CENTRAL EUROPEAN WRITERS
AS A SOCIAL FORCE
647
the sense that, as Wat puts it, "what had just occurred was a total earth–
quake," a frame of mind that found its extreme expression in Dadaism.
Now if I may digress for a moment, where the Dadaism
avant la lettre
of
the Russian Futurist movement, most notably of its "trans-sense" variety,
was a matter of dislocation of language, the Polish Futurists shared with
their Dadaist contemporaries the postwar trauma of "nihilism," of a total
collapse of faith in the viability of the Western civilization. A nihilism,
argues Wat, which made one singularly vulnerable to the temptation of
the Communists' "new faith." Wat's own evolution tells a significant
story. Actually, in contradistinction to some of his fellow Futurists, he
was rather slow in embracing the cause of Soviet Communism. As Milosz
reminds us, as late as 1926 he published an ironic, paradox-ridden and
brilliantly negativistic collection of stories entitled
Lucifer Unemployed,
which subverted all pieties.
In
fact, when this book was republished in
1959, as astute an essayist as Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski was moved to
wonder whether it was written after Wat's break with Communism.
In
answering Milosz's query as to how he happened to espouse
Communism in the wake of producing so irreverent and playful a work,
Wat said simply; "I got stupid," and added in a somewhat more substan–
tive vein, "I could not stand my nihilism, if you will, atheism." Calling
everything into question became an intolerable burden. At this point
Milosz is appropriately reminded of Bertolt Brecht.
Mutatis mutaHdis,
that
is, making due allowance for a significant difference in literary stature,
one could cite also the case of lIya Ehrenburg.
In
his memoirs,
People,
Years, Life,
which, admittedly, is only partly reliable, he offers a similar
clue to this metamorphosis from a freewheeling muckraker to a skillful
Soviet propagandist: "I could not live by negation alone, I was chilled
by [presumably his own] satirical smirks."
Wat is no less revealing about the consequences of the Communist
engagement for a creative individual than he is in discussing the roads
leading to it. Though he never joined the Party, he was for a number of
years an active and influential "fellow traveler," a prolific and articulate
Marxist critic and political essayist. As editor of the leftist
Literary
MOllthly,
he tried hard to follow the shifting Party line. Interestingly
enough, during this period he proved incapable of producing, or to be
exact, of publishing, any verse of fiction. Apparently, his was too fine and
original a literary sensibility to yield to the crippling demands of prole–
tarian realism. Thus, as a creative writer he was effectively paralyzed by
the irreconcilable conflict between his Marxist-Leninist politics and his
essentially modernist aesthetics:
