“Here, to lie, is to protect society; to speak the truth is to overthrow the state.”
“A silence more frightful than the evil itself.”
—ASTOLPHE DE CUSTINE,
Letters from Russia, 1839
WHAT STRIKES me most when I meet people coming from Poland is that I find in them not only the same problems as before, but the same obsessions, not subsided, not resolved, but as if on the contrary, exacerbated by exasperation. The war, the German occupation, fifteen years of People’s Poland, October 1956,1 all of these seem relatively superficial events by comparison.
If existence, and only existence, really determines consciousness, such different conditions should open up a precipice between me and them. However, they reveal to me on the contrary what endures—not only what endures of the things most essential to people in Poland and to those of whom Mickiewicz says are “shod with geography and politics” after “traipsing across many countries,” but also the endurance of instinctive reactions, of injuries, of everything that shuts us in, creating a closed morality that cuts us off from everything that is other.
•
I wrote in Inhuman Land about my conversation with Stasova,2 member of the Northern Commune triumvirate, in her cell room at the Smolny, in Petrograd in 1918.
Going to visit her, walking through halls to get to her, I passed piles of propaganda leaflets about kolkhozes.
“Do you believe in the Soviet propaganda for kolkhozes in the countryside?” I asked.
Stasova looked at me like a person of faith looking at a poor unbeliever. “Existence determines consciousness; we have changed existence, idea nasazhdaetsia, the idea will take root, you should come back in twenty years, then you’ll see,” she said calmly.
That sentence stuck in my memory to the degree that, when we were deported deep into Russia exactly twenty years later in cattle cars, I looked around me eagerly, almost believing that I would see in the faces of the people some reflection, even if only the slightest, of the new socialist land and the new heavens. It didn’t take many hours for me to be able to read the truth in the extinguished faces of crowds at the train stations. Later I saw, got to know peasants in kolkhozes. The passion, the longing to possess, seemed to me just as enduring, as rooted in these people, and even strengthened by their exasperation. The prophecy, the “scientific” assurance of Stasova, “the conscience of the Revolution,” as she was then called, turned out to be a delusionary dream. The immemorial passion for material possession endured.
•
When in the camp at Starobielsk I heard poems by Mickiewicz and even Or-Ot about Siberia and exile, I was shaken by their relevance to the present, new to me but just as acute as at the moment when they were written, by the magical power their immediacy increased a hundredfold. Then, too, I felt not the passing away but the endurance of the world of injury and resentment that a few years previously had seemed to belong to the past.
•
Similarly, today, in conversations with quite a few visitors from Poland, I am struck by the heat, by the power of resentment toward Russia brought to the point of exasperation.
In his study of Conrad,3 Miłosz shows how the writer’s attitude to Russia was very much the view of the average Polish Borderlands nobleman of those times. Both for the English writer, long cut off from Poland, and for the Polish milieu from which Conrad derived, Russia is a cruel and evil world, as Conrad’s father, Apollo Korzeniowski wrote, a “government that sponges like a common thief off European states.”
And here again, after twenty years of life outside Poland, I find that the anti-Russian resentment has more force even than in the time when exile and injuries suffered shaped Conrad’s feelings and formed his worldview. To any question about Russia, so many times I hear the reflexive response: “I know nothing about it.” The same words Conrad, the author of Under Western Eyes, who had an aversion to Dostoevsky (though he admitted once that “Dostoevsky is profound as the sea”), who spent his childhood in Russia and lost his mother in exile in Vologda, wrote to Edward Garnett: “I know nothing about Russia.” When I listen to the stories of people who lost loved ones in Russia or because of Russia, when they express their judgment of Russia, I feel as if each of them had touched some magical boundary that he or she had no strength or ability to cross, a boundary beyond which there is a more complex and more just vision of Russia or way of looking at Russia. The attitude shaped by the prism of “the tears of our saints and our damned” cuts us off not only from Russia but from the whole world, which sees Russia either in a simplified but rosy light, or as full of contradictions and hopes, with the eyes of Dostoevsky.
Our view of a country that is and will be our neighbor, “because we’re not surrounded by the sea like the Italian peninsula,” has opposed to it, we must not forget, a view of Poland that is just as simplified and no less hostile. Pushkin’s kitchlivyi liakh4 and Dostoevsky’s various “little Polacks,” brilliant caricatures of Polish hypocrisy, aristocratic pomp, and pathetic, ineffectual phrasemongering, also falsify and destroy the true image of Poland in the eyes of millions of Russians.
Miłosz, citing the most anti-Russian statements made by Custine or Marx, correctly remarks that what might seem revelatory in the West and indeed might have been—because it was so different from common opinion about Russia—in Polish literature was merely banal (Miłosz calls it “stereotypical”), that this view of Russia dates back to the old Republic, where inferiority-superiority complexes grew up between Poland and Russia, and that all of that didn’t prevent a nobleman in the Borderlands (physically and psychologically close to Conrad) from having a certain inclination toward the Russians; after all, it wasn’t particular Russians who were to blame, but a civilizational type that has to degrade each and every one of them.
This stereotype seems to hold sway again in Poland, strengthened by new facts—and what kind of facts!—and arguments.
That vision of an inhuman Russia that brings and can only bring destruction and evil, how could it not develop and become popular in Poland, Hungary, and in all the countries where its domination reaches? For Poland today Russians are the people who deported a million and a half Polish citizens to the East, condemning them in great part to perish; they are the people who murdered thousands at Katyń, who used a foul trick to deport the sixteen, and who watched the destruction of Warsaw with their guns within hand’s reach; they directed the secret police, which tortured people; it was the Russians who suppressed the heroic uprising of Hungarians with Soviet tanks, they who wiped out Nagy and his comrades, a year and a half after putting down the uprising. So nothing, nothing has changed, and nothing can ever change, for it is always the same Russia; Mickiewicz was right in part III of Forefathers’ Eve, and Conrad was right, and Custine, and Marx, who wrote that Moscow was formed “in the school of debasement which was the Mongol yoke, through Peter, who combined the political agility of a Mongol slave with the proud aspirations of a leader forbidden by Genghis Khan to conquer the world.”
So again this vision of Russia reigns as it did over the Borderland nobility of the nineteenth century, and over Conrad, the vision of Forefathers’ Eve, of the section “Review of Troops”:
Heroism (of the faithful slave), a death like that
is a dog’s reward, sin for a man . . .
But is there also in our consciousness the other aspect of Mickiewicz, the Muscovite’s friend?
Do you remember me?—I dream so often
of the deaths, exiles, prisons of my friends,
I dream of you . . .
Anyone who has lived even a year or two in Russia, reading this, will see behind these lines the faces of his friends, his own good memories of Russia and Russians.
Who nowadays hears Norwid’s solitary voice, his remarks on a Russia lost in a prewar edition of his letters, now unavailable? It is Norwid, enemy of “patriotic puritanism,” who rises up against one-sided judgments and has harsh words for anyone who surrenders to the stereotype even Conrad surrendered to, which Norwid disliked so much that in the years 1863 and 1864 he attacked even Mickiewicz —he thought he was not a national writer but only an exceptional one.
“Critical unconsciousness in the sphere of thought,” wrote Norwid, “and in the sphere of spiritual work, you see the same thing in historical reality. Just as Mickiewicz’s exceptionality was called nationality, and they call it that in an ecstasy like a fever—so in reality, exceptionality is mistaken for nationality. When Duchiński5 stoutly bashes them with: ‘Muscovite = Chinaman,’ they will be pleased, and if someone warns them that today, a nation is made up not only of a spirit distinct from others but also of what connects it to others, and that you can’t cut down the trees in a twenty-square-mile cordon around Poland so that it can have a true national poet or national historian, they will spit on you—and in this way they raise up the patriotism of the enemy, as they have done, and cause the fury of enemies, and the graceful withdrawal of friends. Every anachronism always has these consequences.”
“Only free people,” writes Norwid in another letter, “only those who are not branded SLAVES from their cradle, know that living next to Russia we must have OUR PARTY in Russia—otherwise it will always be the clash of two monoliths, who have nothing in common—and if two monoliths collide with each other, what is left is a void and the clashing of ultimate forces.”
But my pessimistic remarks on our being walled in by the Polish morale close, on our inability to objectivize our resentments, are perhaps also one-sided.
