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PARTISA REVIEW
progress, isn't it? With lines in front of empty stores, this city had a fourth
world look not so long ago."
He is right: the queues, so symbolic of the quality of life in a Socialist
state, have all but disappeared from Warsaw streets (if you don't count the
enormous lines in front of Western embassies' visa offices). Free enterprise
provides competition; competition provides better supply, better service,
and
even lower prices: capitalist commonplaces seem to work at least at the level
of Marszalkowska Street and the farmer's van . In the larger perspective,
though, the first beneficial consequences of the switch to a market economy
are counterbalanced,
if
not overshadowed, in the eyes of the average con–
sumer by its negative side effects. You may buy your pork chops straight
from the itinerant farmer-salesman for a lower price than at the nearby
butcher's but, on the whole, the cost of living has risen dramatically. This
is
a
result of sharp price increases caused by stopping the government subsidies
in virtually every area of production and services, from agriculture to mining
to housing to transportation. Perhaps more important in the long run, the
looming vision of the capitalist catch-as-catch-can system makes many people
wonder what the fate of those less aggressive, less able, or just less lucky is
going to be. What about the old and disabled? What about the severely un–
derfunded orphanages and houses for the mentally impaired? What about the
unemployed, whose number at this point, with no genuinely massive layoffs
put in effect yet, has already reached 700,OOO?
And what about other areas oflife, seemingly not so necessary for so–
ciety to physically survive, therefore the first to get hurt by the economic
reform's paring knife? Culture, in particular, seems to have been victimized
most severely in this way during the first year of post-Socialist Poland:
an
ironic development in the nation that owes a great deal of its political trans–
formation to the courage, determination, and ethical spirit instilled in the minds
of its best people precisely by its culture. This particular area may not mean
much in the daily life of the man in the street, but culture's withering may
have ominous long-term consequences. The artistic, literary, and scholarly
communities in Poland, in any case, are still reeling from the shock. There is
no shortage of indignant voices of intellectuals who, generally supportive of
the new government's policies, accuse the Parliament and the members of
Tadeusz Mazowiecki's Cabinet of indifference toward Polish culture's future.
Izabella Cywinska, a well-known theater director and former Solidarity ac–
tivist who serves as the Minister of Culture, has become the critics' favorite
scapegoat for her alleged lack of guts in defending culture's interests, even
though she has managed to ensure the continuation of government subsidies
for a selected group of the most cherished, and most endangered, cultural in–
stitutions such as several literary periodicals and a few dozen theaters.
The writer Jacek Bochenski recently reminded his colleagues in a sober
speech that the future of culture is part of the future of the entire nation;
