and a heroic retreat” (I 101). The highest value of this “heroic fiction” is neither the community nor the idea, but the protagonist’s concern about his near and dear ones and with his own self-image.
The author of Spowiedź thus for the second time – following Błoński’s formula – deepens and problematizes his fundamental experi-ence, elevating representations of reality to the “order of ideas” which he, in turn, transforms into narrative solutions.142 Wycieczka do muzeum [A Trip to the Museum] and Przygotowanie do wieczoru autorskiego repre-sent a new model of textual communication. Their heroic narratives are mediated, paraphrased in a memoir story, recalled in everyday dialogue, quoted from a newspaper or a book. Although still existing in the char-acters’ consciousness and in common use, they are no longer the natural semiosphere of the Różewicz protagonist but function instead as a pecu-liar code which is instrumentalized in the practice of collective memory, political propaganda, educational activities, and community rituals.
The “New Man’s” Identity
Szacki is right, of course, when he writes that, “The cultural intel-lectual’s independence from politics resulted not only from their choice of a particular stance but also from the fact that in the past they were able to live happily ever after without ever facing the necessity to defend that stance against the state making totally different claims on them. There is no doubt that this kind of opportunity was drastically reduced” in the middle of the 20th century.143 Unrestrained creativity and intellectual freedom were most seriously threatened by totalitarian systems, Nazism and Stalinism, that destroyed “all cultural values that cannot be politi-cized or nationalized”.144 Under such circumstances, the
“clerkism”-vs-142 J. Błoński, op. cit., pp. 62–282.
143 J. Szacki, op. cit., p. 398.
144 Ibid., pp. 398–399.
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involvement alternative was a deceptive and unreal opposition. The Na-zis aimed at a physical destruction of the Polish intelligentsia, while the Soviet Communists wanted to subjugate it to their own political goals or to marginalize it. The German occupiers did not come up with a po-litical offer that would correspond to significant ideological narratives or generate major ideological debates on the Polish side.145 By contrast, the ideology and the “new man” of communism as identity patterns left im-portant traces in Polish journalism, literature, and art because for many prominent intellectuals and artists they constituted a serious challenge.
A consistent “clerk” in the Stalinist state was invariably sentenced to silence; the time server, in turn, could serve in a number of ways.
Toutes proportions gardées, one could generalize that the ideologist in the Stalinist period would usually choose “inner emigration”, isolation in the private sphere, or would take an ideological stand on reality (or would be ascribed one by the powers-that-be) as neutral intellectualism was in-conceivable to the Communist worldview. Totalitarian institutions did not leave the ideologist a necessary margin of creative freedom, nor did they respect his/her political agency. But it was not only administrative pressures that decided the ideologist’s position in the Stalinist culture.
What affected his/her real situation was also the experience of the oc-cupation, mostly traumatic, intensive social reforms after 1945 resulting in pauperization of the intelligentsia, quantitative growth of the white-collar workforce and its inner diversification connected to professional specialization, educational promotion of workers and peasants changing, to a certain degree, the cultural profile of the entire group as well as its social recruitment base.146 The latter changes caused some of the elements
145 On the difference in attitude on the part of Polish intellectuals towards German Nazism and Soviet Communism see A. Walicki, Zniewolony umysł po latach, op. cit., pp. 31, 282–284.
146 See J. Szacki, op. cit.; H. Palska, Nowa inteligencja w Polsce Ludowej. Świat przedstawień i el-ementy rzeczywistości, Warszawa 1994.
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of the intellectual’s ethos to disappear, for example the social service im-perative. Nevertheless, a considerable part of the creative intelligentsia attempted to continue carrying out its traditional mission – either within the existing political system or, if it was possible, against it. That was one of the reasons why the social and mental transformations of the Stalinist period – which affected, after all, not only the ideologist – were carried out with the active participation of intellectuals as co-authors of the vi-sion of the “new man” and his public role.
It is not only Communist ideology that postulates the creation of
“new man”.147 Such a project also features in republican thought, Chris-tian doctrine, Existentialist philosophy, and in interwar programmes of avant-garde and nationalist literatures. The project’s conclusions and postulates usually pertain to interpersonal relations, the nature of the in-dividual or of the self, axiological worldviews and moral stands. Despite all these similarities, however, they fulfil different functions. The “new man’s” identity can be interpreted as a rhetorical figure, an ideological postulate, a diagnosis of the political situation, a normative description of the human condition (or its assessment), a result of submission to stereotypes or an attempt to combat them or replace them with different stereotypes. Of all the 20th-century implementations of that model iden-tity, the most characteristic one is probably the “new man” of totalitarian-ism, a homoid du systeme, perfectly submissive to social engineering and propagandistic persuasion.
