ADAM MICHNIK
Gogol's Venom: A Study in Lost Illusions
W
HEN IN 19
82
JAN KOTT wrote an essay entitled "On
Venom," he dedicated it to the memory of Adam Wazyk,
and noted: "A snake bite disables the mind. Inside a magic
circle, the mind moves in a fictitious world, believes in lies, and cannot
distinguish reality from illusion." He went on to say that intellectuals'
involvement in communism went from joining the movement to leav–
ing it-in disappointment and disillusion-and that "the moment of
disillusion is perhaps the most important."
Jan Kott's own writings bear him out, when one looks at successive
versions of his texts that were first published in journals, then in book
form, and then in later editions of these books. Kott changed his texts,
gave them new meanings and significance, got his dates wrong, his
names mixed up; and he made up quotations. Thus, one could conclude
that Kott didn't tell the truth. But, as Czeslaw Milosz wondered when
analyzing the captive mind, is the truth to be found in thoughts on
"Hegelian venom"?
It
certainly describes the path taken by Tadeusz
Kronski, the Hegelian philosopher and patron of the Warsaw school of
the history of ideas, and by Kolakowski, Baczko, and Beylin. Wazyk,
however, did not mention Hegel-he used the term "a lunatic asylum."
Sometimes I think that the people demanding Kott's head have a
point. Undoubtedly, he was a communist, and an intelligent one at that.
He wrote extremely well and helped shape public opinion. He was able
to persuade his readers while wounding his adversaries. This should be
enough for our would-be lustrators and decommunizers. But could he
have made Hegelian venom the main ingredient of his life? After all, his
books don't indicate that he ever read Hegel.
When you consider the increasingly oppressive climate of the
1930s-Poland caught between Hitler on one side and Stalin on the
other, the grotesque and brutal regime of the Sanacja colonels under
attack from the National Democrats, discrimination against Jews in the
universities, thugs from the extreme-right National Radical Camp with
their knuckle-dusters-is it surprising that a young intellectual from a
family of Polonized Jews should be attracted to the left?
