Gogol’s Venom: A Study in Lost Illusions

Adam Michnik
Translated from the Polish by Jane Cave

When in 1982 Jan Kott wrote an essay entitled “On Venom,” he dedicated it to the memory of Adam Wazyk, and noted: “A snake bite disables the mind. Inside a magic circle, the mind moves in a fictitious world, believes in lies, and cannot distinguish reality from illusion.” He went on to say that intellectuals’ involvement in communism went from joining the movement to leaving it—in disappointment and disillusion—and that “the moment of disillusion is perhaps the most important.”

Jan Kott’s own writings bear him out, when one looks at successive versions of his texts that were first published in journals, then in book form, and then in later editions of these books. Kott changed his texts, gave them new meanings and significance, got his dates wrong, his names mixed up; and he made up quotations. Thus, one could conclude that Kott didn’t tell the truth. But, as Czeslaw Milosz wondered when analyzing the captive mind, is the truth to be found in thoughts on “Hegelian venom”? It certainly describes the path taken by Tadeusz Kronski, the Hegelian philosopher and patron of the Warsaw school of the history of ideas, and by Kolakowski, Baczko, and Beylin. Wazyk, however, did not mention Hegel—he used the term “a lunatic asylum.”

Sometimes I think that the people demanding Kott’s head have a point. Undoubtedly, he was a communist, and an intelligent one at that. He wrote extremely well and helped shape public opinion. He was able to persuade his readers while wounding his adversaries. This should be enough for our would-be lustrators and decommunizers. But could he have made Hegelian venom the main ingredient of his life? After all, his books don’t indicate that he ever read Hegel.

When you consider the increasingly oppressive climate of the 1930s—Poland caught between Hitler on one side and Stalin on the other, the grotesque and brutal regime of the Sanacja colonels under attack from the National Democrats, discrimination against Jews in the universities, thugs from the extreme-right National Radical Camp with their knuckle-dusters—is it surprising that a young intellectual from a family of Polonized Jews should be attracted to the left?

At that time, when the predictions of Nietzsche and Marx came true, when God seemed to have died, when Revolution was knocking at the door, was it surprising that young people were looking for a remedy? “Demoliberalism”—the contemptuous name given to parliamentary rule and respect for human rights—was on the defensive, the norms of bourgeois democracy and morality were subjected to merciless ridicule at political rallies and in literary cabarets. Totalitarian ideologies were triumphant. The younger generation was fascinated either by Hitler and Mussolini, or by Stalin and communism. Does this mean Jan Kott was a communist? I don’t think so.

He was a neophyte. He wrote that he acquired the status and character of a neophyte when he was baptized. But in the 1930s, baptism was no longer enough. The “real Poles” from the National Democratic press liked to check people’s birth certificates, and they checked Kott’s. But with his mischievous and restless disposition, he sought salvation in a world marked by an all-pervading sense of impending catastrophe. He presented papers full of left-wing ideas at meetings of the university Polonist Circle; he was fascinated by the Spanish Civil War; he read the novels of André Malraux and then went to stay in a Dominican monastery in the south of France, where he meditated on the mysteries of Catholic belief while studying Jacques Maritain and other Thomists. He went on to seek spiritual sustenance in surrealist poetry and the manifestos of André Breton. What was he searching for?

More than once, Kott describes a drunken party taking place after the curfew in Nazi-occupied Warsaw. Kott enters a room, where he sees two people, Jerzy Andrzejewski and Czeslaw Milosz, on their knees making faces at each other.

They were making the most horrible faces at one another. Like Syfon and Mietus in Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke. They banged their heads on the floor and then, one, two, three, they raised their heads and made faces. Private and public faces, innocent and obscene faces, military and civilian faces, the faces of virgins and pederasts, and great historical faces—Beck, Hitler, Stalin. They made the faces of the archetypal father and king. Perhaps Czeslaw’s last face was Almighty God, after which Jerzy collapsed on the floor. Who or what were they bowing to? To the prewar years or to what lay ahead?

Kott was impressed that Milosz found the face Kott had been looking for in the Thomists and the surrealists, in secular humanism and Marxism—a face with which to confront a world of nihilism and cruelty, a world of round-ups and summary executions. He considered Jerzy Stempowski and Stefan Zolkiewski his masters, but he followed in the footsteps of Boy and Slonimski. From them, he inherited his brilliant journalistic style, the mordant wit of his theater reviews, the subtlety and grace of his conversation—and the seeming superficiality of his observations. This superficiality was a kind of mask, a stylistic stratagem. Kott’s writing always had several levels: he wrote for the authorities, for his readers, and for his friends. He also wrote for himself, and at this level dealt with what was most essential and personal, which he carefully camouflaged—not only out of fear of Hitler and Stalin, but of himself.

Jan Kott dreamed of writing a great novel that would register the enormity and horror of the human condition in the twentieth century—a sociological construction of man’s fate. But man’s fate is not a sociological construct: neither Balzac’s Rastignac nor Stendhal’s Julien Sorel was a hero typical of his time. As a critic, Kott demanded the typical, but he was fascinated by what was unique and nonstandardized in human beings. He once wrote: “Some life stories belong not just to literary history but to literature itself. . . .[They] are imbued with existential experience and demonstrate the boundaries where literature ends and the zone of silence begins.” He went on to add:

There are years and places. . .in which history demonstrates its horror and destructive force with exceptional clarity. These are chosen countries in the same sense that the Bible refers to the Jews as a chosen people. In these places and in these times, history is “let off the chain.” The fate of individuals seems to be directly overwhelmed by history.

Kott’s books constitute a series of volumes of a twentieth-century Human Comedy. The structure of his life story is a transcription over time of the hero-narrator’s internal monologue. The hero appears in various incarnations. He is a budding writer, fascinated by Thomism and surrealism. He studies Maritain and Breton and explores the novels of Malraux. He witnesses the Soviet occupation of Lvov and the Nazi occupation of Warsaw. He is a Jew in hiding who miraculously escapes death. He is a member of the underground Communist party and a fighter in the partisans. He subsequently becomes an aggressive Communist and a rabid columnist for Kuznica, demanding the settling of accounts and revolutionary transformation, a disciple of Voltaire with a party card, an inveterate womanizer, a mendacious witness of the period, repeating the stilted phrases of official propaganda. Our hero becomes a critic and a rebel, a star attraction in literary salons and at theatrical opening nights, a bitingly witty polemicist, whose work is tolerated and confiscated in turn. Finally, he becomes an émigré. All of this is recorded day by day—a tale to rival Wilhelm Meister’s Travels, as well as The Confessions of a Child of the Century. Without Kott’s writings it would be difficult to understand the bitter taste of this era, its fascination and its horror, its hopes and fears. But we need to remember that they constitute a literary fiction, so that it makes no sense to check quotations, dates, or names, to look for precision in the details or to correct errors of fact. Kott’s “human comedy” is a creation of his imagination.

