The Changing Face of Polish Writing Abroad
Wojciech Ligęza
0000-00-00The true beginning of the postwar Polish community abroad was the Yalta Pact of February 1945. The situation that came into being at the time bore all the marks of human tragedy: writers had to choose between being foreigners in a new country, or living without freedom at home. The most important of the institutions that integrated the Polish Diaspora arose soon after the war. In 1946, Mieczyslaw Grydzewski revived Wiadomosci, a magazine aimed at the émigré community, who cherished freedom, were strongly attached to their Polsh identity, and enjoyed traditional literary forms. In 1947, Jerzy Giedroyc founded the Literary Institute, with its periodical Kultura, in Rome. The monthly took account of the fact that many of its readers lived in Poland, and it proclaimed aesthetic pluralism while emphasizing issues affecting all the countries of East-Central Europe. Such outstanding writers as Witold Gombrowicz, Czeslaw Milosz, Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski, Jerzy Stempowski, and Andrzej Bobkowski published in Kultura.
The uncertain times in which the Polish cultural mileu abroad coalesced were not exactly favorable to literature. The most valuable writings are the GULAG memoirs, in which eyewitness accounts add up to a sort of guide to the Archipelago. This library is made up of Jozef Czapski's Wspomnienia starobielskie and Na nieludzkiej ziemi, Waclaw Grubinski's Miedzy mlotem a sierpem, Anatol Krakowiecki's Ksiazka o Kolymie, and Beata Obertynska's W domu niewoli.
The Fifties saw a rich, dicverse growth in Polish émigré literature. Searching began to give way to stabilization as masterpieces of contemporary prose and poetry arose under conditions of cultural freedom. The cast of characters grew more distinguished as Milosz, Aleksander Wat, Marek Hlasko, Leopold Tyrmand, Witold Wirpsza, and Wlodzimierz Odojewski chose to live outside Poland. Changes in poetry were marked by new longer poems in polyphonic forms, withintersecting lines of metaphysical, historical, and ethical reflection, along with creative reference to the work of Eliot and Pound. The poets from the Kontynenty group (Bohdan Czaykowski, Adam Czerniawski, and Boleslaw Taborski) distanced themselves from the shopworn symbols of Polishness while regarding British and American poetry as their inspiration. Brwaking out of the ghetto of émigré writing, they desired to take part in literary life in Poland.
Gombrowicz's Trans-Atlantyk was a masterful coming to accounts with patriotic ideology. It initiated a whole series of outstanding émigré prose works. The display of subjective freedom led to artistic experimentation. Writers poked fun at and created parodies of prophecy, the national mission, and the rhetoric of the heroic deed, as in Czeslaw Straszewicz's Turysci z bocianich gniazd. In Matuga Idzie, Marian Pankowski subjected historical martyrdom and an exalted sense of obligation to a destructive juztaposition with the pithy vitality of provincial speech. In Leo Lipski's Piotrus, solitude in a new country took on the dimensions of nightmare. The obsessive return of the war and its aftermath in human consciousness was an epic theme in Jozef Mackiewicz's Droga do nikad and Nie trzeba glosno mowic, as well as Tadeusz Nowakowski's Oboz Wszystkich Swietych. Another such theme was eyewitness GULAG testimony, suspended somewhere between chronicles and narrative fiction, as in Herling-Grudzinski's Inny Swiat. Yet a third theme was the mythical return to the time of childhood: Milosz's Dolina Issy. Critics identified a category of Kresy prose, which carried the romantic legacy of the idyll and the catastrophic bloodbath forward into the twentieth century. Writers like Vincenz, Mackiewicz, Zygmunt Haupt, and Odojewski preserved the imaginative quality of cultural distinctness while embracing the theme of the historical destruction of the Eastern Marches of the Polish Commonwealth. There were superb developments in the essay and diary forms. The 'School of the Polish Essay,' as practiced abroad, outstripped what was being achieved back home in Poland at the time.
The dates 1976 (when KOR, the Comittee in Defense of the Workers) and 1981 (the beginning of Martial Law in Poland) mark changes in the model of émigré literature, which henceforth moved closer to the domestic scene in terms both of the works themselves and the manner in which they were published. The best poetry collections of the time issued from under the pens of Milosz -- Nieobjeta ziemia, Kroniki, and his Polish edition of The Poem of the Pearl -- and the members of the 'Generation of 1968,' most notably Stanislaw Baranczak (Atlantyda, Widokowka z tego swiata) and Adam Zagajewski (Jechac do Lwowa, Plotno). A continually attractive theme was the literary documentation of extraordinary wartime experiences, as in Jerzy Lerski's Emisariusz Jur and Jan Nowak-Jezioranski's Kurier z Warszawy. There was also literary testimony to the complicated way in which inhuman wartime experiences left their stamp on people's lives, as in Henryk Grynberg's Zycie codzienne i artystyczne or Zofia Romanowiczowa's Skrytki. Slawomir Mrozek experienced international theatrical success while residing in Paris and Mexico, and Janusz Glowacki garnered similar renown while living in the United States.
The diagnosis of the subject of Poles abroad as offered in Mrozek's famous The Emigrants has been continued in new prose by Edward Redlinski (Szczuropolacy) and Janusz Rudnicki (Mozna zyc). The theme of the memory of the Holocaust returns in books by Grynberg (Szkice rodzinne and Drohobycz, Drohobycz), as well as Wilhelm Dichter (Kon Pana Boga). Intellectual enquiries into the case of the intriguing newcomer who is unable to find a place for himself in an affluent, soulless, and well-organized society are taken up in the novel Slowa obcego by Bronislaw Swiderski, who resides in Copenhagen. From issues of exile and the dilemmas of emigration, we thus arrive in the Nineties at a universal conception of the problem of Otherness. Younger writers like Marzena Broda, Maciej Niemiec, Izabela Filipiak, Manuela Gretkowska, and Marek Jastrzebiec-Mosakowski -- who live or have lived abroad-decisively cut themselves off from the past of émigré literature. The transitional phase, a peculiar sort of post-emigration, is clearly ending.
Wojciech Ligęza
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