A Fugitive from Utopia

A Fugitive from Utopia

The Prose of Adam Zagajewski

“To write the history of one’s own literary adventures-what could be more pretentious?” There is any number of living poets for whom this statement is true, but to find it in Another Beauty, the most recent prose collection by the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, is like stumbling into a practical joke. After all, Zagajewski, who was born in 1945, was a child of communist Poland, and his “literary adventures” included all sorts of loud protests against one of the most totalitarian of fathers, the Stalinist state. As a university student in Krakow in the late 1960s, Zagajewski co-founded an influential poetic circle called Teraz (“Now”), which was committed to exposing the paradoxes and ideological lies of communism. In 1974, he and fellow poet Julian Kornhauser sparked a major literary controversy when they published The Unrepresented World, an essay collection that condemned the allegorical writing of the previous decade for its moral evasiveness and advanced a “critical realism” capable of boring through the Soviet-speak of everyday life.

It’s a remarkable résumé, and one that an older Zagajewski—who has lived in Paris since 1982 and has taught during spring semesters at the University of Houston since 1988—has repeatedly downplayed. In Solidarity, Solitude, published in Poland in 1986, Zagajewski coolly explains that when he wrote The Unrepresented World, he took his place “among the Catos of the world for a while, among those who know what literature should be and ruthlessly exact those standards from others. . . . To read it à la lettre, my God, what backwardness.” In Another Beauty, self-reproach has crystallized into utter disbelief: “I apparently wrote whole manifestos proclaiming the triumph of a ‘young literature.'” At those moments in Another Beauty when Zagajewski does let his dissident self shuffle across the historical stage, it’s not to reenact his skirmishes with state censors. Instead, Zagajewski matter-of-factly describes Our Hero as one of many ill-taught poets clad in the standard uniform of black sweater and leather coat dusted with dandruff.

American readers who relish the cold war view of Central Europe as a kind of literary Byzantium, a region of calamity where art springs from historical necessity and wields unshakable moral authority, may protest that Zagajewski’s deflation of his dissident activities is a betrayal. Let them gripe. Judging from “Central Europe,” a short sketch in his second prose collection in English, Two Cities, it seems that Zagajewski is the one who feels betrayed by a certain highbrow obsession with Central European tragedy. While sitting in a café, Zagajewski is approached by “an unremarkable, tiny man with greasy hair combed flat across his head who, without waiting for permission,” joins his table. “Where are you from?” the man asks. No sooner does Zagajewski say “Poland” than a stream of blurbish clichés gushes from the tiny man’s mouth: “Force of conviction. Categorical feelings. Moral integrity. A literature that is not alienated from the polis.” The tiny man asks Zagajewski a few questions, but before he can respond the man abruptly leaves and installs himself before a writer from Prague. As for Zagajewski, “I paid for two coffees and left.”

Zagajewski is a champion of solitude. By that I do not mean isolation but a realm of self-reflection and privacy, a state of mind sensitive to the patterns of history but not reduced to their cipher. “The collective man in Poland rejects totalitarianism, despises it and rejects it energetically,” Zagajewski observes in Solidarity, Solitude in an essay written in the early 1980s, “but he does this as a man who is still collective—instead of as a man who is collected within himself.” Indeed, in the poem “A Warsaw Gathering,” written in November 1981, shortly before the imposition of martial law, a collective opposition to totalitarianism produces a compulsory, pinched language of its own: “the left, the right, the thumb, the lightening, / the vixen, the virgin, the lioness, society, / Allegiance, the Consequences, Consciousness, / We’ve Been Through That Before, God Patriot, the Latest / News, the Great Community.” Meanwhile, in the back row, “the author of this little poem is sitting and dreaming of / music, music.” The “collective man” clings to what Zagajewski mocks, the involuntary power of “history, that never sleeps or dies, / And, held one moment, burns the hand,” to borrow some lines from W.H. Auden. For Zagajewski, it’s as though communism spawned not one but two unsavory utopias—the classless paradise of the state and the visionary country of the opposition—and solitude was a casualty of both.

