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PARTISAN REVIEW
This approach has some characteristics of clowning but is also stoical."
Second, the eruption of the volcano is presented as a historical necessity.
The volcano then becomes a deity.
It
is possible to pray to it, and to
demonstrate rationally the necessity for the eruption. The third
approach is the heroic one. One must struggle against the volcano
regardless of the chances of victory, in the way Camus's heroes struggled
with the plague. Barricades and shelters must be built.
If
one manages
to stem the flow of lava, this approach will be heroic; if the lava over–
flows the inhabitants in their homes, it will be decidedly farcical. The
fourth approach is to keep on doing business as usual right up to the last
minute. This is the most widespread approach, but it turns out to be far–
cical when the volcano actually erupts.
There seems to be no sensible approach to the end of the world, only
farcical ones. Even heroism becomes farcical. A sense of absurdity pre–
vails over all else. From here on, our hero-narrator will be reading Shake–
speare and Kafka, Beckett and Witkacy afresh. He will find the absurd
everywhere. About Mrozek's
Tango
he will write that it isn't a work of
surrealism: "Mrozek is a realist, a realist about Polish absurdity."
Kott not only wrote books and essays: he also signed protests, such
as the "Letter of the 34," the first collective protest of Polish intellectu–
als against censorship. As before, he was ferociously intelligent, bold,
and popular. He was the "jester" of the Gomulka years, in the positive
sense of the word. He remained on close terms with the inner circle. At
opening nights he would come across ministers and say malicious things
to them. In
I966
he left Poland for a lecture tour of the United States.
In
I968
he chose to become an emigre.
Kott continued to search for new faces to carryon his contest with
the world. He sympathized with the American protest movement,
enjoyed the student rallies at Berkeley, and signed petitions against U.S.
intervention in Vietnam. He wrote vividly, intelligently, deceitfully. And
yet his writing lost something that had made him one of the most sensi–
tive barometers of historical processes. Only the most attentive reader
would perceive that nearly everything he wrote was a fragment about
himself. And he wrote two different autobiographies-a public one,
Przyczynek do autobiografii [Contribution to an Autobiography],
and a
secret one, whose outline I shall now attempt to trace.
Kott didn't understand Russia, and-like the rest of Poland-he
was afraid of it. He was also afraid to write about this fear. This pro–
vided the basis for Gogol's venom. He could have coped with Hegel,
but not with the Spirit of the Times embodied in the Red Army. Years
later, he described his meeting with Boris Pasternak in
I947.
The great
