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exodus from cities where they constituted the majority (such as Wilno
and Lw6w) and from numerous regions with mixed populations, and to
accept complicity with Stalin's work in the "Western Territories." ...
December
25, 1987.... Recently I read and was pained by a slim vol–
ume of recollections and opinion essays about the Paris journal
Ku/tura.
Must I always be punished for my spiteful stupidity? At the beginning of
my stay in Maisons-LafTitte they assumed they had to educate me, so I
would open my eyes wide, pretending to be a child, "How can that be?
Do they have forced labor camps there?" And poor Zofia Romanowicz,
in her recollection of 1951, took me literally.
All this happened a long time ago, and now it's the end of the cen–
tury and the time to balance the accounts of our century is approaching.
Screens, fogs, veils obscure the view and it is difficult to determine where
things are, what is more important, what is less important. Anyone who
has dabbled a little in the history of literature knows how elusive are di–
visions into schools and trends, and how mistaken the bestowing of lau–
rels can seem after the passage of a decade or two. Perhaps the ultimate
criterion will be the dose of reality present in a given work, demanding
allegiance to the truth. Then those books that dispel the fog behind
which the monster of Leninism-Stalinism used to hide will enjoy a great
rehabilitation. I have observed over many decades how reluctantly they
have been received and how quickly forgotten.
In Wilno in the early thirties, one Olekhnovich, a Bclorussian former
prisoner in the Solovki Island prison camp, received from his Polish read–
ers the same reception that Poles who were released from the camps later
received from the English public: sympathy, but disbelief, because the
witness must have done something wrong; after all, no one is punished
unless he's guilty. In those same 1930s, Panait Istrati and Andre Gide,
with his
Return From the USSR,
presented an opportunity for an orga–
nized campaign against the disillusioned, the "traitors." Victor Serge,
Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, and George Orwell were placed on this
list immediately; Albert Camus was soon added. The progressive intellec–
tuals conducted a whispering campaign - actually, not so much a whis–
pering as a gesticulating campaign - which was much more effective than
defamation in the press. They dealt with those inconvenient writers as
they did with the servants of the bourgeoisie: without resorting to
words, with an unspoken, mutually agreed-upon system of grimaces,
snorts, dismissive gestures.
I could give the titles of books that either were not published or
were effectively killed by silence. Also of books that were published in
