THE SARMATIAN REVIEW Vol. XXXVII, No. 3 ______September 2017
Contemporary Warsaw Architecture
Photo by Edwin Dyga.
September 2017 THE SARMATIAN REVIEW
The Sarmatian Review (ISSN 1059- In this issue: 5872) is a triannual publication of the Polish Institute of Thank You Note...... 2104 Houston. The journal deals with Polish, Central, and Eastern European affairs, and it explores their implications Sarmatian Review Data...... 2105 for the United States. We specialize in the translation of Krzysztof Brzechczyn, Is Poland being flooded with documents. Sarmatian Review is indexed in the American xenophobia and racism? Statistics and myths . . 2107 Bibliography of Slavic and East European Studies, Peter Dale Scott, Miłosz, Eliot, and the Generative EBSCO, and P.A.I.S. International Database. From January Canon: Literature, the Past, and the Future . . . 2110 1998 on, files in PDF format are available at the Central SB, Poland in the Irish Nationalist Imagination: and Eastern European Online Library (www.ceeol.com). Anti-Colonialism within Europe (review) . . . . . 2120 Subscription price is $21.00 per year for individuals, SB, Czerwone pająki (Red Spiders) (review) . . 2121 $28.00 for institutions and libraries ($28.00 for individuals, Ewa Thompson, The Demon in Democracy: $35.00 for libraries overseas, air mail). The views expressed by authors of articles do not necessarily represent Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies (rev.)2122 those of the Editors or of the Polish Institute of Houston. Edwin Dyga, Donald Trump’s Warsaw Speech and Articles are subject to editing. Unsolicited manuscripts and the Nihilism of Modern Sophisticates ...... 2125 other materials are not returned unless accompanied by a LETTERS ...... 2128 self-addressed and stamped envelope. Please submit your About the Authors ...... 2130 contribution electronically and, if requested, send a printout by air mail. Submissions and Letters to the Editor can be emailed to
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Sarmatian Review Data
Legacy of communism Estimated number of persons executed in prisons or who died in communist prisons in Soviet-occupied Poland between 1945–1959: 50.000. Among them, the number of partisans who continued to fight against the communist regime after the Second World War was over: 15.000. Source: Professor Krzysztof Szwagrzyk, Head of the Polish Institute of National Memory, as reported by
Polish food exports in 2017 Percentage of food coming from Poland consumed in EU: 9 percent. Poland is the sixth-largest producer of food in the EU. Polish products as percentage of products consumed in EU: dairy products 8.2 percent; meat products 10.5 percent. Source: Artur Osiecki, “Polska żywność podbiła Europę, teraz czas na świat,” Rzeczpospolita, 11 June 2017 http://www.rp.pl/Debaty-ekonomiczne/306119950-Polska-zywnosc-podbila-Europe-teraz-czas-na-swiat.html#ap-1, accessed on the same day. Defamatory stereotypes Number of persons suspected of participating in car theft in Germany in 2016: 17,701. Among these, number of German citizens: 11,037, or 62 percent. Number of citizens of other countries, European and non-European: 6,664. Source: Lausitzer Rundschau, as reported by Rzeczpospolita, 18 March 2017, http://www.rp.pl/Przestepczosc/303189932-Kradziez-samochodow-w-Niemczech-Obalony-stereotyp-o- cudzoziemcach.html#ap-1, accessed on the same day.
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Catholicism in Poland Percentage of Poles who define themselves as Catholics: 92 percent. Percentage of Poles who declare that they attend Mass weekly: 50 percent (a drop of 8 percent since 2005). Source: CBOS poll, as reported in Gość Niedzielny, 28 June 2017 http://gosc.pl/doc/4009288.Ilu-jest-w-Polsce- katolikow> accessed on the same day.
SELECTION OF DATA FROM PREVIOUS ISSUES
Financing of the far-left and neo-Marxist organizations in Poland Percentage of funding that Krytyka Polityczna, a neo-Marxist left-wing periodical, receives from abroad: 90 percent. Exact quote: “My organization employs several dozen people and the majority of donations––90 percent, and it has always been so––comes from abroad.” Source: Krytyka Polityczna editor Sławomir Sierakowski in a Radio TOK interview, as reported by portal
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Federation of Anarchists) posted an anonymous statement on its website, titled Oświadczenie – Nacjonalizm nie przejdzie! (Statement– Nationalism Won’t Pass!), in which it called for Is Poland Being Flooded a demonstration on April 8, 2017. They wrote the following: with Xenophobia and Racism? “In the last few years a wave of nationalism, Statistics and Myths racism, and xenophobia has flooded Poland in its entirety. The growth of popularity of these Krzysztof Brzechczyn ideas, supported by the ruling party, has been on the increase from month to month. More and ecause of the temperature of the political more often one hears that ethnicity and religion conflict in Poland, some problems that play the key role in these attacks. Everywhere B should be solved after a thorough you go you see people wearing T-shirts with discussion of the subject matter––leading to slogans about killing the enemies of the nation. constructive actions acceptable to everyone–– Antirefugee news has become the norm in the have instead become instruments of media government-owned media. In 2015 the number attacks on the democratically elected of reported racist crimes grew by 20 percent government, to the detriment of Polish society. compared to the year before.” Notably, the One example is the issue of crimes against figure of 40 percent appears in the Polish foreigners. Fortunately, they are rare and Poland version (the Statement was issued in two is still a relatively safe place, compared to languages): Western European countries. However, these http://www.rozbrat.org/dokumenty/lokalizm/452 crimes, presented in newspapers and popular 1-owiadczenie-nacjonalizm-nie-przejdzie, television channels as proof of the increase in accessed 06/23/ 2017. nationalism, xenophobia, and chauvinism, fuel the fight of the opposition against the rightist- This anonymous statement was reposted on the conservative government. Facebook website of the Institute of Philosophy and, for a time, of the Institute of Sociology of In order to get a full picture of crime in Poland, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. The it is necessary to know that in 2016, a total of initiators of the demonstration mentioned in the 748,464 crimes were committed in Poland statement, supported by the local edition of (http://statystyka.policja.pl/st/przestepstwa- Gazeta Wyborcza, organized a press conference ogolem/121940,Przestepstwa-ogolem.html). and asked university authorities to join the This figure includes all kinds of crimes, from demonstration and publish a call to participate petty theft of a candy baton to murder. The on official university websites. Robert Wielkopolskie voivodeship where the Adam Winnicki, a nonattached member of the Polish Mickiewicz University is located registered parliament, a former member of the Kukiz 15 61,705 crimes. Within this number there were parliamentary club and president of Ruch just a few cases of racially aggravated battery of Narodowy (a small right-wing party), issued an foreign students and generally foreigners. The interpellation about the support given to the most recent such case took place on March 31, radical left by the academic entities of Adam 2017. A student from India was hit as he was Mickiewicz University. Winnicki addressed his getting off a streetcar. The attacker ran away, interpellation to Jarosław Gowin, Minister of and after witnesses gave their testimony the Science and Higher Education police ruled out racism as the motive for that (http://www.sejm.gov.pl/sejm8.nsf/InterpelacjaT attack. In spite of that, the incident activated the resc.xsp?key=62A8E6C8, accessed June 23, circles in Poznań who are against the governing 2017). Although he does not have any coalition and like to describe themselves as “the connections with Poznań and its university, he total opposition” (totalna opozycja). Poznańska availed himself of this opportunity to attract the Federacja Anarchistyczna (the Poznań attention of the mass media. The university’s
2107 September 2017 THE SARMATIAN REVIEW president judged Winnicki’s action to be an When we take a look at the statistics of crimes attempt to breach university autonomy, while the motivated by ethnic, racial, and religious local and national media presented the prejudice, which are publicly available on the interpellation as a denunciation and a Internet website of the National Police governmental attack on academic freedom. On Headquarters (http://statystyka.policja.pl/st/, April 6, 2017, AMU’s Vice-Chancellor Tadeusz accessed April 8, 2017), it turns out that in 2005 Wallas met with the demonstration organizers, (when SLD, the communist party that morphed while President Andrzej Lesicki wrote a letter in into a social democratic party, was still in which he presented the position of the university power), the number of initiated proceedings was authorities on the matter. In the end, the twenty-five. In 2006 it grew to thirty-nine, but in university authorities did not give in to pressure 2007 fell to thirty-seven. Between 2008 and and did not join the demonstration. 2014 the number of crimes of this type was growing slowly but systematically. In 2013 there The described event can be interpreted as an was the first sudden increase of the number of attempt to involve the university in a fight hate crimes––by over 100 percent in comparison against the government and to shift political to the previous year (from 98 cases in 2012 to conflict to university territory. The structure of 196 in 2013). A similar increase took place in the Statement itself favors such an interpretation: 2014 (262 committed crimes). At that time, no the Statement contains 3,431 characters with one alarmed public opinion or accused the PO- spaces, while the description of the alleged hate PSL coalition of supporting “nationalism, crimes takes up only 624 characters. The racism, and xenophobia.” No one organized remainder (2,807 characters, or 81.8 percent of antigovernment demonstrations. There was the text) consists of accusations against the indeed a huge increase of the number of hate current government of the Republic of Poland crimes motivated by ethnic, racial, and religious and of reflections on worldview and ideology. prejudice in 2015 (768 recorded cases). It is worth noting that the quoted excerpt from However, in 2016, when the rule of the the Statement, which refers to crimes motivated “nationalist-racist-xenophobic” PiS began, the by ethnic, racial, and religious prejudice, does number of such crimes did not grow but actually not contain complete data (they stop at 2015), fell by three, to 765 (in words: seven hundred and the data is quoted without referencing and sixty five) (https://oko.press/2016-byly-o- sources. In my opinion, this falsifies the big przestepstwa-nienawisci-niz-2015-razy-wiecej- picture. Beata Szydło’s government, which niz-2014/, accessed April 8, 2017), in allegedly supports the growth of “nationalism, comparison to the 748,464 recorded cases in racism, and xenophobia,” took office on 2016. Although the number of hate crimes did November 18, 2015. How then can the not fall to the 2014 level, the growth tendency government and the supporting party be was stopped for the first time since 2012 (see responsible for the increase of crimes pursuant chart 1). Yet the anonymous authors of the to section 257 of the Criminal Code in that entire Statement do not notice this and mislead readers year? There is no mention in the Statement of into believing that the number of hate crimes the fact that before November 18, 2015, Ewa grew under the present conservative Kopacz was the prime minister and the government. government was controlled by the PO-PSL coalition.
