MICHNIK
369
Marxism-a face with which to confront a world of nihilism and cruelty,
a world of round-ups and summary executions. He considered Jerzy
Stempowski and Stefan Zolkiewski his masters, but he followed in the
footsteps of Boy and Slonimski. From them, he inherited his brilliant
journalistic style, the mordant wit of his theater reviews, the subtlety and
grace of his conversation-and the seeming superficiality of his observa–
tions. This superficiality was a kind of mask, a stylistic stratagem. Kott's
writing always had several levels: he wrote for the authorities, for his
readers, and for his friends. He also wrote for himself, and at this level
dealt with what was most essential and personal, which he carefully cam–
ouflaged-not only out of fear of Hitler and Stalin, but of himself.
Jan Kott dreamed of writing a great novel that would register the
enormity and horror of the human condition in the twentieth century–
a sociological construction of man's fate. But man's fate is not a socio–
logical construct: neither Balzac's Rastignac nor Stendhal's Julien Sorel
was a hero typical of his time. As a critic, Kott demanded the typical,
but he was fascinated by what was unique and nonstandardized in
human beings. He once wrote: "Some life stories belong not just to lit–
erary history but to literature itself.... [They] are imbued with existen–
tial experience and demonstrate the boundaries where literature ends
and the zone of silence begins." He went on to add:
There are years and places... in which history demonstrates its hor–
ror and destructive force with exceptional clarity. These are chosen
countries in the same sense that the Bible refers to the Jews as a
chosen people. In these places and in these times, history is "let off
the chain." The fate of individuals seems to be directly over–
whelmed by history.
Kott's books constitute a series of volumes of a twentieth-century
Human Comedy.
The structure of his life story is a transcription over
time of the hero-narrator's internal monologue. The hero appears in
various incarnations. He is a budding writer, fascinated by Thomism
and surrealism. He studies Maritain and Breton and explores the novels
of Malraux. He witnesses the Soviet occupation of Lvov and the Nazi
occupation of Warsaw. He is a Jew in hiding who miraculously escapes
death. He is a member of the underground Communist party and a
fighter in the partisans. He subsequently becomes an aggressive Com–
munist and a rabid columnist for
Kuznica,
demanding the settling of
accounts and revolutionary transformation, a disciple of Voltaire with a
party card, an inveterate womanizer, a mendacious witness of the