Kott wrote more modestly about himself and his colleagues at Kuznica. In March 1945 he proclaimed in this aggressive Marxist weekly,

History has become a public matter. History is taking place before our eyes! The hierarchy of events is now visible. The great issues of the Third Independent Republic must find expression in literature. From Lodz and Krakow we must follow and transmit to our readers the struggle that is being waged in the countryside, at the front, in Warsaw. We must depict the mainstream of history.

To be in the mainstream was Julien Sorel’s dream. It was the dream of people who felt unsure of their position when the old regime was decaying and when Napoleon and other outsiders were making spectacular careers. The life stories of these people—although each was different—came to constitute A Study of Customs of the Era. Their morals were appropriate to a period of massive upheavals. People who had been marginalized and hunted as criminals, stalked like animals, now landed on Mount Parnassus. They took revenge for years of degradation and humiliation. They repeated the prayer of Daniel Defoe: “May the Lord keep me from hunger, that I may not steal.” They dreamed the dream of Julien Sorel, who knew that “one must know how to wear the uniform of one’s era” and that “only the strong and the cunning are victorious.” The hero of Kott’s “human comedy” is not, however, “a common arriviste and small-time rascal.” He wanted, like Voltaire, to wage war on “ignorance, fanaticism, and obscurantism,” to battle against slavery and the Inquisition, against syphilis and the extortion of the tax collectors, against the military dictatorship of the Jesuits in Paraguay and the absolutist rulers of German principalities. Like Diderot, he was excited by politics, even when writing about literature or eroticism. “He was not afraid of being biased, because there were good reasons to be biased.” But his “exceptional charm” lay in his deeply concealed self-irony. In July 1945, he already liked to quote d’Alembert’s pre-Revolutionary comment: “Let’s talk about the elephant, because it is the only large creature we can safely talk about.” To which he added a quote from Montesquieu: “Despotism is such a dreadful thing that even those who practice it turn against it.” After which he went back to unmasking the armed “bandits” of the underground and General Anders, the Catholic Church and Tygodnik Powszechny, Milosz’s view of impending catastrophe, and the concept of honor in Conrad’s novels.

Szkola klasykow [School of the Classics], published in 1949, announced the arrival of literary realism in “a country building socialism.” In this manifesto of impending doom, with its brilliant analyses of Defoe, Swift, and the French socialists, we find the following quotation from Diderot:

Power acquired by force is nothing more than usurpation; it lasts only as long as he who gives the orders remains stronger than those who receive them. Therefore, if the latter become the stronger and impose the yoke, they will do so in a manner as lawful and just as that in which the yoke was imposed on them.

This was well said, but it was just an aside. The main thread was rejection of “the whole despicable deceit of bourgeois solidarism.” And the hero-narrator went on to reject Zeromski and Wyspianski, Sienkiewicz and Conrad. His arguments were often threatening in tone. This was, after all, a time when “it was possible to destroy someone with a single joke and kill him with a single denunciation.” He was often a great actor in a terrible play. He behaved as if he were living at a time when “Alaric entered Rome, when the cultural values of the intelligentsia lay in ruins.” He was the gravedigger of the old era and the herald of the new. He drowned out the horror of the new era with such phrases as: “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs,” or “You can’t make a revolution and keep your hands clean.” One of his friends simply commented, “Janek always blathers on until late at night.”

Where did this blathering come from? In 1956 Kott wrote: “The occupation taught me the most. . . .The only thing that saved me from succumbing to the horror. . .that helped me resist the nightmare, was the belief that right is on the side of history, that fascism would be crushed and that it would be crushed by the Red Army. . . .When I joined the People’s Army, I stopped being afraid.” Such was his explanation in the spirit of Voltaire, Hegel, and Marx—a eulogy to the rationality of History. There was also a eulogy to the rationality of Geography—the people of the Home Army believed that “liberation would come from the Allies. . . .It seemed to me this was simply a fantasy that people wanted to believe in.” Kott, however, knew that “liberation could only come from the other direction.” On the other hand, the occupation gave him a fine sense of the absurd, of the perfect nonrationality of human fate, of the Gombrowicz-like contest to make faces at the world. He lived simultaneously in both these worlds—the world of Reason and the world of the Absurd. When was he being sincere? Perhaps all the time.

Kott didn’t want to die—that’s why he rejected Conrad, his sense of honor and morality, his notion of being true to oneself. He wrote that this was “the heroism of the stupid. The heroism of a donkey pulling a cart across a bridge full of land mines.” And he added: “Conrad’s version of being true to oneself is that of the slave; a slave is someone who obeys the master he despises, and is concerned only with his own inner rectitude.” The loyalty of a ship’s captain is simply “blind obedience to the great shipowners of the world.” He was sincere when he wrote this. And these were the kind of words needed by the Communist authorities to destroy and defile the Home Army’s mythology of resistance, honor, and loyalty. These words were inscribed, then, in the Great Lie of the era about “Home Army counterrevolution.” Did he realize he was lying?

Our hero-narrator “is not a trickster. He does not lie intentionally, and he forgets he is lying and is almost ready to believe every one of his words. He’s in a fine mood, things are going well with him, people are listening to him, and because of this his tongue unwinds and he chatters away, ever more fluently. He bares his soul, he says what his heart dictates, and lying in all sincerity, he shows himself as he really is. . . .” Thus wrote Gogol, whom Kott cited. It wasn’t Hegel who poisoned Kott. He was poisoned by Gogol!

People tried to counter the challenge of totalitarianism with religious faith and hope, with Conrad’s principle of honor and loyalty, and also with laughter and the absurd, the grotesque-tragic vision of Witkacy, the wry face of Gombrowicz. One could counter the horror with a total lack of seriousness by donning the mask of Harlequin and playing the fool. Only Harlequin, Kott later remarked, manages to bring together “humor and naïveté, cunning and madness.” Was this a “captive mind,” a case of reason infected by “Hegelian venom”? Not at all. It was reason gone astray, seeking for a way to adapt. It needed a “face,” an expression to mimic that would allow it to survive. The mask of Diderot and the grace of Harlequin, laughter instead of honor, the virtues of the Enlightenment rather than the Age of Chivalry. Here is yet another dream—to be the jester of one’s times.

The jester, in Kolakowski’s classic definition, is someone who moves in elite social circles, but does not himself belong there. He speaks impertinently, and questions everything that is taken for granted. A jester must be drawn from outside the elite, must observe it from the sidelines in order to proclaim the nonobvious of its obviousness and the nonnecessity of its necessity; at the same time, by moving in elite circles he knows its revered leader and has the opportunity to speak to him in an impertinent manner. So, a jester or a drawing-room scandalizer? Sorel or Chlestakov? Harlequin or Diderot? A man of the Enlightenment, a follower of Voltaire, someone who jeers at the world around him.

Kott jeered in masterly fashion. He was often cruel to the journalists on Tygodnik Powszechny, who were virtually gagged by the censors during the 1940s: “An independent publication?” he sneered. “Independent of whom? Archbishop Sapiecha and the church hierarchy?” He wrote about Antoni Golubiew: “Talking about a return to the Middle Ages is just a way of putting a pretty face on an attempt to return to a far more recent and uglier age.” He praised Stefan Kisielewski’s book, Sprzysiezenie [Conspiracy] in the most backhanded manner: “painstaking observation, a completely secular intellectual climate, a determination to face unpalatable issues, a healthy cynicism—these are the intellectual and artistic predilections of Kisielewski, and I have to say that these are predilections that I share.” Nor did Kott spare his colleagues at Kuznica: “One reads Dygat’s book with pleasure, while one puts it down with a certain unease. One reads Brandys’s book with a certain unease, while one puts it down with pleasure, enormous pleasure.”

In a report on the Soviet Union (February 1947), full of admiration for the first workers’ and peasants’ state, Kott recounted an anecdote about some American journalists who were visiting a Moscow school. They came to a math class and asked the students: “If you buy shoes in a store for 200 rubles and you sell them for 350, how much will you get?” The kids start to calculate, and one of them raises his hand: “Two years for speculation” was his answer. Was Kott playing the fool?

Reviewing Ewa Fisher’s translation of Nazim Hikmet’s fairy tales, Kott wrote: “The translation is as dry as dust, as uneven as a camel’s hump, as fuzzy as quince, and as poor as a water-carrier in Istanbul.” He said the following about erotic life under Stalin:

Just last week a friend complained to me that he and his girlfriend, with whom he’s been living for a year, only get together twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. “What about Wednesdays?” I asked. “Wednesdays are out because she has a youth organization meeting.” “Well, what about Friday, Saturday, and Sunday?” “On Fridays,” said my friend, “she goes to confession, on Saturdays she repents for her sins, and on Sundays she goes to communion.” “You still have Mondays.” “No, no, I don’t have Mondays. On Mondays, she is firmly resolved to improve the world.”

About Slonimski’s play, Samotnosc [Loneliness] (July 1956), Kott wrote, “This is not the debut of an author with something to say. Quite the opposite. This is a play by someone who has nothing to say and no inhibitions whatsoever.” And he noted: “For the first time in my life, I whistled during a performance. If a play is a flop, one shouldn’t whistle. But if a play is downright disgusting, one ought to whistle. Whistle!” And whistle he did. An angry Colonel Stanislaw Nadzin wrote in a sharp letter that Kott had “incited the audience to hooligan behavior in the theater.” Kott replied: “I regret that I started whistling at Samotnosc; I should have started whistling seven years ago.”

The era of Stalinist orthodoxy came to an end, and somewhere around the end of 1954 the thaw set in. It sprang from the idealization of the purity of the first years of the Revolution, 1944, the political conflicts of the period, the faith and hopes that people nurtured at the time, “the enthusiasm and festering bitterness, caution and recklessness.” In a review of a play by Jozef Kusmierek (November 1954), Kott wrote, “Revolutionaries had not yet become mired in paper-work, meetings, and administration.” In a review of Mayakovsky’s Laznia [The Baths] (December 1954), he noted, “Mayakovsky uses General Director Dupno to depict bourgeois small-mindedness, bourgeois small-mindedness that he hates.”

Thus Kott diagnoses revolutionary purity as contaminated by the bourgeois habits of bureaucrats. He makes yet another face at the world, of a member of the rebellious “acne generation,” younger than the Kuznica generation. Between 1948 and 1951, they attacked the Kuznica writers for their bourgeois literary tastes and demanded “acceleration” of the revolution in culture and art. The younger generation was more fanatical and intransigent. “They considered us ‘intellectuals,’” wrote Kott in 1955, “and they loaded the word with all the contempt they could muster. . . .For our part, we considered them tainted by fascism at the deepest level of their personal lives.” But Kott and the others of Kuznica were hardly “enemy agents” in need of “unmasking”: they themselves were adept at attacking “the enemy.”

Many years later Kott would state: “We didn’t realize how rapid had been the changing of the guard in the race to Zhdanovism and how quickly the new team had seized the baton, or rather the stick.” This attitude reflected on the one hand fear of History, of the younger generation, and of the new socialist-realist esthetic, and on the other hand, an attempt to catch up with an era that was constantly changing its skin. Later Kott wrote:

Through the window one heard the cry of a rhinoceros. Never before had anyone heard a rhinoceros in the town. Then one could actually see the rhinoceros through the window. It began to stroll around the streets.  A dentist opened the door to his surgery and bellowed like a rhinoceros. The owner of a women’s clothing store had a horn growing out of his head.

One could hear rhinoceroses everywhere. The rhinoceros was contagious. This scene from Ionesco’s play served as an illustration. Wazyk had said he was in a lunatic asylum. Did this mean shame, self-delusion, fawning, madness? No doubt something different for each person. For Kott it meant making yet another face—the face of a rhinoceros.

