CENTRAL EUROPEAN WRITERS
AS A SOCIAL FORCE
645
Germany in the 1950s, excerpts from the "report to my friends" were
included. He died in 1958.
Donald Fanger:
Thank you. Our second speaker is Victor Erlich,
whose topic is "The Dilemma of One Polish Writer."
Victor Erlich:
The focus for my brief note is provided by a work born
of a dialogue between an ailing Polish poet, Alexander Wat, and Czes–
law Milosz that took place at Berkeley in 1965. This memorable ex–
change dominated by Wat's voice eventually gave rise to a two-volume
book in Polish,
Moj wiek,
and somewhat later to an English version bril–
liantly abridged by Richard Lourie and Czeslaw Milosz -
My
Cenwry.
That Alexander Wat's
My
Cel/fllry
is one of the major human docu–
ments of our time and the most significant Polish work of nonfiction for
many a year, has by now been widely recognized.
It
is equally apparent
that Wat's staggered and staggering testimony, so skillfully elicited by
Czeslaw Milosz, owes much of its resonance to the speaker's passionate
engagement with one of our century's salient issues - the nature of
Communism, the sources and consequences of its appeal. Yet if
My
Ce/ltllry
is much more than another addition to the vast body of litera–
ture of disenchantment with Communism, more than another instance of
the "God that failed" syndrome, this fact is due in no small measure to
the distinctive vantage point and, no less importantly, the intellectual
caliber of this memoir.
It would be an understatement to say that throughout his reminis–
cences Wat is preoccupied with his central theme. He is demonstrably
and avowedly obsessed with it in an uncannily personal, indeed morbid
sort of way, to the extent of positing some "demonic" connection
between his bout with Communism and his debilitating illness. (Early in
his narrative, he speaks of Communism as "illness-producing" and de–
scribes his dialogue with Milosz as an "exorcism".) Now, as we have seen
time and again, a fixation on one's erstwhile political sins can easily turn
into an impoverishing, vindictive, or self-punitive single-rnindedness. Yet
when an obsession with a major issue is lodged in a first-rate intelligence
and a fine literary sensibility, it is apt
to
become a source of public
illumination as well as of private anguish. Moreover, as the most gifted
member of the embattled band of the Polish Futurists, indeed the only
one among them to develop eventually into an original and serious poet,
and an editor of a short-lived pro-Communist literary journal,
Miesiecz l/ik literacki (Literary Monthly)
from 1929 to 1932, Wat was in a
nearly unique position to offer telling commentary on the problem of
the relationship between the literary avant-garde and the political left.
