Between the Gentry Raconte and Classical Distance
Michał Paweł Markowski
Czeslaw Milosz once wrote: 'It so happened that two people who had spent their childhoods in the years before the First World War proceeded like gardeners crossing two previously alien strains of vegetation: they grafted the old noble raconte with humanist erudition and obtained what is usually referred to as the essay.' The two people whom Milosz had in mind were the great Polish essayists Jerzy Stempowski and Stanislaw Vincenz, who began their education as writers long before the Second World War and published their best work in the Sixties. The flow of racontes, which Milosz refers to in his History of Polish Literature as 'talks,' is certainly a Polish specialty in the postwar essay, which exhibits a multitude of trends that cannot be captured in such a brief sketch. So let us stick to the raconte.
The key to this particularly Polish essay form is the way that the freely constructed structure of the text takes into account the listener, that second person to whom the essayist is recounting part of his or her own biography or relating his or her own mental adventures. The dialogue, epistolary, and quasi-memoir forms jostle objectivized discourse away from center stage, and personal narration replaces a purely intellectual game directed at nothing but the subject matter. Rather than the presentation of fully-formed views, the Polish essay is a request for the reader to participate in the same cultural heritage as the essayist. In ninetenth-century dictionaries, 'gaweda,' or the raconte, is a word used to describe both 'improving' conversation and an amorphic form of presentation. Conversation remains foremost in the twentieth-century essay, while the chaotic style of presentation has been transformed into compositional freedom. One characteristic that has remained unchanged is 'easy understandability,' thanks to which both author and reader are not so much textual figures as flesh-and-blood characters sharing the same set of opinions. This is why the Polish essay flourished particularly well in postwar émigré circles: far from home, this very need to establish contact with other exiles fostered a familiar and intimate tone.
If we are to speak of the cultural subsoil of the Polish essay, the primal experience would certainly resemble the things described by educated landowners in their nineteenth-century memoirs. The most important thing for them was tradition-the tradition of their families and of the localities they inhabited. In their manor houses and on their great landed estates, they told stories. wrote letters, and cultivated the best French narrative modes, colored by Polish style. They engaged in storytelling all the more intensely when the times seemed uncertain and hopeless, when it seemed that they had no future. They also had stories to tell when the memories of historical tempests, like those that had erased Poland from the map of Europe, were fresh-or when they anticipated a coming tempest. Their racontes, both written and spoken, were therefore the fruit of historical uncertainty. The stamp of this uncertainty can be clearly identified in the essays of Jerzy Stempowski, Stanislaw Vincenz, and Czeslaw Milosz. These writers identified strongly with the Kresy, the eastern marches of the Polish Commonwealth (Stempowski's Ukraine, Vincenz's Eastern Carpathians, Milosz's Lithuania). Their essays cherish the romantic past while maintaining faith in the values of European culture. The Polish gentry tradition paid unwavering homage to these values during the years when the Polish state was politically absent. This combination of regionalism and universalism, of a geographical backwater and the spiritual metropolis, can also be noted in contemporary essayists. Foremost among them in this regard is Jaroslaw Marek Rymkiewicz, author of a splendid essay cycle on Mickiewicz's Lithuanian years, titled Zmut, Baket, Kilka szczegolow. What are the ingredients in this particular form of essay? Domestic archives and neighborly gossip, family anecdotes and tales, a love of biographical detail, histories of the region, the province, and its inhabitants, and the point of view of a distanced member of the community who views the collective from its margins.
The second basic principle of Polish essay writing is the ever-present connection with the classical Mediterranean tradition. This can best be seen in such essays of Stanislaw Vincenz's as Homer, The Father of Shapes, On the Hellene Legacy, the apocryphal narrative 'The Postwar Peregrinations of Socrates' or his wartime notes titled 'outopos,' in which he interweaves commentaries on Homer and Dante with observations on the life of birds in the eastern Carpathians. For Vincenz, Greece is more than a reservoir of ideas and beautiful forms; it is above all the birthplace of spiritual autonomy, the fatherland of the civic virtues and of the idea that persuasion should be preferred over force-in the absence of these values, contemporary civilization is doomed to destruction. It is precisely to this tradition, invented in the Polish essay by Stanislaw Vincenz, that subsequent lovers of the Hellades will return: Zbigniew Herbert (Acropolis), Mieczyslaw Jastrun (The Mediterranean Hour), and Zygmunt Kubiak (The Space of the Eternal Works: An Essay on Mediterranean Culture). In each of these cases, the essay takes on epic characteristics. The bygone world acquires glory through the distance across which it is spoken of, although this distance, paradoxically, is what makes it possible to achieve any sort of contact at all with earlier times.
Between the parochial, gentry raconte and epic distance, the Polish essay has never developed a consistent poetics. There are, instead, multifarious forms that refer to divergent generic traditions: sometimes it is a dialogue, as in Vincenz's 'A Small Ithaca: A Nocturnal Dialogue.' At other times, it is a travel diary, as in Stempowski's 'Diary of a Journey to Austria and Germany.' At other times, an epistolary form is used, as in Boleslaw Micinski's 'Answer to a Letter from Francesco, Citizen of Rome.' Finally, it may be a portrait, as in Milosz's cycle 'Portraits' in Beginning with My Streets. However, the linking element among these Protean forms is a shared belief in tradition. This tradition includes familiarity both with what Homer said in an ancient epic, and what was written in a nineteenth-century great-grandmother's guestbook.
Michał Paweł Markowski
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