Kartki z Węgier (1953), Różewicz’s longest work from the first half of the 1950s, is not an ideological or stylistic monolith. Though most of the collection’s journalistic reports offer a clearly biased angle on the so-cial transformations taking place in Communist Hungary, where the poet
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resided in 1950, there are also more personal and ideologically ambigu-ous excerpts there. These are, undoubtedly, the most interesting fragments which, read separately, are close to Uśmiechy (published two years later) as far as the image of reality and the characters are concerned. There are not many of them: “Godzina języka węgierskiego”, “Szekspir”, and “Kartki z dziennika”, a record of a conversation with an old miner dated 16 De-cember 1950, included in the 2004 edition of collected works, and, finally, a childhood memory entitled Ryż and a recollection (included in Kartki z dziennika) of a walk through Tatabánya dated 20 December 1950. In keeping with the chapter’s subtitle (“Najpiękniejsza węgierska puszta …”
[“The Most Beautiful Hungarian Puszta …”]), the entire book is domi-nated by the poetics of “numbers and images” intended to demonstrate the prosperity of the socialist country. The precious few fragments which are more private, colloquial, or lacking in ideological conclusions expose, by contrast, the narrator’s official bias and his instrumentalized representation of the world and characters depicted in the remaining parts of the book.
The narratives making up Kartki z Węgier are conventional, typical of the epoch that produced them. Kartka z życiorysu [A Postcard from a Biography], which opens the book, is a commentary, characteristic of the cult of personality, on the biography of Mátyás Rákosi. The indispen-sable heroic episode in the life of the secretary of the ruling party, raised to a historic rank thanks to museum arrangement, is a long-time inter-war stay in prison.173 Several dozen pages further into the book, the “last word” from Rákosi’s trial, cited in Siła, która spełniła nadzieje biedniaków [The Force that Fulfiled the Hopes of the Poor Peasants], completes, in dis-cursive terms, the identity of the Communist ideologist. The narrator quotes the theses featured in the oration in terms of a fulfilled historical
173 M. Shore explains that in Communist tradition, incarceration was a “type of [ideological] initia-tion”. M. Shore, op. cit., p. 119.
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vision, tacitly accepting their author’s ideological authority. The composi-tion of Kartki z Węgier is nearly entirely subject to the patterns of Socialist Realism in its representation of history and social reality. The history of the workers’ movement, outlined at the beginning, and the model biog-raphy of a Communist activist are concretizations of telic and progressive Marxist historiosophy, while the country’s modernization, improving the quality of life for workers and peasants, is supposed not only to attest to the new system’s efficiency but also to demonstrate its moral legitimacy.
The narrator-agent of Kartki, identifying with this social project, aligns with it even his own textually generated identity. His personal childhood memories, e.g. associating rice with the “poor people” in China, support the general argument for the superiority of the socialist economy.
Another point in the Polish writer’s itinerary is New Dunapentele, soon to be renamed Sztalinvaros, where a new city and a steel mill are being built from scratch. The green and brightly lit Sztalinvaros func-tions in the Różewicz text as the anti-city, symbolically erected on the memories of attics and “damp, dismal cellars that capitalism had in store for the urban proletariat” (K 11). The lifting of the boundary between the textually constructed representation of reality, the city in the making, and a ready-made ideological interpretation betrays the narrator’s bias, which makes him dutifully proceed from thesis to example.174 The narra-tive self of Kartki subordinates exploring reality to social project, and pri-vate memory to the teleological concept of history understood as political and civilizational progress. In Różewicz’s later prose, in turn, for example in “Drewniany karabin” from 2002, a similar ideological conclusion is
174 This type of attitude on the author’s part is referred to by Hanna Małgowska as “the conscious ideologist’s stance”, i.e. one which “subordinates the collected materials to pre-existing beliefs”, the narrator’s role in such texts being reduced to “collecting documentation for the professed beliefs”. H.M. Małgowska, Gatunki reportażowo-dziennikarskie okresu dwudziestolecia (próba ty-pologii), in: ed. K. Budzyk, Z teorii i historii literatury, Wrocław 1963, p. 195.
