Interview with Henryk Woźniakowski, 1971
1.
. . . THE WORLD is full of memoirs now, everybody writes, and everybody thinks it’s terribly important. It may all be greatly overblown. We have hardly any Polish diaries of the nineteenth century. When you have Maine de Biran, when you have Amiel, you have Benjamin Constant, and you have Rozanov, all those diaries . . . I have the impression Poles are in no way more virtuous than Russians; they are more reserved, their thinking is more bifurcated. Poor Przybyszewski would try something and then abandon it.1 With Russians everything is somehow connected and mixed. Poles have a certain decency, and our history is decent in the same way, but whether our reality has been so decent I’m not so sure.
Diaries are interesting in this regard; in Poland they’re still quite rare. And it’s my passion, the journal intime; I’m always reading some diary or other, and I’d like to say a little bit about it. Then something about the enigma of memory. To what degree you can trust your own memory. I’d like to wind these recollections around a few people who had an influence on me. I won’t talk about my childhood, because I’ve already written about it. I didn’t have a happy childhood and I don’t return to it. But as far as my intellectual awakening is concerned, which was quite late; that is, Korczak, Żeromski2—that was the earliest—and Krasiński (I had an aunt, Rejtanówna by birth, and she introduced me to Krasiński’s poem “Reality grows slowly into an ideal world”). But then I left home and the fundamental influence from Russia began. It was Tolstoy above all who [veiled] the world for me, and Romain Rolland, a writer I liked tremendously back then, but whom I now consider completely second-rate. Only later did I discover Poland, in 1919, when I was already twenty-three. When I discovered Brzozowski’s Legend of Young Poland3 in a dentist’s office and suddenly felt I was a Pole, I felt Polish to my bones. Why? It was precisely that outrage at Poland. What tempted me in Poland was that I could criticize everything, being a Pole. As far as people are concerned I want to talk about in this connection, Zdziechowski made a huge impression on us and I followed him all his life,4 with big intervals because I had that way of thinking a lot of normal young people have (even though I wasn’t a normal young person): “This one’s important, that one isn’t.” From early on I wrote a lot of diaries, from about 1920 up to 1939; I had amassed quite a pile and it all perished in 1939. I left it at the house near Józefów; I lived in a little villa and the woman who owned the house, a very nice, sweet woman, threw it all on some wagon and started driving eastward to rescue it. But in the East it all got lost and that was the end of it. And it was quite odd that, having paintings I’d painted, because I was very productive then, I regretted the diaries more. I thought of the paintings as not yet worth anything, I’d paint better ones, I’d be able to paint later, but I don’t know why I cared so much about those diaries. Today I still care a huge amount about the diaries, even if I have the impression they are unreadable for others. Because I quote a massive amount. They include all I read, and polemics against the background of certain reading. I have only to open any notebook, for example, when painting’s not going well, I open a notebook from exactly two or three years ago and see my difficulties at that time, my reactions, and quotations, and the books I was reading, and it always helps. So for me personally it’s important. It’s come to the point, though, that there are so many of these notebooks, over a hundred and fifty I think, or a hundred and thirty, that I can’t even use them, because I can’t really find what I’d like to find.
I’d like to describe certain periods, because they’re truly important—they’re fragments, but they have to do with events that connect all of us, and the people I’ve known, etc. But this requires writing, penetration, deepening things out. When I write, the first version is usually quite shallow, I have to rewrite it, rewrite it again. I’m struck by the fact that the only texts that seem good to me, really stirred up, are the ones I write in my diaries, because I write them for myself . . .
Some quotations are like golden nails that really keep me attached to life. “Not stoical inviolability, but the overcoming of wounds suffered”—that’s in Brzozowski’s notebook, from when he was dying. That comes back to me so often . . . and I have a good few dozen quotations like that. Someone said to me once that diaries are “la bibliothèque des pauvres”; you can’t afford to have all books, you press the juice from them. I’ve already written a whole lot of supposedly loose pages, as if they were prepared for print. But developed a distaste for it. Why a distaste? Because when I started to copy my diaries, always with corrections, whether linguistic or with some sort of selective editing, I thought right while I was writing: all right, now I’ll publish this—and I stopped writing immediately. What Gide said: “My diary, c’est un ami indiscret.” From the time he started publishing his diaries in Nouvelle revue française, I saw them as antidiaries. Gide’s diary was very composed. He wrote it with intent. That’s also a form of diary, but it’s based on something else. At a certain point I gave it all up (I don’t even know exactly where those folders with written texts are), because I realized that it was too late. That my memory was already failing to such a degree that I didn’t trust it anymore. And I used to trust it completely; I had a very good memory.
I’ll jump back to painting, because these are funny examples. Jean Colin5 always laughed at me when I said of myself that I had no imagination at all. That I painted exactly what I saw and nothing more. He would always go to the locations and always tell me they were completely different. “Don’t try to fool me, you probably have some sort of imagination.” Recently a bizarre thing happened to me. I went to the bureau that I used to send paintings to London. You could see the foreheads of the people typing in front of the counter where you stand, and wainscotting. Ordinary wooden wainscotting. And I really liked the tops of those heads against that wainscotting, I drew a few sketches, which I have here in my notebook, I pasted them in and thought I’d make a painting out of it. I left for London, came back, took a big canvas, I did it with great big strokes and with passion; that green of the wainscotting explained everything for me, I’d come to love that wainscotting and I painted it like that. After three or two months I went back to the bureau and saw the wainscotting was gray. So I went straight to the top guy there and said, “Sir, why did you have it painted over, that wainscotting that was green?” And he said, “It’s never been green.” I could have sworn it was green. So in the end you can make mistakes like that when you’re remembering, too. That’s what Goethe very cleverly called Dichtung und Wahrheit—poetry and truth. It seems to me that if you’re telling a story, you have to be faithful to your recollection above all. You can make corrections, but you can’t curate it like a curriculum vitae.
So the period I’ve written least about in many ways, but which may be interesting, is one when I was struggling with certain things, through literature. I wound up in Petersburg, I lived through those years not really very conscious about anything for a long time, because everything came to me through books and that’s how the revolution found me, when the cocoon had to burst. And those experiences are connected with three journeys to Russia. The first journey—I think it was in 1909, when I left for Russia to attend the Twelfth Gymnasium and I hadn’t yet done my exams. We always went back to Petersburg for the summer and for all holidays. We actually lived in total isolation, without deeper contact with Russia, or only through books. Later there was the Page Corps, my entry into the army and the experience of the first revolution up to September in Russia, when that Page Corps was turned into an accelerated officer-training course. I joined a month or two before the revolution. My father did what he could to ensure I didn’t go into the army. I was terrified at the thought of war, because I thought it was forbidden even to kill a fly. I spent a year at the university doing law, learned nothing there, I took some exams and then I entered the corps. I was wholly convinced I would never join the army, because my lungs were very weak and if I just went out without boots on I would get pneumonia, so I was sure I’d get sick right away; whereas not only did I not get sick but I got over all sickness. That’s literally how it was. That was a long period. Later the army, Krechowiecki’s regiment, a few months. And my action with the Krechowiecki First Cavalry Regiment. Then I left, hale and hearty, capable of saving the world together with Antek Marylski and his brother,6 with my two sisters; we formed a phalanstery in Petersburg, which was supposed to convert the world, ensure there would be no more wars and everyone would be brothers. That conviction of ours then—it’s worth thinking about, because I have the feeling nowadays it’s banal. But at that time it didn’t exist, in Poland at any rate. It was there in Russia already. Of course those were all Tolstoyan influences. Well, and that’s our journey, which again ended quite childishly because we never got anywhere, we just left the army, we became deserters. And then the return to Warsaw, where I continue to feel an awful sense of compromise. Compromise was our most hated word; now I’m a great fan of compromise, because without it there’s no life at all. And to me everything was a compromise, because from a Christian point of view everything was egoism, and so on. And then I went to Russia again, two or three days before Piłsudski’s journey to Magdeburg,7 and before that, having reached my regiment, I asked them to give me any kind of work. They were already fighting then, waiting for Poland, I was all fired up myself, and at the same time I couldn’t do anything because everything was in conflict with the principle of nonopposition to evil. I asked to be given some task, said that I’d try to perform any task as long as it was unarmed. And then, I thought it was phenomenal, the head of the regiment at the time, Colonel Dziewicki, said, “Please wait, I’ll confer with my colleagues,” and I was given twelve thousand rubles, which was a big sum at the time, and told, “Go to Russia, search for our men who are prisoners there.” Naturally I took it on with enthusiasm, and this was that third trip to Petersburg, the last, very significant for me because I made contact—though it was very superficial—with prominent Bolsheviks, but above all with the Merezhkovskys, and through them with Filosofov.8 Through them I discovered Dostoevsky, Rozanov, Nietzsche. And Merezhkovsky showed me to what degree Tolstoy’s whole philosophy was somehow simpleminded, extremist, unlivable, and un-Christian. So it seems to me those three epochs are worth recounting.
Now I’d like to make the connection between my first literary memories and memories linked to the awakening of my social and national conscience and the people to whom I owe those experiences. Then I have to talk about Professor Marian Zdziechowski and about Korczak. I’ll begin with Korczak. There was a book that it seems no one in Poland knows anymore, titled Dziecko salonu [Child of the Salon, 1906]. It made a big splash at the time in Poland. It was the story of a boy from a wealthy home who noticed poverty. And from that moment he couldn’t bear to be in his salon anymore and began to visit ever-poorer people, ever-lower social circles. He gave them lessons, gave their children lessons, broke from his family. I still remember after all these years that as soon as he’d met the next circle it seemed to him that its members were very well-off compared with even poorer people. And so he descended step by step always lower. And the end is really quite decadent. Suddenly he sees windows and behind each window unhappy people, through each window a person is looking and dreaming of happiness. And there was even a terrible word, because in one place there was the word “ass,” I think. That was an outrage. I know that the administrator of our estate brought the book to our teacher and pasted that page shut because it was too depraved. That book made a huge impression on us.
In 1915 I decided to go to Warsaw and find out who this Korczak was. He’d written another excellent book called Koszałki-Opałki [Fiddle-Faddle, 1905]. They were little stories that are still in my head to this day. It made fun of everyone, and had irony, and always the thought of humanity that is above class and race, and beyond money. I went to Warsaw, where I knew almost nobody. Only the Górskis, Pia Górska.9 I met Pia Górska at the Łubieńskis10 and right away told her enthusiastically about Koszałki-Opałki and asked about the author. She replied with great scorn that it was fake literature. I was very hurt by that sort of assertion. I found out Korczak was Jewish, that his real name was Goldszmit. Only later did my sister and I go to see him, it must have been 1919. He sat in a dark, banal room, his windows looked out on a dark courtyard, and when we began to declare our love for him, he received it indifferently somehow, reluctantly, and said, “Those books are really of no interest to me anymore, you know. Because now I’m building a home for the poorest Jews; if you wish to visit me, visit me there.” You could tell that the war and everything he’d experienced, that from that time he’d become a great social activist and all those decadent moans and groans were worthless to him, a thing of the past.
The second person was Marian Zdziechowski. Marian Zdziechowski was our neighbor. In those times it was very far, forty kilometers I think. You had to bang along in a buggy all morning to reach him. And his lived in one of those typical nice aristocratic Borderland palaces; he was a professor in Kraków. My sister went to his lectures in 1914. He taught “Romanticism, Pessimism, and the Foundations of Christianity.” And it made a huge impression on Marynia. Before the war, I think, my sister and I went to see Zdziechowski. We decided that he should be the one to tell us what it was all about. At the time I was already up to the neck in Tolstoy. Should land be given to the peasants right now and how should it be distributed? What to do to avoid the army? Patriotism and Poland were really already overcome. It was about Humanity with a capital H. About Tolstoy’s idea, the universal idea. We decided that Zdziechowski knew everything, that he would sort everything out. I remember sitting on a bench in the garden and asking about the peasant question. And suddenly I noticed that this sage (which to me meant that if a person is wise he will know everything one ought to do) was very worried and generally had no idea what to tell us. He said, “You know, naturally the peasants are very important, the conditions are atrocious, but you must understand that Poland’s presence in the Borderlands is crucial, you can’t go distributing the estates because they make up all of Borderland Poland.” What was he talking about? Why had he traveled to see Tolstoy? He must be an opponent of Tolstoy’s as well as a follower. But those were an unforgettable couple of days. We sat there for about two days with him. He introduced us—or really me—to Słowacki. The only thing I still remember is how he read us “Who hasn’t felt you in nature?” by gaslight on a terrace overgrown with grapevines, en glapissant.11 He made it sound almost like a whine. And that poem is unforgettable for me. And that’s what delights me, that a man like that could light up your whole life in a moment. However, I don’t remember now whether it was two times or if it was one time that we were there. In any case I “liquidated” him. I crossed him out. This is not someone to advise me. Still later I found out that when I left the army he was very scandalized by that. He even writes in one of his books about youth running wild, breaking with tradition . . . that was his response. I’m sure. It was only later that I began to rediscover him. I saw him in Paris. He came to Paris, to the Sorbonne, after the war, when I was in Paris with the Kapist group. I found out he was going to give lectures on Russian religious philosophy. Zdziechowski, for whom Russia had always been terribly dangerous, had very close relations with prominent Russians. There was Brianchaninova’s circle, where Poles and Russians gathered. There was a Prince Trubetskoi. There were a few others, I think Merezhkovsky already met people there. He had lectures on Russian philosophy, which the Poles didn’t like at all, by the way. On the other hand, here was a professor from Poland coming to tell them about Russian philosophy. I went to some of those lectures; I don’t remember much of what he said there. Once he took me out for cake and was shocked that only Germany had good cake and France, bad. What I’ll never forget is him taking me to meet a prominent French Modernist cleric, Father Laberthonnière—that left an indelible impression. He had been almost suspended. He lived in an impoverished apartment, was denied the right to give sermons, he had a ton of books over him, his own texts bound, written by hand. When he saw us out he said only, “Ça paraitra une fois” (It will appear sometime). He had been completely rejected by the Church. And that was the time when they said Zdziechowski was the only Polish Modernist, he had gone to the pope to defend them. After that I didn’t see him again for years. He had a huge gentry complex, he was a terrible szlachcic.12 The man always exploded, always had the courage of his convictions. There was a Wilson craze and the university in Kraków made him a professor honoris causa.13 By then Zdziechowski was the university rector in Vilnius. He was so outraged that he went to a special gathering to protest it. Why? The university had been created by grace of the Austrian emperor. Wilson had destroyed liberal Austria, so it was indecent for a university created by the Austrian emperor to give Wilson an honoris causa. That was Zdziechowski for you. The last time I saw him was at a gathering. His brother Józef, whom we adored (we knew both brothers well), lived in the same building not far from my studio. That was in 1928 or 1927. There was a party thrown for him because he came from Vilnius to defend Cywiński. Maybe you recall that there was a Cywiński in Kraków, a Norwid scholar, a right-winger. He wrote about Piłsudski, without naming him, “a certain megalomaniac.” And then officers went over to him, beat him up, kicked him, and did I don’t know what else. It was a kind of settling of scores by Piłsudski officers. You can imagine how Zdziechowski responded to that. So Zdziechowski came to protest, but he had a grim look on his face and saw that the world was coming to an end. He saw that Russia would occupy Poland and that there would be war, he saw it all. And Lednicki was also at that party, father of Russian experts, who knew Zdziechowski from the Petersburg years, but he was the opposite of Zdziechowski, he was someone who gave a soft edge to everything.14 Well, and I remember that Zdziechowski was sitting with a kind of bird’s gaze, like an eagle. Looking at everything from a distance, from above. Those conversations didn’t interest him. But Lednicki went up to him and started talking: “But Rector, it isn’t that bad, I’ve just got back from the League of Nations conference in Vienna, we’ll be able to sort things out. There’s no danger of war.” And he sat there, like an eagle sitting on a branch somewhere, to the side, and didn’t even look at him. I went over to him later and he said to me, “You know, I can’t even listen to these things anymore.” He corresponded with Filosofov from time to time. He was quite ill then and wrote only that “I truly regret not having died, I’d prefer to die now than a few years from now in some dungeon at a Cheka jail.”
