MICHNIK
371
erotiCism. "He was not afraid of being biased, because there were good
reasons to be biased." But his "exceptional charm" lay in his deeply con–
cealed self-irony. In July
I945,
he already liked to quote d'Alembert's pre–
Revolutionary comment: "Let's talk about the elephant, because it is the
only large creature we can safely talk about." To which he added a quote
from Montesquieu: "Despotism is such a dreadful thing that even those
who practice it turn against it." After which he went back to unmasking
the armed "bandits" of the underground and General Anders, the
Catholic Church and
Tygodnik Powszechny,
Milosz's view of impending
catastrophe, and the concept of honor in Conrad's novels.
Szkola klasykow [School of the Classics],
published in
I949,
announced the arrival of literary realism in "a country building social–
ism." In this manifesto of impending doom, with its brilliant analyses of
Defoe, Swift, and the French socialists, we find the following quotation
from Diderot:
Power acquired by force is nothing more than usurpation; it lasts
only as long as he who gives the orders remains stronger than those
who receive them. Therefore, if the latter become the stronger and
impose the yoke, they will do so in a manner as lawful and just as
that in which the yoke was imposed on them.
This was well said, but it was just an aside. The main thread was rejec–
tion of "the whole despicable deceit of bourgeois solidarism." And the
hero-narrator went on to reject Zeromski and Wyspianski, Sienkiewicz
and Conrad. His arguments were often threatening in tone. This was,
after all, a time when "it was possible to destroy someone with a single
joke and kill him with a single denunciation." He was often a great actor
in a terrible play. He behaved as if he were living at a time when"Alaric
entered Rome, when the cultural values of the intelligentsia lay in ruins."
He was the gravedigger of the old era and the herald of the new. He
drowned out the horror of the new era with such phrases as: "You can't
make an omelet without breaking eggs," or "You can't make a revolution
and keep your hands clean." One of his friends simply commented,
"Janek always blathers on until late at night."
Where did this blathering come from? In
I956
Kott wrote: "The
occupation taught me the most. ...The only thing that saved me from
succumbing to the horror...that helped me resist the nightmare, was the
belief that right is on the side of history, that fascism would be crushed
and that it would be crushed by the Red Army....When I joined the
People's Army, I stopped being afraid." Such was his explanation in the