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marked by subjectivism and literariness whereas the connection between the social status of the proletariat and the identity of the Różewicz self acquires a personal, autobiographical dimension in the text.175
With few exceptions, the attitude of the “conscious ideologist” ac-companies the narrator of the remaining parts of Kartki, for example in the report “Wycieczka na wieś [A Trip to the Countryside]. The expected visit to a farming cooperative during that trip – all in accordance with the thematic canon of Socialist Realism – materializes under the auspices of the propagandist theatrical play “Burza w lecie”, which functions as the source of the only politically correct interpretation of the situation. The play’s thesis is not subject to any verification, even an empirical one, be-cause it is one of the ideology’s axiomatic truths. One can infer, then, that the Hungarian village’s idyllic atmosphere noted by the narrator of that fragment is just a façade whereas the real struggle for the peasants’ access to the cooperative remains invisible. A similar situation was created by Różewicz in the story “Strach ma wielkie oczy” (Uśmiechy), though the text’s denouement is tragicomic, however. The younger of the agitators, trying to talk the peasants into collectivization, overhears a conversation at night between his hosts, who are planning to kill a rooster for dinner:
“Let’s wring those two necks, period.”
“I pity the old one, but the young one screams too much, all the time.”
“No use wasting a knife on that one, I tell ya.”
“You can always use your axe … but then you’ll mess up everything with blood.”
(I 364)
175 Drewniany karabin was first published in “Odra” (2002, no. 7–8), and then in the second prose volume of Utwory zebrane.
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The agitator misconstrues the intentions of the hospitable farmers.
Expecting to be murdered, he escapes through the window in panic.
“Strach ma wielkie oczy” mocks the excessive presence of ideology in eve-ryday life during the Stalinist era and parodies political thinking in terms of a bloody struggle. By the same token, incidentally, the image of kill-ing a person, well entrenched in the Communist activist’s imagination, reveals its striking similarity to routine animal slaughter. This association could be interpreted as the author’s intuitive sense of the emotional and moral state of post-war consciousness, permeated as it was with images of killing and instinctively responsive to the tenets of social Darwin-ism. “You kill a man like you kill an animal”, wrote Różewicz. As Marta Piwińska rightly puts it,
[We are talking here about] man degraded after the war in his hu-manity, the man who is already aware of the animal he carries within, because he can be hunted like an animal, may die like one, and is perfectly capable of attacking and killing another human animal. He cannot forget this [disturbing] truth, no matter how thick-skinned he becomes.176
The agitator in “Strach ma wielkie oczy” is only seemingly the car-rier of a powerful, victorious (see the episode about the new regime’s bloody suppression of the resistance movement), and emancipatory ide-ology (the civilizational progress of the rural areas); in reality, he is a “man infected with death”. The protagonist’s ideological identity disintegrates not because of the opponent’s arguments, as Różewicz’s “tragicomedy”
does not unfold on a discursive plane at all, but as a result of an inner crack in the consciousness of the Communist activist, stripped of faith in
176 M. Piwińska, op. cit., p. 394.
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pure intentions and of trust in others. Consequently, the identity proves to be merely a role.
The narrator of Kartki z Węgier attempts to legitimize his ideological stands in two ways. Firstly, through argumentation, citing statistical data and commentaries of state officials and social activists arguing and pon-tificating. This way of reasoning pops up even in the scene of saving the abandoned works by Goethe and Shakespeare, one which remains mean-ingful even outside of any political context. Secondly, however, what the narrator of “Wycieczka na wieś” (Kartki z Węgier) means by opposing the destruction of the books with the words “Those two are their property now” is not only that the books now belong to the people and should find their way to the local library. Equally important is the fact that the former farmhands – in accordance with the rule of progressive internationalism and democratization of access to high culture – obtain the rights of culti-vated persons. This is also an element of ideology characteristic of despotic systems in countries boasting a substantial cultural legacy, often famous for their openness to the world’s progressive intellectual and literary traditions.
In his discussion of Różewicz’s report, Janusz Waligóra sees it as a testimony to the symptomatic destruction of any world heritage failing to conform to the “teachings of Marx and Lenin”.177 Still, the ideological tenets are represented in the text by the narrator, not the Hungarian characters re-sponsible for the condition of books from the palace library. Notably, this episode clearly features – thanks to the narrator’s editorializing comments – the Communist equation of civilizational progress with unrestricted access to cultural property.178 Had the former farmhands already been equipped with the awareness that the report’s protagonist boasts of they would have taken proper care of the books themselves. Viewed from this perspective,
177 J. Waligóra, op. cit., p.79.
178 I discuss the socialist cultural state and the democratization of access to culture in the chapter
“Culture, Memory and Community”.
