470
PAl"l..TISAN REVIEW
September
16, 1987. Those who became Communists in 1945 had all
the logical arguments on their side. As for the young writers, even their
alternative option was not very plausible. The country was incorporated
into the new imperium forever; all one had to do was look at a map.
So who could resist it? Those who didn't understand it, who were
counting on a new war, on a miracle, and so forth. That's one cate–
gory. The other was people who disagreed with the atheistic religion of
Communism, which, however, assumed a greater familiarity with the
Russian phenomenon and a better understanding of it than Polish writers
possessed. Not many of them, most likely, had read Dostoevsky's
prophetic novel
The Possessed.
Of course, the Catholic populace had an
intuitive understanding and it was enough for them to see the marks of
the devil's claws. Among intellectuals, those who were religious Oerzy
Turowicz, Hanna Malewska) remained constant in their f:lith, but that
meant accepting the likelihood of martyrdom, which is something peo–
ple forget about today....
September
19, 1987.... My strictness, my defense of discipline, amuses
me. As if
I
conformed. Let's say this expresses my great need for a higher
order.
In
this regard I am Italian or Polish, not American. We have a
right to behave swinishly, but there should be that higher authority over
us. Rules exist in order to exist, not in order not to be broken.
It
seems to me at times that I am a character from a work of fiction.
This is a serious intuition; it goes deep. For our imaginings about our–
selves, whether written down or not, are a composition. Consciousness is
like a law of form. My cat, Tiny, does not dream up any stories about
himself ...
September
22, 1987. Yesterday Robert Hass and I finished our work on
my
Collected Poems.
I have been looking at texts from around 1950: for example,
Konstanty Galczynski's translations of Shakespeare and also of Schiller
("Ode to Joy"), of Neruda and the Russian poets. What a topic: the
triumphal Communism of the twentieth century after the victories of
Stalin's armies in the years 1942-1945. Aren't they exaggerating today
with their hollering about the immorality of those who entered the ser–
vice of Communism at that time? Also, expressing astonishment at their
blindness, since millions were rotting to death in the gulags over there,
while here there were odes to joy, enthusiasm for the new life, "the new
man"? They ought, instead, to contemplate the fundamental duality of