Chart 1. Crimes motivated by ethnic, racial, or religious prejudice by year
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easier prey for the criminal than permanent residents of a locality. There is no mention of The question of why such growth took place that in the Statement, which is a pity because during the terms of the PO-PSL government there are many more crimes committed for (until November 18, 2015) and why the PiS nonideological reasons than crimes pursuant to government (since November 18, 2015) has not section 257 of the Criminal Code––the victims been able to stop it should be the subject matter of which, by the way, can also be Poles. of serious analyses and not a mere pretext for attacking the political party one does not like. It In 2005, when the SLD party was in power, the seems that one of the reasons for the increase in number of crimes against foreigners was 4,056 crimes committed against foreigners is the rise (http://statystyka.policja.pl/st/wybrane- in the number of foreigners living and working statystyki/przestepczosc- in Poland. For example, in 2013 there were cudzozie/50867,Cudzoziemcy- 400,000 Ukrainians working in Poland. In four przestepczosc.html, accessed July 5, 2017). In years this number has tripled to 1,200,000. It is 2006, when the “nationalist-racist-xenophobic” expected that by the end of the year two million PiS came to power (in coalition with Liga Ukrainians will be working in Poland Polskich Rodzin and Samoobrona), the number (http://wschodnik.pl/ukraina/item/11105-ilu- of such crimes fell to 2,936. In 2007 with PiS still in power, the number of crimes against ukraincow-wyjechalo-do-pracy-w-polsce.html). foreigners decreased again, to 2,161. The falling If the anonymous authors truly cared about the trend continued until 2010; since that time the safety of foreigners in Poland they would number of crimes against foreigners has been acquaint themselves with other statistics, such as slowly increasing. The statistics on the website the number of crimes committed against of the National Police Headquarters cover the foreigners in Poland. Crimes against foreigners period from 2004 to 2012. In 2012 1,043 such are often committed not because of ideologically crimes were committed (see chart 2). motivated hatred but because foreigners are an
Chart 2. Crimes against foreigners by year
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rywali-platforma-17-nowoczesna-tylko-9- sprawdz-wyniki, accessed 07/01/2017). The A few hundred people participated in the solid public support for the rightist-conservative demonstration in Poznań. The invited speakers government that has introduced social reforms made fiery antigovernment speeches. Toward that have diminished economic inequalities is the end there were scuffles between the reason that the opposition has been testing pseudofootball fans and anarchists, and between nondemocratic means of action as possibly the anarchists and the police. Have the foreigners only way to lower public support for the present living in Poland benefited in any way from the government. ∆ demonstration? Probably not, since that was not the point of the whole affair. The reason for this demonstration and probably many others has been the opposition’s inability to create a Miłosz, Eliot, and credible political program assuring its return to power in the nearest democratic election. The the Generative Canon unfolding of the numerous corruption cases that Literature, the Past, and the Future has been going on in Poland in mid-2017, starting with the Amber Gold affair, makes this supposition probable. In the reent opinion polls Peter Dale Scott PiS leads over the rest of political parties. According to poll results conducted by TNS “The poetic act both anticipates the future and speeds its coming.” 1 Polska between June 3–8, 2017, PiS is supported MIŁOSZ, ELIOT. AND THE CANON by 40 percent, PO by 17 percent, and Nowoczesna and Kukiz-15 by 9 percent of n his lecture accepting the Nobel Prize in respondents I 1980, Czesław Miłosz acknowledged his debt (http://wpolityce.pl/polityka/296643-pogrom- to authors preceding him like William Blake, tns-polska-pis-z-40-proc-poparciem-miazdzy- and also his duty to maintain their tradition by rescuing it from what was now dated:
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Those who are alive receive a mandate from those took Communion––though, as we shall see, for who are silent forever. They can fulfill their duties opposite reasons. only by trying to reconstruct precisely things as they were and by wresting the past from fictions and ___ 2 legends.' I now see Miłosz as a response and important In acknowledging a poet’s obligation to what we corrective to Eliot’s important but decidedly now commonly call the literary canon, Miłosz idiosyncratic view of tradition, which itself was following in the footsteps of T. S. Eliot. can be seen as a corrective to the Eliot also argued that great creativity came from idiosyncratic perspectives of Blake. incorporating tradition, not from just breaking ___ with it. In his seminal essay of 1919, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot argued that “the Both men were deeply critical of the provincial best, the most individual parts of [the poet's] cultures in the remote regions of Missouri and work may be those in which the dead poets, his Lithuania where they were born. However, their ancestors, assert their immortality most provincial origins enabled them to come to the vigorously.”3 Eliot saw tradition as a whole as masterpieces of European literature, as had an “ideal order,” and he saw new works as Goethe and Schiller before them, as outsiders, rejuvenating a past: “What happens when a new the more able to see great literature in work of art is created is something that happens perspective, and thus wish to rescue tradition simultaneously to all the works of art that from an uncritical status quo.6 On a deeper level, preceded it.”4 In the essay this emphasis on the both men believed in the doubleness of the past leads to a polemical argument for human condition: that all of us exist in a fallen “Classicism” (obedience to “outside authority”) everyday world but also have access to a higher as opposed to “Romanticism” (inspiration from order of being, or what Miłosz called a “second an “inner voice,” which according to Eliot space.” This led in both men to an oscillation “breathes the eternal message of vanity, fear, between pessimism and hope. Miłosz’s quarrel and lust”).5 with Eliot was in part a debate within himself. More than that, I believe, it was a quarrel at the Here we come to a paradox. In his Nobel speech dialectical heart of Western culture, perhaps at Miłosz endorsed what Eliot wrote about––the the heart of all literate cultures. need to learn from poets of the past. But where Eliot was concerned with great poetry Eliot’s praise of a Eurocentric “ideal order” has rejuvenating past poetry, Miłosz was concerned frequently been criticized as too static, with it escaping the past and offering hope to underestimating the degree to which its tradition advance a future society. This brought him to was to be dialectical and even anti-traditional, in take issue with Eliot. A believer in his own what Octavio Paz once called “a tradition 7 daimonion or inner voice, he did much to elevate against itself.” Once we read Eliot from this the canonic authority of Blake, Whitman, and perspective we can see that Eliot’s critique of others whom Eliot had marginalized. In short, moribund Romanticism was itself a valid part of Miłosz redefined the canon established before that anti-traditional tradition. So, in the same him by his semblable, T. S. Eliot, much as Eliot spirit, was Miłosz’s later critique of moribund had redefined the notion of culture established classicism. before him by his semblable, Matthew Arnold. I would like to consider Eliot, Miłosz, and the Miłosz was heavily influenced by Eliot, tradition they both cared for, as not just a especially after having translated “The Waste recuperative but a generative tradition. Although Land” into Polish. Both men became famous for it has taken me many readings, I have slowly their alienated depictions of their war-torn come to see Miłosz’s Witness of Poetry as a century, and also for their tantalizing glimpses seminal correction to the polemics of Eliot’s of a spiritual alternative to it. Both men in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” just as diverse ways considered themselves Catholics; Eliot’s essay had been a seminal correction of unlike many of their colleagues, both regularly the decadent Romantic critic Middleton Murry.
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I say “correction” because so many of Eliot’s In The Witness of Poetry Miłosz situated Polish early critical assessments were not only poetry in the larger context of “our [European idiosyncratic but untenable. For example, Eliot and American] civilization, shaped as it is by the himself revised his earlier downplaying of Bible and, for that reason, eschatological to the Milton and Goethe, just as his decade of efforts core.”13 Both here and in the more radical book to define himself as “a royalist in politics” ended The Land of Ulro, Miłosz was explicitly in the 1935 crisis of Edward VIII’s abdication following both Blake and especially the great when, like most, he chose the voice of the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz. As Miłosz Church over that of the Crown.8 explained in Witness, Poland, precisely because of recent historic experiences “comparable only THE WITNESS OF POETRY to violent earthquakes, offers a peculiar Winning a Nobel Prize is not always good for perspective” on poetry.14 Through two centuries poets. However, in Miłosz’s case it revived of oppression from abroad, “Polish poetry ambitions for poetry that he had voiced earlier in became a home for incorrigible hope, immune to the bardic tradition of Poland, where for over a historical disasters.”15 In this way Polish poetry century poets had preserved the integrity of a preserved the spirit found in Blake’s “prophecies nation that had lost its sovereignty and on the victory of man in his struggle against the government.9 The most memorable example is night.”16 This spirit is vital: “The fate of poetry his 1945 poem “Dedication” (“Przedmowa”) depends on whether such a work as Schiller’s about which he was later deeply ambivalent: and Beethoven’s Ode to Joy is possible. For that What is poetry which does not save to be so, some basic confidence is needed, a Nations or peoples? sense of open space ahead of the individual and 17 A connivance with official lies, the human species.” A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a To exemplify this “sense of open space ahead,” moment. . . .10 Miłosz looks first to Walt Whitman, a poet for In his middle years Miłosz distanced himself whom the future was as open as it had been in from such extreme ambitions, especially after both the Age of Reason (Schiller) and in the Age moving to California, where until 1980 he was of Raptures (the Romantics).18 Miłosz’s example relatively unknown and remote from his from the latter age is Pan Tadeusz by readership. A Marxist in his youth, he later Mickiewicz, which “seems to draw its strength criticized secular Marxism, and for––as Robert from a belief in the basic goodness of the world Hass neatly summarized it––valuing “becoming sustained by the hand of God and by the poetry more than it valued being.”11 of country people.”19 Its verse was “shaped [like all Polish poetry] by Latin classicism” and it was After the Nobel Prize Miłosz began to write in a also marked, like the Enlightenment before him, style that was more confident, optimistic, and by “a basic optimism toward the future, a suited for a global rather than a narrowly Polish millenarian faith in the Epoch of the Spirit.”20 audience. We see this change in the series of Right after the Second World War Miłosz had Harvard lectures published in 1983 as The similarly argued that the social function of Witness of Poetry. Here Miłosz developed what poetry was to sustain an Arcadian dream of he had said earlier about a poet’s role in “universal happiness”: “Sometimes the world extracting the future from the past. In his words, loses its face. It becomes too base. The task of “The poetic act both anticipates the future and the poet is to restore its face, because otherwise speeds its coming.” Miłosz hoped for a literature man is lost in doubt and despair. It is an that would supersede a prevalent indication that the world need not always be like pseudoscientific “reductionist Weltanschauung,” 21 12 this, it can be different. one afflicting the entire present era. In short, the canon should help prepare for the future, not Seeing his own era through the eyes of his just restore the past. francophone Lithuanian cousin the poet Oscar Milosz, Czesław Miłosz claims in Witness that Western poetry has lost its sense of “an open
