CZESLAW MILOSZ
25
place on the plains of Eurasia, near the Arctic Ocean, and in the
Caucasus.
After 1939, the young poets of underground Warsaw could not re–
main indifferent to such accurate forebodings by their predecessors. Nev–
ertheless, prewar catastrophism was a threat to these young people, be–
cause it was international in its intellectual references, and they wanted to
enclose themselves in the national dimension whatever the cost. Similarly,
when they encountered another catastrophism, Witkacy's, what they
borrowed from him was chiefly his grotesque, from his plays, whereas we,
judging by my own response at least, were influenced primarily by the
historiosophical premises of his novels . We were not , however, as
pessimistic as the desperately clowning and suicidally earnest Witkacy.
Who knows if a totally pessimistic poetry is even possible or, if poetry is
to be at all valuable, whether it does not always have to be hopeful? In
the poetry of the Catastrophists, every so often a note of irony toward
the fate that befell them can be heard, but there is also a yearning for
harmony, for beauty, which ought to be the lot of a saved man.
And what about today, when those dire prophecies and their fulfill–
ment (or, rather, partial fulfillment) are in the past? Our planetary reality
has split in two into the so- called West and the so-called East, and I have
drunk from both the one and the other poisoned well. I have also be–
come convinced that the puzzle of the thirties still cries out for a solu–
tion.
Did the nineteenth century lie when it dreamed its dream of itself?
That can't be ruled out. But at least its great metropolis, in which
Macbeth's witches stirred their brew, speaks to us from the pages of
Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky; it is the stage for a human comedy like the
cite infernale
of Baudelaire's poems; it looks at us with the faces of the
corrupt judges and venal journalists of Daumier's prints, and with the
face of the prostitute from Manet's
Olympia.
There was something then
that could be called the will of realism. That will was still in evidence at
the beginning of our century, but not for long. Its disappearance from
literature and art is more or less contemporaneous with the widespread
dissemination of the newsreel and the documentary, which is why people
have sought
to
lay the blame for this on emulation of these new, vicari–
ous means of expression. But the true causes probably lie much deeper.
Man is either a
supported
being, or he dissolves into mist, into a mirage.
For the nineteenth century the impetus given by Christianity still sufficed
to support man; that is, to understand individual fate as meaningful. The
advocates of Man as the Masses, industriously patching together their so–
cial literature during the thirties, fooled themselves into believing that
Nietzsche's laughter had nothing to do with them. For no matter what
