CENTRAL EUROPEAN WRITERS
AS A SOCIAL FORCE
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most pathological fear of the mortal sin of heresy, suggest
to
Wat a
striking observation: "We see here a duality of remarkable courage,
heroism and nonconformism with terrible fear and extreme conformism."
Courage and heroism, that is, in facing the powers that be, the outside
world, the class enemy, and total submissiveness to, and craven fear of,
one's own authorities, the Party.
This sketch of a Communist true believer points across the expanse of
many pages, of a full decade and a thousand miles, toward what is,
without any doubt, the most dramatic moment of Part Two of
My
Ce/ltllry,
indeed of all of Wat's testimony - a conversation in the Saratov
prison hospital with the dying old Bolshevik Nakhamkes Steklov. One of
the most eminent victims of the Great Terror, Steklov was spared an ex–
ecution and allowed to die a slow death in Stalin's prisons. The chance
encounter between the Polish poet, stranded in Stalin's gulag and the
temtinally sick relic of the old Bolshevik elite, in a prison van headed for
the hospital, produces instant rapport. Wat is stuck by Steklov's innate
distinction, the aristocratic fineness of his gaunt, ravaged face, the ele–
gance of his diction, his familiarity with the Polish intellectual tradition,
and, above all, by the intensity of his passion. (It seems that it was
Steklov's burning hatred of Stalin that kept him alive through all his or–
deals). At some point in the wide-ranging exchange a vexing question
predictably surfaces: "Why did the heroes of the Revolution confess? ...
How come they stooped so low? ... Were they afraid of torture?" Wat
recalls Steklov answering him:
"Torture' Who needed it? All, all of us," - I remember almost every
word of this, for even though I was feverish I felt a cold shudder be–
cause of the way he said it, "had our arms up to our elbows in shit
and blood ... Every one of us, the arrested heroes of the Revolu–
tion, had on our conscience so many degradations and villainies, and
that almost from the beginning, that we really did not care. To con–
fess or not to confess, this was not important. A man who knew that
his entire life was full of degradation ... felt a revulsion from his
own past. This revulsion . .. explains the confessions."
It
seems
to
me that in order to fully appreciate the import of
Steklov's
cri de coeur,
one ought to supplement it by Wat's insight into
Jan Hempel's "duality." "Revulsion from one's past," a sense of guilt and
unworthiness induced by contemplating one's past misdeeds, would not
have prevented the old Bolsheviks, I believe, from standing up to the
Fascist inquisition. (Witness the courage shown by the international