So he knew everything. Luckily he died in 1938, because by 1939 he would most assuredly have been in a Cheka jail. That book is called Facing the End. But he was one of the crystal veins I found in life, a man of righteousness, and humility, and profound tragedy, and deep religious feeling. That religion of his is strange. He said he came to the Church through the liturgy. He respected liturgy, respected ritual, he found his way to faith through ritual. I think now how he would have been pained by the liquidation of the liturgy from symbol to meaning.
He had two brothers. They owned Raków, precious, cherished Raków, Orzeszkowa used to go there.15 It is that tradition. He talked about hiding Mickiewicz’s poetry in the hollows of trees, it was brought in secretly then, when you weren’t allowed to speak Polish in schools in Minsk, and later the problems of the peasants, left-wing issues. I don’t know the word in Polish, there’s a Russian expression, kaiaiushchyisia dvorianin. A repentant nobleman. Brother Kazimierz was typical, repentant because he was wealthy and others were poor. I remember that when we were riding in the buggy, they were driving us around the estate, not old of course, but it was that Kazio, who probably ran the place, he had a loden coat, and he saw the cows straying and turned the other way in horror. Naturally a decent steward would have whipped those cows and the peasant along with them. But that was the problem, it was getting to the point of Żeromski. That was the Polish gentry then. Noble intentions. But I wondered a lot how everything should be distributed among the peasants, although at the time I’d never even cleaned my own shoes. I didn’t know what it meant to concern myself with my precious person, because everything was done for me by others. It was all completely abstract. To make the leap from that abstraction to some living concreteness, that was a difficult road. So I wanted to remember those two.
As far as Tolstoy is concerned, well, I was maybe sixteen and had read a bit of Tolstoy. That’s quite a funny thing too. My father had Chicherin in his library.16 That same Chicherin had a sister, Zofia, who visited us when we were children. She was very religious, extremely devoted to social causes. She had fought for national minorities in Russia. And it was she who read us children Tolstoy’s first novellas. That may have been my first contact with Tolstoy. But I remember—it’s even painful to remember—that I knew that there was a Tolstoy book, The Kreutzer Sonata, and that in it passionate, erotic things happened. I read it as an immodest book and I thought it would tell me something interesting. And I recall one of the great shocks of my life. I felt the sweat run down my spine when I read it. First, it hit me hard because Tolstoy’s attitude to such things, especially in The Kreutzer Sonata, was incredibly brutal; I thought that interests of that kind were almost criminal; but at the same time it posed the problem of conscience and that worried me greatly—that was the beginning of Tolstoy for me. And I remember that I came home, to Przyłuki17 and I gave the book to my sisters, who were seventeen or eighteen. They were also very impressed. Particularly Marynia. I still remember Marynia saying, “All right then, we’ll have to wear roofs.” Do you know what roofs were? They were double furs with little holes for eyes. In order not to show yourself at all, that was the conclusion, but she wasn’t so completely convinced. But that was the time when we started to read Tolstoy and I remember I read terribly boring things. As brilliant as Tolstoy is in Anna Karenina, in War and Peace, in other stories, and his Diary is splendid—his educational philosophy is a tough read. Somehow the language is wooden, didactic. But in any case, I was immersed in those teachings, though I’m not saying I read them so very attentively.
2.
After 1905 we got a teacher, Mr. Iwanowski, who really changed our lives completely, took us in hand and guided us up to our school exams, and even further. The way he took us in hand I’ll describe later.
In 1911 or 1912, I think 1911, I and my brother left for Petersburg. And here began our Petersburg life with visits to Przyłuki for holidays and school breaks until 1917. For me this was a completely new epoch and for my brother too, a period when we were under the powerful sway of the authority, strength, passion of our teacher Mr. Iwanowski. Mr. Iwanowski was later regarded in Poland as an excellent pedagogue, after us he went to the Łubieńskis, after them to the Radziwiłłs; he considered himself a great pedagogue, but more important his later students spoke of him very warmly, and I never really knew if that was real or out of fear. Because fear played a large role, something I’d like to recount sometime, because it’s important. Generally when I start to recollect those times I’m struck by two things. My organic cowardice, physical cowardice—I was afraid of horses, afraid of everything. The pony bucked and I fell off six times in a row and from that time onward I had a fear of horses. And as far as civil courage goes, I had none at all. If I had to act a certain way, do something the way I thought it should be, differently from Mr. Iwanowski or my father, or differently from how it was supposed to be done, I’d die of fear and I’d never do it. And so that whole period was very difficult for me, I don’t have a single good memory from those times. I’m sure there were other good moments, wonderful ones, but I don’t remember them. To show how strong it was, when Mr. Iwanowski arrived my brother—my brother, of all people, who was never an intellectual, who disdained the problems that bothered me—fell in love with horses, with the stables, rode, and knew about village life, and was always reading one book. We laughed at him when he settled down to read: he had a little green book called Story of a White Horse. That was the only book we saw in his hands at that time. But I was already quite taken up with bookish matters then. I remember the biggest event of my youth: there was a magazine that was hugely popular in Russia, called Niwa, and Niwa published forty volumes a year, which it sent to subscribers. At Christmas I was given forty volumes of Jules Verne by my father. I still remember that it was a treasure. I can’t say I was all that interested in Jules Verne himself, but the very fact that I possessed all those books. And here is where my private life really began, really quite isolated from others. I just remember one thing, that once at night—it was dark, I shared a little room with my brother —he said, “You know, we don’t love Mr. Iwanowski at all, I don’t love him at all.” I said in abject terror, “No, that’s impossible, I’m sure we love him a lot.” Today I think of the coerced love for Stalin, that it’s madness to succumb to such things. But when I was eleven, I had a similar experience, so I should understand those people. It’s truly hard for me to understand it now . . .
The domestic wars began, and those domestic wars were a big event, it wasn’t an international war, but it was: Is Mr. Iwanowski offended or not? Because there was a power struggle on. On one side there was my sister, who saw herself as the heir of my mother, responsible for the house, and Mr. Iwanowski was on the other side, he who had taken over the full scope of authority. So I remember that we were required to give an accounting of our expenditures every month. I think we got a ruble a month, something like that, just small change. And I remember my sister telling me, “You’ll come to me then and show me your accounts.” That was already an encroachment on Mr. Iwanowski’s power. Iwanowski was so outraged he came upstairs, took a big crystal glass—we had tall glasses made of thick crystal—and squeezed it so hard it broke into pieces. Out of rage. And he pinned me to the wall as a vile traitor, for dealing with women and not with him. My sister once came into our room and said there was a mess. That was another monstrous sin on her part.
I really don’t want to come down too hard on Iwanowski, because he did love us, he cared terribly about us. But it was only about us being healthy, putting our galoshes on in wet weather, so we didn’t catch cold. And of course all of us getting A’s. If I ever got a B for something there would be such lamentation that I no longer wished to live. When I needed to sneeze I ran to the privy so he wouldn’t hear me. And from that time I got bronchitis and pneumonia. Then he ran around his office in his silk pants, because he was an insane snob where clothes were concerned. To him pants from Tremlet in Paris, or a tie, were the summit of elegance. He scratched the pimples on his face and told me I was bound to die because I’d get another fever. But when I’d fallen ill, then I was the victor, because he was so terrified. I remember he brought us strawberries in January, they must have cost a ruble apiece, and even some books that interested me. But the results were tragic, because on the one hand when it was decided to send Staś and me to study together—we wanted to go to Poland. We wanted to go to Lvov; we had a cousin, Franuś Czapski, who was a student in Lvov. We got very eager to go to Poland. No deal: we had to finish our studies in Russia, to have some sort of rights there, to be a justice of the peace or something like that. It was completely incomprehensible to us, and unnecessary. Maybe we had to have taken the Russian final school exams so we could set ourselves up in some way. That shows you what our Polishness was then. In fact we really felt sorry for ourselves, we sang Polish songs, elected a Polish king, naturally the Polish king had to be our steward Mr. Hoffman, who was a great steward and who called me to see him when I was leaving for Petersburg, and said, “Remember it’s a giant on legs of clay. Don’t be too impressed with Russia.” That was the only wise advise anyone gave me on nationality in that period. We got to Petersburg and it seemed to me awful at first, we were given a five-room apartment with a cook and a servant who came from Przyłuki. And at the same time the bedbugs bit us so badly that two specialists had to be brought in to exterminate them. So at first it was very hard to adapt, but it was how we were separated . . . Mr. Iwanowski always dreamed of having total power. We were at a gymnasium whose director or vice-director was very decent in relation to Poles, but it wasn’t an environment where we could find friends. A year later the doctors decided that Petersburg was unhealthy for us and we moved to another apartment in Tsarskoye Selo, where the climate was better. We went to Petersburg by train every day, to school. That’s when my intellectual interests developed, I started to read; through school I discovered Russian literature, not Polish, and my first powerful experiences at the time were mostly Russian. That was the Twelfth Gymnasium, on the Fontanka, we were in a building on Trotskaya that belonged to the former governor-general or something like that, Bibikov, from Warsaw. He was charming, for that matter, a very cultured old man. His wife had been born a Baltic baroness, she immediately took us in, my brother and me, as if we were her own children. We could run to her, she always sat by a silver samovar in the afternoons, at a table set with various cakes, and received people. We went there whenever we wished. I got very friendly with her daughter, who was about my age and was a truly exceptional and charming girl. So that’s how our family household took shape, and I really felt that Mrs. Bibikov was like a mother to me, and parting from her was very, very painful.
Now we had several relatives there, who socialized with Russians in one way or another, if they weren’t Russian themselves. So the Meyendorffs, the Pohlens. But we didn’t see them very often, we were intensely concentrated on our studies all the time. Because if we got a B . . .
What really affected me at that time? Undoubtedly religious questions. Perhaps it was precisely at that age of fifteen, sixteen, seventeen that I had my strongest religious experiences, and here there were some idiotic things as well. I wanted to take communion every Sunday. My teacher thought that was exaggerated and absolutely impermissible. He went with me from Tsarskoye Selo to Petersburg to see the later Bishop Łoziński, who had been our confessor at one point, to resolve the issue, and the later bishop, blessed Father Łoziński, said, “Obedience is above all things, submit to it.”
Anyway, those were experiences that later lost some of their intensity thanks to some idiotic machinations on the part of Mr. Iwanowski, who in fact was quite indifferent in these matters. But they were important things to me. Apart from that, music. And I already wanted to paint, I had already decided I would paint, but it was music above all. I had a marvelous music teacher, whom I truly respected enormously, I went to him once or twice a week and it got to the point where I was playing about five hours a day. I thought maybe I’d be a virtuoso, but later from the moment I lost the piano I gave it up completely. When we were in Paris there was still a piano, I played a lot for pleasure, but it ceased to be the path I’d choose. As far as drawing was concerned, I had a great desire to learn. I remember I was so busy that when I got back from Petersburg and went to my drawing lesson I had to run to make it on time and get back. Concerts made a huge impression on me then. I remember Rachmaninoff’s concerts, I heard the last concert Scriabin gave before his death. Those were truly great impressions of my very early youth.
•
When I see how I drew when I was a child—it was awful. Mannered and pointless. I didn’t draw very much, I always thought about music, but I don’t know why, I never doubted I’d be a painter. Why that was, I have no idea. Because I had no artistic culture. I remember I had Hodler’s Die Musik thumbtacked on my wall, one of those twisted ladies from his fussiest period, which I liked a lot. But I knew nothing about what art is. Nothing. I know of no other artist who toiled as much to arrive at painting. I worked for seven years, not counting university, and then part of Paris, where I had the reputation of having no talent. So I really don’t understand. Of course I had moments or an hour here or there when it seemed to me that I could feel and see and that I could draw, but it would vanish altogether. It’s a phenomenon that’s completely incomprehensible to me, where I got the need to be a painter. Because I had no ambition to be famous—but this was the one thing that seemed to me my calling . . .
The war broke out, it was 1914, I saw people who were going to the front, and it really shook me up. After the outbreak of war I wanted to go off to join the Red Cross right away. I wanted to do the simplest work, as a volunteer. Well, and then I got tragic hysteria from Mr. Iwanowski, who said that it was impossible, that if I left he wouldn’t be able to bring up Staś, that he was Staś’s father and I was his mother. Staś didn’t actually require that much upbringing, he brought himself up perfectly well. But in any event I gave up the project. As far as the war itself, it didn’t even enter the realm of the possible for me to kill. I was so ignorant that I didn’t know the difference between the rank of second lieutenant and general. Literally. I didn’t know what they had on their epaulets. As a consequence of my physical weakness, or that was the doctors’ opinion, I thought they’d surely reject me, so that the problem of going to the front didn’t even exist for me.
