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PARTISAN REVIEW
between the law and legalized illegality, between a just war and
rapacious invasion, and between obedience to the law and slavery.
The most unexpected and thought-provoking feature of the con–
temporary dissident movement is the revival of long-forgotten,
antiquated, almost cottage-industry forms of protest and resis–
tance:
samizdat,
the chain method of transmitting information,
silent picketing, individual hunger strikes, books smuggled across
frontiers, open letters signed by a selected group. I belong to a gen–
eration which-and I am not just referring to those of us who
believed in its two extreme ideologies-believed in modern forms
of organization: large-scale political movements, discipline, and
sworn obedience seemed to us the only effective means of improv–
ing the world. Recent experience has shown that large political sys–
tems, just like the most modern airplanes and computers, have their
weak points. A whole army of policemen and spies finds it
extremely difficult to prevent a meeting of a dozen people who
have decided to speak their mind.
In
this world, which has been
hacked into three different pieces, it has been impossible to silence
the quiet voice of the cottage-dissidents. The dissident position has
demonstrated not only its moral values but also its political effec–
tiveness.
It
is one of the few sources of fragile hope that remain.
And dissidents are to be found not only in countries ruled by com–
munist parties.
Kott's essay, in a collection entitled
Kamienny Potok [The Stony
Stream],
was published by the underground publishing house, NOWa .
In
this way he returned to Poland.
Kott had always conceived Poland in a particular way. He loved and
understood the Poland of the Enlightenment and Kollataj's
Kuznica
group, the Poland of the positivists and Boleslaw Prus, the Poland of
Wiadomosci Literackie,
Boy and Sionimski. He felt at home in, and in
touch with, this Poland. He didn't trust or understand the messianic–
insurrectionist Poland, the nationalist-Catholic Poland, the Poland of the
Home Army and Mikolajczyk. He sawall the blemishes and pitfalls of
this tradition and failed to see its brilliance and splendor. Did he under–
stand his friend Wlodzimierz Pietrzak, a critic associated with the jour–
nal
Prosto z mostu
and the radical nationalist right? Did he understand
postwar Catholicism, Wyszynski and Wojtylla? People from the Home
Army, Zbigniew Herbert and Jan Jozef Szczepanski? I'm not talking
about approving but about understanding the extent of their tragedy.
Kott defended himself with laughter, irony, and derision. These are excel–
lent weapons, but they do not facilitate understanding. La ughter is
