – was a period of intensified Communist propaganda and political repressions aimed at local nationalists and anti-Communist resistance. Still, the characters portrayed in the fiction are caricatures rather than simple reflections of political loyal-ties, the disintegration of their political discourse pertaining to the collec-tive Polish mentality rather than to particular doctrines. Questioning the purpose of “acting in history” as the foundation of the Polish biography, the writer disputed the heroic perspective on war rather than modern na-tionalism. First and foremost, however, he polemicized with the Romantic concept of identity according to which the individual “actualizes” himself only through the history of a nation.¹²⁰ It also Różewicz’s coming to terms, so to speak, with his own debut. The anti-Romantic attitudes and behaviour of the partisans in Różewicz’s post-war short fiction can be viewed as a revi-sion of the soldiers’ biographies presented in Echa leśne and openly referring to the works of Słowacki, Wyspiański, Mickiewicz, and Żeromski,¹²¹ even though in a humorous sketch titled Uwaga! Tylko dla chlopców z lasu [Please Note: Forest Boys Only] as well as in other texts from the 1943 bulletin “Głos z Krzaka” [“A Voice from the Bush”], those biographies are glaringly flat, ostensibly reduced to the schoolgirl’s shallow fantasy of the “forest knight”

(E 58).¹²² One could argue that Różewicz was purposefully explicit in his

120 See M. Janion, Romantyzm i historia, op. cit., pp. 16–18.

121 The literary tradition in Echa leśne is reconstructed by Stanisław Gębala in his essay Śmierci piękne i śmierci brzydkie (“Dialog” 1986, no. 11). The critic considers the references to Żeromski and Słowacki as the debut’s patrons to be a “choice within the curriculum canon” of the interwar Polish school. Ibid., p. 105. See also: S. Gębala, Odpowiedzialność za słowo (felietony i szkice), Bielsko-Biała 1993. The literały critique of the Polish heroicist self-stereotype in post-war fiction is discussed, among others, by Błoński and Maciąg. See J. Błoński, op. cit.; W. Maciąg, Litera-tura Polski Ludowej 1944–1964, Warszawa 1973.

122 On “Głos z Krzaka” see T. Drewnowski, Walka o oddech – bio-poetyka. O pisarstwie Tadeusza Różewicza, op. cit., pp. 49–50.

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choice of pre-war “school” literature so that he could first establish a rapport with the reader and then liberate himself from its – internalized – aesthetic, historiosophic, and moral presuppositions. Turning the implied reader of his volume into an active participant in literary “Polishness”, the writer nev-ertheless managed to present national memory and civic identity as non-obvious issues that needed reinterpreting in the war reality (but also in the quotidian one) – first and foremost in relation to the consciousness and attitude of the common man.¹²³ Różewicz would exploit this opposition be-tween the literary image of war and the prosaic experience of its rank-and-file participant in the short stories collected in Opadły liście z drzew, whose central character brings to mind the protagonists of World War One pacifist fiction rather than the “chivalric” poem by Rainer M. Rilke, even though both literary contexts are present there. The stories reflect a tendency in Pol-ish post-war (1946–1948) fiction to explore wartime themes not so much along ideological lines but more in moral-existential terms. The tendency was disrupted by the imposition of Socialist Realism on writers.¹²⁴

The crucial moment in the Romantic ideologist’s biography, Niko-dem Bończa Tomaszewski tells us, is the transformation of the subjective self into the identity of an active and conscious participant in the nation’s heroic history.¹²⁵ “Rymwid”, the tragic protagonist of Stefan Żeromski’s Echa leśne, “faithful to his duty for the fatherland”, leaves the Russian army to join a forest unit of insurgents.¹²⁶ This is the scenario used by

123 See M. Kisiel, op. cit., pp. 67–69.

124 The moral-existential “deepening” of wartime themes in literature was what Anatol Stern ex-pected in his 1946 essay Pisarz a wojna, in: A. Stern, Głód jednoznaczności i inne szkice, War-szawa 1972, pp. 104–107.

125 N. Bończa Tomaszewski, op. cit., p. 197. Generally speaking, the transformation of the indi-vidual in the sense given by the Romantics, e.g. J. Słowacki, supposedly consisted in a “heroic-Promethean effort to combat the weaknesses of the spirit and the body in one’s actualization of the self-creation and self-realization imperative understood as moral action”. See I. Bittner, Romantyczne “ja”. Studium romantycznego indywidualizmu, Warszawa 1984, p. 176.