Finally I passed my school exams with a gold medal and I had to do something to avoid going straight into the army. I entered the university in Petersburg to do law. Then I got my own room; before that I always shared with my brother. But I didn’t go to the university at all, I prepared for social economics; there was some well-known professor. I had one exam, I went to the university maybe two or three times and I don’t even remember attending any lectures. There were some diseases going around and Mr. Iwanowski arranged to keep me protected. Not to mention that then the university wasn’t a safe place, there were already some disturbances. I remember the army occupying the university once. But those problems were somehow outside of me; I didn’t understand them at all, I didn’t participate, because I never met anyone who did participate in them, I was living on the margins again. My friends, the ones I met, were the ones I lived with; later Eugeniusz Lubomirski joined us, Józio Przewłocki, Heniś’s brother, and there was a guy called Wołowicz with us at first, and two of my cousins, of whom one became a Bolshevik and the other is a Hospitaller in Rome, Emeryk.18 The one who perished in Russia during the war we liked a lot. He was unbearable, because he was devout to the point of bigotry, a liar, very gifted as a draftsman and stubborn in his reluctance to study. Well, and then he stayed in Russia and was drawn into everything there. That is his whole story. We tried to find out how he was to the end, and how to get him out somehow. The last one to see him was Poniński, our cousin, who went to the Polish embassy in Moscow and asked to see him but he wouldn’t come. And then he asked the NKVD and they brought him in. He was humbly dressed, said he was glad that he was working—those were hungry times in the Volga region and they used him as a translator because he spoke English.
Returning to me. It was 1916, the previous year I had done my exams, I had a year at university, and the question of the army came up. We thought the war was already coming to an end, but it didn’t come to an end. I remember now that we were worried because I’d bought a secret copy of Romain Rolland’s Au-dessus de la mêlée, which was a book strictly banned in Russia.19 Marynia and I then wrote to Rolland. We were already attuned to each other, our views were the same. I was preoccupied with the Tolstoy question then, and at the same time I was trying to get into the Page Corps, or rather that’s what my father had decided. It wasn’t the corps itself but an accelerated officer-training course at the Page Corps. And in order to get in, you had to have some record of service to Russia. I managed thanks to my grandfather, who was a high official, at the rank of general. I was convinced that I wouldn’t survive more than a month there, that I’d fall ill. I didn’t fall ill. They made unbelievable fun of me, because I didn’t know how to salute or how to march, nothing. It could be a book about some kind of Schweik. But somehow they liked me because they knew I had good intentions. I cowered in fear before all those generals and colonels. I got pneumonia. But I got better as a result of the revolution, it was like this: I’m lying there in the Page Corps hospital with a high fever, and a general, a commander, comes to me and says, “Tomorrow you must be at the Europeisky Hotel”—that was one of the two great hotels—“at noon, because a princess [?] has arrived from Austria at the head of the delegation of the Austrian Red Cross and wishes to see you.” She was a friend of my Austrian aunt Taxis.20 I say that there’s no way, that I had a fever of over 38 degrees and couldn’t possibly go. He was quite angry and left; in the end she came to the Page Corps, stood by my bed, and told me how horribly the Russians were treating the Austrian prisoners in some camp. It’s worth recounting because it shows you what still remained of the old chivalry. In that period when I was at the corps, I was living with my uncle Aleksander Meyendorff in Petersburg21 and I used to walk to the corps from there, and this was one of the great experiences of my life.
Here I came into contact with real life for the first time. I saw colleagues who partied and were always turning up drunk, but there were also well-brought-up, sympathetic boys. I began to have relationships with people beyond our little clan. And living at my uncle Meyendorff’s house was really a big event for me. No one was hysterical and no one was afraid whenever I was five minutes late. Before that it was enough for me to be five minutes late home for Mr. Iwanowski to come running in despair thinking I had been run over. And Uncle Meyendorff treated me as an adult. I came and went as I liked, I had a charming aunt whom we loved dearly, and he was an attentive man, he watched me, observed me, above all he was an educator. And a man qui a coupé les cheveux en quatre, who always saw all the aspects of life. He was a Duma delegate for some years and always defended national minorities and diverse religions. Generally he was a liberal. At his house—and it moved me deeply later, though I didn’t understand at the time—I found a book that I kept with me for years, Amiel’s Diary. That was one of those philosophical journaux intimes that Tolstoy read. Everybody read them at that time. And it carried a dedication to my uncle, who must have been eighteen, from his cousin, Stolypin, the premier’s brother.22 “Read, but don’t read too much.” And this is interesting—Meyendorff’s mother was Princess Gorchakova. One of her sisters married Stolypin, and that Stolypin, who later became prime minister and was assassinated in Kiev, was her son. The other sister married a certain Stala, I think, who was ambassador in London for years. My uncle’s mother was an exceptional woman, of very firm character. After a while she decided that Russia was completely barbaric and she couldn’t live there, and so she moved to Weimar, where she met Liszt and fell in love with him. She lived in Weimar for years and when Liszt came he went to see her every day and they played piano á quatre mains. That was a recollection of my uncle Meyendorff, who had met Wagner in his mother’s house. He and his brothers were raised in Weimar, three of them, one of them had great talent in painting. Their mother raised them very strictly. My uncle Meyendorff didn’t know what poverty was. His brother dreamed of going to Paris, there was already talk of plein air. His mother didn’t consent, because she regarded Paris as the pit of iniquity, and sent two sons to Petersburg to study. Uncle Meyendorff’s face changed when he spoke of Petersburg as they saw it then—so appalling was the poverty that reigned in it. His brother, the artist, was apparently deeply affected by these things and shot himself after about a year, leaving only a note: Je demande pardon á ma mère. There’s a version according to which he was part of some revolutionary organization that made him do things he wouldn’t and couldn’t do. Uncle Meyendorff always spoke of those years with great dread.
He came from a Baltic family. In those Baltic families, Russia offered the only road to a career. I remember my uncle telling me, “Don’t imagine that your grandmothers and great-grandmothers were always so cultured. They sat in their old palaces or castle and had long notebooks in which they wrote down the price of meat and quotations from Scripture.” I always remember that, that’s my tradition. The sons of those families went into diplomacy. There were loads of them. My uncle was absolutely Russian, he was very concerned about Russian affairs and took a lively part in them. But a German Russian, of Baltic origin, who would never have denied it in the slightest. But it was absolutely an international circle to a certain degree, where English or French was spoken. He was a deputy and for a while even vice-marshal of the Duma. He had a wide acquaintance, saw it all, was an excellent observer, and for a time he was an Octobrist. That was the party defending the constitutional monarchy, which he left after a time because of what he saw as their too-liberal stance toward Finland. He was a man of principle.
He wasn’t at all rich. He earned a living as a professor of law in Petersburg and was married twice to Georgian women. Those Georgian women were older than he was and both were divorcées; he was maliciously called an amateur des antiquités Georgiens. His first wife was beautiful and charming, she had some horrible marriage behind her, and three children who later poisoned my uncle’s life. I still remember a stain on the ceiling, because those boys cracked eggs against the ceiling during dinner. Uncle Meyendorff, who was truly a man of marvelous delicacy, had those wild boys with him and took care of them to the end and saved them from various brawls, and so on. His second wife was the daughter of the prince of Abkhazia. At the moment when Russia and Georgia united—Georgia chose Russia out of fear of the constant Turkish invasions—he became prince of Abkhazia for a while, a feudal prince or whatever you call it, until it was finally decided in higher Petersburg circles that he was just sowing discord and he was invited very cordially to hunt. He went, got on a ship on the Black Sea with a pack of hounds for the hunt, and never returned to his country again. That tradition is observed to this day in Soviet Russia. And because the children had pedigree, were from an old ruling family, they were given away as gifts to high-placed families related to the czar. I don’t remember which svetleishyie kniazia took them, my aunt as well. She was taken as a daughter and she loved the people who raised her as their own daughter. She was very beautiful, to the day she died. She had a lovely complexion, lovely eyes and such fire, something so warm, the complete opposite of my uncle Meyendorff, who was très cérébral. In any case she fell in love with some prince or other—princes were as numerous as dogs in Georgia, it seems—who was a terrible brute and killed someone. And she ran away from home to marry him. They put the prince in prison for three years, she married him in prison, built a little home for herself and waited for him for three years. Three years later he got out, within a year and a half he had raped her niece and was exiled to Siberia. She then went to Siberia with him. (That’s worth telling, it’s more interesting than my scruples.) And only there did she leave him, and he blackmailed and persecuted her, too. She moved to live as a member of the family with the princes Oldenburg, relatives of the czar. And she was a very close friend of my uncle’s first wife. Uncle married her soon after, I think it was a year after the first one died. I knew only the second. And for that reason I want to tell this story, because it’s connected to what I’ll talk about later. Once we went on a caper—I ran from the army, my sisters from Przyłuki—to Petersburg to form a phalanstery, which was supposed to introduce world peace. My aunt found out my sister was coming, that we were living with two other young people in some dive. She couldn’t allow that and said it was quite impossible, that Karla would live with them. I had no intention of relenting and I defended myself. Marynia got irritated and said: “Aunt, you were young and you had all sorts of adventures and that all turned out all right in the end.” Then—the only time in my life that I saw anything like it—tears fell from her eyes and she covered her face and said, “Ne m’en parlez pas, il y a des souffrances qui dessèchent.”
She never said another word about it. And she never returned to it. But it became a revelation to me, that a young person treats matters of life so lightly that forty years later still hurt so badly, are so terrible.
I lived at the Meyendorffs’. The revolution broke out and I was in the hospital then; I still had a high fever and was lying in the hospital making the revolution. And here I saw a phenomenal thing. That czarist Russia, that mighty power, fell apart. I was living in Tsarskoye Selo and knew those court carriages, black-yellow-red, those drivers’ liveries. The czar’s park was nearby and I saw through the fence the czar receiving some delegation of skiers: “Bozhe tsaria khrani,”23 they sang. And of course as now you have the GPU, then you had the Okhrana, and that Okhrana was powerful.24
Those people lost their shape from one day to the next. They fled like rats, you felt it. I remember at the beginning of the revolution a demonstration on which the army was set. The unit was commanded by an officer who consciously chose not to carry arms, lest God forbid he should shoot. And he was shot himself. I was looking from the side of the people who defended the czar. There was great fear at the Page Corps, but when the revolution was victorious the corps was dissolved from one day to the next. The order was given: we leave for two weeks.
I still remember the wild euphoria of joy I saw in Petersburg. I went out with a friend who had simply broken or sprained his leg, not on any front, he was in the hospital and walked with crutches. We set out for Mierzów, to reach the Łubieńskis. Every other person came up to us to accompany us, to take us part of the way, telling us we were heroes, in uniform and one of us on crutches, surely gravely wounded. This was fraternizing with the army, the euphoria of brotherhood. I never experienced that euphoria again. It was a conviction that a new era had begun. A new, happy era, the brotherhood of nations. No one knew yet about the killing of the czar.
I had a friend named Meller Zakomelski. It’s a well-known family I believe; his father was a member of the Council of State, a prominent lawyer, a civilian, a cultured man, much more sympathetic than his son, whose only strong point was that he had a fine Bechstein and played the violin, sang a little. I used to go there to play the piano. I knew his father very superficially. They had a beautiful apartment on the Moika, on the canal, on the third floor.
It was July 3, 1917, after our return from Mierzów, to what was no longer the Page Corps but the Accelerated Officer School, for that was the new name given to the campus. At that time army forces, delegations, deserters began to pour into Petersburg and suddenly all the streets got incredibly dirty. Soldiers sat on the ground eating sunflower seeds, miles-long formations moved past, constantly on the move. I remember my nephew, who was with some naval captain or someone like that, told me that he had to cross that vast central boulevard (I can’t remember the name) and the procession was always moving there, demanding the estates be dissolved, gentry be driven out, generals be hanged. To get to the other side he had to go under some banner. So he chose one that read “Long Live Free Love.” That was the only one acceptable to him. But you see, that’s how people got through.
So I’m at my friend’s and his father says, “Please stay with us, we’re having a celebratory dinner.” I stay and see some courtly gentleman sitting in the middle with a wide and quite flat face, some sort of gray beard, and that was Prince Lvov.25 That was the day Prince Lvov had stepped down, handing over power to Kerensky, and because he was a friend of my friend Zakomelski’s father, they were giving the dinner for him. Prince Lvov gave me a sign to come over and said, “I discover that you live at Baron Meyendorff’s, I know him very well, and I would like to ask you to tell him that I thank him for the interesting information he sent me during my time in government. I haven’t had the time to tell him so myself, as you can imagine, I was very busy. It’s just that, you know, he doesn’t understand the Russian soul. He claims that the only force organizing itself in Russia is the Communist Party. And that it must come to power. To say something like that nowadays, when they just carried out a putsch, that is to plunge a knife into Russia’s back. I assure you that they will never have the chance to come to power. My pereshli cherez khrebiet' russkoi revolutsii, my idiom k mirnomu trudu russkogo krestianina.” (We went across the backbone of the Russian Revolution, we are on the path to the peaceful labor of the Russian peasant.)
That was that faith. I remember some well-known intellectual who said with an impassive face that it was a miracle taking place, that for the first time this was a bloodless revolution, that only in Russia the peasant was a bogonosiets, a peasant carrying God within him, only in that country could such a revolution of the ideal take place. But that was before the sea of blood. So that seems to me my only real historic recollection. Lvov still spoke with great respect of Kerensky, that Kerensky was a man of inspiration, of great moral qualities, a great speaker. And he was. He was—only, what of it? When it came to making a decision he couldn’t make any. And meanwhile, that’s another detail, all revolutionaries were brought back from prison, from Siberia. And among them was Ceretelli. He was the Georgian revolutionary leader who had a very handsome face, still young, a long face like many Georgians have, a bit like from an icon, he looked very noble. And as he had been imprisoned in Georgia for a number of years, he then immediately joined the soviet, the first revolutionary soldiers’ soviet, which my uncle Meyendorff went to hear every day. He said it was the most intelligent gathering of the kind he had seen in his life, that you couldn’t compare the level with the level in the Duma. That they were the most powerful intellects, revolutionaries of all nationalities and classes. And not only revolutionaries. They made Ceretelli the chairman of that soviet. He was the godson of my aunt; I saw him twice in the Meyendorff house. For years I carried in my wallet Ceretelli’s appeal, calling for fraternity over the piles of corpses that divide us from the German soldiers; the war was over, now we have to build a happy world together. A very beautiful text, right down my line. It seemed to me then that a new world was truly opening up.
Later Ceretelli was in emigration a long time, he wrote a big book. But I remember that in September when everything was falling apart, he came to Meyendorff and spoke to him for an hour in his little study, and my uncle allowed me to sit and listen. He was in total desperation and said that nothing could be done with Kerensky anymore, that Kerensky had completely lost his head, he couldn’t make a single decision. And I remember at the same time (I don’t remember exactly what month it was) my uncle reading a paper; he was always very self-possessed, never used Czapskian superlatives, but I saw he was reading with great emotion. And those were the laws that were being passed then, protecting the complete freedom of religion, freedom of affiliation, full rights for national minorities. And I again with my idiocy of the time said, “Why are you so emotional, you must see that it’s all falling apart,” And he replied: “Tu ne sais pas combien de gens et combien de générations ont souffert pour ça.” He suddenly saw what people had fought for so many years. This was the fruit falling from the tree . . .
