564
PARTISAN REVIEW
ZH: Ashes and Diamonds,
reprinted again and again, poisoning the
minds of the young. One hears that it was the "Hegelian sting." I am
sorry, but Hegel was dead . He died a century earlier. It was Ber–
man, Sokorski , Kronski who did the stinging . When I am speaking
about a crime, it is the crime against the young generation of those
now in their twenties and thirties. They are still being raised on this
kind of literature. This is a crime against the Holy Spirit-an un–
pardonable sin. I am a Roman Catholic, but more Roman than
Catholic.
JT:
That's true . The generation that wrote at that time - in fact an
even older generation was still active then - has not analyzed its own
position thoroughly enough. I think that the sting - whatever it
was - happened earlier. Those procommunist sympathies, which
continued after the war, originated in the interwar period or even
earlier. I think that the longer our historical perspective, the further
back in time we have to go to find the roots of the phenomena cul–
minating in the forties and fifties. Milosz, who broke with all that,
was for a short time, as a member of the Vilno "Zagary" group, a
follower of this inquisitional formula that pictures the writer as a
helper of politicians in training human souls according to the dictates
of politics. Milosz later withdrew. As a Polish diplomat he was only
a conformist. Why did so many different. people at different times
follow the same path? By the thirties a lot already was known about
the Eastern neighbor.
ZH:
It
should have been known . At least after the Great Trials . Why
then did the oldest of the old boys choose that line? Andrzejewski
once tried to explain to me that communism was for him like
"Pascal's night." I am not sure whether he remembered Pascal at that
time, or whether he was so influenced by Zhdanov that he had for–
gotten who Pascal was. Let's not hide behind metaphysics. Let's not
inflate ourselves like balloons. We are talking about primitive mat–
ters in a primitive language. The old boys - and girls - knew every–
thing very well. Perhaps the times of terror were too much for a
literary imagination. But what does it really mean? The spirit of
history does not exist. The system was built by people. One can list
their names. First there was a small group of agents who attached
themselves to the intellectuals, and the intellectuals played "Sonata
Pathetique" for the new order.
It
was petty, foolish, pitiable, menda–
cious. Nothing to talk about.
JT:
You have touched upon a very important subject. There was no
material for "Pascal's night." Those who speak about metaphysics