2112 THE SARMATIAN REVIEW September 2017 space ahead.” He criticizes the “pessimism, occurs in the course of an entire chapter titled sarcasm, bitterness, and doubt” of twentieth- “A Quarrel with Classicism.”26 We need to century literature, which had withdrawn “from explore the informative reasons why Miłosz, in the domain common to all people into the closed these lectures and elsewhere, takes issue with his circle of subjectivism.”22 Defending with Blake obvious forebear Virgil (and also with T. S. the naïve imagination, Miłosz emphasizes the Eliot), but before exploring these differences, let importance of “saving” humanity from “images us acknowledge the similarities. In the words of of a totally ‘objective,’ cold, indifferent world Seamus Heaney, “Miłosz. . . will renege neither from which the Divine Imagination has been on his glimpse of heaven upon earth nor on his alienated.”23 In his last chapter he argues for a knowledge that the world is a vale of tears. return to a different poetry, one that supplies a There is something Virgilian in this combination hope grounded in “the dimension of the past of of tender-minded susceptibility and melancholy our human race.”24 understanding.”27
MIŁOSZ’S QUARREL WITH VIRGIL CLASSICISM, CLASS, AND HUMANITY I warmly endorse what I see as Miłosz‘s Miłosz did not see classicism as a living argument in effect for a poetry that participates tradition leading to Dante and himself, but as a in an ongoing dialogue with canonical tradition, dead one in antiquity from which one needs to engaging in humanity’s past and future. I do so separate. He writes that “the poetics of as a North American who stumbled on the classicism” are “alien to a poet of today, but also classics belatedly and mostly by accident, just as intriguing in their strangeness.”28 In the essay he I came on my own from an agnostic household proceeds to describe the Latin classics as a mark to an awareness of meditative and religious of a privileged class, not accessible (as he is experience. Miłosz opens his lectures by arguing poetry should be) to “the great human describing how from childhood he was forced to family.”29 The Latin classics were indeed what study what I had to discover for myself: “In the distinguished him as a student in Wilno from the gymnasium for several years I studied. . . the peasants he left behind on his father’s estate.30 history of the Roman Church and dogmatics . . . To sustain his quarrel with classicism, Miłosz Also classicism, the subject of both my quotes from Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, written fascination and my dislike, has its origin in while Auerbach was isolated from libraries in Horace, Virgil, and Ovid, whom I read and Turkey during the Second World War. “In translated in class.”25 Thus his and my attitudes antiquity,” Auerbach writes, “the question of towards Virgil, and for that matter religion, were style became really acute when the spread of very different. Neither was part of my world, but Christianity exposed Holy Scripture, and shone remotely like Platonic ideas outside the Christian literature in general, to the aesthetic cave of my fallen existence, but both religion criticism of highly educated pagans. They were and classicism had significantly shaped the horrified at the claim that the highest truths were world in which Miłosz grew up, and in ways not contained in writings composed in a language to always to his liking. their minds impossibly uncivilized and in total ignorance of [the] stylistic categories.” Miłosz Elsewhere I have assimilated Miłosz to what in adds, “But it is precisely for this reason that we American university curricula is often called learn more of everyday life in the Roman empire “the classical tradition” of Virgil, Dante, Milton, from the Gospels than from the Latin poetry of and Blake. As mentioned earlier, I prefer to call the Golden Age. Horace and Virgil so filter and it the “generative canon,” the continuous distill their material that we can only guess at redefinition of our culture’s core that supplies some of the down-to-earth data hidden behind new commonplaces with which authors can their lines.31 Miłosz thus sees the classics as a agree or dissent. But while in The Witness of literature shared only by a privileged class, one Poetry Dante and Blake are repeatedly offered that is protected from experience and isolated as models of inspiration, Virgil is only from the audience of the general public and also mentioned once again, and negatively. This from their sufferings.
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“Mankind has always been divided by one rule Elvira, or Julia, whatever the name/ Of her with into two species: those who know and do not whom I sleep and play chess”), he addresses speak and those who speak and do not know. Dante and concludes This formula can be seen as an allusion to the only, as once for you, this remains real: dialectic of master and slave, because it invokes La concreata e perpetua sete,* centuries of ignorance and misery among serfs, The inborn and the perpetual desire peasants, and proletarians who alone knew the Del deiformo regno – for a God-like domain, cruelty of life in all its nakedness but had to A realm or a kingdom. There is my home. keep it to themselves. The skill of reading and I cannot help it. I pray for light, writing was the privilege of the few whose sense For the inside of the eternal pearl. L’eterna 37 of life was made comfortable by power and margarita. 32 wealth.” This separation is one Miłosz * Dante, Paradiso 2:19 remembers from his own childhood. Elsewhere MIŁOSZ’S QUARREL WITH ELIOT he has written in prose about his “shame that I came from a family which had lived for In thus grounding a vision of a “second space” generations off the labor of the common in a setting of sordid casual sex, it is obvious to people.”33 The same sentiment underlies his me that Miłosz was drawing on the precedent deeply personal and important late poem and style of Eliot’s The Waste Land, the poem “Treatise on Theology,” in which he laments his he translated while the Germans were growing alienation through learning from the systematically demolishing what remained of peasants of his parish––“The opposition, I Warsaw after the 1944 Uprising. versus they, seemed immoral”––and in the end This analogy barely begins to encompass the revived the tepidity of his own faith with the similarities between the two poets. For example, “vein of ecstasy” of those singing and praying at I cannot read Miłosz’s late confessional poem Lourdes: “Here walks a many-tiered man. . . frightened of Naturally, I am a skeptic. Yet I sing with them, a verdict, / now, for instance, / or after his death” thus overcoming the contradiction without thinking of Eliot as Pound reported him between my private religion and the religion of the 34 in the Cantos, saying, “I am afraid of the life rite. after death.”38 Tinged with pessimism after the Throughout his life Miłosz strove to overcome experience of tragic wars, both poets express the schism, described by his mentor Oscar irritation at what Miłosz once called the 39 Milosz, “between the poet and the great human “shameful ‘progressive’ nonsense” of liberals family.”35 In Witness he explains that his (like myself). Both poets considered themselves purpose “is to make clear . . . that, roughly Catholic and came from strongly religious described, a quarrel exists between classicism backgrounds in remote regions. But whereas and realism. This is a clash of two tendencies Eliot distanced himself strenuously from the independent of the literary fashions of a given optimistic Unitarianism of St. Louis, Miłosz period and of the shifting meanings of those two found nourishment by returning to the simple terms. These two opposed tendencies usually piety of his birthplace in Lithuania. This led to a also coexist within one person.” Miłosz more serious difference: Miłosz was born into illustrated this doubleness in himself in his poem the gentry, but strove hard to reduce the gap “No More,” where he saw himself as an artisan between himself and the less privileged; Eliot’s “who arranged verses about cherry blossoms,” roots were Midwestern and middle class, which failing to find adequate words “in a graveyard he strove hard to transcend by reinventing whose gates are licked by greasy water.” The himself as a factitious English Tory. poet accepts this inability at the end: “so, cherry 36 Many critics have recognized the pervasive blossoms must suffice for us.” More influence of Eliot’s techniques and values on affirmatively, he transcends the disjunction in Miłosz.40 It was thus a surprise for me on my the poem “Dante” in which, looking at a woman first reading of The Witness of Poetry to find sitting at the edge of a bathtub (“Theodora,/ Eliot treated even more disparagingly than
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Virgil. There Miłosz criticizes The Waste Land Even here the real issue was not so much with for having lost the vision of an open space in the Eliot himself as with his complex but powerful human future that animated first Schiller and influence. In Eliot’s shadow, Miłosz wrote, then Whitman: “It is difficult to find any “American poetry fell ill; excessive straining for tomorrow in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.”41 high culture and a fear of simplicity of Later he alleges that “in Eliot and to some expression are not, as a rule, healthy for extent in Pound a certain norm is placed in the poetry.”48 This hostility to “highbrow” literature past, the model of time is regressive, the future is echoed in his extended criticism in Witness of does not promise anything good.”42 Admittedly “the separation of art and the public” in the Eliot, like Miłosz himself, was pessimistic about West; and his comment in his Nobel lecture that the course of time, but this summary judgment “theories of literature as écriture, of speech of him seems unfair on first reading, the more so feeding on itself” are conducive to “the growth from a man who elsewhere could admire the of the totalitarian state.”49 poetry of both Jeffers and Ginsberg, and who Here we can see Miłosz’s quarrel with elitist once wrote that “the more harshly we judge classicism mirrored in his quarrel with Eliot. It is human life as a hopeless undertaking and the a quarrel that is not limited to style, but extends more we rid ourselves of illusions, the closer we to their different attitudes toward spirituality and are to the truth.”43 indeed society. We have already seen that I do believe that Miłosz’s summary judgment of Miłosz’s Catholicism was a reaffirmation of his The Waste Land fails to do it justice. Elsewhere links to the people among whom he was born; in Miłosz admirs Eliot for his “oppositional stance” sharp contrast Eliot’s Anglo-Catholicism was a in an age of decadent secularism.44 On the other way of distancing himself from the Unitarianism hand, as I said at the outset of this essay, Eliot in of his family and surroundings in St. Louis. In his criticism was idiosyncratically fixated on a Eliot’s famous profession of his new values–– poet’s relationship to the past, rather than (like “an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in Blake or Miłosz) to the future. Over the course literature and a royalist in politics” ––all three of time I have thus come to internalize Miłosz’s terms stand out as deliberately and provocatively overall assessment of Eliot, who was once so unpopular. important to me that he was the subject of my Miłosz once commented on the poetry of Philip dissertation. Larkin, “That emptiness and cruelty, which is We need to understand that in his Harvard the basis of Larkin’s Weltanschauung, should be lectures Miłosz was not seriously evaluating any accepted as a basis on which you single poet, but making an Eastern European work toward something light.”50 Intelligent case against the “separation of art and the evaluators have seen Eliot’s work as a lifelong public” that in his eyes had afflicted culture striving towards something light, indeed a “heart since the retreat of poets into Bohemia (and of light.”51 But if poetry is to “change nations more recently the universities) starting in the and peoples,” I can see how Eliot’s contorted nineteenth century.45 In his earlier “Reflections and unhopeful spirituality, together with his self- on T.S. Eliot” he had assessed Eliot’s work as a professed classicism, might have struck Miłosz hopeful “attempt at learning that the as too refined and elitist to be serviceable for imagination, and also religious poetry, can society. regain [their] privileges,” lost since the age of THE LIMITS OF CLASSICISM Dante.46 The real issue with Eliot at that time that Miłosz raises did not concern his pessimism I myself am far too deeply indebted to Eliot to but his style: “The poetics he [Eliot] chose made distance myself from him in this way, but him an ‘obscure’ poet, and some of his Miłosz’s Harvard lectures have persuaded me digressions, such as those in Four Quartets, are that the term “classicism” distorts what I see as indecipherable without resort to the often the generative canon of Homer, Virgil, Dante, dubious assistance of his commentators.”47 Wordsworth, Eliot, and Miłosz. Both in its history and in its current meaning, “classicism”
