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PARTISAN REVIEW
the ailing Polish poet (in residence for the year at Berkeley in 1964) was
the brainchild of Gregory Grossman (at Berkeley's Center for Slavic and
East European Studies), who enlisted Czeslaw Milosz to record Wat's tor–
turous memories. Wat found Milosz the ideal listener and felt that when
they sat down with the tape recorder, Milosz was performing "an act of
exorcism" on him. Thirteen years after these tapings, the eminent
Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova visited Berkeley and "rediscovered" the
poetry of Aleksander Wat, who, to his astonishment, was "a major twen–
tieth-century writer as yet undiscovered in the West." Twenty years later
- despite the publication in English of two books of War's poetry, short
stories
(Lucifer Unemployed),
and
My Century
-
this brilliantly eccentric
writer and intellectual remains nearly as unknown and underappreciated
in this country. During Wat's lifetime, one Polish critic declared, "Perhaps
there is nothing in his work except un-accomplishments," but it is the
fragmentary nature itself of Wat's output reflecting "the cataclysmic
nature of his disastrous times" that fascinates Venclova.
While the facts of Wat's shattered biography are, as Venclova puts it,
"paradigmatic" of many East and Central European twentieth-century
intellectuals, few writers have identified so closely with "the expectations,
blunders, and disillusionments of modern times." Venclova makes an ele–
gant and persuasive case for renewed attention to War's writing as well as
to his profound, bold analysis of ideological and cultural trends, of which
he was both an observer and targeted victim.
Wat's disjointed career was punctuated by a succession of spiritual
crises, a thirty-year-long silence as a writer broken at age fifty-seven, and
fourteen imprisonments for an array of trumped up charges. During World
War
II,
Wat served time in Soviet prisons for allegedly being a Zionist, a
Trotskyite, and even an agent of the Vatican . An agonizing long-term neu–
rological illness, caused by a ruptured blood vessel in his brain during a
stroke (which occurred just after he had been severely criticized for his
attacks on social realism) a few weeks before the death of Stalin, shaped
both his life and literary output for the last fourteen years of his life before
his suicide in 1967.
Wat's poetry is imbued with religious issues, allusions, and images, and
Venclova sensitively probes the attraction of both Judaism and Christianity
to Wat's soul. Wat's Jewish lineage, described in an unfinished poem, "An
Attempt at Genealogy," was impressive. The Wats (the real family name
was Chwat) traced their ancestors to Rashi and Israel ben Shabbatia
Hapstein of Kozienice, a Hasidic wonder-worker and preacher who had
followers among Polish aristocrats. Other ancestral luminaries included
the Gaon of Kutno and the original proponent of the Lurianic Kabbalah,
Isaac ben Solomon Luria (known as the Lion or
ha-Arz).
Wat's father was
