96
PARTISAN REVIEW
alternately opinionated and straightforward, or elusive; during a lecture on
history and Dostoyevsky, he commented, "Truly intelligent people are
reactionary, not progressive." But in a lecture on Stanislaw Ignacy
Witkiewicz's dark vision of art, in view of the demise of religion and phi–
losophy, Milosz stated, "This is not my philosophy-necessarily."
Each course began with a lesson in history.
In
Contemporary Polish
Poetry and Fiction, he said: "This course will deal with much history,
where Americans show a great lack of understanding." My note in the
margin shows how accurate he was; I wrote, "Get a good map of Europe."
He then spoke of the constant struggle between spiritual and temporal
powers, from Saint Stanislaw, the Bishop of Krakow in the eleventh cen–
tury, to the Church versus the Communists in Poland in the twentieth, and
observed that "history tends to be telescoped into one short paragraph;
what of other factors?" Each course became a discourse on those "other
factors," with Poland's "strange maverick history and mistrustful central
authority" as a backdrop. He alternated between straightforward history
and traditional and comments like, "Walt Whitman was responsible for
World War
I,
since it was one of his followers who shot Ferdinand."
For Milosz, the role of the writer is inseparable from the larger his–
torical context. Noting the poli tical orientation of Poli sh
Ii
terature and
how it determines the role of the writer, he spoke of how Gombrowicz
represented the rebellion of the individual, particularly in light of the unde–
veloped collective nature of Polish society. As to Dostoyevsky, he did not
agree at all that what is needed to change the individual is to change soci–
ety, as this would reduce man to a series of causes and events, bringing
about ultimately the death of man. Dostoyevsky's work depicted what was
going on the minds of the intelligentsia. Milosz described him as a realist,
not a psychologist; he placed
Crillll! alld Pllllishllll!lIt,
for example, to the year
and month , through references to particular si tuations, and described the
conU110n Western approach through psychological insights as "possible,
but mostly wrong." He believed that Dostoyevsky introduced the novel as
an instrument of both history and philosophy.
Milosz described the theme of Pure Form in Witkiewicz, where aes–
thetic values alone count. The reci pe for a Pure Form play: "Nothing is so
bad it can't be made worse." Here art exists for its own sake and is free
from reali ty, representing nothing but itself and/or the metaphysical
strangeness of existence. As Milosz put it, "Why here not there? Why now
not then? And me, sitting here playing professor." And he warned: "Don't
write about Pure Form unless you understand it."
In
Gombrowicz, form
was the all-embracing problem of art and life. Thus men, and especially
women, were different now than five hundred years ago, while the cat
today is the cat as he was then. Milosz notes that Gombrowicz wrote with