2115 September 2017 THE SARMATIAN REVIEW is too partial, too identified with and restricted to that Milton came to him in Lambeth in the form the pagan authors that, from an early age, of a falling star, and entered his left foot.53 It is monastic schools chose to enhance the spiritual worth recalling Eliot’s famous dissent from what legacy of the Old and New Testaments. The he described in Blake as “the crankiness, the sharp disjunction seen by Matthew Arnold eccentricity, which frequently affects writers between Hellenism on the one hand and outside of the Latin traditions.” What Blake’s Hebraism on the other is reflected in American “genius required,” Eliot continued, “and what it institutions today––not just in the sharp contrast sadly lacked, was a framework of accepted and between schools and churches, but in the traditional ideas which would have prevented Classics Departments of the universities, which him from indulging in a philosophy of his own, consider it quite appropriate to study Sanskrit and concentrated his attention upon the texts but never the Bible. problems of the poet. Confusion of thought, emotion, and vision is . . . eminently not a Latin We return to where we began: Miłosz’s accurate virtue. The concentration resulting from a description of Western civilization, as shaped framework of mythology and theology and “by the Bible and, for that reason, eschatological philosophy is one of the reasons why Dante is a to the core.”52 That awareness was existential for classic, and Blake only a poet of genius.”54 him in Lithuania and Poland where his Latinity Miłosz, both a born Catholic and also even more made him somewhat an outsider, while of a geographic outsider from Latin Europe than Catholicism has remained widespread, even Blake or Eliot, has I think achieved a far more after decades of half-hearted communist efforts balanced incorporation of Blake into the to extirpate it. This awareness was reinforced in generative tradition. He recognizes what the him by Mickiewicz. Pan Tadeusz, perhaps the royalist classicist Eliot ignored: the importance greatest recent epic in the Western lineage, is of Blake’s compassion for “those who know and also perhaps the first epic in the classical do not speak:” “William Blake combats the tradition to incorporate the point of view of the diabolic vassal of inertia responsible for the Book of Exodus, seeing a foreign army of inhuman industrialization of England, or, as occupation from below, as alien to the culture Allen Ginsberg calls it, ‘Moloch whose name is that matters, not as embodying it. Because of the the mind.’”55 In the close to his Nobel Lecture of peripheral status of the Polish language, Pan 1980, Milosz acknowledged Blake as one of Tadeusz is unlikely ever to achieve a similarly three writers from whom he has received a central status in the Western canon. However, mandate: “Our century. . . has also been a Miłosz has helped strengthen for the generative century of faith and hope. A profound canon its peasant’s-eye biblical perspective–– transformation, of which we are hardly aware, that the future of God’s people, once and still because we are a part of it, has been taking now and forever, depends on release from place, coming to the surface from time to time in Pharaoh, not on becoming Pharaoh. phenomena that provoke general astonishment. . CLASSICISM AND THE GENERATIVE CANON . . For we all who are here, both the speaker and In every generation, but perhaps especially in you who listen, are no more than links between the past and the future.”56 times of profound and traumatic change, poets face the task of readjusting the relationship of My own hope is that posterity will agree with the past to the future. Each great poet offers Joseph Brodsky’s judgment that “Czesław his/her own personal (and often idiosyncratic) Miłosz is one of the greatest poets of our time;” solution to the dilemma of reconciling the old and that his works will be recognized as classics. and the new, as defined by correcting his or her I would make this claim in particular for The antecedents. I now see Miłosz as a response and Witness of Poetry. Despite its Polish perspective, important corrective to Eliot’s important but it is in the tradition of Sidney’s An Apology for decidedly idiosyncratic view of tradition, which Poetry, Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic itself can be seen as a corrective to the Education of Mankind, Shelley’s A Defence of idiosyncratic perspectives of Blake, who wrote Poetry, and Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual
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Talent,” with the difference that it is at present to the American revolution.59 More recently, more useful than any of these for pointing out Miłosz’s poems and prose helped inspire the our own open space ahead. Polish Solidarity movement as it ousted a Soviet-installed government in Warsaw.60 THE GENERATIVE CANON AND HUMAN PROGRESS: A PERSONAL CONCLUSION I once wrote an entire book on Dark Age Pastoral, arguing that the poems of Virgil and It is significant that both Eliot and Miłosz, like others helped guide a recovery to a civilization Virgil, Dante, Milton, and Blake before them, on a higher level, relatively purified of slavery wrote their defining works in a context of great and gladiatorial amusements. The evidence of social upheaval. Eliot finished The Waste Land commentaries suggests that after the Dark Ages in a Swiss asylum after World War 1, while Virgil’s text was being read more deeply than Miłosz wrote his wartime poems after hiding his contemporaries were ever capable of doing, from Nazi machine-gun fire in the streets of hence Dante. Warsaw. Like their predecessors, in their works both poets were coping with the loss of social To combat the sickness of Nazi barbarism in structures that were precious to them. Both World War 2, the German scholar Bruno Snell believed that their eras had been misled by false wrote the seminal work The Discovery of the visions of progress and both were determined to Mind.61 In it he discusses how awareness of rescue precious values from a decaying past to inner mental life, a notion not to be found in rectify the present. Eliot would write later in Homer, slowly evolved in literature toward its Little Gidding, with the failures of both King articulation by Virgil. In contrast to the earthy Charles and the Commonwealth in mind, bucolics of Theocritus, Snell saw Virgil’s We have taken from the defeated Arcadia as a “spiritual landscape,” “an earthly beyond, a land of the soul yearning for its distant What they had to leave us––a symbol: 62 A symbol perfected in death. home in the past.” “We should realize,” Snell And all shall be well and wrote, “that [the] modern poet, the poet of All manner of thing shall be well.57 fancies and dreams, did not exist until he saw the light of day in Virgil’s Arcadia.”63 I see the In a Warsaw war poem Miłosz wrote generative canon as continuing this venture into where the wind the richness of the imagination, an ongoing Blowing from the Vistula scatters advance toward a more civilized society with The red dust of the rubble more civilized humans. In this search both Eliot ends in a similar but more hopeful vein: and Miłosz played an important role. ∆ I want to sing of festivities, The greenwood into which Shakespeare NOTES Often took me. Leave To poets a moment of happiness, 1 58 Czesław Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry (Cambridge, Otherwise your world will perish. MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1983), 109. 2 I believe we can see the whole of the generative Czesław Miłosz, Nobel Lecture, Stockholm, canon as performing a similar task: extracting December 8, 1980, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/lau from the setbacks of history something of value reates/1980/milosz-lecture.html. for a better future. Seen in this light, the canon is 3 T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in itself a record of human history but on a higher Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1949), and happier level, one where progress is 14. possible. The canon itself may suffer setbacks in 4 Eliot, Selected Essays, 15. time but its achievements, unlike those of mere 5 Ibid., 17. empires, can be carried forward in human 6 See Jan Gorak, The Making of the Modern Canon memories, and even enhanced there. The result (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 1991), 52–80. In can then uplift society as a whole, as when the Gorak’s words, “Eliot’s development. . . indicates yet tacit republicanism of Milton’s epic, which was again that the modern canon is the product of a deeply anti-canonical spirit” (79). read by a large and diverse audience, contributed
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7 Octavio Paz, Children of the Mire: Modern Poetry Madeleine Levine (New York: Farrar, Straus and from Romanticism to the Avant-garde Giroux, 2001), 348, 350. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1974), 1. Cf. 22 Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry, 26. Cf. Czesław Michael Palmer, Active Boundaries: Selected Essays Miłosz, A Year of the Hunter trans. Madeleine Levine and Talks (New York: New Directions, 2008), 106 f. (New York: Noonday Press, Farrar, Straus and 8 For details, see Peter Dale Scott, “The Social Critic Giroux, 1995), 211: “I am still the poet who knows and His Discontents” in The Cambridge Companion and struggles against the subjectivism of to T. S. Eliot, ed. by A. David Moody (Cambridge: contemporary poetry.” Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), 70. Miłosz also could 23 Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry, 47. modify his assessments. Although he once paid 24 Ibid., 109. Cf. p. 114: “From where will a renewal considerable attention to Swedenborg, to whom come to us, to us who have devastated the whole Blake, Dostoevsky and his cousin Oscar Milosz were earthly globe?’ asked Simone Weil. ‘Only from the indebted, he himself later discounted Swedenborg’s past, if we love it.’” “pedantic prose” (Czesław Miłosz, Milosz's ABC’s 25 Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry, 5. trans. Madeleine Levine (New York: Farrar, Straus 26 In this lecture Miłosz talked as if unaware of and Giroux, 2001), 276–77. Blake’s earlier invective against “The Stolen and 9 Although Miłosz’s concept of a wieszcz or bard is Perverted Writings of Homer & Ovid, of Plato & profoundly Polish, it can also be found in the Cicero, which all Men ought to condemn.” William Democratic Vistas of Walt Whitman, whom Miłosz Blake, “Milton,” The Poetry and Prose of William read at an early age in a Polish translation: “I demand Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Nonesuch races of orbic bards, with unconditional Press, 1927), 375. uncompromising sway. Come forth, sweet 27 Seamus Heaney, “Secular and Millennial Milosz,” democratic despots of the west!” in Seamus Heaney, Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 10 Czesław Miłosz, “Dedication,” in New and 1971–2001 (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2002), Collected Poems: 1931-2001 (New York: Ecco, 445. Like other critics, Heaney compares Miłosz’s 2003), 77. I have translated ludzi in the second line as “naïve” pastoral sequence, “The World,” to Virgil’s “peoples” rather than the anticlimactic “people”. Eclogues, also written in a time of war (445–46: “As Miłosz ultimately dropped Przedmowa altogether in the case of Virgil,” he concludes, the felicity of the from the Polish edition of his Selected Poems. art was in itself a heart-breaking reminder of the Czesław Miłosz, Wiersze Wybranie (Warsaw: desolation of the times.” Cf. Vergil's Eclogues, edited Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1996). by Katharina Volk (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 11 Robert Hass, What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, 2008), 254–55. Imagination, and the Natural World (New York: 28 Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry, 62. Ecco, 2012), 153. 29 Ibid., 65–67; cf. 31, 37. 12 Czesław Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry 30 The clash between Latin and vernacular had (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1983), 109. religious and political significances. Cf. Czeslaw 13 Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry, 37. Milosz, The History of Polish Literature (Berkeley: 14 Ibid., 4. Univ. of California Press, 1983), xv-xvi: “The 15 Ibid., 11. vernacular, stifled for a long time by Latin, the 16 Ibid., 13. language of the Church, won its ascendancy in 17 Ibid., 14. Poland primarily thanks to the religious controversies 18 Ibid. engendered first by the ideas of Jan Hus, then by 19 Ibid., 13. Though in Witness Miłosz defined poetry Luther’s and Calvin’s. Poland of the “Golden Age” as “a passionate pursuit of the Real” (p. 25), he was largely a Protestant country, a ‘paradise for recognized elsewhere that Pan Tadeusz, written with heretics.’ And despite the subsequent victories of the the goal “to fortify the heart,” “is a fairy tale, an idyll, Counter Reformation, the heritage of intellectual an embellishment.” Czesław Miłosz, A Year of the rebelliousness has never been lost, and was Hunter, trans. Madeleine Levine (New York: transmitted through the publicists of the Noonday Press, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), Enlightenment and the democrats of the nineteenth 363. “The Real,” for Miłosz, is Platonic rather than century to the liberal intelligentsia of our time.” scientific. Miłosz liked to tell me of the Polish intellectuals like 20 Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry, 13–14. Samuel Hartlib who, at the time of the Counter 21 Miłosz, “A Semi-Private Letter about Poetry” Reformation, migrated to London (where Hartlib [1946], in Czesław Miłosz, To Begin Where I Am: befriended both Milton and Robert Boyle of the Selected Essays ed. Bogdana Carpenter and future Royal Society). Meanwhile, the Polish urban
