NEW POLISH WRITING
497
not intend to emigrate. But the problem of emigration itself is nei–
ther simple nor new, nor is it insignificant. As far back as your
memory can reach, our attitude to emigration has been ambivalent;
one of envy tinged with distrust, a mixture of megalomania, and an
inferiority complex. Surely you remember from your childhood
those bitter remarks about people who would return "in shining
armor," snide remarks about writers who "chose freedom," ironic
jokes and sarcastic comments. And we must honestly admit that this
was one tactic in which the propaganda was successful. In the fifties
and sixties, in the years of our youth, emigration was not well
thought of.
It
was something alien to us. The person who turned his
back on his country, put himself outside the nation, refusing to share
its changing fortunes, who nurtured a hopeless longing for a return
to the old ways, to his own privileges-this was the stereotype of the
emigrant; the emigrant who opted for easy bread, safety, and well–
being, and who was paid by the Americans to tell lies about Poland
over Radio Free Europe.
It was a common attitude that, in order to make statements
about important Polish affairs, you had to be here, on the Vistula,
where life is cumbersome and hard, and not on the Thames or the
Seine, where it is comfortable and safe.
Few people then read emigrant journals; fewer still sought in
them inspiration for undertaking political activities. After the
Stalinist terror, people wanted peace; after years of wartime poverty,
they looked to their finances, they sought satisfaction in their fami–
lies, their professions. For the emigrants, this way of thinking was
unacceptable. For them the "small stabilization" was not enough:
they had to think in terms of" Independence and Democracy." Peo–
ple were unwilling to accept any programs of action that entailed an
overall change in their own lifestyles; the emigration could only dis–
turb their internal stabilization, could only be a constant pang for
consciences too quick to abandon their aspirations to widen the
realms of national and human liberties. The Poles scattered
throughout the world were seen as rich relatives from abroad, not
compounds of the Polish fate in the twentieth century. This was pos–
sible in a country whose culture is inextricably linked with the posi–
tion of the emigrant; in a country that for many years had a spiritual
existence thanks to its emigration: romantic literature, the music of
Chopin, the political work of the Great Emigration; a country where
people ought to understand quite well the sense and meaning of emi-
