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not only in the case of the barbarian peoples converted by Rome,
but also in the vast territories that had taken religion from
Byzantium: religion, but not the language of the church . The
Russian historian Georgy Fedotov sees the source of all Russia's
misfortunes in its having chosen a Slavic idiom for its church
language instead of Greek, which could have become in the East an
equivalent of the West's universal Latin. Russia was thus isolated for
a long time until it suddenly and belatedly discovered Western ideas,
giving them grotesque and ugly shapes . In Poland, which won the
war of 1920 with revolutionary Russia and succeeded in preserving
its independence until 1939, the feeling of danger was too elemental
to require research into its historical causes . Nevertheless, my
knowledge of the Russian language since childhood, as well as some
non-Western elements in my own makeup, has gradually led me to a
reflection on Russian messianism and its holy city, Moscow, a city
once called the Third Rome (which fact has not been without
consequences). Thus my interest in Dostoevsky results to a large
extent from geography.
The South-North axis. The language of the Polish poets of the
sixteenth century, like the language of the newly translated bibles,
both Catholic and Protestant, is closer to today's Polish than the
language of
The Faerie Queene
is to today's English. Or, if you prefer,
it is closer in tone and sensibility. This means that a Polish poet has a
more intimate relationship with his predecessors in the poetic craft
and feels at home in the sixteenth century. But the most eminent
among those poets, Jan Kochanowski, was bilingual; he wrote a
number of poems in Latin, and many of his Polish poems are just
adaptations from Horace. A Polish poet is thus constantly reminded
of that very professional question: What should be done today with
classicism?
The notion of the South-North axis is, I hope, clear enough.
Another notion, the West-East axis, is perhaps more exotic, though
not for readers of
Uizr and Peace,
for instance, where the heroes,
well-educated Russians, happily converse in French. In the eigh–
teenth century French becomes, after Latin, the second universal
language of Europe, and this time Russia was included in its range.
In provincial East and Central European capitals a myth was born,
of Paris, the capital of the world. The eyes of devout Catholics might
still have been turned to Rome, the capital of the papacy. But the
enlightened, the worldly, the chasers of fashion , all wanted to know