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middle class was diminished, a fact contributing to (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2012), 83: “Eliot is the disappearance in 1795 of the reactionary Polish– the English-language modernist most important to the Lithuanian Commonwealth. young Miłosz.” 31 Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry, 63; quoting Erich 41 Miłosz, Witness of Poetry, 14–15, 34; cf. Miłosz, Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in To Begin Where I Am, 389; Jesse T. Airodi, “Eliot, Western Literature trans. by Willard Trask Milosz, and the Enduring Modernist Protest,” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1968), 154. Twentieth Century Literature (Winter, 1988), 455. 32 Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry, 66–67. Cf. Miłosz, 42 Miłosz, Witness of Poetry, 34. A Year of the Hunter, 135: “Poland is a country of 43 Miłosz, “If Only It Could Be Said,” in To Begin unheard-of caste differences, from heights such as are Where I Am: Selected Essays (New York: Farrar, rarely met with elsewhere, to depressing lower Straus and Giroux, 2001), 327. Later in The Witness depths, and perhaps the most powerful strata are the of Poetry (p. 95) Miłosz softens his summary two extremes.” critique: “Clearly, any neat division of poetry into the 33 Miłosz, Milosz's ABC’s, 204. ‘alienated’ and ‘non-alienated’ will encounter serious 34 Treatise on Theology,” in Czesław Miłosz, Second difficulties. I pretend to no precision here.” Space: New Poems, trans. by the author and Robert 44 Czesław Miłosz To Begin Where I Am, 391. Hass (New York: Ecco, 2004), 47, 48, 62–63. This 45 Miłosz, Witness of Poetry, 27. Cf. Miłosz, A Year poem, “Traktat Teologiczny,” completes a trilogy of of the Hunter, 111: “One can say about these Miloszian “Tractates,” the other two being his [contemporary American] poets that their technique “Traktat moralny” (“Treatise on Morals,” not yet is first-rate but that they have nothing to write about. translated into English) and “Traktat Poetycki” (“A Their ‘life experience’ shows through every line of Treatise on Poetry.” New and Collected Poems, 107– verse; it is the life of lecturers on university campuses 51). or in high schools.” 35 So much more so than Oscar himself, who when 46 Czesław Miłosz, “Reflections on T.S. Eliot” translating Lithuanian myths resorted “to such (1965), in To Begin Where I Am, 398: “This is an masters of literary representation as Homer, Virgil, almost unbelievable undertaking; he built out of Dante Alighieri, Johan von Goethe, William impossibility, absence, ruins. If, however, he Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Wordsworth achieved his aim to some extent, it would mean that Longfellow, Daniel Defoe, Voltaire and others. Thus, people in the twentieth century need not be too the [Oscar] Miloszean texts restructure the picture of pessimistic about their own potency.” the Lithuanian audience from ancient rural (i.e. 47 Czesław Miłosz, “Reflections on T.S. Eliot,” 391. peasant/primitive) into elite (i.e. 48 Ibid., 397. aristocratic/learned),” Jadvyga Krūminienė, “Oscar 49 Miłosz, Witness of Poetry, 27; Czesław Miłosz, Miłosz as Translator: Playing Games with Memory,” Nobel Laureate Lecture, 8 December 1980, https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome- http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1980/milosz- instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF- lecture-en.html. 8#q=Jadvyga+Kr%C5%ABminien%C4%97%2C+% 50 Czesław Miłosz, interviewed by Robert Faggen, E2%80%9COscar+Mi%C5%82osz+As+Translator% “The Art of Poetry No. 70,” Paris Review, Winter 3A+Playing+Games+With+Memory%2C%E2%80% 1994, 9D. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1721/czesl 36 “No More,” in Czesław Miłosz, New and Collected aw-milosz-the-art-of-poetry-no-70-czeslaw-milosz, Poems, 168; Milosz, The Witness of Poetry, 72. emphasis in original. 37 “Dante,” in Miłosz, New and Collected Poems, 51 See e.g. Lyndall Gordon, T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect 567. Life (New York: Norton, 1998). 38 Miłosz, ”Many-Tiered Man,” Second Space, 34; 52 Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry, 37. Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: 53 I think it is correct to say that Miłosz corrected New Directions, 1971), 145. Cf. Eliot’s confession to Eliot’s 1919 essay because Eliot himself modified his Mary Trevelyan in 1953, as recorded by her: “I slurs against romanticism in The Use of Poetry and believe in hell, yes, I do. I live in constant fear of it the Use of Criticism. There he praised Wordsworth myself…. I don’t believe this is common – perhaps I for striving “to imitate…the very language of men,” am abnormal” (Lyndall Gordon, T. S. Eliot, 468). and for the “purposes and social passions which 39 Miłosz, The Year of the Hunter, 220. animated” Wordsworth’s greatest poetry. The Use of 40 E.g. Magdalena Kay, In Gratitude for All the Gifts: Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Seamus Heaney and Eastern Europe Relation of Criticism to Poetry In England
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(Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1933), 62, However, the Irish perceived many similarities 64. between their own situation in the British 54 T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Writings Empire and the numerous Polish risings that (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 185. 55 were met with sympathy (tea and sympathy, one Czesław Miłosz, “The Rebirth of Utopia: Herbert would like to add) in Western Europe. She pays Marcuse,” in Czesław Miłosz, Visions from San Francisco Bay (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, strong attention to the November 1830 Rising in 1982), 185. Poland and compares it to the Young Ireland 56 Miłosz, Nobel Lecture. movement. The January 1863 Rising and its 57 T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” iii; quoted in Scott, disastrous consequences for Polish social and "The Social Critic and His Discontents." 70. cultural life are then juxtaposed with the Home 58 Miłosz, “In Warsaw,” New and Collected Poems, Rule Bills and Minorities Policy in the British 76. Empire up to the First World War. The book 59 Lydia Dittler Schulman, Paradise Lost and the concludes with the achievement of statehood in Rise of the American Republic (Boston: Northeastern both Poland and Ireland. Univ. Press, 1992). Cf. Armand Himy, “Paradise Lost as a republican ‘tractatus theologico-politicus’,” While there is little to disagree with in the book, in Milton and Republicanism, ed. David Armitage, two issues require clarification. Professor Healy Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: sees the Russian Empire as somewhat similar to Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), 118 f. 60 the British. While all empires share certain Peter Dale Scott, "Czesław Miłosz and Solidarity; features, the differences here are significant. I or, Poetry and the Liberation of a People," Brick 78 subscribe to the view that the Russian Empire’s (Winter 2006), 67–74. An extract from a poem by Miłosz, “You Who Wronged,” is inscribed on the political and social culture substantially derives Solidarity monument in Gdańsk. from that of the Mongols rather than being 61 Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind: In Greek European in origin. Hence for a country like Philosophy and Literature trans. by T. G. Poland––as well as Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Rosenmeyer (New York: Dover, 1982). and Georgia––Russian bondage was both alien 62 Snell, The Discovery of the Mind, 281, 301. and immeasurably destructive. Most Western 63 Ibid., 299. Europeans remain blind to the deep non- European roots of Russia’s culture and/or BOOKS consider them a nonproblem. After all, anthropologically speaking, Russians look pretty Poland in the Irish Nationalist Imagination, much like their European neighbors to the west. 1772–1922: Anti-Colonialism within Europe, This misleading biological similarity hides deep by Róisin Healy. New York: Palgrave psychological differences. The second issue MacMillan, 2017. viii + 321 pages. Index, concerns the minorities of whom prepartitioned bibliography. ISBN 978-3-319-43430-8. Poland had a good number. It does not take Hardcover. $79.96 on Amazon. much political savvy to realize that during the A scholarly survey of Irish attitudes toward partitions of Poland, the occupying powers Polish struggles for independence since the (Russia, Prussia, and Austria) did everything partitions in the eighteenth century. It is clear they could to turn the minorities against the that the author’s knowledge of Polish affairs is majority Polish population, and vice versa. limited; she is primarily an expert on Ireland. Catherine the Great issued an order about the However, she judicially uses the information she Pale of Settlement that expelled Jews from the possesses and does not overgeneralize on the properly Russian parts of the Empire into Polish basis of limited knowledge. territory. One can imagine how the high density of the Jewish population and competition for Healy begins with analyzing attitudes toward the jobs influenced Polish-Jewish relations. Austria Polish cause in nineteenth-century Europe. She did its best to cultivate the attitude of alienation rightly points out that the majority of Polish from the Poles in Ruthenian peasantry: it is emigres lived in France rather than Ireland. largely to Austrians that Ukrainians owe their