I have seen and I know more than one Pole reacting to these matters in a manner closer to Norwid than to the “stereotype”; I know people who have suffered, who were even tortured, who did not cling to their resentment toward Russia, more, who leaving Russia, said farewell to it with tears, because he also experienced so much brotherhood from Russians, so much compassion, because they met those who had suffered the same thing they had themselves and like them sought to do fierce battle. Whether there are many such Poles, I do not know.
I have also met people with a similar attitude toward Russia among experts in Russian literature. Even enemies of all Russias, that of the czars, the Soviets, or “republicans,” even they do not deny the greatness and depth of Russian literature, although they would cancel out the organic links. After all, the Russian nightmare and the Russian genius, the cruelty and mercy, the most refined, most European culture and the barbarism, it is all part of one reality, and whoever denies that whole, even if he is Conrad, is not thinking in categories of reality but in fictions. That Russian literature, whose universal value and greatness no one probably denies apart from W. A. Zbyszewski,6 is connected to that Russian reality. This is an elemental truth.
In Tolstoy’s diary of 1903 there is a sketch of the story “Divine and Human”; this draft seems to me a model of tough and full prose, “unfaltering fidelity to the truth,” as Pasternak is supposed to have said of Tolstoy. Within barely five pages Tolstoy depicts a man sentenced to be hanged, who is a stranger to all violence, the young Svetlogub, servant to the general who condemns him to death, the condemned man’s mother, a terrorist who dreams of murdering thousands of people, and a sectarian peasant, who has spent years in prisons because he is a seeker of truth. The whole eternal Russian world, because the conflicts in the story are eternal: religion, freedom, violence, fanatical faith, love, and sacrifice. In the full Moscow edition of Tolstoy I find a description of how this story came to be written. What an absolute, barely transposed faithfulness to reality. The story’s main character, Svetlogub, was a man hanged in Odessa in the 1870s, Lizogub, son of a Russian landowner and probably a Polish mother, for her name was Dunin-Borkowska. The fabric of this story is so intertwined with Russian reality that there is no way to separate them. This is one of millions of examples of this fusion of literature and reality one could cite.
•
Can the vision of Russia as entirely cruel and criminal, nowhere more widely accepted than in the countries swallowed up or subjugated by Russia or the Soviet Union—can this vision be a surprise to Russians, even if only to those of the best sort, who suffer no less cruelly under the current state of affairs? The precipice opened up between Russia and those countries under her yoke—I think specifically of Poland and Hungary—is so deep that shattering, breaking the hardened stereotype, in Poland for example, seems quite impossible, if it were not for one thought, one truth more than ever self-evident, that freedom is one, and that terror oppressing all is one. The workers going out into the street of Berlin, the events in Poznań, October, the Hungarian Rising, the fierce, furious battles within Communist parties of all countries after Khrushchev’s speech at the Twentieth Party Congress—“monolithic” parties only in their leaders’ speeches—all of these seem tragic, hopeless gestures if Russia does not join the battle, if not only Polish, German, or Hungarian workers, intellectuals, or peasants are ready to fight for the old, worn-out, so often falsified and overused slogan of freedom. Russia is more cut off by the curtain of “silence worse than misfortune” than it was a hundred twenty years ago when Custine wrote those words. But we know of the Vorkuta rebellion, we know of the ferment at universities, at institutions of higher education, we know of the extremely anti-Soviet mood among the younger generation, whose political consciousness was formed during the period of the Twentieth Party Congress.
Wherever freedom of thought appears, even on the narrowest patch, that freedom gives birth to freedom. That is why looking at Russia only as a country that has “one fanaticism—for obedience” is false in its one-sidedness.
In Resurrection Tolstoy describes the young grass trying to grow in the spring even between the stones of a prison. Without that hope, the hope that the will to fight has not died out in Russia, that a freer life, for which so many generations of Russians died, can be achieved there, too, all attempts at liberalization, all revisionist attempts in countries outside Russia, would seem to be the despairing gestures of drowning men.
Only then the people who know Russia not only as a school of debasement but also as a world of struggle and love of man, only then can friends of Russia raise their voices and fight the image of a Russia that is nothing but cruel, nothing but inhuman. If we can re-create the instinct of a lost solidarity with the other Russia, which never ceased to exist, only then can we dream of a future that will not be, in Norwid’s words, “a collision of two monoliths, a void and the clashing of ultimate forces.”
Kultura, 1958