Jacek Trznadel
AN INTERVIEW WITH ZBIGNIEW HERBERT
JT:
We are talking on the 9th of July, 1985 .
ZH:
Anno Domini. The conversation is about a period I do not like
to talk of. I do not like to remember it. I am in a rather difficult
situation. I was not a participant in this enslavement of literature
during the Stalinist period.
JT:
But this may give us a special perspective .
ZH:
Perhaps. Can only the plague-stricken talk about plague?
Although I certainly won't be able to avoid it, I would like to exclude
the element of pride and self-elevation. It was a rather repulsive
chapter in the postwar history of our literature. I am a specialist
neither in the history of pornography nor the history of political
gangsterism, and all this smacks exactly of pornography and polit–
ical racket. People in Poland at that time could be divided into two
categories : those from the left and the right bank . Those who lived
through the Soviet occupation of 1939-1941 in Lvov or Vilno had
some idea of the Soviet system. They witnessed its demonstration
in
nuce.
Such people, like me, did not consider 1945 a "liberation" of
any kind, but an invasion-a new occupation which was both longer
and morally more difficult to survive. The Lvov experience was a
lesson that left virtually no doubts about the color of the regime and
its intentions. For me it was a brand of fascism. A terrible word, but
I can prove it - fascist in its method . It is true that communism had
its saints, while fascism had none, and that there was a certain qual–
itative difference. But the method was the same .
JT:
I quite agree with this definition , especially when we speak of
the essentials. The term "totalitarianism," although still evoking pro–
tests from the authorities when used directly to describe the present
regime, begins to be tolerated by censorship in indirect and peri–
pheral analyses.
ZH:
Perhaps for a Frenchman "totalitarianism" still means some–
thing. Here, in Poland, it is going out of use. So I was a Pole from
the right bank, an Eastern Pole, who knew everything about the
Editor's Note : This interview first appeared in
Kultura N iezalezna,
a Polish under–
ground review, in 1985.
It
was later published , together with other interviews by
J acek Trznadel, as
Hanba domowa (Domestic Ignominy).
