ZBIGNIEW HERBERT
571
It had its own apparatus of repression, lots of prisons, a sufficiently
corrupted judiciary. Who needed
Ashes and Diamonds?
Who needed
literature? Suddenly the writers saw the social demand disappear–
ing. They felt the emptiness, so they joined the opposition. They
loved us, they pampered us, and suddenly they dumped us . That's
how it looked in general terms. 1956 destroyed the myth of the engi–
neers of human souls - the myth of political usefulness of those who
were ready to support the system with their poems, paintings and
symphonies. The so-called elite was sent away empty-handed de–
spite its good service because the new lord was an upstart and held
the intellectuals in contempt.
iT:
The intellectuals were rejected although they helped the regime
in the most tragic times for the society - after the forged elections,
when the Home Army people were killed or sent to prison.
ZH:
Stalin expected that the sovietization of Poland would take
longer than it actually did. The party elite and the liberals closed
their ranks and the citadel was taken in no time at all.
iT:
Yes, but the Polish intelligentsia did not sell out during the Ger–
man occupation; it did not seek any accommodation... .
ZH:
...
some nationalistic factions included .
iT:
And what happened a couple of years later, when the repressions
were also severe and aimed at the nation's elite, although less spec–
tacular since people were not executed in the streets?
ZH:
What happened was the cultural revolution at the universities.
iT:
The triumphant Congress of Science in 1951, where I was also
present. Always the same conjurers. Later there were other purges,
like the one at the Warsaw Philosophy Department after 1968 .
ZH:
Let's start from the very beginning: The end of the forties and
the early fifties witnessed the revolution at the universities, or
simply,the liquidation of the Polish Humanities. There is no direct
testimony about that, only naked facts . The perpetrators remain si–
lent, the victims mostly died. A blank page. But it all happened not
in Peking, but on Krakowskie Przedmiescie. Our Napoleonic gener–
als , like Kolakowski or Pomian , did not do the dirty work. They
stoked the ideological fire . The dirty work was left to a group of
activists who later occupied prominent positions in the party. This
earthquake wiped out scholars representing various schools - people
of great academic and moral authority: Adjukiewicz, the Ossowskis ,
Elzenberg, Ingarden, Tatarkiewicz ... a long and decorous list.
Not a single one of them adopted the newspeak. Not a single one re–
nounced his phenomenological or neopositivist "fallacy."
If
they