Zagajewski’s prose would be little more than an intellectual curiosity if it was nothing but a collection of such romantic pensées and ironic jabs, the work of a Polish poet writing in the shadow of Witold Gombrowicz. A novelist and polemicist, Gombrowicz, who died in 1969, was admired by many writers of Zagajewski’s generation for the extended prose sneer of his Argentinean exile. In August 1939, with a single novel to his name, Gombrowicz was invited by the Polish government to sail on the maiden voyage of the ocean liner Boleslaw Chrobry. He was to be an ambassador of Polish culture to Argentina’s Polish émigré community. But his mission changed a few days after the Chrobry docked in Buenos Aires, when Germany invaded Poland on September 1. Instead of returning home to serve in the military, Gombrowicz remained in Buenos Aires, and for the next three decades he repaid the Polish government the favor of his passage by writing polemics against Polish cultural nationalism. He became an ambassador of impudence. In his novel Trans-Atlantyk, the first work he wrote during his exile, and his three-volume Diary, he argued that Polish writers are individuals only in a superficial sense. They are social institutions, he claims in his Diary, “inhibited by something impersonal, superior, inter-human and collective emanating from the milieu … Polish thought, Polish mythology, the Polish psyche.” His Diary was a calculated affront to that psyche. Consider its opening words: “Monday Me. Tuesday Me. Wednesday Me. Thursday Me.” Gombrowicz wanted nothing less than to liberate Poles from the false and constraining loyalties of Polish legend.

When Zagajewski broke with the avant-garde he was also rejecting various chimeras of the Polish legend. “To be a Pole, to participate in the work of Polish literature,” he claims in the title essay of Solidarity, Solitude, “is practically the same as becoming a member of a religious order with very strict rules.” There are two literatures in this church. “The first reminds us of literatures created in other European countries, literatures written by mere mortals-by artists devoting their lives to a search for meaning, symbol, expression.” As for the second, it “has a different author: it is written directly by the intelligentsia, the intellectual élite, a social stratum. The intelligentsia write it with an enormous, rapacious goose feather, and write it to cope with collective aches and unhappiness.” It was this second literature, Zagajewski explains, a phantom government of select souls that orders one “to write or not write decrees,” that authored The Unrepresented World. In “Solidarity, Solitude,” the skeptical Zagajewski has snapped the goose feather in two and, like Gombrowicz, written a manifesto against manifestos.

It would be a mistake, however, to characterize Zagajewski as the Gombrowicz of contemporary Polish letters. Zagajewski himself realizes that although Gombrowicz may have broken his goose feather, he never got around to leaving the church. “Even Gombrowicz, an uncompromising individual when giving Poles advice,” he writes in “Solidarity, Solitude,” “expressed his views as if they pertained to everybody.” In Zagajewski’s eyes, Gombrowicz was a blasphemer of sorts, his tirades against the church of Polish literature as ecclesiastical as the institution he reviled.

In his prose, Zagajewski tries to avoid this trap by cultivating a guarded historicism, a temperament expressed most vividly in the discussions of Friedrich Nietzsche that figure prominently in Solidarity, Solitude and Two Cities. In Two Cities, Zagajewski discusses Nietzsche’s The Use and Abuse of History, in which Nietzsche ridicules the historicism of philologists. No sooner does Zagajewski credit Nietzsche for attacking the pedantry of history than he argues that the philosopher’s skepticism leads almost “to discounting memory. Historical memory appears to him as the opposite of creativity.” Such nihilism, Zagajewski continues, was perfected by communism, which literally “declared war on memory. Feeling uncertain about its freshly declared utopia, communism was like a madman who throws his most valuable possessions from a fifteen-story window…. Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance were depicted in schoolbooks as epochs full of mistakes, ravings, misunderstandings, and crimes.”

Zagajewski turns to another book about historical understanding, Zbigniew Herbert’s Barbarian in the Garden, as a counterweight. Published in Poland in 1962 after Herbert had made his first trip to the West, the book contains Herbert’s impressions of the cathedrals, museums, paintings, and sculpture that he saw during his travels in France and Italy. Zagajewski first learned of Herbert shortly after the book’s publication, when the elder poet came to his high school and read poems as well as a few passages from Barbarian in the Garden. “It never occurs to him to get angry at historicism,” Zagajewski observes. “Historical memory, and especially the loveliest component of it, which has been preserved in works of art, is something absolutely vivifying.” Barbarian in the Garden, Zagajewski concludes, “can be interpreted as the notes of a man who is revived by his contact with small, sunny towns, the receptacles of history.”