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Różewicz’s text is not so much a testimony to Communist cultural policy as it is an accusation of the pre-socialist past to which the behaviour of the characters of “Wycieczka na wieś” can be traced back. The revolutionary changes in Hungary had not been long enough in the making to shape proper attitudes to culture among those characters.179
Because of its argumentative excess, some parts of Kartki sound pon-tificating and doctrinarian, too general and isolated from personal expe-rience. Only in scenes and stories featuring specific characters that the narrator-agent focuses upon are ideological premises corroborated not by sociological diagnosis but by individual biography or personal stand – which is another way of making them more credible. The fancy signature of János, an employee of the “Tancsics” cooperative farm and a former illiterate, is ample material evidence, the narrator argues, of civilizational progress and democratization of culture in a people’s republic. The scene featuring a swineherd who signs the Stockholm Appeal calling for a ban on nuclear weapons seems ambiguous, though, not only because the date of the Appeal coincides with the aggravation of the Cold War tensions but also because the episode described by Różewicz is a potential carica-ture of the people’s emancipation. Juxtaposing a herd of mud-covered pigs with an act of international politics seems grotesque.180 To counter the effect, the writer focuses the narrator’s attention on personal experi-ences of the characters and only indirectly on collective history. Such fragments, however, in the entire volume are few.
179 Ksawery Pruszyński, more critical of communism as such, described in similar terms, in the 1930s, the difference between ideologically defined “property of the people”, which commands concern about the cultural legacy of the Catholic church and the upper classes, and social prac-tice of the revolution: looting and devastation perpetrated by undereducated workers and peas-ants. See K. Pruszyński, W czerwonej Hiszpanii, Warszawa 1997.
180 Also, texts by other authors featuring collecting signatures under the Stockholm Appeal among peasants are unintentionally grotesque, what with the protaginist of Seweryn Skulski’s reportage who “signed it, though unevenly”. S. Skulski, Plon trójki, “Wieś” 1950, no. 22, p. 1.
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More compelling are Kartki z dziennika (Entries from a Journal), the book’s closing chapter. The protagonist of one of the journal’s fragments, dated 16 December 1950, a Polish emigrant named Józef Prusek, tells the story of his 90-year-old life to the narrator-agent.181 Against the back-ground of the old miner’s personal tale (and the narrator’s account) the history of several formations and political systems of the 20th century unfold: the twilight of the landed gentry, the industrialization and revo-lutionary movements of the century’s early years, economic migrations, nationalism, and communism. The emphasis in Prusek’s story, however, is neither on political events nor patriotic merits. When they do pop up, having been woven into the fabric of his commonsensical reasoning, they fit into the cognitive and emotional framework of personal existence.
Military dramatism (“the Battle of the Piave River”) is accompanied by existential pragmatism, individual exceptionality (“Francis Joseph, Em-peror and Apostolic King”) – by commonness, the lofty style (“has in his royal magnanimity kindly consented to announce”) – by blunt addresses, symbols (“the golden cross of merit”) – by real action. The protagonist’s life, modest in comparison to its historical and social context, comes across as authentic, complete, and balanced. Revealingly, the narrator abstains from editorializing comments on it, trusting in the compelling composition of the text itself and the colloquial narrative form.
I disagree with Janusz Waligóra, who claims that Różewicz wasted the opportunity to create a portrayal of a committed worker and seasoned activist.182 This is not the kind of portrayal the writer had in mind. It still does not follow that Prusek’s image is, as Waligóra argues, ideologically
181 The character of Old Miner Janosz features also in the closing part of The Card Indexwhere he recalls the arrival of Hero, then a young author, in 1950 or 1951. That character directly refers to the realities and rituals of the Stalinist period as well as the tendentious literary practice of the day (IV 54–55).
182 J. Waligóra, op. cit., p. 79.
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indifferent. The miner character is a challenge for two models of identity:
the worker-revolutionary and the Polish emigrant. The Różewicz pro-tagonist vaguely resembles the two types, at the same type not conform-ing to their implied axiologies. The seemconform-ingly most elevatconform-ing episodes of Prusek’s life – political and patriotic – have been rendered at the level of mundane biographical facts. They seem comparable in status to the anecdote of the killed piglets and other equally prosaic vignettes. The hierarchies are gone: the ideologist within the old emigrant and worker does not rule over the common man inside him, nor has a model iden-tity dominated the individual existence. Różewicz, though accentuating the universal aspect of Prusek’s experiences, refuses to subject them to ideological typology. The ideological distance pertains not only to the doctrine of Socialist Realism, which Waligóra notes, but also to the con-cept of Polishness conceived as a supreme symbolic value, privileged over existential and social values. The author of Kartki z dziennika created a positive protagonist without subjecting him to ideological identities, but not ignoring them either.