The thaw brought new faces: the unmasker from Kuznica, unmasked by the younger generation again became an unmasker—this time, the unmasker of Stalinism. Once again he tore the masks from the hypocrites: he attacked the politics and esthetics of socialist realism; he defended jazz and the stories of Marek Hlasko. In 1955, in a review of Groteska, he noted: “Terrifying masks are worn by the dreadful old woman who believes in miracles, by the children, who have been fooled by the old woman, and by Serafynski, who has been fooled by stupidity. Horrible masks are also worn by the professional swindlers and specialists in miracles. The enormous, mystical, petty-bourgeois humbug wears a frightening mask. Ciemnogrod wears a mask.” Thus the notion of Ciemnogrod was redefined: once it had referred to the old-Polish, chauvinistic, clerical strand of the national tradition, to which enlightened communism was supposed to provide an antidote. Now it had come to mean a way of thinking to be found within communism itself.

Then came Mickiewicz’s Forefathers’ Eve. “On the opening night,” wrote Kott (November 1955),

in the stalls and in the balcony, people were in tears. The stagehands cried, the cloakroom attendants wiped their eyes with their handkerchiefs. Forefathers’ Eve was stunning. It gave rise to lengthy late-night discussions. . . it was more powerful than all the contemporary plays of the decade. It spoke about our history and about modern times. . . .All of Poland is a gigantic stage, and the young people, officer cadets and writers, patriots and traitors, are the actors. Novosiltsov and his gang of thugs and spies, and Bestuzhev with his hand held out. . . .We need to say it as clearly as possible. We are storming the communist heaven, and Mickiewicz is with us in our endeavor. Our “forefathers” are on the side of revolution and those who are clamoring for justice.

Kott’s use of “we” should be noted. “We” are the inheritors of the Mickiewicz tradition, storming the communist heaven. But who are “they”? “They” are the inhabitants of Ciemnogrod, both the long-standing inhabitants and the newer arrivals. The title of Kott’s review was a quotation: “Why do you not wish to write about this, gentlemen?” The people to whom the question was addressed—writers who refused to acknowledge Polish truths—were also “them.”

Of course, “they” were also those in power. In October 1956, at the moment of the Great Turning Point, Kott once more recalled Dejmek’s production of Laznia:

Dejmek put Pobiedonosikov and all the others like him on a large platform. . . . This was a platform used to review the May Day parade. . . .They all sat in the front rows and clapped. . . .Precisely at this time Party comrades started referring to the leadership as “them.” It’s only this past week that we have begun talking about “us.”

A week earlier, Gomulka had become First Secretary of the PUWP Central Committee. He embodied the hopes of the whole nation, including the “comrades.” For the previous ten years, the “nation” had referred to the “comrades” as “them.”

In October 1956, Kott spoke to tens of thousands of people at an enormous rally at the Warsaw Polytechnic. Several years later, he reminisced: “When I had diphtheria just after the Warsaw Uprising, after three days I spat out some tissue like the skin of a reptile. At that rally, I had the feeling that I’d finally spat out the rest of this slimy tissue.”

Did he start to speak freely? And what kind of face did he adopt in his contest with the world? Once again, he is a follower of Voltaire, but he is now a different kind of Voltairean, one more suited to the new times. A post-Stalinist Voltairean, confronted with a new reading of Shakespeare. Hamlet after the Twentieth Congress—this is how Kott referred to his thinking in 1956. He wrote about how words and phrases had acquired a new meaning: “Denmark’s a prison,” “the gallows are built stronger than the church.” He noted that the word most commonly heard on stage is “watch.” “Here, everyone is being watched,” he wrote, “and they are always being watched.” Polonius, one of the king’s ministers, sends a flunky after his son all the way to France. Behind every curtain someone is hiding. Ophelia is under surveillance, her letters intercepted. “This watchfulness corrodes everything at the castle in Elsinore: marriage, love, and friendship. What terrible experiences Shakespeare must have had at the time of Essex’s conspiracy and execution to understand so well the workings of the ‘Great Mechanism.’” Each person “is simultaneously part of the Mechanism and its victim, because politics here leaves its imprint on every emotion and there is no escaping it.”

And Hamlet? He pretends madness; “he dons, in cold blood, the appearance of madness in order to carry out a coup d’état. Hamlet is mad because politics, when it rejects all feelings, is itself madness.” Hamlet is “as rebellious as the young people on the journal Po Prostu. He has a burning passion. He lives for action, not reflection. He is angry. He revels in his own indignation. But he has regained his capacity for action. This is Hamlet after the Twentieth Congress.” This is how a Voltairean skeptic sang the praises of the “angry young men.” The “angry young men” of October ‘56 were the younger generation who several years before had condemned the bourgeois tendencies of the Kuznica writers for adhering to Communist principle.

From the outside, these revolutionary fanatics looked like “them” and seemed to have nothing whatsoever in common with Hamlet. A witness of the era, a young woman opposed to the Communist system, wrote that they were out to destroy all forms of human ties: in schools, universities, the workplace. Most of them were aggressive and ruthless; they were “informers and judges.” In schools and universities, “they followed the lecturers’ every sentence,” denounced their “deviations,” and organized campaigns against them. They felt most comfortable in an atmosphere of revolutionary vigilance. When dictatorship became stabilized, they found themselves shunted off to one side, because it was no longer the students who were to supervise the teachers, but the teachers who were to supervise the students. This was the cause of much frustration.

Kott considered George Bernard Shaw a modern-day Voltaire. In an essay on Shaw’s Saint Joan, Kott stated: “He spoke many bitter words of truth to his country. He was ironic, he jeered and scoffed. He was skeptical, he defended reason, and struggled against myths of all kinds. His independent judgment and critical ability made him an authority of the intellectual left.”

This left-wing syndrome and critical rationalism constituted a new profession of faith for Kott. Previously, he had been inclined, like Voltaire, to deride Joan of Arc’s heroism, to jeer at her ignorance and fanaticism, and at the demons and the spirits which haunted this “bellicose simpleton.” Now, like Shaw, he was inclined to defend her greatness in the language of rational analysis and common sense, and to defend her against the kind of narrow rationalism symbolized by Flaubert’s Monsieur Homais, “an enthusiast of progress and the classic type of rationalist stupidity. A personal enemy of God, he believed blindly in the powers of patent medicines, parliamentarianism, and the press.” He exchanged his belief in God for belief in progress.