Polish Army forces were beginning to form then, everything was falling apart, but the Polish soldiers were forming into groups right away. They marched and drove for hundreds of kilometers to cavalry divisions to join up. And then a corps began to be formed. General Dowbór’s corpus. That was right when I finished the Page Corps, already not the Page Corps; I got my officer rank just as the temporary government was dissolving, but before the revolution. The revolution itself, that is to say the overturn, I experienced with the First Krechowiecki Regiment. Maybe I should add something here about the meaning of the patriotism that didn’t exist, existed only in words. Żeromski was beginning to be read, there were calls for Polish-language education. Marynia taught two Belorussian peasant girls. But we were entirely isolated. I remember that terrible period when Warsaw was occupied and a wave of refugees passed through Minsk, thousands and thousands of people fleeing Poland at that time. I remember we would go up to the top floor, to the attic, from the balcony you could see the meadows in the autumn mist and the fields were full of wagons, bonfires, people were dying, walking in droves, our house was full of people who were staying with us. My sisters went to the Association for Aid to War Victims, and I went back to Petersburg. My sisters saw a group of excellent Polish intelligentsia in Minsk who were organizing aid, and under whose direction my sisters worked, and they saw there what Polishness was, what social work was, everything you couldn’t find in dreams and in books.
3.
Now the most important thing: I want to talk about my father. I have no recollection at all of my father, that’s a whole chapter to itself. It’s really another example of fathers and children: the degree to which children don’t understand their father. Our father, who after our mother’s death—I was seven at the time—was left with seven children on his back, in the countryside, had never been any sort of intellectual, held the most conservative convictions where Polishness was concerned. We thought he was indifferent to all the things my sisters tried to set up: schools, and so on, my father pretended he didn’t know anything. That was the only way to bear it. But without malice really. He loved us very much, but he made his own life, spent a lot of time in Petersburg, a lot in Minsk. Maybe these are the prejudices of a son, but they really did call him “the good count” and liked him a lot. Both where he was the president of charity and farm associations, and among the staff everywhere, he was considered a just, a good man, and as far as I went, how could I have the face to say anything against my father, my father loved me very much. Once we, the children, wanted to play horns—and he brought in some horn instructor every Sunday and we got to such a point of artistic excellence that we played the Ave Maria on All Souls’. And later I suddenly wanted to sculpt and my father arranged with Ludwik Puget, through Stryjeński who was his friend,26 for Puget to write a long letter with drawings showing how to build with clay on steel frameworks and so on, and my father brought in a teacher, a long-haired artist, with very elegant locks, just as it should be, and an artist’s coat, a velvet one. A studio was set up in our attic and there Marynia was taught to draw and I to sculpt. I still remember we had an old man whose only source of income was ringing the Angelus. He had a wooden leg, and ended his days on our charity. And he was always posing for everything we did. He was very proud, he’d go off and say, “A menia odin malowal, drugoi lapil, a tretii komandoval.” (One painted me, another sculpted me, and the third gave orders.)
About my father, I wanted to say one other thing. I deserted, because you can’t really call it anything else, I left the army suddenly—whatever my convictions were, I took off when the shooting was just beginning. And my father was then head of the military aid association in Minsk, for that army that was being formed. And he resigned—he couldn’t do otherwise, shamed by his son as he was. And when I arrived from the army—I’ll tell that story later—to see my father in Minsk, my father only kept saying, “My poor child, my poor child, but you understand, you’re a deserter now.”
Poor child. When I joined the army my father had given me a marvelous horse, Traken, such a beauty—I think the only horse I ever loved, and who was later taken by the Bolsheviks.
As far as Polishness was concerned, we’re also speaking very lightly. We now know a man who was the president of Arkonia in Vilnius, who said with reverence of my father that it was he who taught him to be a Pole. But this is a very strange question. Here you have to wonder how existence determines consciousness in people who aren’t revolutionary by nature, who don’t think in terms of self-interest. All that Polishness returned to father with Poland itself. I was extremely bitter with Poland, that Poland had rejected, had abandoned us, the Eastern Borderlands. My father behaved unlike everyone else in the Borderlands; my father behaved differently from many landowners. He came back right afterward, before 1920, when Minsk itself was occupied. And when that threat was already upon us, he sowed again; during the harvest, when he should have fled, everything was carried on as it always had been. Others sold their forests to Jews or cut them down, just to gather as much money as possible. My father thought that was impossible. A strange thing, because my father didn’t spend much time on the estate, but he was a farmer. I remember how he exploded in rage at us when we lit a bonfire in a field: How can you light a fire in a field, it’s burning the grass off! You understand, these are traditional things for people who truly love the earth. And naturally my father dreamed that I would sit on the land while I really didn’t know anything about horses or about anything else. Too bad. In any case all I’ve said about my father is superficial, without any deeper weight. One could write and speak quite differently of my father, much more profoundly and beautifully.
Another thing about Mr. Iwanowski. Because of what I was saying yesterday I began to remember my youth, which I’d forgotten. I remember that we larked about, we did very funny things, that Mr. Iwanowski wrote long Częstochowa-style poems for every holiday and we laughed at them, he played with us, took part in entertainments. Until he got mad at one of my sisters for interfering in his indivisible rule and until he got into quarrels with female teachers, he was delightful, he was very nice. And besides that he was good, you have to remember that well too. Before he came to us he took in the son of his friend Złotnicki, a young boy, he was maybe twelve years old when I met him, and Iwanowski took him into his complete care. This Złotnicki would come to stay with us regularly for a few days, we liked him a lot, he was very quiet, he was someone who didn’t impose himself at all, and he died while staying with us, of his lungs, when he was a very young boy. That was another gracious, good-hearted gesture on Iwanowski’s part. You mustn’t forget such things.
In 1909 Mr. Iwanowski arranged for us to travel abroad, to the sea. There was a Mr. Kon in Minsk where Iwanowski had been a teacher for a while, a very ardent Pole, naturally of Jewish origin, and he and his wife and their sons were traveling to Houlgate. Mr. Iwanowski arranged for us to go together. To that terrible Northern France. In Houlgate we got typhus and didn’t go to Nervi until the winter. After all those illnesses I was terribly disappointed, because I thought that if it was the South it should be hot, with grand palm trees. I saw palm trees in pots, and outside as well, but it was cold at night and in the morning you had to wear a cloak. I thought it wasn’t the South. Only the mountains, the mountains, I adored them. That was most certainly a matter of activity. Then I went to Switzerland—you could crawl and climb there. Lila and I went to various high mountains (there weren’t any real peaks there but to us it was high up). We stayed in a huge hotel, enormous, this was 1914, for we went there twice. I was there with Lila, with my sister, just us and one Prussian officer and one French officer, we went on treks in the mountains. Everybody lay around on sunbeds, drinking aperitifs, at best they played a little tennis.
I talked about my Russian gymnasium, but when it came down to it we had no Russian company at all, we didn’t know the Chicherins, and those families we knew were typical Baltic families. They were related to us through my grandmother Meyendorff, who had one sister, who married Nicolay and had daughters, so that the people we saw were the Meyendorffs, Pohlens, and Nicolays. Only those people. Everyone was connected to Russian diplomacy and czarist circles.
And it’s very interesting what Marynia writes,27 that in the Baltic provinces that fell into Polish hands, those families all became Polonized, and in the Russian provinces they always felt like a higher class, a different sphere, and retained their Germanness, although they were extremely loyal. The same people behaved completely differently.
A bit more about my music teacher. His name was Wulfius. I think he was a German who had lived in Petersburg for many years. I played a lot, because before this we were taught at home by Miss Kemp, our German piano teacher. I played from the age of seven. So that when I started going to him, Wulfius, I was already fourteen, fifteen. I felt I could already play. And I remember I started playing something with him I’d played many times before: Schumann’s little pieces. And right away I saw that the little piece of Schumann could be played as a masterpiece and could be completely flubbed. I remember him teaching me the pedal, I saw right then what music was, a whole horizon opened up for me and I was terribly happy. Later, during the revolution, he managed to get as far as Crimea; he lived there, gave lessons, and because he lost an arm, he played with his one arm—he played beautifully himself—and so one figure of great culture flashed past in my life.
Returning to the Page Corps: Almost all of the people who came there—the sons of officials, generals, military men, etc.—had already been educated in virtually paramilitary schools. So it was a school where the uniforms were elegant, the caps were elegant, you knew how to salute. I didn’t know any of that. It was very cold; I had some fur coat and I bought a fur-lined hat for four or five rubles, with big earflaps, and the flaps were tied together with a string. But because I lacked that string, when they suddenly said, “Hats on!” I stood there with my hat and its one swinging earflap. I was tallest, so they always started everything from me, and there was another tall guy next to me, some Baltic baron, almost as tall as I, so all the embarrassment fell on us. I didn’t even know that when they say “shagom marsh,” you have to wait for the “marsh” (march). So as soon as I hear “shagom,” I’m off. Well, it was a riot, everybody laughed at me, this tall joker, idiot who didn’t know anything. I can’t say it was pleasant; I lived in terror of those musters. Later there were cavalry musters, so I had to lead my platoon on horseback in a little yard the size of this room. But it didn’t matter, they liked me, the commander liked me and saw I was trying hard to do my best. And others laughed at me but in a good-natured way. No one ever did me any harm. Some had a worse time. We saw some men, there was one who was destroyed, but they didn’t destroy me; these things were also about class.
When I spoke of my uncle Meyendorff, I said his mother was Princess Gorchakova; therefore my uncle’s grandfather was Prince Gorchakov, the Russian deputy in Warsaw before 1863. When those stormy events were approaching that year he was replaced, because he was too soft, too liberal. There was a pro-Polish tradition connected with him. His mother was also a rebel, connected in some way with Warsaw. But those Gorchakovs are a whole other story. There was a premier Gorchakov who was premier or foreign minister a long time, apparently an unbelievable dunce, but that’s old history, I won’t go into it, we’re getting sidetracked.
Just a word about my drawing teacher, Tuszynski. He was a nice man, but that was just a tiny little wave from the sea that was the Young Poland movement in Kraków, Przybyszewski, folk art, those were things that reached us through him. And at the time we got keen on painting, partly because of him. With our own money we bought a painting by Okuń, whom we liked tremendously then, some Italian city in the mist, and it was hung up at home. There was also Czarnocki, of whom you must have heard—Miss Czarnocka was a friend of Róża’s28—he was a painter, he made us a gift of a painting of a flowering tree, it hung in our little youth salon and we were terribly proud of it. He was the first to speak to us of Żeromski, of the impressionists. Again, he did us a world of good.
•
For me the fundamental problem wasn’t how the revolution would end and how it would turn out, but how to get to the Polish Army, the Polish Army being formed outside Minsk, and to Krechowiecki’s First Cavalry Regiment. We had a few acquaintances there and naturally that’s the regiment I chose. So after our course closed down, when everything was falling apart, we went to Dukora. That was an estate occupied by the First Krechowiecki Regiment and I was immediately assigned to the Second Squadron. The platoon commander, lieutenant or captain, was Podhorski, Zaza, truly a man of kindness. The first pleasure I gave him was in telling him, “Lieutenant, sir, I have really come here out of cowardice.” That’s literally what I said to him. “I’m an antimilitarist, I’m against war, because it is said explicitly in the Gospels thou shalt not kill, so I can’t do anything like that, but I’m here because everybody’s joining the army.” Somehow Zaza took it in a lighthearted sort of way. He said, “Dear boy, you’ll get to know the army, the fatherland . . .” and so on.
I got into it right away. I liked everything a lot, the people, the uhlans, the officers, and the rigor, the enthusiasm, a Polish enthusiasm, it couldn’t have been greater. My commander was Colonel Mościcki, who from time to time made the most unbelievable scenes, he would scream so the walls seemed to burst if you had a button undone, and he did it with the full consciousness that people were struck with terror, but none of it was so awful at all. I took part in all cavalry exercises, and these were serious exercises and I did my very utmost. The central figure for me was not Mościcki—though he liked me a lot and I him, for it was hard not to like him—but another excellent officer, Bronek Romer. There were three brothers, of whom one was our ambassador for an extensive period, the youngest brother. In Japan, then in Moscow, and now he’s in Canada; he lived there a long time as a professor of history or of languages. For me then only this Bronek mattered, everyone liked him tremendously. He was like a picture-postcard uhlan. In the sense of Polish concepts: of Polishness and loyalty to the fatherland. His mother was a Jundziłłówna. They had a beautiful patriotic tradition in the family, of participation in the uprisings. He was the real heart of the regiment. He led a division and you always went to see him, you always got hot tea, we always turned to him for any kind of advice. And I remember that my first important conversations in the regiment were with him. Of course I also told him everything. There were huge discussions on the military and I behaved arrogantly, because I had cut my teeth on pacifist arguments, I picked them up wherever I could, and they were simply decent fellows, soldiers fighting for their fatherland. They had no pacifist notions. And I remember one scene, when we talked by candlelight deep into the night, me and Bronek, I explained those pacifist ideas to him, and he tried to explain to me to what degree war ennobles a man, if you treat it with seriousness. And I still remember him telling me about some terrible things that happened on the French front, trench warfare, etc. He said, “I’m deeply convinced that from all that suffering will grow a great hymn of the spirit.”
I truly came to respect and love that man. He was infinitely kind to me. He had no time to discuss such abstract subjects with me, the regiment’s existence was still very uncertain. I remember how once when he had no time he left me a little note: “Can you imagine Poland can be independent without an army?”
