22
PARTISAN REVIEW
still the death penalty, whether it be death from a bullet, or in prison, or
from hunger, and humanitarian choruses will have no effect on this.
For us, then, reality is social above all; that is, it is such that people–
things follow orders dictated to them by other people, who appear to
be masters of their own and others' fates, but who in fact have been
transformed into things by the so-called necessities of life. We have not
made much progress in understanding how all of this dovetails, and the
scientist who studies viruses or sends rockets to other planets may react to
self-appointed specialists in the social sciences with a sense of well–
founded superiority.
I started paying attention to this nature of things early on, convinced
that a poet who refuses to recognize its weight is living in a fool's par–
adise. While trying to cope with it, I also managed to collect many ex–
periences as early as the years 1930-39; that is, in a period that is virtually
unknown today. Unfortunately, if a reader should wish to find out what
that period was like in Poland and Europe, I would be unable to point
to any sources, because neither literature nor history has achieved even a
passably accurate picture. Social reality is distinguished by the fact that it
is opaque, treacherous, that with its myriad guises it deludes everyone
who is entangled in it. In those days, only a few years after World War
One, there were additional reasons for befuddlement, as happens when a
man has received a powerful blow to the head. Although people talked
a lot of nonsense, they seemed to be doing so in order to avoid thinking
about what reality signified. When I was a student, I got to know a
modest clerk from Poznan who was utterly absorbed in the by no means
so distant past. For he had fought at Verdun as a soldier in the German
infantry and had written a book about this for which he was vainly
seeking a publisher. I read the typed manuscript. This report of a sojourn
in the fifth or sixth circle of hell was probably more detailed and thus
more horrifying than Remarque's widely acclaimed novel
All Quiet on the
Westem Front.
The older members of my family had in their past the years
of war spent in the tsarist army, and even my beautiful cousin Ela, whose
portrait, painted by Janowski, is one of the loveliest examples of Polish
painting from around 1914, was a
sestritsa
[a Russian military nurse
1
at the
time. For a vast number of the inhabitants of our country reality still
meant tsarist Russia or Habsburg Galicia, and above all the World War
and the 1920 campaign - perhaps even more than independent Poland
itself. How well was it understood that the year 1914 was the
manifestation of all of Europe's defects and of her end, that the longed–
for war of nations had brought Poland to life as a posthumous creation?
Pride in "one's own rubbish heap regained" counseled putting on a face
that suggested nothing was wrong, but various subterranean currents