“Personally, I don’t believe in God,” wrote Kott, “but I also know that not believing in God is not enough to understand history.” This is certainly true, but it should be added that Monsieur Homais’s tirades against religion and the Church were harmless stupidities in comparison with Kott’s journalistic attacks on Turowicz, Golubiew, and Tygodnik Powszechny. Our hero-narrator did not like the Church in general, and peasant Catholicism in particular. For him it was a reservoir of fanatical ignorance. Thus Joan of Arc was “first the tool, and then the victim of clericalism and superstition. . .the village idiot who was used by the court to manipulate ignorant feudal knights.” One may refuse to acknowledge her virtues—her intelligence, bravery, and greatness. But Kott also sees her—as did Shaw—as a representative of a new popular patriotism and awakened national consciousness. And heroism. Of all the “decent and sensible people, Joan was the only one who wasn’t an opportunist,” wrote Kott. “Only she has strength of character and courage, only she perseveres until the very end. Sensitive and human, she fears death and suffering, but she remains true to herself. She does not break down during interrogation. She is sent to the stake by the state and church apparatus.”

Kott tries to understand those who condemn Joan of Arc as well. Calmly and soberly, they condemn her—for raison d’état, historical necessity, and dogma. Essentially, she is a victim of the system. This provides the basis for “the lie of raison d’état and the Great Mechanism.” Kott ends by saying, “We are on the side of Joan.” In other words, on the side of virtue, simplicity, and heroism. But how was one to be on the side of heroism when the Soviets were invading Budapest? When some people—like Wiktor Woroszylski—were broadcasting reports from the burning city, and others—like Kisielewski—were calling for caution because they feared a possible Soviet invasion of Poland? After two months, Kott returned to the subject of Joan of Arc. In October, Saint Joan had been “rational in her madness.” At that time all of Poland had been “rational in its madness.” But was this still the case after a victory achieved without bloodshed in Poland and the bloody intervention in Hungary? “When you are the weaker side, you can be victorious only once. After that, God helps the stronger side.” This is why caution was necessary, why heroic Joan of Arc became an unnecessary nuisance.

Stefan Kisielewski, the heroic joker of Tygodnik Powszechny, knew this well. He would have wanted “Joan to return to her family village. He would not have wanted her to save anyone or try to do so. . . .Only Woroszylski would have wanted her to be a saint. Even Jerzy Zawiejski would have been against. He would have become an adviser to the parliament in Paris, he would have forgiven the English, and he would have prayed that Joan avoid the stake, because he had a warm heart. But he would have sentenced her to life imprisonment.” And our hero-narrator? He no longer has complete faith in Joan. He can see both sides of the issue. He respects level-headed analysis and rational argument. “Passion is one-sided”; rationality encourages discussion. Maybe those who said that in the end the English would be driven out and France united were right. “Maybe there really was no cause to rush to make history.” So, get thee to a nunnery, Joan!

In 1957, a group of distinguished writers formerly associated with Kuznica, among them Jan Kott, left the PUWP. This was a gesture without precedent. Until then, no one had ever left the Party; the only way out was expulsion. The fact that these writers left the Party had symbolic significance. The very people who after the war had urged the Polish intelligentsia to support the communist leadership were now publicly withdrawing their support for the communists.

A high-level Party apparatchik commented, “I am amazed to see such unprecedented capitulation on the part of communists in the face of bourgeois liberalism and the abandonment of any attempt to struggle for socialist culture.” The anti-communists greeted the developments following October ‘56 with delight and optimism. The difference must be emphasized. The rebellious ex-communists were devastated by Khruschev’s report, the Polish October, and the invasion of Hungary, while their former adversaries saw these events as a source of hope for normality.

The hero-narrator we find in the pages of Kott’s books and essays was not aware of this difference. And yet he was viewed as one of those responsible for the tribulations that Stalinism had brought to science and culture. It was he who was accused of refusing to accept responsibility, of passing moral judgment on Gomulka’s associates, who were far less virulent than he had been, of assigning responsibility to others, and of appropriating to himself the role of leader of Polish emancipation, of wanting to lead the people whose self-expression he had once ruthlessly stifled.

These accusations contained a substantial grain of truth and considerable bitterness. Our hero-narrator and, no doubt, Kott as well, considered themselves victims of communism rather than its architects. Others viewed them differently, and this is not surprising. Nevertheless, they were attacked for their communism at the moment they broke with it, and for this break they paid a price. There was, then, a settling of accounts with people who were already opponents of communism, although the nature of their opposition was not always clear.

“We are all a bit lost and are slowly finding our way,” Kott wrote in June 1954. “We are undergoing shock therapy to cure us of the great ideologies.” This meant he had to look for another face to adopt in contest with the world and that he had to review his previous faces. As early as 1954, he wrote about the debate over Aleksander Fredro. He recalled Goszczynski’s brutal attack on the playwright for his antipathy toward conspiracy and the romantic vision of the country, his imitation of foreign models, and his uncritical praise for the traditions of the nobility. This attack was similar in tone to Kott’s diatribes against other writers. And he was honest enough to admit that then, in the nineteenth century, it would have been easier for him to find a common language with Goszczynski, a parochial and good-humored Jacobin, than with “that embittered Count, who was incredibly intelligent but also incredibly reactionary.” Goszczynski, like Kott after him, wanted to destroy the Poland of the nobility. He wanted a social revolution “with big words and morals.” None of this was to be found in Fredro, but it was Fredro who “rescued Poland from widespread melancholy.” These were unusual thoughts in 1954. Their conclusion was equally unusual: Goszczynski and other critics had failed to recognize Fredro’s intelligent realism; their judgment had been “immature. . . .But were all their opinions unfair? I don’t know. If I had been alive at that time, there’s no doubt I would have written about Fredro even more harshly. I would have been mistaken. But I would have had my reasons.”

This article constituted a face-making contest with himself. Perhaps also an act of tearing off his own mask. Four years later (November 1958), Kott wrote about another great reactionary, Zygmunt Krasinski: “He knew how to hate and was wonderfully alienated from the epoch, but at the same time he was most closely entwined with it.”