That was the simplest question, which I saw as so naive, so irrelevant, because in my judgment it had already been overcome and humanity was going to be happy; internationalism of societies, ideas, a fraternity of nations. His wise and simple question seemed to me the height of naivete. And at the same time I was a Pole at heart, but the question of whether an army was necessary still tormented me. Why didn’t I think the matter through and start agitating vigorously in the army? I met Antek Marylski there, he was a hero among us by then, he had already been in battle. He wasn’t an officer, he was in the Russian Army, with some noncommissioned rank. But he rode, his horses were like oaks, and he told us some of his terrible adventures, not even from wartime but very moving stories of certain encounters. From the first Antek always had an astonishing gift for human encounters, and I remember to this day that he became good friends with some nurse on the front, and that nurse told him how Russians behave, how they die. She was in one of those large wards, where there were dozens of severely injured people waiting for operations and the doctors operated on them, and she had to make sure the patients were brought in from a queue. She saw one with a pale face, covered with an army coat, and she asked him, “Why are you waiting, it’s your turn?” And he said to her, “Christ endured his suffering for us all, so I can endure it for myself.” And she removed the coat and saw his abdomen was gaping open. They were those sorts of memories, it may be no accident that I’m mentioning them here, because they were the kind of recollections that made Antek so fascinating to me. Antek also thought constantly of world peace, but he didn’t doubt that we had to fight. And so some time passed, until finally, when we had had a really good talk, around Christmas I remember it was, I completely talked brother Antek round. He walked me back to my hut and said, “I’ve decided to leave the army . . . I’d rather be a night watchman than kill people.” I remember I experienced that as the great victory of my life. The first. A fine conversion. We went to Antek—at that time the army was supposed to move from Dukora to Bobruysk, and there was huge confusion around our departure, etc.—and we said we would go to the commander in Bobruysk and report, the three of us together, that we were withdrawing. But I have to tell another funny story. There was a Russian Army captain, who later became a general, visiting the president of the Polish Republic. They told me he didn’t eat meat, because he was a Buddhist, had Buddhist tendencies and didn’t want to kill. And at the same time he was in the army. So I set off to his village, where he had stationed his division, some ten or fifteen kilometers away, to ask him how he figured that out. And I remember—I think that he had a cold, was lying on a fold-out bed in the middle of his hut. I say, “Captain, sir, please tell me how it works. You think we should not kill.” “Yes, we shouldn’t kill.” “So how can you be an officer and command soldiers, who are trained to kill?” “You know, you do what you can.” I have to say that compromising stance didn’t sit well with me, but I was taken with the man’s pure conscience. There was some holiday in Dukora, or maybe it was Christmas, that I spent with my sisters who came to see me there. I lived in a village called Korovaya or Kovorayevo. It was raining, muddy, Marynia and I went out into a little field and dreamed of going to Paris. We were dreaming. Maybe this terrible war will end at last and then we’ll go to Paris. I’d paint and she’d study. And I remember what reading I’d brought, it was La Vie de Jésus by Renan, which had actually disappointed me, even today I wouldn’t go back to it. But there was some snobbery in it too, of me thinking I was so smart to be reading such interesting things in French. Right. So we set off, I’m in one squadron, Antek and his brother in another. I’m under Podhorski’s command, they’re under the command of Lieutenant Zakrzewski, a stout, tall, very nice man. Soon on the road to Bobruysk, Romer’s squadron is attacked by Bolsheviks. Peasants and their Soviet instructors, who were already training the peasants. They attacked at night and killed one of our officers. And here the fighting begins, the attackers were driven off, but we have an officer dead. And here immediately everything changes, we had been quietly planning to hand in our resignations and withdraw, and meanwhile war was starting up here. The craziness of the uhlans, their rage, they would have wiped out a whole village right then and there. It was like that in Algiers too. I have a friend who was a splendid boy, an officer in the Algerian war, they were concerned with villages, bringing condensed milk, there were doctors among them who treated the Arabs, and so on, and the same people came to them in the night with the FLN and took money from them for the revolution. And they were beset from both sides. And he tells a story about how two of his friends went to a village to deliver condensed milk and it turned out the road had been dynamited and of course the whole village knew because it was they who had planted the dynamite, and I remember him describing what a terrible effort it was to restrain the soldiers from burning and killing all those people. It’s that at first a person takes it all in a provincial kind of way. That is, the law of war, the law of cruelty, that awakens cruelty. I had never even seen someone hit someone else before, apart from Mr. Iwanowski, who shocked me; I didn’t know what brutality was. I didn’t know, I’d only read about it in books and I was deeply affected by the death of our officer, and my pacifistic ideas were always going around in my head; we were riding, it was a severe winter, our whole squadron was drawn out in a long procession, I was at the head of our platoon, and I had my uhlans there, a few young students among them, plucky Poles, one like a little pony, tiny. We’re riding along and we see a peasant, in a military coat to boot, looking at our troops with a sullen expression on his face. Clear enough. There were estates after all, the estates belonged to Poles, and the peasants dreamed of getting land, Soviet Russia had promised them that land. And here go these noblemen back and forth on their fancy horses. They had no reason to love us. So this little student, when he saw the man’s sullen expression, got off his horse and slapped him in the face, one-two, which of course everyone thought was a fine act of patriotism. Something happened to me then, maybe twice or three times in my life I’ve had an experience like that, completely independent of my willpower. I could no longer act otherwise. From that time I have one dangerous habit, that I never decide before I’m forced to. I know the moment will ripen, but that I have to be able to wait, that it’s all right to wait, if you’re waiting honestly. Back then I didn’t wait for it to come, because I thought I’d make my own plans. I said—no, that’s it. I’m leaving. The day before they’d killed a man, war had broken out and right at that moment I would leave the army, what an extraordinary hero. And I remember riding up the line, up to the head where Zaza Podhorski was riding. I rode up to him and said, “Zaza, I have to tell you something very important”—we were really very good friends, he was an infinitely good man—“you know, I’m leaving the army. Because I can’t kill, I told you that from the start, I absolutely can’t do it.”
“So maybe you’ll go to a monastery?”
I hadn’t been thinking of monasteries at all. I was truly convinced that they would have to shoot me, and there was the simple resolution, they’d shoot me and that would be it. But what I was to do from there on hadn’t even entered my mind. He sent me to Bronek. I go off to see Bronek Romer, tell him, and he listens to me very calmly, he knows perfectly well what my views are, and says, “I’ll ask one thing of you: I’ll see to it that they let you go, but please go as soon as possible. So you don’t demoralize my troops. I’ll take care of it. I have no doubt as to why you’re doing this, I know your beliefs, they are too exalted for you to fight them.”
For a professional officer who lived for the army, loved the army and loved Poland, this reaction testifies to a very high moral level. But simultaneously the Marylskis were undergoing this process. Without knowing about me, they at the same time went to Zakrzewski, whom I barely knew, but he was quite solemn. He burst into tears. He said to them, “Dear fellows, I in my youth tried to create a new life too.”
And Zakrzewski himself perished on that front a few weeks later, in 1920. A wonderful man. Well, we met up in Bobruysk after arriving. What would we do now? We were told “Go,” and we were not to show ourselves. We started detaching the galloons from our trousers, we unstitched everything in a triumphant mood. We were riding a Jewish cart through Bobruysk to buy something to cook for ourselves, and we meet Mościcki. And he already knew about everything. He says, “I heard you’re leaving the army. It was all very well to wear a uniform, a fine uniform, while there was no war on. And now the war starts and you gentlemen are running away. I’ll tell you: You won’t get back into Poland, I’ll make sure of it. Poland doesn’t need people like you.”
We saluted him, thinking it all made sense from his point of view, but we were whistling because we felt on the heights of heroic virtue.
We got in the Jewish cart, one of those covered boxes, and I remember us traveling to some inn by night, and how the Jew on his way back from Bobruysk knew exactly what the situation was. Bolsheviks here, Poles there, this and the other. We had some very warm friends. They told us they couldn’t afford to do what we were doing but that they understood us, that we were right. We even managed to plant in those excellent officers who perished a grain of doubt, and a thought about the relative nature of what they were doing, in comparison with what seemed to us a full Christianity. And all those people said goodbye to us very warmly, without a trace of any suspicion or scorn. That is my recollection from my time with that regiment; I have other memories of what followed, things I never forgot. So we got out of there, boarded some cargo train already carrying Bolsheviks traveling hither and thither, and we were Polish military; one railway worker looked at me and said, “Count Czapski!” (my father was very well known in those parts), and left. Generally the people who impressed me most at that time were the rail workers, who executed their duties to the last; there were already loads of soldiers and bandits on the trains who would kill you without a second thought. And those men demanded to see everyone’s ticket, and shouted when someone didn’t have a ticket. They did their jobs the whole time.
No longer in uniform but wearing sheepskin coats and hats, we traveled by night to Przyłuki, where my sisters were. My father was in Minsk throughout and went home only from time to time. Our house was already under Communist control, my sisters had to ask permission of a commissar for everything. Before this my sister Karla, who was the most extreme in her views, had written to me: “I wanted to tell you that it’s terrible to me that you are in the army. If you died for Christ somewhere in the Pinsk or Chinese swamps I’d be happy, but not if you’re killing people.”
So she was already completely prepared, mature. We spent something like three or four days at home, where my sisters were wholly won over. We decided to now proclaim the Gospel in the world. But above all we had to get to Poland, and we couldn’t; the Germans had occupied those lands, and this was the time when the Soviets were already there, but they didn’t immediately control all the villages and estates. In any case I went from home to see my father—my father was ill—and told him everything. And this is when I had that very moving meeting with my father. He, poor man, truly had no idea what I could do, what he could do for me. I remember then also going to a Polish activist named Heltman, a wonderful activist, who became a passionate Communist and later perished. He was a man of great intellect, and when I went to him and asked what he thought I should do, he didn’t understand it at all. He expounded the proper Communist theory that now was the moment for peasants and workers to take over, that we should make the revolution. So he really wasn’t interested in me at all. So we decided that the only solution was to go to Petersburg, where we had people and where we could work. Really it was Antek’s magic at work. Although the idea of leaving the army had been mine, taken from Tolstoy, and he wasn’t into Tolstoy at all. But very quickly we began to think he was probably a prophet, something like that, miraculous. And here again an interesting observation. What does faith give? Faith is a form of falling in love, because we were all in love with Antek. Five versts from us there was the church of our charming and beloved priest, who had always said he “knew people,” and that I would become a priest. That was a pipe dream, because I never wanted to be a priest. We went to visit him, he received me with great emotion, regarding those Marylskis with some distrust, who had led whom astray here. Antek was intensely serious, goggle-eyed, as he was to his death; we sat there for a while, the priest was very moved by us and we went back to Przyłuki. I remember Antek wrote a letter to his cousin Żółkiewski, a Krechowiecki officer, who was his relative on his mother’s side. He was a man of insane courage, a killer, very distinguished. Antek wrote, “Join us, officers are ripping off their epaulets, priests casting off their robes, we must create a new life.”
Where did he get those priests casting off their robes? Imagination. But he wasn’t lying, he was convinced that priests would cast off their robes, if not today, then tomorrow. So it was always a kind of reckoning ahead. And if you had common sense you would say, “Change that!” But it seemed like reality: if he said so, apparently that’s how it was. Terrible, terrible.
I remember an African story about two women jailed for killing and eating a child. The death sentence was passed in some French colony, but the death penalty had to be confirmed in Paris. Those poor women were stuck in some hovel and suddenly all the judges thought there was no clear evidence and sent back the documents with instructions to study the case again, it wasn’t clear. They began going over it. “Did you kill the child?” “We surely killed that child.” “Did you eat it?” “We ate it for sure. No, we didn’t eat it, we buried it.” “Where did you bury it?” “Right here under the hill,” They dig and dig—not one little bone. “So why did you say you buried it?” “We buried it.” “Why are you saying these things?” “Because the magic man said that’s how it was: the magic man said we killed it, so we killed it.”
So this moment of blinding faith, imposing a reality that is more important than every tangible proof. Very dangerous. That division between knowledge and faith, charismatic leaders have that gift. We all know on how many people Antek imposed a certain view of the world.
In any event, it ended with our leaving for Petersburg. Marynia hesitated, she didn’t want to bring Róża. She said she’d join us later, that she had to take care of something with Róża first. So the three of us took off. We didn’t care about places to live, the Marylskis and I, we were a little like crazy peasants. Karla left ten days later. But when my father found out that Karla was leaving, he went haywire. Not to mention the fact that in the course of those ten days the German forces had taken Minsk, estates were returned to their proper owners, the commissars fled. Enthusiasm among all Polish landowners. And that’s the moment when Karla wanted to go to Petersburg. She didn’t speak a word of Russian. She had a fur coat, a short coat, and she draped a Red Cross band over it, though she hadn’t a clue what the Red Cross was. And so she traveled by train. The Germans sent the nonessential population from Minsk across the Dnieper. There were loads of Mongolians, Chinese, who were cutting forests. So they crammed all those Mongolians—suspected of being Bolsheviks—into cattle cars or regular cars. And Karla got in with that company. She found some conductor who noticed her and told her to sit somewhere. And she was taken across the Dnieper, put on some train there. Alone. This was the beginning of 1918. Yes, I was twenty-two, so she must have been twenty-four or twenty-five. Twenty-five, I’m sure. Then she traveled to Petersburg, and it was a good few weeks before Marynia came. Some boundary with the Germans had defined itself, trains were running. My father went gray. For my father it was a blow, especially Karla leaving. And Karla did it brutally. Apparently she didn’t even say goodbye. She was terribly in love with Antek, but if someone said anything she took it as the worst insult. Because she knew it was only in the name of God and for God. This was another insane lack of awareness.
And here our strange life began. What could we do? We would spread the word. Proclaim justice above all. In any case we moved into the apartment of some couple who were leaving, but were thrilled to have us occupy their home. It was deserted, everyone had taken off, the most brutal Bolshevik rule was in force.
Now I’d like to say another thing I haven’t said before; that is, I only mentioned it. You can make an amusing story out of it, but one thing was beyond question. I haven’t talked much about Tolstoy. What I’d like to say about Tolstoy are things I remember well. They are scenes from Anna Karenina, and above all from War and Peace: Prince Bolkonski’s death, several of those unforgettable scenes, Anna Karenina’s death, that come back to me often. Whenever I stand near a big train passing by at speed I always think of Anna Karenina. But this has nothing to do with our pacifist beliefs. As far as Tolstoy goes, he wrote an unforgettable piece, Shto delat' (What to Do), when he had already achieved everything. He was famous, he had a family he loved, he had a wife he loved, and suddenly he felt the complete void and meaninglessness of life. And he locked up his guns because he was afraid he’d shoot himself. That made a huge impression on me, but what really drove us was the Gospels. Tolstoy was like a first reflection. Today I think that all sectarians are closer to the Gospel than we are; those who want to realize everything at once, who think tomorrow is the end of the world, that it depends on us to change the world. I wonder if that massive number of sects active in Russia then may not have influenced us unconsciously, without us even knowing. I talked about Ceretelli, about that speech, which means the same thing: When you are struck on one cheek, turn the other one. Even snakes love their friends, Christians love their enemies too, pray for their enemies. We went in that mood. And I still remember that saying goodbye at Przyłuki I wrote: “There is a golden city hidden in the mist, in the wreath of eternal gardens, golden spring . . .” That’s a Staff poem.29 And we really believed that we were going to that city hidden in golden mist. Petersburg. It was truly a very powerful religious life, all that was happening to us. And right away I faced the question of the Church and Catholicism. Because we were considering everything in our own terms and we made all the decisions. And here there’s another story I think I should tell, though I don’t like to talk about it, because these are intimate things. In any case Father Łoziński, later Bishop, who had known us from childhood and was very fond of us, was still in Petersburg. I confessed to him that I’d left the army and that it was my conviction that as a Christian I could not kill. Father Łoziński heard me out and said, “But remember that the Church permits war, if the war is just, and that you can’t judge for yourself.”
To that I replied that I could not do otherwise than my conscience dictated, and I insisted it was my conviction. “So I can’t give you absolution.” To which I said, “All right. If you can’t give me absolution, I’ll leave without absolution.”
