492
PARTISAN REVIEW
the so-called dissident in totalitarian countries. As many East
European writers have pointed out-I have especially in mind
yaclav Havel from Czechoslovakia-the so-called dissidents in
such countries may of course constitute a minority and they
usually do, but on the other hand, they are the only normal peo–
ple around. To put it more precisely, against the background of
the rest of society, they seem to be the only human beings who
want to live like human beings. The simplest definition, then, of
a dissident writer is a writer who wants to practice his profession
in a normal way-that is, without submitting his work to any
control or interference. The simplest definition of a dissident
scholar is a scholar who puts truth above propaganda-that is,
who behaves normally, as every scholar actually should.
When I look back on my last decades spent in Poland, I can
describe the atmosphere only as a gradual return of the society to
some priceless normality. I had a chance to participate in that
process; and my literary experiences during that period, which
consisted of contributing to the crea tion of the independent pub–
lishing movement, seemed
to
me first of all a defense of normal,
humanlike behavior against the faceless absurdity of the state cen–
sorship. The point was that a word should have been a word and
a value a value; that nothing should have been deformed, concealed,
or falsified.
It
wasn't a matter of some lofty principles.
It
was quite
simply a physical impossibility of breathing under water.
I think the same can be said about everything else that has
happened in Poland since the mid-seventies. At the beginning,
the situation was quite typical of all totalitarian countries: a
small group of normal people-so-called dissidents-surrounded
by the majority of others who still preferred a way of life contrary
to the human condition. Later, in 1980, something extremely
atypical happened: the birth of a ten-mill ion-strong phenom–
enon called Solidarity meant in practical terms that the word
dis–
sidents
ceased to have any sense at all. In other words, not only the
first, but a lso the second connotation of that term was no longer
valid. What happened in August consisted of a massive return of
the whole society to normality . In that sense, all attempts
to
inter–
pret the phenomenon in traditional categories have been inac–
curate and incomplete. Solidarity is not-or not only-a form of
class struggle, as the Western leftists would like it to be. And it's
not only a form of antitotalitarian protest, as the liberals would