To consider the situation of Fredro and Krasinski is both to try to understand and to refuse to engage in accusation. It also involves asking how to be simultaneously present and absent in one’s own epoch. In the epoch of “the small stabilization,” this was a fundamental question for someone who had watched the student demonstration after the banning of Po Prostu in 1957 and who had read about the execution in 1958 of Imre Nagy—a communist and the prime minister of a rebellious Hungary. Our hero-narrator didn’t want to take part in this; he didn’t want to bear the responsibility. Nor did he want to be absent. Gomulka’s “small stabilization” was a kind of barren interlude, a period of waiting. Waiting for what? For a change for the better, for a better socialism. Kott saw in this “waiting for Godot” the boredom of the canny Pole. “He is waiting for Godot, but he believes less and less that he will actually come. Every evening, little boys and important politicians tell him that he will surely come tomorrow. Sometimes he even reads this in the newspapers.” In such a climate the atmosphere is akin to that of waiting for the end of the world. There is no place here for Voltairean enthusiasm. Here, Wyspianski’s Wyzwolenie [Liberation] is transformed into “a cabaret, a monumental and monstrous burlesque.” To foreigners, therefore, Wyzwolenie is just “a product of Polish craziness.” And in this lies the heart of the matter: “We are seen as crazy and thus not fully responsible for our actions.”

This craziness means living in a state of befuddlement, in a world where everyone repeats after Gombrowicz: “I am not so crazy that in these Crazy Times I either do or do not have an opinion.” To put it another way, it means to live in a state between “persistent and shameless self-pity. . .mandatory belief in the insane idea that from the ashes of the nation an ash will arise to avenge us,” and the desire for normality.

History has no meaning, and “cultivating one’s own garden” à la Voltaire is simply naive self-delusion: it is either cruel or farcical—the fate of communities that find themselves living on a volcano. Kott’s essay on the end of the world, in other words the eruption of the volcano (February 1959), is crucial to understanding the new face of our hero-narrator—the face of the philosopher of the absurd.

He sees the volcano beginning to smolder; any minute now it will erupt; there is no possibility of escape. What should one do? How should one behave sensibly? There are four possible approaches. First, “refuse to acknowledge the volcano’s existence. Avoid allowing yourself to be caught up in eschatology. Live as though nothing were happening. This approach has some characteristics of clowning but is also stoical.” Second, the eruption of the volcano is presented as a historical necessity. The volcano then becomes a deity. It is possible to pray to it, and to demonstrate rationally the necessity for the eruption. The third approach is the heroic one. One must struggle against the volcano regardless of the chances of victory, in the way Camus’s heroes struggled with the plague. Barricades and shelters must be built. If one manages to stem the flow of lava, this approach will be heroic; if the lava overflows the inhabitants in their homes, it will be decidedly farcical. The fourth approach is to keep on doing business as usual right up to the last minute. This is the most widespread approach, but it turns out to be farcical when the volcano actually erupts.

There seems to be no sensible approach to the end of the world, only farcical ones. Even heroism becomes farcical. A sense of absurdity prevails over all else. From here on, our hero-narrator will be reading Shakespeare and Kafka, Beckett and Witkacy afresh. He will find the absurd everywhere. About Mrozek’s Tango he will write that it isn’t a work of surrealism: “Mrozek is a realist, a realist about Polish absurdity.”

Kott not only wrote books and essays: he also signed protests, such as the “Letter of the 34,” the first collective protest of Polish intellectuals against censorship. As before, he was ferociously intelligent, bold, and popular. He was the “jester” of the Gomulka years, in the positive sense of the word. He remained on close terms with the inner circle. At opening nights he would come across ministers and say malicious things to them. In 1966 he left Poland for a lecture tour of the United States. In 1968 he chose to become an émigré.

Kott continued to search for new faces to carry on his contest with the world. He sympathized with the American protest movement, enjoyed the student rallies at Berkeley, and signed petitions against U.S. intervention in Vietnam. He wrote vividly, intelligently, deceitfully. And yet his writing lost something that had made him one of the most sensitive barometers of historical processes. Only the most attentive reader would perceive that nearly everything he wrote was a fragment about himself. And he wrote two different autobiographies—a public one, Przyczynek do autobiografii [Contribution to an Autobiography], and a secret one, whose outline I shall now attempt to trace.

Kott didn’t understand Russia, and—like the rest of Poland—he was afraid of it. He was also afraid to write about this fear. This provided the basis for Gogol’s venom. He could have coped with Hegel, but not with the Spirit of the Times embodied in the Red Army. Years later, he described his meeting with Boris Pasternak in 1947. The great poet, living in disfavor on the margins of official life, told this Voltairean-Marxist that one day he and his colleagues at Kuznica would wake up behind bars. “Now,” said Pasternak, “you are like birds singing in the trees. Everyone is singing his own tune. In a cage, even a gilded cage, you will be described as a ‘former futurist,’ a ‘former symbolist.’ You’ll find yourselves in a zoo for ‘enemies of the people.’” These were words to send shivers down the spine. They were also prophetic.

Kott saw Russia through the eyes of Gogol—a Russia where “there is no laughter, only fear,” where “there is emptiness and silence,” where “everything trembles and shivers like a leaf,” where everything “is imbued with menace.” Where “disorder” reigns, where all is “confusion, muddle, and nonsense.” Where everything, even sleep, “begins and ends in dread.” In the faces of apparatchiks and security agents, he saw the outline of such a Russia beginning to take shape in Poland. Fearing any kind of Russia, he never sympathized with its dissidents. He fled from Russia and sought refuge on the campuses of American universities, in experimental theater, and in exploration of the erotic. His essays acquired a different rhythm when he wrote about Poland, about Witkacy and censorship, about Borowski and Gombrowicz, Andrzejewski and Grotowski—and especially about Stempowski and Konwicki.

Kott saw Konwicki’s A Polish Complex as signifying the revival of history. The revival of the legend of the January Uprising in Konwicki’s ultra-contemporary style of writing caused Kott to declare: “Time did not stand still. It’s just that history has revived.” Kott regarded Jerzy Stempowski as his mentor. In a 1976 essay on Stempowski, Kott returned to the question of how one should behave at a time of apocalypse or plague, the end of the world, when “all moral and social norms collapse and all apparent choices seem pointless.” He had once written that every choice, even a heroic one, is a farce. Now he reiterated Stempowski’s view that after the flood one has to seek out people who “will prepare themselves for another flood and may have a new plan for building a new ark.”

