CZESLAW MILOSZ
23
were at work undermining the supports of official thinking. And just
when virtually every grown man was struggling with some Verdun of his
own, there came a new blow to the head: the 1929 crash on the New
York Stock Exchange, mass unemployment, and Hitlerism, orchestrated
by the German combatants of World War One. Soon afterward, a poet
who had been one of Pilsudski's Legionnaires of 1914 wrote, "Mother,
hand me my boots,! The ones from twenty years ago." The boots may
not have had time to grow old, but the "acceleration of history" has
changed the world around Poland a little bit.
*
When someone assures us after many years that he had a clear aware–
ness of standing "face to face with the end," we should not believe him,
because almost no one had such a clear awareness. Among writers, per–
haps only Zdziechowski and Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz did. As one of
the creators of "Catastrophism" I could, in fact, present written evidence
on my own behalf, but it would be evidence only of an intuitive, poetic
recognition.
Let me briefly explain where catastrophism came from. First, a rather
general background, not just the Polish one. The social reality of the
nineteenth century weighed upon people in literature and art, so they
considered protesting against it the chief aim of their activity, although
they reached out for various solutions. However, even the most abstract
aesthetic theories had as their foundation a rebellion against the swirling
vortex of the oppressors and the oppressed; the artist, as the only free
man, had to be set against this vortex. By taking refuge in bohemian
circles from the morality of the hated bourgeoisie and concluding
numerous alliances with social dreamers, the writer or the artist bore
witness to his heritage: the centuries-long yearning for the Second Com–
ing. Secularization was proceeding apace, however, and if Jesus was still
the central figure in utopian socialism, this Jesus figured only as an ethical
ideal and a reformer. Soon it would be openly announced that Man–
God and not God-Man would restore fallen nature.
In my mind, contrary to what I know about frivolous Paris in
La
Belle Epoque,
the beginning of my century has a gloomy color and a
shape that is, if I may say so, Russo-Anglo-Saxon . The year 1905. The
Russian "stormy petrels." The American writers of the class struggle: Up–
ton Sinclair's
The JUllgle
(1906), Jack London's
The frou Heel
(1907) . And
considering what I know about New York I do not think that the
picture Gorky painted in
The City oj the Yellow Devil
(1906) was an ex–
aggeration. Furthermore, a gloomy reality does not appear only in rev–
olutionary writers. It is also present in Joseph Conrad's
The Heart oj
Darkness
(1902), the novel that Thomas Mann called the beginning of