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modern sense of nationhood. Bismarckian educated Marxist teachers was on display day Prussia did its best to uproot Catholicism and and night. One might add it has survived in denationalize Polish peasantry; it partially those politruks who, unpunished, are now succeeded. Had the partitions of Poland not enjoying their retirement pensions in taken place, Poland might have remained the inconspicuous Polish towns and villages. largest European country and its republican Daily life in the communist army is described in tradition might have accommodated the heartbreaking detail. The army, the author says, Ukrainian and Belarusian nations. Healy does is chaos. It is also torture and an excellent way not make note of these aspects of the Polish to shorten the lives of the recruits by exposing struggle for independence. (SB) them to the elements without proper clothing; Józef Maria Ruszar, Czerwone pająki [Red feeding them nutrition-free food; and allowing, Spiders]. Edited by Kamil Dworaczek and indeed encouraging, drunkedness. The narrator Jacek Jędrysiak. Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci rightly remarks that there is a shortage of books Narodowej (www.ksiegarnia.ipn.gov.pl), 2017. containing firsthand experience of soldiers under 275 pages. Bibliography, footnotes, index, Soviet communism. He is perhaps one of the photographs. ISBN 978-83-8098-126-3. Zl. 20 few who have the verbal skills and experience to plus postage. tell the world about this little known aspect of the Soviet system. Every book is sui generis, or should be–– otherwise it is not worth reading. Ruszar’s book Parallel to the horrific story of army recruits in fulfills this condition splendidly. On the surface Soviet-occupied Poland is the story of the it is a diary/memoir of the author’s service in the spiritual development that occurs in spite of, or army in Soviet-occupied Poland in the 1970s, perhaps because of, these circumstances. The but in fact it is an analysis of the Soviet ways of author realizes that the main goal of totalitarian destroying human persons by making them go systems is to deprive one of trust in other human through a physical and psychological “meat beings––not human beings as a group, but grinder” from which they emerge dripping with individual persons, those whom we meet in daily vulgarity, bad health, hatred of their superiors, life. He concludes that we have to trust others or and a destroyed religious identity. The diary is else we shall not find God. However, these replete with the none-too-elegant vocabulary reflections come later. While he is in the army, used in the army, and with inserts of poetry and Ruszar feels hatred and depression––hatred of reflective passages that signal to the reader the those who dehumanize the teenagers who come civilized author’s presence. The title refers to the to the army as recruits, and depression because, omnipresent politruks, or political indoctrinators in addition to the horrible physical conditions in assigned to each military unit. They see to it which the recruits live, there seems to be no way that soldiers do not veer too far from Soviet out of the ugliness, greyness, and vulgarity of Marxist principles. An interesting episode of the barracks. To a reader it soon becomes clear placing a Christmas tree in the common room is that a major reason for these destructive feelings described: of course no mention of the tree, let is the absurdity and brutality of social alone of Christmas, was allowed, and it was only engineering underway. Here the government has after the last politruk left for the day that the tree men at their most vulnerable: uneducated, was set up. Yet in spite of savage attempts to young, ready to absorb whatever comes their stop it, the Christmas spirit makes its way. The soldiers know that the totalitarian appearance, if only for one day, among the indoctrination, to which they are subjected even brutalized and hungry soldiers. In the 1970s in more than to military training rings false and Soviet-occupied Poland the Church was the only frequently exposes itself as duplicitous. Yet they institution that allowed one to escape communist absorb it because there is nothing else to absorb– slavery, if only for a short while. The fanatical –no counterinfluence, no good books, no Bible, hatred of Christianity among the Soviet- no decent people who could serve as role models. So the intended goal may be achieved—
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the army strives to produce vulgar and brutal atheists who act as beasts twenty-four hours a day. In Poland, with its background of Catholic The Demon in Democracy religiosity, echoes of another world penetrate the Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies walls of the barracks and save a good percentage By Ryszard Legutko. Translated by Teresa of soldiers, but in countries like China and, until Adelson. Foreword by John O’Sullivan. New recently, Russia beasts were consciously York-London: Encounter Books produced by leaders of the system who (www.encounterbooks.com), 2016. viii + 182 considered their social engineering to be an pages. ISBN 978-1-59403-863-1. Hardcover. achievement rather than a crime. $23.99. The book concludes with a lengthy afterword detailing the story of struggle against the Ewa Thompson totalitarian regime in Soviet-occupied Poland. Here the narrative centers on student activities, Does liberal democracy share common features because the author played an active role in with Marxist communism? Of course not, its student protests. As one peruses the lists of adherents and propounders would say. Those names of students who signed various protests, who look with increasing skepticism at the turn one can easily find the reasons for the failure of Western liberalism has taken over the last these initiatives to bring desired changes. The several generations are not so sure. Professor lists are replete with names of people who later Legutko is in that number. He dares to go turned out to be on the payroll of the secret against general expectations in postulating that police, such as Lesław Maleszka. Secret police the two political and social systems share the agents penetrated the entire protest movement in same roots. Both are built on the assumption that communist countries from the very beginning. human beings either lack a metaphysical Today the debate in Poland concerns not the dimension (metaphysics being a product of their agents like Maleszka who betrayed their overactive minds), or that their spirituality can colleagues in a horrible way and whose activities be fully ignored in planning and executing their have been well documented, but personalities social and political trajectories. Both systems such as Lech Walesa who, according to recent proclaim that human development can be fully discoveries of documents, was also steered by explained by science; those aspects of it that communist social engineers. In Walesa’s case have not yet been explained will be clarified in the stake was the system itself rather than the the future. Finally, both make a claim, overtly or murders of one’s colleagues. covertly, that full implementation of their One may ask why a university graduate like postulates will bring universal harmony, or the Ruszar was forced to join the army and spend a happy sojourn of humanity on this earth for the year with recruits ten years younger than he. It rest of imaginable time. Communism claimed turns out that in the 1970s a law was passed this overtly, while the proponents of liberal regarding an obligatory 180-hour military democracy merely imply that after all improper training for students in all institutions of higher behavior and thoughts have been weeded out education. Ruszar was directed to a particular humanity will live in reasonable contentment unit that had the reputation of being a punitive forever after. unit. Apparently the communist authorities This kind of criticism of liberal democracy may hoped that isolating him in this way would wipe seem startlingly absurd to those who are used to out his influence on others. (SB) the facile formulae of “separation of church and state” or “freedom of religion,” or “religion is a private matter of citizens.” Implied in these assumptions is the thesis that there are no religions incompatible with liberal democracy––
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if they are practiced in private and not brought to crucial cases the judiciary seemed to legislate the public square. Liberal democratic writers do rather than interpret the existing law. Even not usually write about metaphysics, nor is though Legutko does not mention specific cases, public discourse in countries like America Roe vs. Wade and Brown vs. Board of occupied with things “not of this world.” Yet Education can serve as examples. When these Legutko’s most profound thesis is just this––that two judicial decisions were made, the majority the very absence of the metaphysical dimension of citizens were against abortion and against in the public square implies a view of man and busing. It seemed as if the judiciary was society that partakes of the totalitarian instructing society in the march toward the end temptation. If one believes that societies can be of history. A contemporary example of similar organized without taking man’s spiritual procedures is the issue of forcible relocation of dimension into account, one proceeds along the immigrants to EU countries. While the majority road that takes us to tighter and tighter state of EU citizens do not wish to receive these control. It goes without saying that liberal economic migrants (among whom Syrians democratic ideals leave man’s relation to God fleeing war constitute only 5 percent) and opt for totally outside the political and social discourse. helping the needy in their own countries, EU This metaphysical absence is dealt with openly bureaucracy opts for quotas to be forcibly at the end of the book, as the crowning part of resettled in each and every EU country. This the author’s reflections on the contemporary free kind of procedure is painfully familiar to those world. who, like Legutko, suffered under the Soviet- imposed communism. Legutko’s credentials justify his skepticism toward present-day liberal democracies. Under Legutko points out that in spite of massive communism, citizens of Poland looked with evidence of how horribly communism treated its longing, admiration, and hope to the countries of own citizens, Western elites––intellectuals, Western Europe where the Soviet soldier’s boot artists, university circles––seldom expressed did not step or from where it withdrew (as in outrage at communist doings. It seemed as if Austria in 1955). In the 1990s when communism outrage was reserved for Nazi crimes only. disintegrated (or morphed into social Perhaps the most famous example of this democracy), it was disappointing to discover leniency is Walter Duranty and his travel reports that underneath the glitter and a better standard from Russia published in the New York Times in of living there was little to emulate in Western the 1930s during the Ukrainian famine. Or take societies. Particularly disappointing was the Jean-Paul Sartre’s flirtation with the Soviets–– discovery that Western democracies shared a and Sartre was one of the most highly respected number of common features with Soviet Western intellectuals in the 1960s! Legutko “democracies”: both looked forward to some points out what most citizens of formerly kind of an end of history where either communist Central Europe know and what most communism or the perfect liberal state would Western intellectuals refuse to learn to this day: free citizens from political worries; both were that the totalitarian temptation affected not only engaged in social engineering (communism tried Lenin or Stalin, but a number of individuals in to raise a perfect communist man, whereas the West who contributed mightily to the liberal democracy tries to inculcate “political direction their societies have taken between the correctness” in its citizens); and both worked to 1960s and the present day. intimidate citizens into obedience and agreement The issue of the uniformity that both communist with the prescribed trends of social life. In and liberal democratic societies impose on communism it was the communist party that had citizens is a delicate one, however. In the first the last word; in liberal democracy, the secular case it is a matter of uniformity by force, elites, the media, and the universities dictate whereas in the second external appearances what is acceptable and what is not. There was matter: one can have one’s own private views also the disturbing discovery that in many and choose a profession that does not require