In other words, one must seek out dissidents because there is something both noble and valuable in their attitude. Kott wrote:

There are two different dissident traditions: the Aryan and the Puritan; and the Central and East European and the Anglo-Saxon. But one element common to both traditions is rejection of state religion and recognition of individual conscience and unfettered intelligence as the last resort which makes it possible to distinguish between the law and legalized illegality, between a just war and rapacious invasion, and between obedience to the law and slavery. The most unexpected and thought-provoking feature of the contemporary dissident movement is the revival of long-forgotten, antiquated, almost cottage-industry forms of protest and resistance: samizdat, the chain method of transmitting information, silent picketing, individual hunger strikes, books smuggled across frontiers, open letters signed by a selected group. I belong to a generation which—and I am not just referring to those of us who believed in its two extreme ideologies—believed in modern forms of organization: large-scale political movements, discipline, and sworn obedience seemed to us the only effective means of improving the world. Recent experience has shown that large political systems, just like the most modern airplanes and computers, have their weak points. A whole army of policemen and spies finds it extremely difficult to prevent a meeting of a dozen people who have decided to speak their mind. In this world, which has been hacked into three different pieces, it has been impossible to silence the quiet voice of the cottage-dissidents. The dissident position has demonstrated not only its moral values but also its political effectiveness. It is one of the few sources of fragile hope that remain. And  dissidents are to be found not only in countries ruled by communist parties.

Kott’s essay, in a collection entitled Kamienny Potok [The Stony Stream], was published by the underground publishing house, NOWa. In this way he returned to Poland.

Kott had always conceived Poland in a particular way. He loved and understood the Poland of the Enlightenment and Kollataj’s Kuznica group, the Poland of the positivists and Boleslaw Prus, the Poland of Wiadomosci Literackie, Boy and Slonimski. He felt at home in, and in touch with, this Poland. He didn’t trust or understand the messianic-insurrectionist Poland, the nationalist-Catholic Poland, the Poland of the Home Army and Mikolajczyk. He saw all the blemishes and pitfalls of this tradition and failed to see its brilliance and splendor. Did he understand his friend Wlodzimierz Pietrzak, a critic associated with the journal Prosto z mostu and the radical nationalist right? Did he understand postwar Catholicism, Wyszynski and Wojtylla? People from the Home Army, Zbigniew Herbert and Jan Jozef Szczepanski? I’m not talking about approving but about understanding the extent of their tragedy. Kott defended himself with laughter, irony, and derision. These are excellent weapons, but they do not facilitate understanding. Laughter is always a mask. When you’re wearing a mask, it’s difficult for people to see your face.

The sanctimonious hypocrite is a mask, but does Tartuffe have a real face? He is not who he pretends to be, and he pretends to be someone he is not. He is an impostor, but what will happen if he dissembles perfectly? He wears a mask, but what if he never takes it off? A perfect hypocrite is a living contradiction: a person who has become the role he plays. He no longer has a face; the mask has become fixed to his face.

This is a kind of warning that Kott issued to himself. He was constantly changing his mask, sometimes from necessity and sometimes because he wanted to. There was a lot of “affectation and desire to please” in this, but he never ceased being sincere in his own way. “The strangest thing about him is that all his faces, all his masks are simultaneously genuine and fake, that on the surface they don’t fit together, they are incoherent and in each of them there is a fragment of himself. Perhaps taken together they constitute a whole epoch and its style.” This sounds like an apt description of our hero-narrator. In fact, this is Kott writing about Ignacy Krasicki.

Kott utters the most fundamental truths as though in passing, always concealed and encoded—as in Juliusz Slowacki’s reflections on Poland in his letters to his mother. He refused to admit to himself that, in an era of enthusiasm for Progress, Reason, and Revolution, he believed in the rule of an enlightened elite over the unreasoning, ignorant, and reactionary Polish population. In this lay the greatest sin of Kuznica: they wanted to bring enlightenment by force, under cover of dictatorship and the Red Army. They understood all the pitfalls of nationalist mysticism, but they didn’t understand the close link between Voltairean reason and the Jacobin guillotine. As for communism—they didn’t want to understand it. They knew the bourgeois hypocrisy of the 1930s and wanted to demystify it, to tear the mask from its face and reveal it for what it was. All of Kott’s writings, the whole of the intelligentsia’s settling of accounts, were focused on this unmasking. “The aim of the most varied and changing constructs was always to show official history to be a joke,” wrote Hannah Arendt, “to demonstrate the existence of a sphere of hidden influences, in light of which the observable historical reality that can be followed and known is nothing but a facade erected for the sole purpose of fooling people.”

They wanted to reveal the inner workings of History. But History isn’t just inner workings, and morality isn’t just a hypocritical mask of high-mindedness concealing a network of dirty interests and shabby behavior. The attack on the hypocrisy of bourgeois democracy gave rise to a specific alliance between the elite and the rabble. The rabble, too, hates the hypocritical world in which it has been deprived of privileges and is looked down on. According to Hannah Arendt, “The alliance between the elite and the rabble could be explained by the unfeigned delight that the elite took in the rabble’s destruction of anything considered decent.” An apt example is provided by the fate of Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, which portrayed gangsters as respectable businessmen and businessmen as gangsters. The rebellious elite applauded the play for its courageous and bitter irony: “exposing hypocrisy was such irresistible fun.” Nevertheless, notes Arendt, when “the rabble greeted this play as signifying artistic approval of gangsters, the irony disappeared.” Furthermore, “the only political result of Brecht’s revolution was to encourage everyone to reject the inconvenient pressures of hypocrisy and to adopt openly the standards of the rabble.”

Quite early on, Kott discovered—albeit from a novel perspective—the ambiguity contained in André Gide’s writings. Lafcadio was a dangerous rebel, although Kott was equally irritated by Gide’s anti-Soviet stance. He didn’t detect the ambiguity inherent in his own stance: his hero-narrator, a Voltairean-Bolshevik, “dug his own grave” when he rejected Conrad and Malraux, Kisielewski and Golubiew, and thus paved the way for cultural barbarism and vulgar philistinism.

Years later, in 1971, Kott came to see this:

Among the titans, artists, and demons, scoundrels and poseurs are always lurking. The scoundrels are young and of the people. They can be divided into two groups: the metaphysical and the ordinary. The metaphysicals resort to cruelty and meanness to drown out the mystery of life. The ordinary scoundrels want to have money and women, to use the world and take charge. They throw their weight around and have absolutely no inhibitions. They pretend to be meek and mild in order to worm their way in everywhere. Edek in Mrozek’s Tango, a modern-day Fortinbras who kills a modern-day Hamlet with a blow of his fist, is from the same family as all of Witkiewicz’s common scoundrels. The poseurs— gigolos and petty crooks—sometimes pretend to be artists and are ready to provide whatever service might be called for, no matter how despicable.