Two Cities and Another Beauty abound with similar notes, the sketches of a writer in search of a usable past, a sense of the past that quickens the present instead of deadening it, that nourishes solitude instead of poisoning it. “A repugnant civilization is in decline,” Zagajewski wrote in 1990 in “Changes in the East” in Two Cities. “[B]ut it shaped me, I revolted against it, I tried to flee it; whether I like it or not, I am most certainly marked by it. It will be a while before I find out what has really happened for me.” But Me is not the sole subject of Zagajewski’s Mondays and Tuesdays. In Two Cities and Another Beauty, the mirror of self-reflection is silvered by the lives of others. Both books feature Herbertesque descriptions of paintings and cathedrals viewed in Krakow and Paris, but more interesting are Zagajewski’s portraits of towns and people. He is especially fascinated by people caught up in the quotidian, “or rather in defending the quotidian from the attacks of a fanaticism embedded in historical routine,” as he writes in Another Beauty.

Zagajewski was born in Lvov one month after the armistice. Four months later, his family was uprooted when Lvov passed into Soviet hands. Three generations of Zagajewskis had to move west to Gliwice, a formerly German town about thirty miles north of Auschwitz. His relatives are emigrants in their own country, and as a child he was enchanted by their rhapsodies about the lost paradise, Lvov. “Things were different with Lvov leaves. They were eternal, eternally green and eternally alive, indestructible and perfect. . . . Their only flaw was their absence, and even their nonexistence.” But Zagajewski feels the tug of the imperfect Gliwice as well, its bridges and balconies, park and swimming pool, even its river, “transformed years ago into an industrial sewer and reeking of chemicals, not water.” A huge gulf opens between Zagajewski and his elders’ generation, one that makes writing about them all the more necessary.

The Gliwice of “Two Cities” teems with people who have built fragile fortresses out of their pasts. There are neighbors who “carried their pasts around like moth balls. Old fashioned suits, summer jackets with short sleeves, creases pressed for all eternity into fine wool trousers, shoes from twenty years ago. They walked in them all gingerly, so as not to damage the soles or nick the leather.” A similar cast of eccentrics populates Another Beauty. Early on, Zagajewski recalls moving from Gliwice to Krakow to attend the Jagiellonian University, and he rents a room from a Mrs. C., a former member of the landed gentry “with a cross, homely face like a crushed doughnut,” who never left her fourth floor apartment. She “refused to enforce a treaty with reality,” Zagajewski says, “she had decided to remain an heiress, a mistress of an estate.” Zagajewski eventually relocates to the lodgings of a Mr. M., a retired court clerk who owned four prewar suits and preserved them by lying “motionless on a sofa in a kitchen, and if he used up anything, it could only be oxygen and time.” And at the Jagiellonian there is a Professor U., who endorsed the state’s atrocities without reservation. “The bourgeois and landed gentry were shot for his benefit, the peasants were starved, the intellectuals murdered,” Zagajewski notes.

What’s striking about these portraits is that they are neither triumphalist nor sentimental, tales neither of progress nor decline. It is through his subtle recollections of these people that Zagajewski avoids succumbing to their faults: Mrs. C.’s blind devotion to a past that smothers the present, and Professor U.’s embrace of a revolutionary present that murders all links to the past. Some people are pitied and others scorned, but all are treated by Zagajewski as figments of the past that are part of the tangible reality of his present. There is a little of Mr. M. about Zagajewski: he is thrifty, preserving memories without wanting to wear them out.

Or perhaps not. “I will say, however, that memory should not be accorded so high a place,” Zagajewski writes in “Two Books,” just after praising Barbarian in the Garden. “It certainly does not deserve to be monopolistic or dictatorial. Memory is an indispensable component of creating culture, but isn’t it true that it records and preserves the creative act rather than expresses itself in it?” For all his doubts about memory, Zagajewski is less concerned about memory per se than with the way a writer approaches and even transforms it. Zagajewski wants to write about the past without becoming its valet; he wants his prose to assume the function of a historical chronicle without falling prey to antiquarianism. Memory is only as indispensable as the art used to evoke it.