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revealing them in public. In other words, In this connection one recalls Benedict pressure is far less and of a different kind than in Anderson’s definition of nations as “imagined communist societies, but such a pressure communities.” Anderson is wrong: unlike gays nevertheless exists. Today most university or women, members of the same nationality do professors hold the same views on abortion, sacrifice for one another, and history is replete homosexuality, and family as the major media, with examples of such sacrifices. However, we and substantive discussion about these issues have not heard of women or gays willingly begin with accepting the postulates that seemed submitting to persecution and even execution on absurd a hundred years ago. At most American behalf of women and gays in countries they can univeristies a humanities assistant professor barely find on the map. The national community skeptical of the generally accepted views who is a real entity (albeit essentialist in nature, and made his views known and interpreted works of therefore ignored by Marxist thinkers like literature accordingly would have a slim chance Anderson), whereas the artificial communities of of receiving tenure. gays and women exist in the minds of Marxist and liberal democratic thinkers, hence the On pages 94–95, the author brilliantly identifies participle “imagined.” the “imagined communities” of neo-Marxist scholarship. Among them the primary role is Legutko spends less time than might have been played by women and homosexuals. Legutko advisable on changes in the universal image of points out that such imagined communities what constitutes a happy and successful life. replaced the equally imaginary international While in ages past happiness was perceived as proletariat of classical Marxism. In both cases connected to the spiritual side of man, in liberal there was not, and is not, any real solidarity democracy the emphasis is on entertainment and between members; solidarity exists only in the pleasure. One is supposed to have a good time progressive heads of contemporary elites. These all the time. The heroes of today’s youth are communities are “imagined” because only those movie stars rather than people of great moral women or gays who conform to the theories achievement––what is moral achievement about them are considered members. Women anyway, a liberal democrat may ask. People who are perfectly satisfied with being invisible, living in a liberal democracy discount the notion staying at home, raising children, and cooking of clear and imminent danger from abroad, but meals are not the subjects of feminists scholars’ their leaders try to instill in them the fake fear of books; for the feminists, they might as well not “wrong” or “backward” views and actions. I say exist at all. Ditto those homosexuals who are “fake” because in spite of the horrific visions of happy to stay in the closet. They are not part of scorched earth painted by some believers in that imagined international brotherhood of global warming, few people lose sleep over such victimized individuals who display toward each visions. They are creations of the elites who other a victim’s solidarity. They may even be wish to lead society in a direction best known to considered deserving of verbal scourging if they themselves. In liberal democracies the specters actively oppose postmodern sexual or feminist of famine or war are not seriously considered, theories. Nor are those homosexuals who are while CO2 is. Yet problems such as climate dissatisfied with their sexual preferences and change would be easier to alleviate by piecemeal would like to change them considered members actions than by all-embracing schemes imposed of the group whose “rights” neo-Marxists on an unwilling world, somewhat like the allegedly defend. In some countries the Soviets who made grandiose plans of reversing legislature forbids attempts to change the sexual the flow of Siberian rivers in order to irrigate preferences of gays. Legutko points out that in deserts in Central Asia. contemporary understanding multiculturalism The book has its flaws, the gravest of which is does not involve the existence of many cultures the author’s tendency to slip into a classroom in one society, but rather the existence of many lecture mode instead of maintaining the political identities of the imagined collectives. polemical mode that in today’s intellectual
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world gives books a chance to survive and Polish experience reminds us,” Trump stated, flourish. Legutko’s observations are brilliant, but “the defence of the West ultimately rests not as he continues his lecturing one begins to feel a only on means but also on the will of its people scarcity of quotable data to support the to prevail,” adding that “the fundamental argument. One feels that the argument is question of our time is whether the West has the plausible, indeed correct, but the difference will to survive” and specifically, whether “we between scholarship and journalism consists in have the desire and the courage to preserve our that scholars supply quotable sources for their civilization in the face of those who would discoveries. In the classroom or in journalism subvert and destroy it.” The partisans of the there is no time for data and just delivering the Warsaw Uprising understood the value of what outline of an argument must suffice, but in a they were fighting for in 1944, and Trump’s book that deals with fundamental issues in an words last month were an urgent reminder of the often strikingly original way a certain amount of apocalyptic risks to the rest of the continent, documentation, and therefore footnoting, makes should its leaders fail to unapologetically the argument rock solid. Related to this lack of embrace and reaffirm their heritage in the documentation is the lack of firm subdivisions in political and cultural sphere. “We write chapters. The impression that topics overlap one symphonies. We strive for excellence, and another often arises. Greater orderliness within cherish inspiring works of art that honor God . . . chapters would have improved the book. Even We put faith and family, not government and without footnotes and bibliography, however, bureaucracy, at the center of our lives. Those are the book is one of the most profound probes into the priceless ties that bind us together as nations, the woes of liberal democracy to date. One as allies, and as a civilization.” Notably, these should be alarmed that this kind of book has things can only be achieved by a confident appeared so late in the history of liberal people with a strong faith in their place in the democracies. ∆ world, and it is those two things, confidence and faith, of which Europe has suffered a chronic deficiency. Donald Trump’s Warsaw A people ceases to embody a civilization the moment their cultural assertiveness is numbed to Speech the point where they can no longer distinguish and the Nihilism of Modern Sophisticates the boundaries of their hearth or the framework of their identity. The process of collapse in Edwin Dyga Western Europe seems to have gathered considerable momentum over the last half On 6 July 2017, US President Donald Trump decade, particularly with the aggressive stood before the Warsaw Uprising Monument on demographic shifts that have tested the threshold Krasiński Square (Plac Krasińskich) and of tolerance in ways unimaginable half a reminded Europe––by extension, the Western generation ago. Yet it seems difficult to imagine world––of the choice facing its cultural and a political solution to a problem that obviously political elites in the early twenty-first century. runs deeper than mere disputes over the That his message was delivered in Poland was bureaucratic style of governance. The both symbolic and telling; it constituted a predictably pathological responses to the recent warning and a call for the reassertion of those terrorist attacks in Manchester, London, and things that have defined our civilization by recently at the Cathedral of Our Lady in Paris, is reference to the near-Sisyphean struggle of the emblematic of a spiritual crisis that has retarded Polish underground in the Second World War. the ability of a people to think clearly and act The history of overwhelming odds, betrayal by with conviction. Instead of righteous anger at alleged allies, and the brutalities of genocidal those who fostered the conditions for the violent war set the scene for a Huntingtonian declaration spiral of decline, people one might expect to for civilizational perseverance: “Because as the
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have a vested interest in the survival of their contemporary consumerist Americanism; here culture and society turn their scorn upon those the particular is replaced with the contingent or who object to the forces under which the edifice undefinable abstract: people and homeland are has begun to crumble. Consider the irrational supplanted by hyper individualism and opinions of soi-disant “children of the increasingly vacuous notions of freedom. On the Enlightenment” who are heard with increasing left, we witness the contradictory belief that frequency in debates about the “national foreign cultures differ from our own only in question” or the culture war in the Old World. trivial outwardly ways and are therefore The most common is the belief that the present essentially fungible, or are so fundamentally immigration crisis west of the Oder-Neisse line different that they can and should enrich our is part of some natural or evolutionary process, own; here the implicit message is to sever any no different from the great migration of peoples special affinity one might have with one’s now- across the isthmus of centuries past, and unfashionable patrimony. therefore intrinsically unremarkable and For both these positions, the only things worthy unobjectionable. What is declared to be natural of affirmation are ephemeral and fleeting therefore cannot be bad, so those who raise concepts such as values or the constitution, both concerns about the effect of large scale interpreted through either a libertarian or demographic tides affecting Europe are met with libertine moral lens. Summarized with the bewilderment, often have their motivations slogan invade the world, invite the world, these questioned, and in extreme cases, their opinions two positions have formed the policy platform of censured or criminalized. most major Western global powers in the post- The overadjusted “nowhere men” of modernity 1960s era, mutatis mutandis––the difference are riddled with internal inconsistencies and being mainly in the emphasis placed on invading cognitive dissonance. The mainstream or inviting, never interrogating the merits of commentariate’s incongruous reaction to the either. Add the masochist tendencies of cultural Finsbury Park attack–– where a native Briton Marxism with establishment conservatism’s ploughed a van into a crowd of worshippers thoughtless impulse to preserve yesteryear’s outside of a mosque infamous for its incubation progressive vanguard, and the combined effect is of local jihadists––is a case in point. The fatal an ideological cocktail that mocks, slanders and consequence of political modernity’s inherent denigrates Christianity, delegitimizes Occidental contradictions is the ideologically driven refusal traditions, reflexively embraces the Other in to see obvious cause and effect between existing public discourse, and ultimately leads to national policies and the resulting moral anarchy and autoerasure, societal balkanization, and cultural social decay. The narrative never changes: the implosion. Both of these worldviews will lead to core assumptions on which current policy rests the overthrow of the liberal order that gave rise are never questioned; instead, their failure is to them, yet these distinctions of little difference interpreted as proof of the need for their more define the two seemingly opposing wings of the vigorous application. This evident resignation to political spectrum: from today’s shallow catastrophe betrays an underlying suicidal belief conservatism to the banality of modern progress. in the inevitable death of a civilization that is The terrorist attack in Manchester therefore also implicitly (and ironically) touted in liberal takes on added significance as the UK’s Charlie discourse as the alleged peak of cultural Hebdo. Its Ouroboros-like qualities can be achievement: talk of imminent Western eclipse summarized thus: an assault against an and end-of-history triumphalism will therefore expression of a culture that is responsible for its emanate from the same postmodern mind. Thus, own vulnerability at the hands of a threat it has the Janus-headed idol of contemporary welcomed to its bosom. Press and political elites liberalism. On the right is the expectation that no longer have the intellectual honesty to assess the rest of the world either wish to, or should, the situation without routinely relying on mimic the secularized and deracinated norms of mendacious spin. What follows is a
