174
PARTISAN REVIEW
sorting out discrepancies and distortions of perspective. Venclova's bio–
graphical detective work is superb, despite his lack of access to sources
such as KGB archives, which might have helped reconstruct Wat's
Communist activities in the 1930s and 1940s.
The discrepancy between Wat's relatively tiny output and his
grandiose ambitions (which included solving the metaphysical problem of
the source and nature of evil, and analyzing totalitarian society from the
perspective of language) arose largely due to his being in continual dis–
abling physical pain. "The devil behind my illness," Wat declared to
Milosz, "is the devil of Communism." During much of his life in Poland,
Wat was known primarily as a translator (he translated two of Ilya
Ehrenburg's books) and fiction writer.
In
Begirllling With My Street,
Milosz
explains that "for several decades Wat's high position in literary circles was
actually the posi tion of a talker rather than a wri ter," attributing Wat's
long silence as a writer to his having been "struck mute" from the "vast
store of knowledge he had accumulated about our century."
Wat believed his moral imperative duty was "to give a philosophical
interpretation of the phenomenon that determined the course of his dis–
graced century" through means that were often startlingly original. Wat
yearned, he explained, to "dance on the ruins ... to smash the language
into pulp, to fragmentize words so that their syllables make a new idiom
of one's naked skin." Wat's long Dadaist prose poem, "Me from One Side
and Me from the Other Side of My Pug [ron Stove" (1920), which
Venclova refers to as "his war against sense," was one of the most radical
avant-garde texts of its era, confirming Vladimir Mayakovski's assessment
of Wat as "a born Futurist."
Wat's next work,
Lucifer UI/employed
(/927), a collection of cata–
strophic short stories, questions and nihilistically discredits morality,
religion, love, and the idea of personality itself, in an attempt to show how
intellectuals fell under the inOuence of totalitarian movements as a "glob–
al answer to negation .. . that hunger for something all-embracing."
"Communism," he explained to Milosz in
My Cel/II/ry,
"arose to satisfy
certain hungers .... One of those hungers was a hunger for a catechism, a
simple catechism. That sort of hunger burns in refined intellectuals much
more than it does in the man on the street."
Wat's unfinished essay, "Nine Notes Concerning a Portrait of Joseph
Stalin," a critique of totalitarian reason, prefigures and complements his
personal critique of Stalinism in
My Centl/ry
and his other autobiograph–
ical works, the as-yet untranslated (and presumably untranslatable)
Diary
withMlt Vowels
and
Scraps
oj
Paper ill the Wind.
Venclova observes that in
"Nine Notes," Wat "carved out a niche at the intersection of linguistics
and philosophy" with his exploration of "the profound semiotic psy-