But Father Łoziński was concerned with my immortal soul. He was very consistent. And he said, “This is arrogance, it’s pride, humble yourself before God.”
I humble myself, and he says the same thing again. “I’m going to serve Mass now”—we were in the Maltese chapel—“and you humble yourself.” I humbled myself. Half an hour, he says Mass and comes back. “Have you humbled yourself?” “I’ve humbled myself.” “Do you understand what I’ve said to you?” “I understand, but I can’t act otherwise.” And then Father Łoziński perhaps for the only time in his life acted in a way not according to Catholic belief. He said, “I can’t absolve you. Go to the confessional across the way.”
Well, I went across the way to the confessional. The good priest granted me absolution at once. I told him everything in the same words. But I was reading Renan at the time and I found one sentence that really convinced me. Renan writes somewhere, “The Church is like a steel bar—either you take it as a whole, or you reject it as a whole.” And consequently I rejected it whole and didn’t practice for a long time. And at the time we were entirely left to our own resources. At first we lived in that house, the apartment of a couple whose name I can’t remember. They were well off, there was a kitchen, a few rooms, all the conveniences, but we were terribly hungry. We had brought with us some hams, which we finished off, we had a lot of bone broth—that was our breakfast. And I remember this: as hunger rations we bought smoked fish on skewers, there were excellent fish, some kind of whitefish, you got a lot of that in Russia. We had five of those whitefish for our darkest hour. And after a certain time we saw that two fish were left and two had disappeared. We thought someone was stealing from us, maybe a servant of the couple who came there. We are starving and he’s playing nasty tricks on us. Suddenly we saw a hole in the floor and a fish being dragged into the hole, rats had pulled it in. And I remember that Karla, who was always squeamish about things that weren’t clean enough, when she saw that whole fish that was eaten away—eaten away, but there were still pieces of flesh on it—under the floor, she threw it in the garbage. And when she’d gone I got the fish out of the garbage, cleaned it on the outside and ate it with great relish. This is what I recall now as proof that we were really starving. We began looking for jobs, some kind of work. It was incredibly difficult to find anything to eat. You could get herring, that was still for sale, or potatoes from a shuttle trader. That meant going to the station where they brought in those potatoes. Then we found out there was a man named Karol Jaroszyński30—founder of a Catholic university, a bit of a genius. And a bigot, as some brilliant people are. He built up a huge fortune. The Jaroszyńskis were rich already, but he got involved in bank business, in speculation of some kind, in Paris, some sugar works, an enormous fortune. And then he began buying up stocks of all the banks that were collapsing. Still counting on being able to return to Russia in three months. He lived like a pasha, had a big palace on the Moika, helped various people, had some thirty Boy Scouts whom he received, who went there to eat, to take their meals, he had that palace with extraordinary salons, and in addition on the islands he had a splendid marble villa—all of it purchased at moments when people were getting rid of everything. He kept buying and buying. His waiting room was filled from morning to night with people wishing to sell him something. There were great princesses, bankers, merchants, he received them all. When you went to see him you had to walk through those halls and salons, where all those people were waiting. In addition to that he had thirty-six apartments in Petersburg that belonged to him. And no one knew where he slept. Because he was afraid—he was an awful capitalist in a center of Bolshevism. He paid off various people in the higher Soviet spheres, among them the former czarist minister or deputy minister Manushevich of the Cheka, who was on a fixed pension, so when a raid was going to take place he was always informed and could escape to another house by some little bridge. He became acquainted with us. I can’t remember who recommended us to him. He took a great interest in us. He said: Your heads are mixed up, but I like you. I want to help you. I offer you a typist and a typewriter so you can write down all your ideas.
Why do we need a typewriter? We are going to work miracles. Why should we write down concepts? All the concepts are in the Gospels and we don’t need any concepts or typists. This surprised him again. He started to think how he might find us work. And he decided to buy up books, organize a great economics library. Through me, through us, he met a wonderful man, Belov, director of the Duma library, one of Russia’s greatest librarians. An old man, very nice, whom we knew through Meyendorff. Jaroszyński put him in charge of the whole enterprise. He rented a whole apartment and Belov gathered the books, and Marynia and I made a catalog. I remember we were so hungry that by lunchtime I couldn’t see straight. There was a student canteen where we were allowed to go, and we would have a bite there, some disgusting slop. But I got enough to eat, because in the morning before work I’d go to Jaroszyński for soup. So that really kept me going . . . And so Marynia and I went out to work, to have something to live on, Antek took the job of guard in the building where we lived, and Karla was supposed to do housework, sweeping, cooking. The cooking was awful because she thought it was quite inappropriate for us to eat well. She hated cooking, she had never cooked, and she’d boil potatoes without washing or peeling them, and serve them with some horrible herring. It was inedible stuff. When Marynia arrived she dismissed Karla from the position after a while and took over the housework herself. And what did Karla actually do? She prayed; she had a beautiful sweater I loved, orange silk, and she dyed it black. Marynia had a nice jewel brooch she’d inherited from our mother, and we sold it. Whatever we had, we sold to have something to live on. There were no miracles, but Antek was the one growing in virtue. He was a night watchman; he prayed, prayed in the snow, had some kind of visions—no, not visions, but when he was completely exhausted he didn’t sleep, he sat on the ice, then he’d come back in and write things in a half-conscious state. Écriture automatique. Écriture automatique in an almost Pascalian sense. “O blood, O blood, O Cross, give us God, that we may be crucified, that we may die for you, Your blood . . .” Marynia has some scraps of these texts. So that we still had no doubt that something extraordinary was going on here. I remember that Antek went out a while later and there was this scene: They were drowning some cat on a little bridge, a crowd standing around, and he said to me, “You know, I had a moment when I felt I could work a miracle now. But it’s not yet time.”
And this wasn’t a put-on. It was all real conviction. Naturally we believed it all the more and we were very concerned that our—I wanted to say Rasputin—that our saint would survive, because he was in miserable shape. He was ill. Jaroszyński came to see us, took an interest in Antek, wanted him to eat better, to talk to him. Nothing came of it. We took Antek to Uncle Meyendorff. We thought Uncle Meyendorff would fall to his knees, astounded by the miracle of Antek Marylski. But he was a skeptic, an agnostic, he regarded it all respectfully, because he was a man who could respect others, but also a little bemusedly, or so it seemed to me. I remember an evening at Uncle Meyendorff’s, lovely arrangements, we had a very humble dinner because he had hardly anything in the house, and he said some very interested things about politics. But I kept feeling that it was tasteless and tactless of my uncle that he spoke of such unimportant matters. Antek sat there flushed, not listening but thinking the whole time about how to act so as to convert this man. So that contact with others was very strange, because really at that time he was entirely oriented toward a miracle. Literally, that he was a messenger of God. And as I recall even I didn’t want to believe it. True, your memory sometimes wipes from your mind things that are embarrassing. I remember us walking together and he said to me, “You see, I know that Christ’s suffering is not sufficient. I have to complete that suffering to the end. Take it on myself.”
I came to believe it. And suddenly that Jaroszyński of ours stuck his nose into it all, that brute who didn’t understand a thing about what was going on. Who saw that we were living like madmen, who saw that with those ideas no one knew where Antek would come to. So he started to send people to him. For example, he sent some old rabbi, so the rabbi could explain to him that the Jews were swindled with the birth of Jesus. As if God promised them a bottle of wine and gave them champagne instead. Well, it’s a swindle. They were waiting for the Messiah, who would be king of the Jews. But of course Antek listened to all that with a smile and nothing could persuade him. I was with Jaroszyński at his palace, he had enormous plans. He was in touch with people in France and England. A whole government had been formed. He paid them all because he’d bought up half the shares in every Russian bank. In the event of a turnaround he would be the ruler of Russia. So you see what colossal dreams we had all around us. On the one hand, rule over capitalist Russia, on the other, pan-Christianity. Marynia and I were always seen a little by Antek and Karla as the earthbound ones. You understand, we were interested in what we would live on. They didn’t care what we would live on, or how to act on ideas. They thought it wasn’t the right time at all, because we weren’t mature enough. We had to attain such spiritual heights that we would act by prayer alone. But we decided we really had to do something. And we wanted to establish the Red Cross in Soviet prisons. And with this we went to Chicherin, my father’s cousin, who was then minister of foreign affairs, to propose that we would organize Red Cross work for all those countless prisoners at the time. I remember I waited a long time; he received me in the corridor, a thin older man, small. He said it wasn’t his area, told me to go to comrade Petrov: “He’s a crystal-clear man.” We left feeling quite insulted, we thought he was sending us to some subordinates and we gave up. On the other hand there was Henryk Przewłocki, who was with Lednicki. Lednicki was doing great things. He was gathering the Poles, it was he who forced the Soviets to proclaim the independence of Poland. Przewłocki was his secretary. Well and he somehow knew how to manage to get by, traded in something, he’d always bring us butter or something like that, and he had a real eye for Karla, he was very interested in Karla, but Karla didn’t want him, to her he was a cousin at best. But before I finish this story, I want to tell a funny story in the interim. At that time our aunt was in Russia, Emeryk’s mother, Pusłowska.31 She was a very strange woman. She had great elegance, was very uninhibited, said what she thought, was always very sensitive to money matters, jewels, appearance—she dressed well, but at the same time she had a lot of heart. Well, she was in Petersburg. And she had her jewels, which she put in a safe. She had gorgeous jewelry. Bolshevism comes along and they take her jewels. Outrage, outrage. But still, her husband’s cousin is the commissar. So she simply pushes in to tell him: Give me my jewels back. But he doesn’t receive her. She finds out he’s giving a lecture somewhere. She goes to it. Waits and waits, and pushes through at the exit, catches him, but he doesn’t want to see her at all. Meanwhile there was Uncle Meyendorff’s house where we used to go, and she used to go, and Aleksander Meyendorff maintained relations with the commissar. They’d once been good friends. And in the time when Chicherin was a socialist and totally opposed to the czar’s rule, Uncle Meyendorff had relations with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and thanks to Meyendorff he managed to sneak out of the country and avoid arrest. He went to Switzerland, leaving his estate to his brother; he took only money himself and had money in Switzerland. He was a remarkable man, quite exceptional. I have a book of Mallarmé here with commentary written by his hand. An explication of a poem. Meyendorff gave it to us and it’s written at the top that it came from Chicherin. Later, when he was in England, Lenin summoned him. And at the time he was a Left Socialist Revolutionary. He wasn’t a Communist. Later it shifted completely. So Lenin made him commissar for foreign affairs, or rather vice-commissar under Trotsky, Trotsky was the first commissar; later as far as I recall Trotsky left and he became commissar. Well, he was returning from the ministry with his briefcase and dropped in on Meyendorff on the way. And here’s my aunt. Chicherin is leaving, politely saying goodbye, and she grabs his briefcase from under his arm. And she says, “Vous m’avez volé les diamants, moi je vous vole la serviette.” She refuses to give it back. And he had secret documents in there. So they had a little tussle, then of course she gave it back to him. He goes out and at the entrance in the hall my aunt says goodbye to my uncle and says, “La seule chose qui me reste c’est de demander à Dieu qu’il vous rende la raison.” (The only thing that remains for me is to ask God to restore your reason.) And he, having already closed the door, opened it and said, “Dieu? Je le considère comme non-existant!” (God? I consider him to be nonexistent!)
So there ended all my dealings with Chicherin. Meanwhile Antek was getting sicker, I don’t know what was the matter with him, he simply couldn’t take Soviet life. Well, and it was a matter of his having milk. There was no milk. Well, to revive him a little. I will never forget this: I went to the station, I was determined that he would have a little milk at Easter. Women came there with big canisters of milk, with tins. And there was a crowd of a thousand, thousands, waiting for those women. Three women and a thousand people waiting. I saw I wouldn’t get any. I thought, I’ll get on the train and go three stops on to the country. I left—three or two stops—and suddenly I saw the countryside, fat women with those tin canisters, enormous, with milk, with ponies, riding up close, not even to the station itself, you had to walk a little ways, and for good money you could get milk. And at last I got a bottle or two—a triumph. So I went back. At one of the stations nearby I saw one of those women had driven up, people threw themselves at her so that all the milk was spilled and they couldn’t get anything. I got to the station where the thousand people were waiting, and I was really carrying that milk like a treasure for a sick man. And they looked at me so enviously, seeing me carrying that milk. Some old woman came up to me and said, “Please let me have just a sip,” and I didn’t, and I still think today, what that . . . If I had given some to her, people would have killed me, they would all have wanted some. And I already had that ruthlessness of defending myself. Anyway, it went on like that until about May or June of 1918.
At the same time we heard that Dowgiałło had died, that Haryś perished after that, we heard that Mościcki had died,32 because he was trying to get through to Poland and communicate with them so that the corps wouldn’t be dissolved, because the Germans had decided to dissolve the corps. So they wanted to save the army from the Warsaw authorities. There were attempts to contact Piłsudski, but Piłsudski was already in Magdeburg. Mościcki had to get there by way of the forests. So I saw that—I being such a hero, got out of the world of battle—that nothing was going to come of all that salvation, that we were hungry, and out there my friends were falling, dying for something. Evangelically speaking it was a terrible thing. And at that time Antek broke down, he got very ill and lost his faith. He was completely reduced to tatters. The physical and psychic strain caused a reaction, a sort of collapse. Then Jaroszyński butted in, took him from us by force, put him up in his palace and then took him to Kiev. And there we were without our boss, without our Rasputin. All authority dissipated and our splendid adventure ended in a total failure. But we didn’t feel humiliated.
Here I’d like to add a few things. I’ve thought about it. Due to the lapses of memory, the lack of materials, all of this is somewhat oversimplified by my account. Let us remember that Antek Marylski’s state back then was that of a person who later in Poland devoted his whole life to a great work, if he didn’t create it himself. His state at the time was the point of departure for his complete surrender to a certain idea, the Christian idea. I am the one who never in my life, apart from the first period—and maybe precisely because I idealized him so much in the beginning—who never saw him as my ideal. Up to the very last I was irritated by some of his things; for example, the piece he wrote—and again here’s the danger of writing from memory when you’re losing your memory—for the journal Znak; they were recollections of the past, which seemed to me quite muddled and also exaggerated in some way. And that taught me, too, to beware of the memory that later projects a light on everything, giving it dimensions such as it didn’t have in reality. So it seems to me that if you talk about him, about those things he experienced and that led to a few people believing so blindly in him—not in him being a decent person, that he was nice, or something like that, but that he was a prophet, literally, that he was a saint—there had to be something besides the personal grace of the man. And it seems to me that the text he wrote to Róża in Petersburg in May 1918 is so typical and so reminiscent of other prayers he wrote at that time—there weren’t many of them, a couple, but they were in exactly the same tone—that I think I should read it, in order to truly understand or be shocked, shocked as Zdziechowski was later—he thought we had all gone astray in some Russian extremism, betraying the great Polish tradition. But to see why we betrayed it, what those entanglements with Russia really were, is a problem that goes far beyond the person of Antek Marylski, it seems to me. He met Róża when she was seventeen, saw her for maybe three days, maybe eight days, no more. We were all terribly wrapped up in him, my sisters were wrapped up in him—but not Róża. She was seventeen years old and her mind was elsewhere, she didn’t even feel any magic in him, and maybe that aroused him even more and he wrote her a letter in May. I’ll stammer a bit, because this was copied by my sister at the time into her diary, which she always had with her, which she brought to Poland and later left in Warsaw with the burned-out house. And a year or two later she found it in the garbage in the courtyard, among pillows and so on.