Two Cities, for instance, is a delicately patterned book that shatters the illusion of a well-ordered past. It is pitched athwart unresolved contrasts, either between two writers (Nietzsche and Herbert), two cities (Lvov and Gliwice), or two genres (memoir and critical essay). Moreover, these contrasts do more than signal the presence of Zagajewski’s shaping hand. They create a history of temperaments in opposition, drawing attention to the intricacies of historical understanding itself.

Consider the book’s first half. Zagajewski’s recollection of Lvov (“Two Cities”) is followed by “Open Archives,” a series of five dramatic monologues in which unidentified, fictional former communist officials are given an opportunity to explain themselves. Perhaps the most intricate of these monologues is “Betrayal,” in which a Party hack, prompted by an interviewer, defends his character assassination of dissident writers. The monologue does more than measure the cut of the official’s homespun suit of compromises and lies. It is wide ranging and at times remarkably sly and ambivalent. Several of the hack’s observations echo those made by Zagajewski in “Two Cities”: “A historian sees people from a given period as if they were mannequins steered by the spirit of history.” (Zagajewski: “For some time now, I have been convinced that even if totalitarianism is not History, History has something totalitarian in it. It commands a marshal who calls himself Zeitgeist.”) Yet for all his intelligence, the writer, unlike Zagajewski, lacks empathy, and it’s on account of this failing that he betrays others as well as himself. In the end he reveals himself to be a cynic and a brute, altogether a truly nasty piece of work.

This play of contrasts reaches an intense pitch in Another Beauty, which is a hodgepodge of untitled, unnumbered pieces: portraits, reminiscences, aphorisms, narratives, critical asides, glosses, and reflections, some distilled into a few words and others flowing for many paragraphs. Over the course of a dozen pages Zagajewski might touch on everything from his undergraduate studies in psychology at the Jagiellonian to Krakow’s Renaissance architecture to the behavior of Mr. U., with some of the passages being nothing more than lyrical descriptions of quotidian experience, such as “An orange lay on the table. The shrieks and laughter of children rose from the courtyard below. It was four in the afternoon.” The book is a swirl of discontinuities, a prose geography akin to Zagajewski’s favorite Parisian haunts: “The beautiful Paris surfaces where the city’s different strata meet: fragments of medieval structures stand along broad, modern streets, a vast square shaped by Napoleon I abuts a riverside boulevard.” It’s the juxtaposition of, say, Zagajewski’s portraits of Mrs. C. and Mr. U. and his attempts to glimpse a quotidian experience free of a zeitgeist or ideology that lends Another Beauty its poignancy and verve.

It’s a hard-won style, and one far from the strict sentences of Solidarity, Solitude. That book is urgent and quarrelsome; it is tirelessly dialectical and a tad pedantic, the work of someone who has broken with the avant-garde but hasn’t quite shaken its rhetoric from his prose. Contrasts make up the fabric of Another Beauty, too, but they are not hectored into a pattern. The work of memory and self-reflection is undertaken without contest or difficulty. Zagajewski is preternaturally calm, seeming to derive pleasure from nothing but the telling itself, happily losing one thread of thought to take up another. At first this is a little bewildering, but gradually and almost imperceptibly, like the young Zagajewski finding his way around the tangled alleyways and courtyards of Krakow’s Old Market, one recognizes landmarks and rhythms, and gradually a whole way of life and thought emerges.

“Who has once met/ irony will burst into laughter / during the prophet’s lecture,” Zagajewski writes in the poem “Ode to Plurality.” It’s a lesson he has learned well, and there’s no better indication than the absence of apocalyptic despair in his three prose books. There’s turbulence and an occasional squall, but these never swell into thunder. This is hardly surprising. Apocalypse is the most fevered, enduring expression of the avant-garde’s theory of creative destruction: The old order is leveled and innovation rises from its ashes. Literary forms are discarded, new ones forged, and social health is restored. It’s a heady view of art, one deeply wedded to a vision of utopia, something that does not figure in Zagajewski’s prose. While the absence of apocalypse suggests that Zagajewski has moved beyond the avant-garde, the incredible variety and intricacy of his prose make clear that he is still in the midst of his own quiet revolution.

John Palattella writes about poetry for several publications, including the London Review of Books, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and the Nation.