126 S. Żeromski, Echa leśne, Warszawa 1935, pp. 15–17.

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Różewicz in his novella Przemiana strzelca Korzenia, adapted of course to changed social realities. An apathetic peasant, totally bereft of national awareness, becomes, as a result of the occupation experience, a “real sol-dier” in the civic-patriotic sense, his biography acquiring dramatic and martyrological characteristics (E 41). The concepts of the simple folk adopting political ideas and the transformation of “the people” into a na-tion – the “nana-tionalizing of the people” – is part of the canon of both socialist and National-Democratic thought of the turn of the 19^th and 20^th centuries.¹²⁷ The heroic biography may also run the opposite course:

from patriotic sacrifice (and sanctification) to personal collapse. The tit-ular protagonist of another novella from the debut collection Zmówcie pacierz za duszę sierżanta Grzmota ends up as a “drunk, a destroyed man, prematurely withered, fallen”. Though existentially degraded, the former 1914 legionary remains symbolically a character from a heroic tale, a sa-cred “echo of that magnificent and horrific thing” (E 26-28).¹²⁸ The col-lective history, which provides a background for his biography, marks him with historic tragedy, elevates his all-too-common fall, and coun-terbalances the moral and physical regress. The hero of the Great War

127 On the topic of “nationalizing the people” see e.g. J. Molenda, Chłopi, naród, niepodległość.

Kształtowanie się postaw narodowych i obywatelskich chłopów w Galicji i Królestwie Polskim w przededniu odrodzenia Polski, Warszawa 1999. Hanna Gosk writes, following Tadeusz Łepkowski: “The major building block of the modern Polish nation was, in fact, the peasant lass, for whom Polishness initially connoted a land, a language, and a religion; only later did it begin to connote national tradition, classless solidarity, supralocal culture, and a pursuit and defence of one’s own national, supra-class state.” T. Łepkowski, Rozważania o losach polskich, London 1987, pp. 104–107 (qtd in H. Gosk, op. cit., p. 31).

128 The myth of the legions as the greatest patriotic “act” on the way to independence, referred to in the novella, served in interwar Poland the apotheosis of Marshal J. Piłsudski and was used to legitimize the dictatorial policies of his political formation after the May Coup. The legions, however, were a relatively small military formation, subservient to the army of Austria-Hungary and then of Germany, which did not play a major military role in World War One and was even viewed by the victorious allies (the Entente) as collaborating with the enemy (i.e. the Central Powers). See T. Komarnicki, Rebirth of the Polish Republic, London 1952.

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and struggle for independence, though in danger of losing his humanity, cannot nullify his heroic biography, overlapping at crucial points with the history of the nation. The nation stands here for a subjective commu-nity of historical experiences, generated by the memory of past glory and sacrifice.¹²⁹ The metaphysical “national good”, collected through history by self-sacrificial military action, is not subject to existential verification.

Grzmot constitutes the Romantically interpreted occupation-period em-bodiment of Sarmatian patriotism, the equivalent of the patriot-rake fig-ure from the 19^th-century nobiliary tale.

The epitaph-style novellas from Echa leśne are surrounded by sa-tirical texts and humoresques from “Głos z krzaka” and the author’s In-troduction (added in the 1985 edition) which circumscribes these texts with a tongue-in-cheek commentary, recalling his guerrilla poster (issued on 11 November 1943) featuring a little rhyme that went as follows:

“Olaboga / Czy to wojsko Świętej Jadwigi, / Czy pluton Ostroga” (E 8). The literal translation, with the rhyme effect lost, reads: “Oh, me God! / Is this Saint Hedwig’s army, / Or Ostroga’s platoon?” The literary motif of Saint Hedwig’s army – subsequently used in Do piachu – is also Romantic in origin, as Danuta Szkop-Dąbrowska tells us, noting that in Różewicz’s drama it was used against the grain of its own tradition. “The sleeping army, or – as in Goszczyński [in the 1833 poem Wojsko Królowej

W dokumencie Tadeusz Różewicz (Stron 73-88)