Ideological identity is not synonymous with ideology, that is with a system of conceptualized political or social beliefs. Still, as a pattern of sorts, it may fulfil the same functions, integrating or disintegrating the
147 Concepts of “new man”, from Plato’s philosophy to the Polish Workers’ Party programme and the 1956 breakthrough debates are extensively discussed by Mariusz Mazur in his dissertation O człowieku tendencyjnym… Obraz nowego człowieka w propagandzie komunistycznej w okresie Polski Ludowej i PRL 1944–1956, Lublin 2009.
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group, generating the group’s awareness of its goals and thus mobilizing its members for collective effort, strengthening existing images of real-ity or undermining them.148 Ideological identity results from harmoniz-ing ideology with experience and individual plans, providharmoniz-ing that the systemic character of the ideological ingredients and their rootedness in a particular doctrine are not blurred in the process. Thus the identity nar-rative of each individual, each member of the ideological group (S. Os-sowski) is different, even though it contains elements belonging to one and the same ideology. In order to make the most of the integrative force of ideological identity – for example, so as to define social relations on its basis – one needs to refer to the source ideology. Ideology’s functions, as described by Szacki, imply that ideological identity does not pertain to members of every community. It is indispensable for representatives of those groups whose identification does not result from a naturally given vision of the world, but is an ideological construct formulated in historiosophic, ethical, or political terms. The church, nation, and so-cial class are the most important and typical cases in point. Ideological identity, similarly to ideology, either ruins such group’s inner order or, contrastingly, legitimizes their status quo, defining their separateness and uniqueness, conserving the group’s collective goals and their hierarchy,
148 J. Szacki, op. cit., pp. 223–224. I use the dictionary definition of ideology according to which it is a system of “historically, culturally, and socially condtioned beliefs shared by the members of a given social group, offering them a holistic and simplified vision of the world, one that fa-cilitates manipulating the collective consciousness. It employs religious or mythic, or empirical, rational, and scientific legitimizations, its aim being either to maintain the social status quo or to negate the current order and construct a new one in accordance with its ideological directives”.
Słownik społeczny, ed. B. Szlachta, Kraków 2004, pp. 399–400. It may also be in place to note the difference between ideology and idea. Jan J. Szczepański writes that, “Whereas the idea re-mains in a vast realm of abstract concepts, ideology is its practical derivative aspiring to the role of a worldview system in general and a political one in particular.” J.J. Szczepański, Inżynieria dusz?, in: Literatura i demokracja. Bezpieczne i niebezpieczne związki, ed. M. Gumkowski, War-szawa 1995, op. cit., p. 62.
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establishing the individual’s place or role in the realm of interpersonal relations. An identity of this type is a discursive totality bound by axiol-ogy and specific rules of reasoning. Ideas and personal patterns included in it remain semantically accessible, even when referred to in isolation from each other, with social phenomena acquiring ethical explanations or an emotional tinge.149 When a collective and its conflicts are presented in the ideological narrative, one can explain them in causative and nor-mative terms; name their originators or beneficiaries; ascribe reasonings, intentions, and motives of action to their participants; give them po-litical and moral meaning within the conceptual framework generated by the ideology. The ideologist thus construed is a carrier of ideological orientation, one that s/he identifies with.150 This act of identification is an individual interpretation of group relations the individual participates in, a personal identity narrative effected from the perspective of ideology, and at the same time an expression of a group identity.
The “new man” of communism is a model identity, affecting other identity patterns preserved in journalism, literature, culture, or the me-dia, especially when those patterns, though still vivid, lose credibility and appear to be anachronistic. Jan Błoński argues that the process of weakening the traditional intellectual’s status in Polish literature gained momentum in the 1950s. In all kinds of texts, but primarily in fiction, the dominant image was that of a nondescript, transitional figure, or, as Błoński put it, “an anonymous employee, neither a proletarian nor a bourgeois, neither a farmer nor a bureaucrat”.151 Significantly, the
“tran-149 On the significance of referring to the realm of values in political practice see S. Opara, op. cit., p. 54 and passim.
150 Among literary examples of characters functioning as “carriers of ideological orientation”, Han-na Gosk includes minor characters of J. Andrzejewski’s Popiół i diament. H. Gosk, op. cit., p. 15.