The miner is not a “proletarian version of Skawiński”, as the scholar argues, but, rather, seems to have been cast in the role of the positivist emigrant.183 Bogusław Bakuła, in his essay “Antylatarnik”, writes that,
“Sienkiewicz refers in his novella [Latarnik – WB] not to common sense, not to the positivist cult of work and responsibility, but to the myth of the word creating a new man”.184 Różewicz, by contrast, has no use for that mythology, relying instead on the colloquial “biographical” narrative. His protagonist does not undergo a radical inner transformation, a symbolic return to Polishness conceived as a primary identity. The miner’s frag-mentary biography – confirming reasonable work for the Polish diaspora
183 Ibid.
184 B. Bakuła, Antylatarnik oraz inne szkice literackie i publicystyczne, Poznań 2001, p. 121.
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in Hungary – is crowned not with a dramatic sense of national bonding but with a vitalist memory of “the shade of orange trees”, the strong scent of Italian fruit and flowers, or of joking with young women. This is, in fact, an anti-Romantic creation, referring to the positivist type of a so-cial-economic refugee, describing “the everyday reality of emigrant life”
through a well-balanced account of historical, political, economic, and personal matters.185 On the other hand, though, Prusek is not a type of positivist homo pauperum, a physically and psychologically degraded pro-letarian. Compared to his antecedents from the fiction of Artur Grusze-cki or Aleksander Świętochowski, he seems to be a happy man, satisfied with his life, emotionally and morally balanced, and, first of all, liberated from a compulsive bond with his homeland.186 The difference is, prob-ably, a result from the optimistic image of the “new Socialist man”, in line with the literary doctrine of Stalinism, but also an effect of the departure from the sacrificial, Romantic stereotype of the Polish emigrant.
As a positive protagonist, Prusek is also a discreet realization of Różewicz’s literary projects presented in earlier journalistic texts, such as Most płynie do Szczecina or Wyprawa na złotą rybkę.187 The narrator of the latter piece, recounting his conversation with Wolin Island fishermen,
185 See H. Gosk, op. cit., p. 101.
186 See A. Notkowski, Robotnik polski schyłku XIX wieku – postawy wobec rzeczywistości (Kilka mi-gawek z literatury lat 70.-90.), in: Przemiany formuły polskości w drugiej połowie XIX wieku, ed.
J. Maciejewski, Warszawa 1999.
187 T. Różewicz, Most płynie do Szczecina, “Trybuna Tygodnia” (a Sunday supplement to “Trybuna Robotnicza”, an organ of the Silesian Regional Committee of the Polish Workers’ Party in Ka-towice, Katowice-Kraków-Wrocław-Częstochowa-Rzeszów-Kielce) 1947, no. 9 of 16 November 1947; T. Różewicz, Spacer po Opolu, “Trybuna Tygodnia” 1947, no. 10 of 23 November 1947;
T. Różewicz, Światła na drodze, “Trybuna Tygodnia” 1947, no. 11 of 7 December 1947 (a cycle of three reportages reprinted as one text with slight abbreviations and changes in sequential order: T. Różewicz, Most płynie do Szczecina, in: Wejście w kraj, ed. Z. Stolarek, vol. 1, War-szawa 1965 – subsequent quotes come from this edition unless otherwise noted); T. Różewicz, Wyprawa na złotą rybkę, “Trybuna Tygodnia” 1948, no. 33 and 35 of 26 August and 12 Septem-ber 1948.
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concludes that in working-class people and common readers of contem-porary literature,
There is a great longing for the positive protagonist, for the type of person who is good, authentic, involved. Among the mentally de-ranged, the grotesque, the cowardly, the abnormal, there are no pro-tagonists that my interlocutors are longing for. It is my deeply held conviction and my greatest gain as a young writer.188
Apart from the image of the individual “derailed” by historical expe-riences or that of the anti-social man in both texts, there appears a nega-tive example of the idealized protagonist of propagandist literature, full of worn-out journalistic clichés about working for Communist Poland and devotion to socialism. These two types are contrasted with the im-ages of the authentic worker, a man of flesh and blood, and with the literary model of the Polish positive protagonist featured in the works of
Apart from the image of the individual “derailed” by historical expe-riences or that of the anti-social man in both texts, there appears a nega-tive example of the idealized protagonist of propagandist literature, full of worn-out journalistic clichés about working for Communist Poland and devotion to socialism. These two types are contrasted with the im-ages of the authentic worker, a man of flesh and blood, and with the literary model of the Polish positive protagonist featured in the works of