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PARTISAN REVIEW
week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. "What about Wednesdays?" I
asked. "Wednesdays are out because she has a youth organization
meeting." "Well, what about Friday, Saturday, and Sunday?" "On
Fridays," said my friend, "she goes
to
confession, on Saturdays she
repents for her sins, and on Sundays she goes
to
communion."
"You still have Mondays." "No, no, I don't have Mondays. On
Mondays, she is firmly resolved to improve the world."
About Slonimski's play,
Samotnosc [Loneliness]
(July
I956),
Kott
wrote, "This is not the debut of an author with something
to
say. Quite
the opposite. This is a play by someone who has nothing
to
say and no
inhibitions whatsoever." And he noted: "For the first time in my life, I
whistled during a performance.
If
a play is a flop, one shouldn't whistle.
But if a play is downright disgusting, one ought to whistle. Whistle!"
And whistle he did. An angry Colonel Stanislaw Nadzin wrote in a sharp
letter that Kott had "incited the audience
to
hooligan behavior in the the–
ater." Kott replied: "I regret that I started whistling at
Samotnosc;
I
should have started whistling seven years ago."
The era of Stalinist orthodoxy came to an end, and somewhere around
the end of
I954
the thaw set in.
It
sprang from the idealization of the
purity of the first years of the Revolution,
I944,
the political conflicts of
the period, the faith and hopes that people nurtured at the time, "the
enthusiasm and festering bitterness, caution and recklessness." In a review
of a play by Jozef Kusmierek (November
I954),
Kott wrote, "Revolu–
tionaries had not yet become mired in paper-work, meetings, and admin–
istration." In a review of Mayakovsky's
Laznia [The Baths]
(December
I954),
he noted, "Mayakovsky uses General Director Dupno
to
depict
bourgeois small-mindedness, bourgeois small-mindedness that he hates."
Thus Kott diagnoses revolutionary purity as contaminated by the
bourgeois habits of bureaucrats. He makes yet another face at the
world, of a member of the rebellious "acne generation," younger than
the
Kuznica
generation. Between
I948
and
I951,
they attacked the
Kuznica
writers for their bourgeois literary tastes and demanded "accel–
eration" of the revolution in culture and art. The younger generation
was more fanatical and intransigent. "They considered us 'intellectu–
als,'" wrote Kott in
I955,
"and they loaded the word with all the con–
tempt they could muster... .For our part, we considered them tainted
by fascism at the deepest level of their personal lives. " But Kott and the
others of
Kuznica
were hardly "enemy agents" in need of "unmasking":
they themselves were adept at attacking "the enemy."