151 J. Błoński, op. cit., p. 279.
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sitional” identity in Communist Poland was not merely – like in inter-war literature – a projection of the intellectual-narrator projecting his/her social and ethical imaginings onto a figure excluded from “the cultural community which includes neither a storekeeper nor a proletarian, or an illiterate, or an upstart”,152 but constituted instead a new interpretation of Polish culture and society after great changes. Andrzej Werner called these changes “transforming Poles into Communist citizens”, accusing some writers – including, among others, Tadeusz Różewicz – of contrib-uting, perhaps unwittingly, to an axiological situation in which there was room only for the “New People”.153 The critic did not charge the poet with engaging in Communist propaganda or with playing any organizing role in the Sovietization of Polish society. However, in his reconstruc-tion of the “cultural zero point” awareness in Różewicz’s works there is no unambiguous confirmation of national tradition narrowed down to patterns and obligations acceptable in the 1980s. Between nihilism and a dream of the humanist “full humanity”, he argued, there is no room for a “formation that does not attain this ideal”.154 The essayist did not claim that the writer took particular pleasure in denigrating all things Polish, but, quite the contrary, he noted that the attacks on the values protecting Poles against Sovietization resulted from the totality of Różewicz’s vision, who was equally critical of Western civilization too.155 This observation implied, in fact, another unspoken charge. In adopting a supranational historical and moral perspective, Różewicz was supposedly severing the
152 Ibid., p. 273.
153 A. Werner, Polskie, arcypolskie…, London 1987, p. 122.
154 Ibid., p. 121. Elżbieta Morawiec, referring to the nihilism-socialist-realism implications, wide-spread particularly in the early 1980s (see e.g. Hańba domowa by Jacek Trznadel), argued that the “clerkist” critics had erroneously linked Różewicz’s alleged acceptance of the doctrine of So-cialist Realism to his “alleged ethical nihilism”, both allegations being simply false. E. Morawiec, Tadeusz Różewicz, “Życie Literackie” 1981, no. 42, p. 5.
155 A. Werner, Polskie, arcypolskie…, op.cit., pp. 121–122.
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ties with his native community of sense and tradition. In substantiating such claims, the critic simultaneously discusses numerous poetic and dra-matic texts that attest to Różewicz’s strong ties to the symbolic universe of Polish Romanticism. Therefore, to avoid contradicting himself, Werner emphasizes the difference between the “image of life” and the “image of cultural, artistic consciousness”, crediting only the former with ethical soundness. Consequently, the charge of nihilism was ultimately formu-lated as an objection – a new-wave one, in fact – to an alleged excess of modern metaconsciousness and a shortage of objective realism, that is an image of specific social life.156 This charge, though, is easily refutable. The critic’s reasoning makes perfect sense only if one assumes that “life” can be faithfully portrayed in literature, without taking into consideration the state of awareness of the artistic (and not only artistic) persona. This essentialist definition of life goes against the grain of modern experience which, among other things, emphasizes the sense of a loss of selfhood on the part of the morally and culturally devastated individual. Only if Różewicz had described the world and man while consciously ignoring this kind of experience would the critic have had any grounds for charg-ing the writer with nihilism.
A more loyal response to Różewicz’s work was provided by Józef Kel-era, who in his 1980 essay Porachunki, published in “Odra” in response to Artur Sandauer’s and Stanisław Majewski’s allegations occasioned by Do piachu, distinguished between nihilism and criticism of “fake values”.157 As the scholar noted, the very concept of nihilism seems anachronistic,
156 Ibid., p. 120.
157 Kelera referred to Artur Sandauer’s statement uttered during a cultural TV show “Pegaz” (3 Jan-uary 1980) and Stanisław Majewski’s article published on 6 May 1979. S. Majewski, “Achtung!
Banditen!”, “Stolica” 1979, no. 18. E. Morawiec called this article a libel of a prophet “possessed by dark ideology”, “an unprecedented instance of crudeness and demagoguery”. E. Morawiec, op. cit., p. 5.
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especially given its modernist-bourgeois genealogy. Kelera argues that in Różewicz’s case one cannot speak of nihilism thus conceived because
The values that are ridiculed or undermined in one way or another, depreciated or simply refused unconditional trust are either fake val-ues – the primary object of mockery – or those that have been habitu-ally overpriced, insufficient or untested for their crucial function in the decisive moments of trial. Thus the revision, the verification of values that Różewicz carries out further and more uncompromisingly than anyone in contemporary literature is always effected in the name of restitution, protection, purification, and strengthening of those val-ues that are elementary and indisputable but also radically threatened.
