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The Poetry and Prose of Everyday Life in Communist Kraków: Moths, Old Maids, and the Memoirs of Adam Zagajewski

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Larry Wolff
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Abstract

This essay analyzes Adam Zagajewski’s recent memoir W cudzym pigknie (Another beauty), in which he reflects particularly on the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, when he was a student and young poet in Kraków. The essay addresses Zagajewski’s perspective on the city of Kraków, his reflections on communism in Wladyslaw Gomulka’s Poland, his sense of the relations between older and younger Polish generations, and his efforts to negotiate a personal balance between poetry and politics. Zagajewski’s memoir is discussed in the context of his own poetry, of Polish intellectual life, and of Kraków’s cultural history from the 1890s to the 1980s. Intellectual points of reference and comparison range from Tadeusz “Boy“ Żeleński and Stanisław Wyspiański in fin-de-siècle Kraków, to Witold Gombrowicz, Czesław Miłosz, and Adam Michnik in later twentieth-century Polish letters and politics. The essay, finally, attempts to assess the significance and implications of communism for Polish poetry, literature, and intellectual life.

Type
Review Essays
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 61 , Issue 2 , Summer 2002 , pp. 345 - 356
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2002

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References

1 Milosz, Czeslaw, Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition, trans. Leach, Catherine S. (Garden City, N.Y, 1968), 249–50Google Scholar.

2 Zagajewski, Another Beauty, 68; for the Polish original, see Wcudzym pieknie (Kraków, 1998).

3 Zagajewski, Adam, Solidarity, Solitude, trans. Vallee, Lillian (New York, 1990), 33Google Scholar; for the Polish original, see Solidarność i samotność (Paris, 1986).

4 Zagajewski, Another Beauty, 33-34.

5 Zagajewski, Adam, Tremor: Selected Poems, trans. Gorczynski, Renata (New York, 1985), 60 Google Scholar.

6 Ibid., 78-80.

7 Zagajewski, Another Beauty, 69.

8 Zagajewski, Adam, Two Cities: On Exile, History, and the Imagination, trans. Vallee, Lillian (New York, 1995), 3–68 Google Scholar.

9 Zagajewski, Tremor, 3-5.

10 Hoffman, Eva, Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (New York, 1989)Google Scholar.

11 Zagajewski, Another Beauty, 41-42.

12 Mitosz, Czeslaw, The Captive Mind, trans. Zielonko, Jane (New York, 1953)Google Scholar.

13 Zagajewski, Another Beauty, 212.

14 Ibid., 19, 152.

15 Ibid., 90-91.

16 Ibid., 77-79, 94.

17 Ibid., 4, 48, 95, 99.

18 Ibid., 141-42.

19 Zagajewski, Adam, Mysticism for Beginners, trans. Cavanagh, Clare (New York, 1997), 62–63 Google Scholar.

20 Zagajewski, Another Beauty, 153-54.

21 Ibid., 42, 55, 212.

22 Mickiewicz, Adam, Pan Tadeusz, trans. Mackenzie, Kenneth R. (London, 1986), 570 Google Scholar.

23 See Wolff, Larry, “Dynastic Conservatism and Poetic Violence in Fin-de-siècle Cracow: The Habsburg Matrix of Polish Modernism,” American Historical Review 106, no. 3 (June 2001): 735–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 For Przybyszewski’s memoir, see Moi wspótcześni, vol. 2, Wśród swoich (Warsaw, 1930); Boy’s memoir took the form of essays reflecting on Przybyszewski’s recollections, published individually in 1930 and 1931 and later gathered together as a book under the title Znaszli ten kraj? (Kraków, 1945). The Kraków cabaret world of Zielony Balonik is treated in English in Segel's, Harold Turn-of-the-Century Cabaret (New York, 1987), 221–53Google Scholar.

25 Zagajewski, Another Beauty, 176-77.

26 In a typesetter's transposition Wyspiański’s stained-glass window is said to have been installed in 1940, though the correct date is 1904. Zagajewski, Another Beauty, 196. This accidental mistake underlines the extraordinary turns of Polish history in the twentieth century, for though Habsburg rule permitted remarkable cultural and intellectual life in 1904, it is hardly conceivable that Kraków would have been mounting artistic masterpieces during the Nazi occupation in 1940.

27 Zagajewski, Another Beauty, 111, 117.

28 See Jan Kubik, The Power of Symbols against the Symbols of Power: The Rise of Solidarityand the Fall of State Socialism in Poland, (University Park, 1994). Since Kubik himself was a student in Kraków during the 1970s, his discussion of the period is particularly interesting in relation to Zagajewski’s memoir.

29 Zagajewski, , Cienka kreska (Kraków, 1983), 11 Google Scholar: “Czy jestés dysydentem?“

30 Zagajewski, Another Beauty, 207-9; for counterpoint, see Michnik, Adam, Lettersfrom Prison and Other Essays (Berkeley, 1985)Google Scholar.

31 Cavanagh, Clare, “Lyrical Ethics: The Poetry of Adam Zagajewski,” Slavic Review 59, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 3 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 See Zagajewski, Wcudzympieknie, 152 (popielata, wilgotna ciemność) and Zagajewski, Another Beauty, 152 (“the damp, gray darkness“).

33 The Gombrowicz essay “Against Poets” is published in English at the end of the first volume of his diaries; see Gombrowicz, Witold, Diary, trans. Vallee, Lillian (Chicago, 1988), 1:215–30Google Scholar.

34 Zagajewski, Another Beauty, 207.

35 Zagajewski, , Mysticism for Beginners, 9-10; Zagajewski, Ziemia ognista (Poznań, 1994), 12–13 Google Scholar.