MICHNIK
377
Shakespeare.
Hamlet
after the Twentieth Congress-this is how Kott
referred
to
his thinking in 1956. He wrote about how words and
phrases had acquired a new meaning: "Denmark's a prison," "the gal–
lows are built stronger than the church." He noted that the word most
commonly heard on stage is "watch." "Here, everyone is being
watched," he wrote, "and they are always being watched." Polonius,
one of the king's ministers, sends a flunky after his son all the way
to
France. Behind every curtain someone is hiding. Ophelia is under sur–
veillance, her letters intercepted. "This watchfulness corrodes every–
thing at the castle in Elsinore: marriage, love, and friendship. What
terrible experiences Shakespeare must have had at the time of Essex's
conspiracy and execution to understand so well the workings of the
'Great Mechanism.'" Each person "is simultaneously part of the Mech–
anism and its victim, because politics here leaves its imprint on every
emotion and there is no escaping it."
And Hamlet? He pretends madness; "he dons, in cold blood, the
appearance of madness in order to carry out a
coup d'etat.
Hamlet is
mad because politics, when it rejects all feelings, is itself madness."
Hamlet is "as rebellious as the young people on the journal Po
Prostu.
He has a burning passion. He lives for action, not reflection. He is
angry. He revels in his own indignation. But he has regained his capac–
ity for action. This is Hamlet after the Twentieth Congress." This is how
a Voltairean skeptic sang the praises of the "angry young men." The
"angry young men" of October '56 were the younger generation who
several years before had condemned the bourgeois tendencies of the
Kuznica
writers for adhering
to
Communist principle.
From the outside, these revolutionary fanatics looked like "them"
and seemed
to
have nothing whatsoever in common with
Hamlet.
A
witness of the era, a young woman opposed to the Communist system,
wrote that they were out
to
destroy all forms of human ties: in schools,
universities, the workplace. Most of them were aggressive and ruthless;
they were "informers and judges."
In
schools and universities, "they fol–
lowed the lecturers' every sentence," denounced their "deviations," and
organized campaigns against them. They felt most comfortable in an
atmosphere of revolutionary vigilance. When dictatorship became sta–
bilized, they found themselves shunted off to one side, because it was no
longer the students who were to supervise the teachers, but the teachers
who were
to
supervise the students. This was the cause of much frus–
tration.
Kott considered George Bernard Shaw a modern-day Voltaire.
In
an
essay on Shaw's
Saint Joan,
Kott stated: "He spoke many bitter words
