MICHNIK
381
"He knew how to hate and was wonderfully alienated from the epoch,
but at the same time he was most closely entwined with it."
To consider the situation of Fredro and Krasinski is both to try to
understand and to refuse to engage in accusation.
It
also involves ask–
ing how to be simultaneously present and absent in one's own epoch.
In
the epoch of "the small stabilization," this was a fundamental question
for someone who had watched the student demonstration after the ban–
ning of Po
Prostu
in
I957
and who had read about the execution in
I958
of Imre Nagy-a communist and the prime minister of a rebellious
Hungary. Our hero-narrator didn't want to take part in this; he didn't
want to bear the responsibility. Nor did he want to be absent.
Gomulka's "small stabilization" was a kind of barren interlude, a
period of waiting. Waiting for what? For a change for the better, for a
better socialism. Kott saw in this "waiting for Godot" the boredom of
the canny Pole. "He is waiting for Godot, but he believes less and less
that he will actually come. Every evening, little boys and important
politicians tell him that he will surely come tomorrow. Sometimes he
even reads this in the newspapers."
In
such a climate the atmosphere is
akin to that of waiting for the end of the world. There is no place here
for Voltairean enthusiasm. Here, Wyspianski's
WyzwoLenie [Liberation]
is transformed into "a cabaret, a monumental and monstrous bur–
lesque." To foreigners, therefore,
WyzwoLenie
is just "a product of Pol–
ish craziness." And in this lies the heart of the matter: "We are seen as
crazy and thus not fully responsible for our actions."
This craziness means living in a state of befuddlement, in a world
where everyone repeats after Gombrowicz: "I am not so crazy that in
these Crazy Times I either do or do not have an opinion." To put it
another way, it means to live in a state between "persistent and shame–
less self-pity...mandatory belief in the insane idea that from the ashes of
the nation an ash will arise
to
avenge us," and the desire for normality.
History has no meaning, and "cultivating one's own garden"
a
La
Voltaire is simply naive self-delusion: it is either cruel or farcical-the
fate of communities that find themselves living on a volcano. Kott's
essay on the end of the world, in other words the eruption of the vol–
cano (February
I9 59),
is crucial
to
understanding the new face of our
hero-narrator-the face of the philosopher of the absurd.
He sees the volcano beginning to smolder; any minute now it will
erupt; there is no possibility of escape. What should one do? How
should one behave sensibly? There are four possible approaches. First,
"refuse
to
acknowledge the volcano's existence. Avoid allowing yourself
to be caught up in eschatology. Live as though nothing were happening.