The days were long gone when a young Kuznica editor enthused about the progress brought by the age of reason. For Kott, as for many others of his generation, the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the stabilization of the early Gomulka years undermined his faith in the feasibility of reform. He never again enthused about anything, although from time to time it seemed as though he was again prepared to get involved—but only briefly and from a distance. By the end of the 1950s, he viewed history and his epoch with ever greater irony. “Thanks to the so-called philosophy of our century, the most stupid of all centuries, we have been left to fall prey to misfortunes of all kinds, and, to make things worse, we talk so much nonsense about ourselves that when our grandchildren and great-grandchildren read the history of this era, they won’t believe such things were possible. . . . As always, the masks fall away in old age, one after the other.” So wrote Kott—again, about Ignacy Krasicki.

Kott joined the Polish Workers’ Party during the occupation, to be in tune with History, to be on the side of progress, modernity, and social reform. Was that all? He couldn’t stand the prewar establishment, nor its wartime underground and émigré counterparts. He felt himself rejected and ignored:

During the occupation, Warsaw was an intellectual backwater, provincial and isolated. Twentieth-century intellectual trends became monstrously deformed. Writers and scholars became financially dependent on the London government’s network of agents. Historical falsehoods were artificially kept alive, thought and creativity stagnated and died away. Who received financial support? Zawieyski, Milosz, Jadzwing-Suchodolski. . . .At the same time, the policy of eliminating all left-wing ideas and creativity was strictly enforced. . . . Even something as trifling as my participation in organizing poetry readings was considered undesirable. These are not just old grudges, but pertinent reminders to the current defenders of freedom of the press and those who are calling for justice in the allocation of paper and newsprint.

This was the most dangerous of our hero-narrator’s faces. He donned the mask of the just avenger of yesterday’s wrongs. He distorted reality, presenting the conflict between the veterans of the Home Army and communist Poland as though it were the dispute between the Targowica Confederation and those who favored reform. He was passionate in his condemnation of actors who appeared on stage during the occupation. He sharply attacked the court that acquitted Stanislaw Wasylewski of having collaborated with the occupying forces. (Wasylewski then worked at and wrote for Gazeta Lwowska.) The court was of the opinion that Wasylewski’s writings “provided the population of the eastern borderlands with spiritual sustenance.” “While the Lvov Jews were being murdered,” wrote Kott, “Wasylewski wrote essays about flowers, birds, and castles.” He considered the justification for the verdict an insult to those who wrote for, printed, and distributed the underground press. He labeled Wasylewski’s behavior despicable and cowardly.

I read these articles by Kott with a growing sense of confusion. In their tone, style, and morally ambiguous pomposity, they are similar to much that has been written in support of lustration and decommunization in recent years. Only it’s not Wasylewski who is now under fire, but Boy. And he too is being criticized for his writings in Lvov during the occupation—but under a different occupying power. In this sense, Kott’s settling of accounts ought to constitute a warning to those who are now hot on the trail of writers and intellectuals who “collaborated” with communism. The devil of fanaticism can change his mask—from that of Voltaire to that of the Grand Inquisitor.

In fact, Kott’s entire life story can be read as an object lesson. I have read it closely and carefully, because it is somehow close to mine. Malraux used to be one of my favorite writers. I loved the tradition of the Enlightenment; I loved the derision of the rationalists; I couldn’t stand sentimental trash, nationalist megalomania, or clerical intolerance and hypocrisy. The Kuznica syndrome was especially familiar to me, so that its end was part of my own life story. At some point, I’d like to write about Kuznica—and in a way that’s different from what has been written so far. I’d like to write about wonderful writers who became tools of totalitarian dictatorship. How did this happen? How did they finally make a break with the system? What happened to them afterwards? I’d like to write about Kazimierz Brandys, the author of Romantycznosc, a book much admired by Kisielewski, and about his Wariacje pocztowe [Postal Variations], one of the best stories ever about Poland and Polishness, as well as about Miesiace [Months], an unusual chronicle of the end period of communism, and Nierzeczywistosc [Unreality], a fascinating document in which the writer spits out the gag that has been stifling him. I’d also like to write about Dygat and Hertz, about Rudnicki, Jastrun, and Wazyk, and about Stefan Zolkiewski, a distinguished man of integrity who became entangled in the communist apparatus. Without an understanding of the Kuznica phenomenon, the phenomenon of betrayal by the intellectuals and their subsequent redemption, it is impossible to understand the history of the Polish intelligentsia—and perhaps the history of Poland. But I’d also like to write about it in order to send myself a warning about the secret venom concealed within the books and articles of these great people and great writers.

“People who were young at that time grew up with the belief that to live life to the full one had to be involved. ‘Standing on the sidelines’ meant not knowing what life was about.” Perhaps this was the source of the poison? Activism, involvement, searching in this adventure for a full life? I have always loved the writings of Jan Kott, although it’s only now that I have discovered in them the monologue that winds through successive volumes written over many years, the monologue of the hero of Lost Illusions, the lost illusions of our era. I have always been enchanted by his language, pithy and nimble, adroit and rich, and have marveled at his ability to recreate himself and read the signs of the times, and at his unequaled humor. I have even marveled at his ability to use Stalinist language. How did he do it?

However, Kott did not understand the Poland that was traditional, provincial and rural, the Poland that was naively patriotic, Catholic, well-intentioned, and imbued with complexes. He didn’t understand its moral principles, or its phobias and fears. One may take issue with this Poland; but without understanding it, light-handed irony becomes venomous meanness.

Kott was saved by his exceptional talent and by his ability to laugh. He was lucky—the merciful God is indulgent towards people with a sense of humor. He likes quick-witted scoffers. But the Good Lord is not only merciful. He is also just. It is from the Good Lord that we get our sense of honor. It was the Good Lord who inspired Conrad to persuade us that honor isn’t something thought up by shipowners looking to make a profit. One of Kott’s most moving essays is the one about dying. Death asks the ultimate question. Honor really does exist.

We are reconciled after a long quarrel
knowing that of human happiness not a single stone will remain.
The earth will open wide its mouth, and in its hollow cathedral
the last pagans will be baptized.

Thus ends the story of a realistic person who danced with masks.