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PARTISAN REVIEW
It
is the vagaries of this precarious alliance as they are reflected in the
prewar section ofWat's memoirs that shall provide the focus for my brief
and sketchy remarks. I may as well admit to a strong personal interest in
Wat's vivid reconstruction of the Warsaw literary and social scene be–
tween the two wars. As one who came of age in Warsaw of the 1930s
and who grew up in the milieu of the Jewish socialist intelligentsia, I
experienced many a shock of recognition as I read
My Centllry.
There
were also, parenthetically, some shocks of nonrecognition, some less than
heartwarming surprises. It seems that as a budding activist I had vastly
underestimated the extent of the Communist infiltration into the ranks
of the left wing of the Polish socialist movement. Yet my main justifica–
tion for choosing to share with you some of the highlights of the War–
saw phase of Wat's odyssey lies in the larger relevance of his retrospective
diagnoses, in the aptness of his hard-earned generalizations.
Early in the story, Wat makes it clear that the attempt to blend aes–
thetic and political radicalism was essentially a one-way street. He speaks
shrewdly of the Mayakovsky syndrome - and Mayakovsky's was a name
to conjure in the circles of the Polish avant-garde! - the tragically false
equation of what was inaccurately called a "revolution in art" with the
social revolution: "Since this is revolution, it must be the same thing.
And here an interesting thing happened. It is we, the so-called
intellectuals, who felt an abiding need for monotheism, for being left–
wing across the board." "Real Communists," continued Wat, "did not
have this need. Though their doctrine is absolutely monolithic, in
practice they would differentiate. Lenin ... could not stand
Mayakovsky's verse; he liked Gorky's prose. Stalin called Mayakovsky the
greatest poet of the Soviet era for political reasons, but, as is well
known, he detested his verse and his experimentation."
Wat reminds us that enthusiasm for the October Revolution on the
part of"the innovative Warsaw literati was in no way diminished by their
increasing awareness of the human cost of the Bolshevik enterprise. Wat
and his
confreres
read avidly Aleksandr Blok, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and
early Soviet prose, including Boris Pilnyak and the candidly disheveled
pageant of the Civil War savagery,
Rllssia Washed
by
Blood
by Artyom
Vesely. Yet not unlike most of their Russian counterparts, even if they
saw the horrors of the Revolution, they accepted them as necessary, as a
purifying sacrifice. "The more blood, the stronger the proof that the
cause is holy."
The Polish avant-garde intellectual's susceptibility to the mythology
and the rhetoric of the Russian Revolution was further enhanced by his
apocalyptic or, if you will, Spenglerian view of his own culture. The
urge toward a total renewal, a clean break with the past, was fueled by