Such as humankind. Such as humanity. Such as fundamental interper-sonal relations. Such as the existence and continuation of species. It is only those values – elementary and indisputable – that other values should refer to and be tested against.158
Kelera rightly interprets the “life-deepening” formula in reference to the real life of the individual articulated by the poet in numerous texts, the earliest one being a note in Dziennik z partyzantki from 1944. The life-deepening process in Różewicz’s writing makes sense as long as it is medi-ated by symbols, signs, and values “tested” in the face of existential being – threatened and genuinely annihilated. Viewed from this perspective, the
“Poles”/“New People” opposition becomes meaningless as modern man’s experience can be related to collective identity only through the individual’s identity. Collective identity plays a role only to the extent that it constitutes a point of reference for the individual person, motivating or accounting for their definition, and providing the individual with a means of
self-158 J. Kelera, Porachunki, “Odra” 1990, no. 3, p. 52.
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expression. The opposition posited by Werner would be more credible if it included the individual’s identity, which in turn could be contrasted with a number of different – though not necessarily of equal standing – col-lective identification patterns (such as “Poles” or “New People”). Further-more, no matter how many adherences and affiliations Różewicz’s modern protagonist defines himself by, he can attain only a “mobile and open”
identity because none of those adherences or affiliations could be consid-ered total, exclusive, final, unambiguous, or coherent.
Andrzej Skrendo notes that the whole nihilism debate – including Różewicz’s case (the debaters in the 1970s and 1980s included Błoński, Trznadel, and Karasek) – revolved around two major stands: the concern with preservation of ethical “foundations of society and humanity” and the bond with cultural tradition on the one hand and the awareness, on the other hand, that “the real nihilism consists in one’s refusal to ac-knowledge the current disappearance of metaphysical foundations”.159 The metaphysical and historical optimism of the autonomous self that
“colonizes and sterilizes the world” according to Heidegger was, how-ever, ascribed by the scholar to Przyboś, the modern nihilist. Różewicz, by contrast, did not appropriate reality, which turns into “nothing” in his experience, but instead attempted to face and address the phenom-enon.160 “Not the ecstatic wonder but the stubborn perseverance with what is contingent, combined with the equally tenacious rejection of metaphysical legitimizations and religious consolations – this is what the Różewicz stand is all about.”161 Nihilism thus conceived is, consequently,
159 A. Skrendo, Dwaj nihiliści: Przyboś i Różewicz, “Słupskie Prace Filologiczne. Seria Filologia Pol-ska” 2004, no. 3, p. 235. The debate over nihilism is also reviewed in Michał Januszkiewicz’s article Różewicz-nihilista, in: Przekraczanie granic. O twórczości Tadeusza Różewicza, eds W. Bro-warny, J. Orska, A. Poprawa, Kraków 2007.
160 Ibid., p. 239.
161 Ibid., p. 241.
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a revolt against the false awareness, one that avoids confrontation with the real human condition and the real world; it is, in Stanisław Brzozo-wski’s terms, an expression of one’s spiritual honesty.
Kelera proposed to call Różewicz an outsider rather than a nihilist as the poet “was never on anybody’s payroll, never marched under any-body’s banner, would not join any coterie, and consistently – from the very first poetry volume all the way to his last dramas – would go against the grain”.162 The latter statement needs qualifying, though. Henryk Vogler, quoted by Zbigniew Majchrowski, recalled that the writer, when cooper-ating with “Echo Tygodnia” in 1949, would “keenly respond to current political demands”.163 To verify that memory it is enough to look at the front page of the magazine’s first issue, which featured a Socialist Real-ist epic poem by Różewicz entitled “Gwiazda proletariatu” (“The Star of the Proletariat”), a panegyric for Karol Świerczewski.164 The Communist general is presented there in terms of the heroic poetics derived from an-cient (Homer) and Romantic (Słowacki) formulas of the warrior’s heroic life and death. Likewise, the character of Marian Buczek, the protagonist of Różewicz’s debut play, dutifully follows the Socialist Realist format.165
162 J. Kelera, Porachunki, op. cit., p. 47.
163 Z. Majchrowski, op. cit., p. 134. “Echo Tygodnia. Nauka. Literatura. Sztuka” was a Saturday addendum to “Gazeta Krakowska”, a Communist Party magazine published in Kraków. The
“Echo Tygodnia” contributors included, among others, H. Vogler, S. Morawski, M. Promiński, W. Szymborska. H. Markiewicz, W. Mach.
“Echo Tygodnia” contributors included, among others, H. Vogler, S. Morawski, M. Promiński, W. Szymborska. H. Markiewicz, W. Mach.