If in the night of suffering and longing of your soul, always poor, you feel—life of care—the heart returns, know that love has entered into it. For life is love and suffering is a voice. And when you feel that your soul wants to die to make an offering of itself to others, then know that you are reaching into infinity. And if in the night . . . the world of love and fulfilled sacrifice leaves you and becomes alien, then know that a new life begins, calling itself eternity and God—memento mori. When life carries you away on its wave and you hear a gust of spring or a heart beating with you in one sound and pulse—memento mori. When your beloved’s head lies on your breast, may your heart brimming with love run to him, whose bitterness was drink, and whose simple cross, life and death. And your lips will pale thirsting for earthly love, and your heart will tremble brimming with happiness, and the Satan clothed in love to possess you and put you to sleep will leave forever and you will hum a song to God. For there will be no earthly nor infernal force that can possess your soul, for on the bottom of every earthly luxury you will see the Cross, and on it the naked body of the Savior. Blessed are those who suffer, for know that God anointed their brows with the blood of sacrifice that they may continue the work of Christ. Cast off the earth’s dust from your soul, for in its delusive rainbow are mixed treason and apostasy. Wish to feel at moments, in order to worship God the more, that all is sin, your eyes thirsting for marvelous nature and your ears waiting for the sounds of love, and your heart longing for pure feeling—all is sin. Memento mori. May the Cross be your only emblem and only desire, only beauty, and then love will flame up for you in the face of death, so strong that you will love the whole world . . . From the height of the outspread cross Christ moans and cries. “You forgot how my blood flowed, how a man suffered, how he loved you. The streams of warm blood do not awaken a pulse of love in you. My bloody hands do not remind you of the hot labor of the day. My eyes veiled with the darkness of death do not light lightning flashes of your sacrifice. My pierced side does not remind you of your suffering brother. My crown of thorns does not free you from the chains of this world. My bloody cross, where I found rest after the labor of my work, is alien and terrifying to you, and incomprehensible.”
And the Savior and sacrifice of his cross cries—(I can’t decipher it anymore). But O Christ, the miracle of your cross, in feeling our nothingness and love for you—we fall and in the depths of our souls toward you, Lord, give us your cross, though we be unworthy. May the thorns from your crown pierce our temples and may your divine blood flow as a spring from our frozen hearts’ sacrifice. May from your open side flow grace and mercy for your poor brothers, for having lost you they suffer and they are covered in the deathly darkness of your eyes . . . and then humanity will flash out. We pray to you Christ, do not abandon us weak ones. We are weak without you. May your cross become our emblem and your sacrifice our only happiness. May not our but your will be done. The voice of the faithful has reached the Master and from the height of the cross words flowed into the world that awaken hope for a new life. Have faith, I have vanquished the world! And the Lord’s heart rejoiced, for his torment has renewed the world again.
I want to say something else here as well. This is very closely connected to certain phenomena in Russia about which I had no idea back then. You have to remember that in the time of that first war, when a census was taken, there were sects that thought you mustn’t participate in such a census, that it was of the devil or something like that. One of those groups committed suicide, burying themselves with their children, with women. And they all died because of the census, in order to avoid it. And there were always extraordinary women who were completely devoted to some one master. On the one hand there is a well-known story about which the newspapers wrote in detail and Rozanov wrote too—a pious Russian peasant had a child he loved. And when the child was three years old it laughed. And he killed it with an ax, because he said that then it was certain the child would go straight to heaven. Otherwise that laughter might draw it into evil things and into Satanism. A simple, arithmetical calculation. There were many such cases. On the other hand there was also the kind of situation in which an unconscious eroticism manifested itself in that sort of states among the Khlysts. That was a sect that had existed for centuries. It’s called radienie. They gather, pray, start twirling, spinning around in a kind of dance, and it all culminates in a sudden crystallization: it turns out that one of the women is the Mother of God or one of the men is Jesus. And then a worshipping of that person as a prophet takes place. Beside all that, let’s remember that apart from the Khlysts there were the Skoptsy; those are the castrates. They operated literally on the basis of the passage in Scripture “If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off.” I know this from Rozanov too, there was even a very beautiful prayer said during the religious ritual of castration, where a person said, “Farewell sun, farewell mountains, farewell lakes and flowers and trees.”
So this is an aura of extremism that must have worked on us, even if we didn’t know it ourselves. It seems neither I nor Marynia succumbed to it. That extremism, the kind I’m talking about now, of the tone of that letter, that was Antek’s tone in his letters to us. And we respected him hugely and honored him for climbing those heights. But I was never infected by it—I don’t remember anything like that—I always thought very rationally about the nonresistance to evil and about work of some kind, but to come to that yourself, there are already some masochistic elements there. That nakedness and blood, the blood of Christ—just that one perspective possible, all others excluded. Never in my life did I feel that. Generally in that period I lived a very vivid life, I think it was a religious life, I attended church ardently and so on, but I didn’t have such ecstatic experiences; but we all honored Antek and believed he was an exceptional person, that he would take us onto some heights that would transform the world, because we didn’t operate below the level of the world. So I wanted to say this again about that Petersburg period and, as I said myself, I’m surprised that after such extreme experiences came that complete breakdown—I’m not sure if for a person like me or Marynia it wasn’t some kind of liberation. That it had already been taken to such a fever pitch. I think my sister Karla had the hardest time with it, certainly, because she truly loved Antek.
Antek’s state of breakdown lasted for years. He left for Kiev with Jaroszyński. Then he came to Warsaw. Karla would go to the station every day there was a Kiev train—he could be on it. And a month later he arrived. He had fallen apart completely, and he would meet with Róża and Karla again, they almost got engaged, but on the last day my sister broke off from him herself, she saw that it wasn’t the same for him. And then we all did everything we could to help him. His mother had a lot of energy, she was an extraordinary woman.
[The recording breaks off here.]
I had another important encounter (after Żeromski), I think it was also in 1919, which was my meeting with Baudouin de Courtenay. He was a professor with the Jesuits in Lublin at that time and he praised those Jesuits very highly, though he was a total atheist himself. I went to see him and he, that old man, received me and talked with me as with an equal, we talked for about an hour, I don’t even remember what about, but I met him through Zdziechowski. Zdziechowski quarreled with him and loved him terribly, they couldn’t live without each other, for they both reacted in the same way, and always selflessly, completely instinctively, to every human wrong. That bound them together. But their concepts were completely different, for Baudouin said that he didn’t belong to any herd. They put him in jail, in the fortress, in Petersburg for defending Poles, and later they persecuted him for defending Jews. So that he was always being condemned for something. And I had a few more meetings with him after that. I remember that when I went to see him in Warsaw, it must have been 1919, he was wearing wooden clogs on his bare feet, he looked like a tramp, in a horrendous apartment in Praga. They were very hard material conditions for everybody then. We spoke of various things, and I with my impertinence of the time began to press him hard about religious questions. How could he not believe in God, and so on. And when I left I said to him, “If I were in your place, I’d shoot myself.”
And his response was amazing. He fell silent, and I remember I was already leaving, and then he said to me, “Do you think I don’t wish to shoot myself? You know, I won’t, because I always think I still may be able to help poor humanity in some way.”
Later, after 1920, when we were in Kraków, it must have been 1922, he came to give a lecture in Kraków, it was in the large hall at the Słowacki Theater or some large lecture hall. The hall was packed, he was a man who was both condemned and loved at that time. He was even the minority candidate for president, which was an insult to the Right. The minority knew he would not be elected, but made a point of putting him forward. Well, and he, the old man, appeared, spoke—nothing scandalous, by the way. He quoted the Romantic poets. He moved everyone. He had started in Kraków, was a professor there. And he said beautiful things about responsibility, and if he didn’t speak about love of country than he surely spoke of love of mankind. But a gang turned up calling for the scoundrel to be locked up no matter what he said—maybe that he was an atheist or something like that. And he said that he had a friend, a professor, a German, whose exclusive focus were the Drzewians and Slavs in general, Luzyczans. He said he didn’t know himself what he was—a German or a Slav—that in fact he was hybrid, both German and Polish. Well, this was going too far, because if that was true, you could be a Jew and a Pole at the same time; so they threw an egg at him. Luckily it hit the wall. This provoked outrage in the hall—half the public applauded him loudly, the other half whistled, it was very stormy. We were sitting in the first rows with the Łubieńskis, with Jerzy Łubieński, who was flushed with anger—he was on the professor’s side, of course. Well, and then we heard that that youth armed with sticks were waiting in front of the building to do him some injury when he left. So we stopped him to keep him from leaving. But he said, going out, “No, I want to walk through the hall. I’ve had lectures in London, Berlin, and Petersburg, and the first egg was thrown at me in my own country, in Kraków.”
We saw him later, he came to see us once, and he always impressed us as a marvelous man. And, it’s very funny, recently some of his letters to Zdziechowski found in a Vilnius archive were published in a periodical in Poland, I have it here somewhere, it was a linguistics journal or some such thing. And he writes, “Thank you for sending me your neighbor.” That was me. “At least I finally have a person I don’t have to get irritated at.”
Of course I listened to him and had no reason or desire to irritate him. Later (I don’t know if it’s worth me telling all this nonsense, but never mind) I had an amusing adventure, with that armored train where our duties were really quite negligible; every other day or so we went out to shoot at the enemy, it was all pretty much child’s play by today’s standards of shooting. The guns were mounted, we rode out to the front line and did some shooting. We shot in the playground. Our army stood there; that part of the front was under General Szeptycki’s command, then there were twenty kilometers of no-man’s-land, then Bolsheviks. There really wasn’t any action, this was before Kiev. We return from our trip to the front and all at once I see—there was a light spring rain, this must have been in 1920, yes of course, it was early spring 1920 and there were great big trunks being sold at that time, the fat bourgeois had them as wardrobes, you could hang up your suits in them instead of folding them, so I see some very distinguished gentleman shaving, in the rain, in some forgotten trenches. It intrigued me tremendously and I went to my commanding officer, saying here was something he should see. It turned out they were the remainder of the diplomats who had been kicked out of Moscow by the Russians. Polish, Swedish, Norwegian, Japanese—lower ranks, because the ambassadors had been thrown out long before. A Norwegian consul from Petersburg, some aide-de-camp of the Danish king—these were the most important people there. So it turned out they were camping out there, in wretched conditions for ten days or two weeks after being expelled from Russia. They had opened a bottle of champagne before their departure, thinking it was the end of their captivity, that they were leaving for Poland, a free country. General Szeptycki says, “This is a distraction, let them stay there, they’re surely some Bolshevik infiltrators. Don’t let them through.”
And so they were left there. Only one of the ladies—there were ladies among them as well—was staying in the lineman’s hut, because she had typhus and they kept her there. They got nothing to eat. They bought eggs from the local peasants, for there were peasants in the vicinity, and maybe they had stores. In any case they were indignant about Poland receiving them so poorly. So naturally I got worked up about it—a national shame for Poland, I thought it was an atrocious situation, infinitely compromising for Poland—and I went to my superiors with the idea of making a quick trip to Warsaw to present the matter there. I said I knew people at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They sent me off. I remember I didn’t even have a uniform yet. I had an outfit with formal shoes with bows and a coat fastened with a belt, I had a cap, so I still looked more or less military. Well, and with a real feeling of my historic mission, I rushed to the Foreign Ministry. Skrzyński was foreign minister at that time; later he was ambassador in Rome for many years. A charming fellow. And Perłowski was bureau chief; I knew him well through Kinia Balowa, from Nervi, where we met him when he was very young. So he received me immediately, saying, “Ach, please, this is very important,” and took me to see Skrzyński. Skrzyński wrung his hands, saying, “But that’s impossible, that’s a disgrace, leaving those people there!” He thought for a bit and said, “You should go to the Belvedere Palace, only there can they handle this properly. Well, what can I do. Szeptycki’s orders, that’s that.” So I head over to the Belevedere. First time. And I already worshipped Piłsudski. Whatever speech by Piłsudski I read, I always felt he was whispering in my ear. Because he had that ability to speak, never wooden, and always with something human in what he said. So, very much taken with my important mission I go there, and a good manservant from the Tyszkiewiczes, who was there with him at the Belvedere, told me the boss was at dinner, please to wait. So I wait there in a narrow hallway or something, there was one female student waiting there in a student cap, me, and one more person. That servant praised the boss to the skies: “He’s such a humane man, very kind, a very decent man.”
So the humane man arrives after dinner, cleaning his teeth with a toothpick. I’ll tell you, I fell in love with him then and there. He had a human face, a natural face, lost in thought. I don’t have a long wait, they let the student in before me, and then I am shown into a large salon behind which there’s a smaller salon. Piłsudski, whom I didn’t see face-to-face, was sitting in the small one. I brought all the reports with me. That aide-de-camp to the Swedish king wrote among other things that this was an insult to the royal majesty, or something along those lines, that they were being left there. I was received by Wieniawa in all his glory, who was with Piłsudski, and he was also visibly appalled, and said he was going to show him right now—he takes the papers and goes in and soon I hear a loud laugh: Piłsudski’s “ha-ha-ha.” He didn’t see any horror or national disgrace in it, he brought it back to its true proportions, but nonetheless he ordered a Red Cross train car to be sent out with a Miss Pińska or something, and I traveled by that car as well. The matter was resolved. They promised me some Norwegian or Swiss medal, which I never got, I felt very hurt. In any case there was even a caricature of all of us when we met at the station. So I’m telling you this simply for fun, it’s really not worth telling. But it’s amusing that that was how war was back then. Suddenly some suspicious soldier gets diplomats out. But it’s typical too. From May or June I was then on a train with that Śmiały. In the winter we had three months of leave, you know, for studies—there was no war on then. Whoever was a student had the right to return from the front, from the army. And before leaving for Petersburg last I had registered as a student at the academy in Warsaw. I was there three or five times—my main professor was Wojciech Kossak, with his hat askew, he cut a fine figure, a famous seducer, whom I later got to know in other circumstances.33 He was wary of me, because he thought I was a strange sort, suspect, because we were waging a battle then and of course I said bad things about Kossak as a painter. But that’s another story altogether, also entertaining.
