Europe, West and East, and the Polish Émigré Writers from Kultura: Five Stories About Asymmetry

Chapter 11 Europe, West and East, and the Polish Émigré Writers from Kultura: Five Stories about Asymmetry

Łukasz Mikołajewski

In her postscriptum to Imagining the Balkans, Maria Todorova sketched pos- sible tasks for historians of Eastern Europe and critics of the notion of the Balkans such as her: rather than “provincializing Europe” (as the title of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s book had it1) she proposed the goal of “de-provincializing” West- ern Europe, “which has heretofore expropriated the category of Europe with concrete political and moral consequences.” She saw this work with many dimensions—cultural, scientific, political—and centered her attention on the field of academic historiography. If they wanted to “de-provincialize” Western Europe, East Europeanists had to continue to keep up with the knowledge ad- vanced in the West European fields, but also to continuously “challenge the sanctioned ignorance of West Europeanists about developments in the eastern half of the continent.” Todorova’s proposed aim was a long-term process, an intellectual and cultural change that could happen only as a result of joint ventures of many historians, those working within national historiographies and those combining the mosaics of archival research with available secondary literature into a broader, more balanced, and evenly constructed historical picture. Todorova concluded that if “[...] this project comes to fruition, we will actually succeed in ‘provincializing’ Europe effectively for the rest of the world, insofar as the European paradigm will have broadened to include not only a cleansed, abstract, and

* Apart from the great team of scholars who gathered at the workshops during which we pre- pared our contributions to this volume, I also wish to thank Elżbieta Janicka from the In- stytut Slawistyki pan, Warsaw, and the participants of the visiting fellows’ seminar at the Remarque Institute (nyu) in Fall 2015 for the opportunity to discuss an early version of this chapter. 1 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 2000).

244 Mikołajewski idealized version of power, but also one of dependency, subordination, and messy struggles.”2 The notion of asymmetry can help us observe phenomena connected to power differences, those cultural and political relations that occur in various regions of the world in very different contexts and scales, yet bear many resem- blances. As a geometrical metaphor, asymmetry has been invoked to describe interdependencies of uneven stakes, when one partner’s commitments, costs, or risks do not mirror the other’s but outbalance them, whether in romantic love or political alliances, marital bonds, or economic relations. One party may be far more affected by the breaking of a commitment (as in marriage when society vests more power in men than women). This impacts on their relations and actions in significant ways.3 This chapter will explore some cultural and political asymmetries emerging from the reconstruction of the struggles with European identity manifest in the history of a group of Polish writers who after World War ii contributed to an émigré monthly review Kultura, published on the outskirts of Paris. The focus is twofold: the exiled writers’ transnational intellectual relations and the notion of power that transpires in their letters and autobiographical works.4 Gathering exiled authors who lived scattered across the world but still wanted to reach readers in communist Poland through smuggled, prohibited, or re- stricted copies of an émigré review, Kultura had a significant impact on the development of a dissident political movement as well as Polish literary cul- ture after the war.5 Its network of intellectuals contributed to the discussions

2 Maria Todorova, “Afterword to an updated edition,” in Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 202. 3 For an imaginative and insightful study of overlapping asymmetries and their impact upon individual biographies, see Natalie Zemon-Davies, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth- Century Lives (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1997). 4 Some letters and arguments analyzed in this chapter are presented and commented in great- er detail in Łukasz Mikołajewski, Disenchanted Europeans: Polish Émigré Writers from Kultura and Postwar Reformulations of the West (scheduled to appear in 2018 in the Peter Lang series “Exile Studies”). This monograph is based on my PhD (European University Institute) on Jerzy Stempowski and Andrzej Bobkowski, both associated with Kultura, and their changing understanding of Europe. 5 For more, see Włodzimierz Bolecki’s chapter on Kultura in The Exile and Return of Writers in East-Central Europe: A Compendium, eds. John Neubauer and Borbála Zsuzsanna Török (Ber- lin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), 144–203; or Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 (Yale: Yale University Press: 2003), 217–31. The most comprehensive monograph in Polish is by Andrzej Stanisław Kowalczyk, Giedroyc i “Kultura” (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Dolnośląskie, 1999).