| About the book
Since the envoys had brought news of the arrival of the Emperor, Bolesław’s kingdom had been overwhelmed by an all-encompassing state of commotion. Aside from the settlers living deep within the deepest forests, there was probably no one who did not, in some way or other, (...)
more >> |
| | About the book
8
The phones are always going wrong, so my parents aren’t upset when there’s no dialling tone. They’re at the fortieth birthday party of a female friend from their class at high school. They say they’re going downstairs to the phone booth for a (...)
more >> |
|
|
Gustaw Herling-GrudzinskiThe Journal Written by Night
Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski's The Journal Written at Night, is, as I remember it from the pages of Kultura, a true masterpiece, and not just within the "family" of biographical literature. Personally, I prefer the Journal to his From Another World, maybe because so-called "gulag literature" can already claim Varlam Shalamov and Aleksander Solzhenitsyn for its own. Of course, Herling is an eminent witness, judge, and critic of communism - but doesn't the emphasis on one part of his work ultimately impoverish the profile of this "most notable Polish writer today," as he has been called by the Italian journalist Titti Marone?
And in the end, who knows if it wasn't precisely "thanks to" communism that the author wound up in Italy, where he came to pen this lovely Journal, in which prose of the highest caliber is interwoven with reflections on history, aesthetics, and ethics? And in which the author so beautifully depicting a life and a people free of the plague of any kind of totalitarianism?
In sharp relief against a sensuous background of the stories and lives of free people, Herling conducts one of his greatest passions: the desire to divest Western intellectuals, enchanted as they are with communism, of their right to "educate the minds of average men." Even more forceful are his consistent estimations of events in Poland.
The Journal Written by Night
I was, then, well prepared for reading the manuscript found in the Silver Casket. From one of the chronicles, I had learned even more: namely, that the Silver Casket was the beloved possession of Teresa Demagno, who made it her secret hiding place. To it, Teresa entrusted her own verses, and also those of Don Miguel. When Cesare Demagno fled from Panicale castle after committing two murders and rushed towards Pastorizia in order to commit a third, he was not too distracted by his attack of madness to remember to steal something as a keepsake of his Italian existence, which was now closing forever. He stole the Silver Casket.
What, in the name of God, could ever have induced me to put off reading Abbot Peter's manuscript that evening? What evil spirit whispered that I should leave it for the following morning? Was I afraid that the harsh light of the electric lamp would harm the delicate sheets of parchment, more than four centuries old? Was I overly excited by my discovery? Did I prefer, mindful of my heart troubles, to spend the night resting up? God alone can say - if He was paying attention at that moment to my thoughts and feelings. All I know (and I can feel the old pain coming back as I write about it a year later) is that I spread a silk handkerchief over the manuscript as it lay on the table, and when I lifted the handkerchief that morning after the holiday... How can the pen convey what I saw? During the night, in reaction to the air, the manuscript had literally fallen to shreds, as if someone had deliberately torn it into strips, sheet by sheet. I sat down at the table thunderstruck. A surge of fury at myself nearly provoked me to throw those miserable, crumbled scraps of the priceless manuscript, some of them reduced to dust, into the trash can. Fortunately, the voice of reason won out after a few moments of perplexity. Armed with a pair of miniature tweezers, I set about trying to save what could be saved, at least a few flakes of the old abbot's tale, which had been shattered in the light of day. The narrative had endured such a long stretch of time in the dark, hermetically sealed refuge of the Silver Casket, only to disintegrate in the clumsy hands of its belated, accidental discoverer.
At the bottom of the first page, there remained a fragment with a fairly long, but interrupted, sentence: "T. was not only my sister, and I was not only her brother; we...." This could be regarded as a miraculously preserved key to the abbot's entire narrative. And also as a revelatory declaration that overturned the conventions of all the chronicles of the period, regardless of which version of the events that they contained. In all of those chronicles, the three crimes committed by the young Baron Demagno served as examples of the exalted (and, as some later commentators added, blind, passionate, mad, pathological) feeling of family honor in those times: without any proof, on the basis of an innocent exchange of letters, he had raised his hand to avenge the "besmirched honor" of his sister (who was also punished by death). Those other chroniclers tried to stick to the facts, but did not always succeed in keeping their rage between the lines.
I could not find another similarly long fragment among the dust on my table. At the most, there were two or three words here and there that admitted of some sort of surmise, that were the broken piers of ruined bridges across the abyss of silence. I spent the whole day over the remains of the abbot's tale. My efforts were largely an exercise in puzzle-solving. In the end, I built up a certain picture full of gaps and question marks. I shall present it here while imploring historians of the period to recall that it is difficult (for me as well as for anyone else) to distinguish what has been reconstructed on the basis of the shreds of the document from what arose in the imagination of a discoverer trying to rescue something from the ultimate disintegration.
Teresa and Cesare Demagno had become lovers at Panicale castle, when they were separated from the rest of the family on their father's orders. Their sinful romance had blossomed earlier, at Turrita castle, and had naturally been concealed from those around them (I frequently found the words Turrita and segreto in close proximity, as well as Panicale and passione). Teresa must have come to her senses, because the words distacco, dolore and furore reappeared near each other. The words that recur most frequently in the next section are sospetto and sangue. It was probably at this period that something began which Cesare did not clearly perceive. This was the exchange of communications between Teresa and the Spanish captain, through the intermediacy of the tutor who rode regularly to Pastorizia each week. The last words of the abbot's tale (before his signature) are a shocking symptom of incurable madness or diabolical possession. Cesare Demagno wrote them - we must remember - as the sixty-year-old abbot of a Benedictine monastery, more than thirty years after suffocating his sister. He wrote them in Latin: Teresa tota mea.
Gustaw HERLING-GRUDZINSKI (b.1919) - one of the outstanding Polish writers of the twentieth century. His subjects are his own writing as well as the human opposition to various forms of nothingness (totalitarianism, religious doubt, the feeling of existential solitude, and the instrumentalization of life). During the war, he was arrested and confined in the Gulag in the Arctic, before leaving Russia in General Anders' army and fighting at Monte Cassino. He was a co-founder in 1947 and one of the original editors of Kultura. He has lived in Italy since 1952.
Polish edition by Spoldzielnia Wydawnicza CZYTELNIK
English edition by Viking Press: New York 1996
German edition by Carl Hanser Verlag (spring 2000)
Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski Dziennik pisany noca
Back |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
There are more than 31,000 publishers registered in Poland. However, the market is highly concentrated. The 300 largest publishing firms still hold almost 98 per cent of it. More »
|
|
|
|