So, I had those three months. I was in Warsaw and a telegram arrives saying that Merezhkovsky and his wife, with his secretary and with Filosofov, had crossed the border into Poland illegally. They left under the guise of a lecture tour and got across that way; it was still easy then. So I got to work, naturally, because it was almost impossible to find a decent apartment at the time. I found some large Jewish hotel, where there was just about enough room for them. Well, they arrived, they’d gone via Vilnius, passed through Vilnius and Minsk and got to Warsaw. We got to be very good friends again. He gave lectures that were very pro-Polish, he lectured on Mickiewicz in Warsaw, and on Pushkin. Well, naturally they were very anti-Bolshevik, but everybody went to them, from Żeromski to Reymont—it was a big event. Because he was a very well-known figure then. And I think they were very good lectures. Merezhkovsky wanted very much to get to see Piłsudski. Piłsudski received him and Merezhkovsky wrote a little pamphlet about him with the greatest enthusiasm, managing to capture that charismatic, human quality in Piłsudski. By then the Russian emigration was beginning to get organized in Warsaw, in coordination with Poles, with the Piłsudski man Wędziagolski, who knew them. It was a meeting of the then-supporters of Piłsudski and those Russian liberals who wanted a third Russia. Anti-Bolshevist and antireactionary. Savinkov arrived around that time as well; he knew Piłsudski from the old days, from Siberia. So Piłsudski had contacts with Savinkov. I remember Savinkov arrived even before the Merezhkovskys and I met him then. He didn’t make a sympathetic impression on me; rather, I found him too actorish. Now I’ll tell you about a thing that’s quite interesting, especially for Russians. Because later, when that democratic Russian group formed in Poland, a problem arose: there were Cossacks who had fled Russia and wanted to fight the Bolsheviks, and they were integrated into our battlefront. There was Savinkov; Filosofov after a while became a kind of representative of Savinkov in Poland, because Savinkov just came and went from Paris.
I remember another scene, again very intimate, but very, very important to me. Because Merezhkovsky was a person of whom Filosofov said that when he met him in 1900 he didn’t know if he was dealing with a genius or with seven children. Because he was always getting some mad idea, besides which he was an insane egoist, he immediately organized his life as to have his hours of writing, sleep, writing again, reading Goethe, etc. He was extraordinarily organized, though he looked a little like a madman. They had been meeting for a long time, Filosofov was Diaghilev’s nephew, they had created Mir Iskusstva together—they were what were then called decadents. Like the Przybyszewski crowd with us. It was a reaction against the peredvizhniki, against positivist art, to which socialist realism referred later. From a certain point Diaghilev was looking more and more to the West and cursed everything that was happening in Russia, but Filosofov got more and more involved in Russian questions. They founded a religious-philosophical society with Merezhkovsky and Rozanov. Rozanov was in Russia, Blok was there—all of this was before 1905. But they had very ambitious projects. At the simplest level some reform of Orthodoxy, they were in touch with Laberthonnière and with the Modernists. In any case Filosofov saw Laberthonnière in Paris. So this was that Modernist movement, which reached Russia as well. They had impassioned discussions at that time and Filosofov completely broke off relations with Diaghilev, who gave up on Russia, said he’d had enough of it all and took his ballets to Paris—they were a sensation back then. Stravinsky, Scriabin, all those great premieres, The Rite of Spring in Paris, and so on. The conquest of Paris—Diaghilev hit the French art world of the time full on. Filosofov broke with him and shut himself up completely in Russian affairs; this ended very sadly because after a while Pobedonostsev—a sort of pseudominister who decided on religious affairs—judged it to be a dangerous thing and closed down the meetings. But those people came to Poland having that whole Russian past behind them. And I remember persuading them to take a trip to Mordy. To rest up a bit, it was a beautiful spring, and Merezhkovsky almost leapt out of his chair: “Ach, what a delight, there are nightingales there.”
And Karla, unhappy, had married Heniś (Przewłocki) and was in her sixth month of a first pregnancy, and here we were inflicting ourselves on her and bringing a gift like that. Merezhkovsky and his wife. I wanted to tell you that as well—I was always very close to them, I always quarreled with her, though in a friendly way, but with Filosofov there was more distance. And suddenly I went to him and said, “Please come too, it’s spring here.”
He broke away, his eyes were full of tears, and said, “I don’t want any nightingales or elderblossom, I’ve seen too much blood in Russia.” And walked out.
Merezhkovsky dreamed that he would have a [government of souls] in Russia, that Piłsudski would get as far as Moscow and “raise a cross over the Kremlin.” And suddenly Piłsudski went and contracted a peace. Merezhkovsky was furious with Piłsudski for betraying his mission. He left Poland and never went back. He went to France and died there. And Filosofov broke with them at that time and stayed in Poland till the end; he died in 1940. At the start of the Occupation. I still remember, when he associated himself with Savinkov, for whom he had little personal sympathy, he said, “It’s always like this, I’d prefer a hundred times over to have to do with a Czapski, but here I have to work in politics and with Savinkov.” And later his whole story was very tragic. Because it was like this: One of the conditions of the Riga Peace was the removal of political émigrés from Warsaw. That was one of the points, to Piłsudski’s outrage. Piłsudski didn’t have any power in those matters at that time. There was Ładoś, I think, and someone else. In any case the émigrés had to leave. But as usually happens—they left, and after a while they returned; nevertheless, these were terrible things because they really had hope, things hung by a hair, everything could take a different turn. This isn’t at all so naive, for remember, there were villages revolting all over Russia that didn’t want communism. There were a lot of local village revolts. There was terrible hunger. On the one hand Lenin’s politics were very shrewd and the Whites’ politics were very inept. Not just inept but typically reactionary. At that time there were a lot of army forces, there were a lot of Poles in the White war with Wrangel, and our delegation went out there to demand that those soldiers be transferred to us. They said they couldn’t do that, because only an assembly—the Uchreditelnoye Sobraniie [Constituent Assembly] in Moscow—could decide whether Poland could detach itself from Russia. You understand, according to the old formulas. And this is the question Mackiewicz touches on—Mackiewicz is a big foe of Piłsudski because he thinks communism won only because Piłsudski didn’t go to Wrangel’s aid. He concluded the peace and as a result all the Bolshevik forces were thrown into the battle against Wrangel. That’s how it was. And his other reproach of Piłsudski is that he absolutely didn’t believe in the Bolsheviks’ promise—they still resent him for this—because they somehow think he should have believed it and then a historic accord would have followed between the Soviets and Poland, which is total nonsense. There were yet others who held it against Piłsudski that he didn’t clearly side with the Whites. Because as far as the Whites were concerned, Piłsudski had no doubts whatsoever. And all of France, England, America—all of them were thinking of the great power, Russia. That’s what it was about for them. Poland counted about as much as it does these days in the thinking of all those countries.
It’s about Russia. Russia had authority and Russia had all that capital. Just think, all that invested capital, those billions that remained there. They cared about Russia as a great power. You see, I’m speaking chaotically today. But now I wanted to go on with my story and I think this will be the end of it. In that armored train I lasted until about May, and from there I put in a request to the First Regiment for them to take me. I said I’d left the army, that I’d like to go back, that I’d played soldier for a year and that I wanted to return. They took me right away. After all, my heroic glory derives simply from the fact that I was at the front for two or three months at the most terrible moment. June, July, August in the First Regiment. That was my only real experience of war, and here again I, a professional antimilitarist, have to say that nothing served me in life as well as the army. When I think that I’m responsible for the platoon, that every stupidity I commit may lead to someone being killed—and in those circumstances that man from your platoon means you’d let yourself be chopped to pieces for him. Here it’s no longer a matter of war, or fatherland, or I don’t know what, it’s a matter of absolute comradeship. And here I’d like to tell in Schweik-like fashion a bit about my fate in the war, though I don’t know if it’s worth it at all. I travel to the front, of course I’m scared out of my wits, because I’m not a real soldier, my uniform is new, with stripes, and a cap with military amaranth emblems just as it should be, and a sword, which didn’t even have a proper sling, it was a silver one with a little pom-pom that you couldn’t even hang the sword on. And I have one bad memory. I met Gucio Zamoyski that winter, 1919 to 1920. A sculptor. I met him on the street, he was then married to a dancer, Rita Sacchetto. And he said he was a Communist, this and that, and I said I was a pacifist. We became brothers, felt we were so revolutionary, very self-important. And when I left for the front, things were already terrible, it was a time of danger, Budionny was there, people were fleeing Warsaw. I left for the front and Marynia was accompanying me. And suddenly we bump into Gucio, who wasn’t even Gucio to me yet, he was still August Zamoyski to me, we were still on formal terms—furious, with boxes of suits and his wife’s dresses; he had sent her to Zakopane, while here the world was falling apart. When he saw me in uniform, where six months ago he’d seen me as a pacifist, he said, “I said you change your convictions like gloves.”
For years I couldn’t forgive him for that, but I think he was quite right. And he had a right to say it to me. Because of course this was a pretty tragic moment for us, Marynia was saying goodbye to me at the station, I was going off to the front, which was almost upon us. I got to the regiment, two or three other officers with me, and a few volunteers, and right away they put me in another squadron, where the second officer was Lieutenant Litewski. This is another man for whom I have the greatest admiration; I think he’s one of the great people I’ve known. Literally. His name was Litewski and he died in 1939 in the first conflict, killed by the Germans. A professional soldier, trained as a pharmacist. A Napoleonic head.
But now I have to tell you some silly things—so I’m pretty frightened, there are those few officers there and every day an order comes: surround and destroy Budionny. And you can imagine what that was. It was a moving wave, the Konarmia, as soon as you press them here they go there, because they’re like water. But we’re supposed to surround them and destroy them. So the order is, our squadron had to occupy some village, the very one where the Bolsheviks were. So we go off, our whole squadron, I’m given a platoon; they’re on little horses —a levy of some poor peasant boys, they can barely stay on their horses. The horses were small, skinny; well, the last pick. And I on my horses—I had a big horse, they gave me a good one—in my uniform with stripes, such an important officer. We get to the village, we’re supposed to conquer it, the squadron leader says to me, “Józieczek”—he knew me from way back, he was in my squadron when I’d left that time—“you stay with half the squadron, I’ll go ahead with the other half to take the village and then you come in when I give you a sign.”
So I stay there with half the squadron and for my life I wouldn’t know what to do with them. Are they supposed to sit or stand, dismount or form a circle—I hadn’t a clue. And I knew no one but Wysocki—the leader. And Litewski already had a strange role, because he was an officer in the squadron with the same rank as me, but when times got tough he took the lead himself and the leader took him seriously, he got the first Virtuti Militari, and so on. He comes up to me with a sour look on his face and says, “Lieutenant, sir, if you don’t know how to fight, it would be better if you’d stayed in Warsaw.”
And I say to him, “Lieutenant, sir, I told you from the start I didn’t know how to fight, and I’m counting on you to help me. What do I do?”
He caught on instantly and said, “But please, sir, I can tell you can fight like Napoleon,” and immediately did everything for me. So anyway I got that Napoleon and that attitude of his somehow disarmed me and I disarmed him. It turned out that the village was already abandoned, the other half of the squadron comes back and all of us enter the village (I prefer not to say who was my squadron leader, because I have bad memories of him). We go into the village and he says, “Józieczek, I have to stay here, I have something to take care of, you go ahead.”
And later I found out he was an awful coward. Not just a coward, but he had a condition that meant that when he got scared he had to go to the bathroom. So he got off his horse. So I, just as if I was on the moon—the village is already taken, I go ahead at the head of the squadron, with all my rich knowledge of warfare, you get the idea. Suddenly there’s a shot. A few shots, and I do nothing. I thought I should wait for what the leader would say, that I owed him obedience. I thought he’d come out from behind his bush in just a second. Not a soul. I say, “Stand, attention!” What else can I say? Meanwhile the whole squadron is falling apart, apart from a few students who were there—they stayed with me, everyone somehow hid in the bushes, behind wire, I don’t know where, they were terrified that the Bolsheviks were about to attack them. So I think, tough. I get on my horse, move ahead, thinking I’m going to die, they’re going to shoot me, but I’ll save my honor. Only those little students follow me, but there’s nothing, it’s deserted. The soldiers gather themselves together, come out from the bushes and join us. It turns out that the cause for that panic was that a few Cossacks had stayed behind with a wagon to bake bread, and when they galloped away with their baked goods they fired four shots and were gone. But you can imagine—me with that stamp on my forehead and I didn’t know yet that these things happened frequently on both sides, it had been like that since the beginning of 1914, that the Russian guard attacked German guard regiments, cavalry clashed with cavalry—whoever attacks first, goes first, because the other is already fleeing—that was the principle. The armies were only half-trained. In any case this was the first experience of my great heroism. Where Litewski was at the time I don’t know, maybe drinking milk, maybe he didn’t even notice anything. I’m making a long story of it but it happened very quickly. So we occupy a wood on the other side of the village. And here something interesting happens. We’re sitting in the wood—we form a little front with machine guns—we’re constantly dragging things around. In front of us high hills spread out from the wood in a horseshoe. And we cover the edge of the wood, without occupying the hill. It’s pretty odd. We’re calmly sitting there when suddenly the news comes that two of Budionny’s regiments are spying on us from above. That the Ninth Regiment had been there but it fled or was driven off, so we have to take the hill right away. Onto your horse, onto the hill! I have that leader—you know what he was like. We’re creeping up the hill. He’s in the middle, I get to the top first, on the right. And because I have a good horse, I get quite a bit far ahead of my platoon, which is constituted of a dozen or so soldier boys, and I see before me a cloud of Budionny’s forces waving their swords in the air. A leader in a Haller uniform, probably taken off a corpse, another in a kind of fur cap and a red shirt—all of it so close that I see them very well—and one of those long Cossack coats, and others behind that, and they’re coming, as if to chase us back down. And then, truly, I understood in a flash that I had to do something crazy, that if I stop, they will come flying at us, so I go toward them waving my sword, and my boys come running from the back as well. Those men we were facing didn’t see how many we were—maybe I had four regiments at my back. And I feel that sword is of no use to me, I can’t keep it on the sling, which might as well have been made of paper. I throw down my sword and grab a revolver. And with my revolver drawn I move forward. I’m riding toward them and they are shooting at me the whole time. I’m at a distance of maybe two of these rooms, no more. And they turn back—they’d stopped. And one of them turns to one side and yells in Polish, “Catch that son of a bitch!”
Meanwhile the regiment catches up with me, clinging to the hillside, and the others are retreating. And then they killed two horses of ours, because they kept shooting at us, but they didn’t hit me. Lieutenant Mazaraki was hit. But he was in the regiment; in my division no one was killed. That won me the greatest fame that I ever had in life. Everyone kept repeating, “Catch that son of a bitch!”
That son of a bitch finally ensured me a decent standing.