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recrudescence towards barbarism at the great sovereignist current in Central Europe has expense of civil society: thus Darren Osborne asserted principles which only a generation ago plays the role of Britain’s Fjotolf Hansen. The may have been thought of as simply common lesson here is that external danger can often sense. Were reason to truly reign supreme in the awaken domestic demons from their slumber; a parliaments and salons of the EU’s founding responsible government might do better to apply member states, it would be readily evident that policies that prevent fostering the conditions for the present mess is a direct result of deliberate anarcho-tyranny, rather than leading directly policy. The inability to acknowledge this is, into its crucible of destruction and dealing with however, unsurprising, especially since it would the problem there. The melees witnessed in the require a further confession of either terminal streets of Hamburg during the recent G20 malice or chronic incompetence. Yet harsh summit recall both the rioters of ’68, and ’38 words and even threats of sanctions are reserved before them: over time, a moral bankruptcy of for those who refuse to follow the suicidal the political class will create the conditions for altruists of the Franco-German régime, one an accelerated self-destruction that can only be which has shown more interest in centralizing controlled through mechanisms that entrench the military might of the continent under a tyranny. bankrupt Bundeswehr, or placing the continental public service in the hands of progressive- Whatever one may think about the plight of endorsed graduates from the Grandes Écoles, those who claim to be or are described as than actually protecting its frontier from breach refugees by the left-leaning commentariat, the or infiltration. sheer scale and magnitude of their influx into Europe since at least late 2015 cannot While it may be tempting to believe these reasonably be called evolutionary or natural. It “nowhere men” are therefore mindless, soulless would be wilfully reckless to suggest that their is perhaps a better indictment. They believe presence will not significantly disturb the nothing, or rather, they would believe anything equilibrium of the indigenous inhabitants’ that permits them to see all human activity as quality of life, their economic order, and the determined outside the realm of human moral nature of representative democracy itself. agency. Absolution for negligence or Revolutionary is a more appropriate descriptor thoughtlessness is thus necessarily coded into of the impact this process will undoubtedly have their mental framework. If all human tragedies on Europe’s native culture, but more are inevitable and therefore natural or part of immediately, its politics. Yet the Gnostic cosmic progress, opposition can be safely and spectators who are content to watch their conveniently excluded from the polite society of forefathers’ civilizational achievements be conformist nihilism. The cultural and political squandered––as they shrug and shake their dissidents of today will interpret this as heads in mocking concern––do not seem to transnational liberalism’s underlying self-hatred, ascribe the same sense of evolutionary one that constitutes a far greater threat to inevitability to the rise of political reaction in the European nations than any overt military nations of the Danube and Vistula basins. invasion could ever hope to be. As an Instead, the resurgence of unashamed political ideological autoimmune deficiency syndrome, it localism among the Visegrád Group, and makes defence in the political arena practically particularly in Poland and Hungary, is perceived impossible. But such lessons are lost on the as an anomaly requiring correction. Opposed as modern sophisticate who fails to appreciate that they are to the utopian programs of the choice means the ability to draw moral progressive bonhommes of Berlin and Brussels, distinctions and make appropriate rational the governments of Warsaw and Budapest are determinations between right and wrong. declared to be on the wrong side of history and Unsurprisingly, she therefore forgets that history denounced accordingly. Despite the pressure of is made by men who have the courage to shape their relentless Western critics, this neo- their destiny instead of being carried by the
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prevailing winds, or the culture of endemic must be remembered is this: solutions are passivity and acquiescence that dominates deemed impossible only until the inconceivable today’s respectable ways of thinking. The is achieved for the first time; and the extent to cotemporary political intelligentsia, a misnomer which solutions are perceived as inconceivable if ever there were one, have simply chosen not will determine just how much we value what is to chose, slavishly embracing whatever reward being lost and how committed we are to reclaim awaits them for the abdication of their own it. President Trump was therefore ominously agency. Tragically, they are unlikely to consider correct in suggesting that the question we face the Warsaw Speech with the urgency and today is whether or not we as a civilization have seriousness it demands even if it ultimately the desire or will to survive. The genuine free serves to defend their freedom, simply because thinkers of the coming decades will be those its politics offends their naïve conceits. The rot who can exercise their moral choice in favor of runs deep: we even witness entire Christian their posterity without fear of risking their denominations denouncing the defenders of a opponent’s opprobrium. In other words, those heritage without which they would not exist, as who will take charge of their own future instead heretics and sinners, because the necessary of being led along the currents of annihilation, defence is seen as a repudiation of a secularized hypnotically chanting the sutras of oblivion and globalist universalism. That this universalism is collective self-denial. In his Warsaw Speech completely antithetical to traditional Christian Trump drew on the Polish partisan theology does not register in their minds because underground’s commitment to prevail when the affirmation of utopian ideas requires the declaring that we too will triumph in the face of negation of everything that is particular. A aggressive barbarism and militant nihilism. Who logical consequence sees Christian charity embodies the future of Europe, Martyn Hett or deform into Babelist idolatry under the banner of Michał Cywiński? One of these two held all the compassion. right opinions, and is dead. The other is hated by transnational elites, but lives and has inspired a This nihilism of modern sophisticates means that generation. This is where the fault lines of the their future will naturally be determined by those present war are drawn, and there has never been who have no qualms aggressively occupying the a more pressing time for men of good will to cultural and spiritual vacuum of an emasculated pick a side. ∆ postmodernity and its political and therefore territorial space. What is witnessed in Western Europe, or indeed the United States, is a living testament to the fruit of a “progress” deemed LETTERS inevitable only to the extent that collective To the Editor: delusion or stupidity is itself inevitable. Unfortunately, delusion and stupidity appears to I wonder if you would permit me to respond to a few be an ineradicable blight on the elite leadership of the inaccurate characterizations of my book A of Western nations, rewarded as it appears to be Kaleidoscope of Poland, which was reviewed in The by a system that militates in favor of a collective Sarmatian Review by Professor James S. Pula (vol. XXXVI, No. 3, 2042-3). lowest common denominator. But nothing is inevitable, only thinking makes it so. The Despite Professor Pula’s claims to the contrary, I do triumphs of Brexit, the successful presidential go into quite some detail as to the rationale campaign of Donald Trump, and before them the underlying the choice of headings in the toppling of rebranded postcommunism by Kaleidoscope. The book is a collection of Polish Viktor Orbán and Jarosław Kaczyński have cultural-historical topoi, which any moderately educated person in Poland takes for granted and often shown this beyond doubt. Yet the longer our uses as a shorthand means of communicating with civilization journeys down its present path, the other Poles, but which are a mystification to a non- more uncomfortable will be the solutions to the Polish visitor to the country. Accordingly, as is dilemma it has recklessly strayed into. What explained in the introduction (which I gather Pula did
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not read carefully), the Kaleidoscope is intended as a more typically Polish funerary customs of Dziady kind of cultural decoder for the non-initiated but (Forefathers’ Eve), Zaduszki (All Souls’ Day), and intellectually curious visitor to Poland, as well as for Dzień wszystkich świętych (All-Saints’ Day) are prospective English-speaking students of Polish covered in some detail, and are also referred to under history and culture, and I believe it serves that such headings as cmentarze (cemeteries), cmentarze purpose nicely, although inevitably there have been radzieckie w Polsce (Soviet cemeteries in Poland), some important political changes in the country in the and dni wolne od pracy (days off from work). few years since the book was written that would need Another meritless comment of Pula’s is that the to be covered in an updated version. Kaleidoscope’s headings should be in English rather Professor Pula’s method of review seems to be based than in Polish (although he himself refers to on making mocking innuendos, to the extent that I postrzyżyny, święconka, stypa, etc.). The purpose of am surprised that the book review editor did not the book (again, as is explained in the introduction) is intervene in the interests of this journal’s reputability. to explicate Polish names, terms, concepts, and so on, One such professionally irresponsible innuendo is the that the culturally curious non-Polish longer-stay sneering contention that I limit discussion of World visitor encounters at every step of his or her being in War II to 150 words. World War II actually receives Poland. A prominent example is the Polish penchant outsized treatment in the Kaleidoscope, as is for naming major uprisings after months, which evidenced on almost every page. One wonders to Poles, especially journalists, have a habit of using as what extent Professor Pula actually read the work he labels with no further explanation, assuming that was reviewing. As is stated in the introduction, if I everyone knows that the powstanie listopadowe felt a subject could not be satisfactorily encapsulated (November Uprising) was the one in 1830–31, not in around 150 words, the topic was subdivided into the one in 1863 (which was the powstanie separate headings. A look at the index, which I gather styczniowe, or January Uprising). Hence the Professor Pula did not consult, shows that some sixty supplement Timeline of Polish Historical Months, (or roughly 15-20%) of the articles in the which Professor Pula (a professor of Polish history, Kaleidoscope deal partly or primarily with World no less) professes to find so perplexing. It is true that War II. Many other articles, not listed as war-related the month of czerwiec (June), as he complains, is in the index, deal with the war indirectly, for doubled up, referring either to the “wydarzenia” example, even the very first heading, entitled Ala ma (incidents) of 1956 (Poznań) or 1976 (Radom and kota (Ala has a cat), treating Falski’s Elementarz Warsaw). Maybe Poles should plan their next (ABC book), the first children’s book to be published uprising or “incidents” for the as-yet unused months after the war, with its references to soldiers returning of kwiecień (April) or luty (February), to satisfy the home after the war and to families resettling to the professor’s sense for orderliness. Obviously, in so-called ziemie odzyskane (recovered territories). Poland the national historical nomenclature, Really, the comment that there is “too much” of including the names of the months, will be World War II in the Kaleidoscope would have been encountered and experienced in Polish, not in an easier criticism to make. The book is absolutely English. Professor Pula does not give non-Poles saturated with references to the war and Poland’s much credit for being interested in what terms are wartime experiences, from the first article on Ala and used to describe things in the country’s native her cat to the last one, on Jews in Poland. language, or for being able to cope with a hooked ę or a barred ł (whose sounds are dutifully described in On a more trivial note, Pula seemingly objects to a the introduction) when encountered here or there. In harmless article on postrzyżyny (boy’s ritual first any event, what visitor to Poland could reasonably be haircut), discussed in connection with the Piast expected to look up a heading under “Ala has a cat?” Kołodziej legend, while claiming that more important (or “Easter food,” “boy’s ritual haircut,” cultural terms like święconka (Easter basket food) “Forefathers’ Eve,” etc.): the cultural resonance and gwiazdka (first star of Christmas Eve) are behind the concepts is inseparable from their Polish missing. In fact these particular terms are not missing designation), The user is provided with an extensive but, as seems logical to me, they are discussed under English cross-referencing index if he or she wishes to Wielkanoc (Easter) and Wigilia (Christmas Eve), use it. A majority of the Kaleidoscope’s headings are respectively. As to whether stypa (wake) is in urgent proper names in any case, where the choice of need of inclusion as an especially noteworthy Polish language is not an issue. custom, as Pula insists, I personally doubt it, but I would leave that decision up to my numerous Polish The pettiness of Pula’s invidious review extends to cultural consultants on this project. The related and the introduction’s Timeline of Polish History. One
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can discuss, yes or no, whether the powstanie Professor Pula responds: wielkopolskie (Wielkopolskie Uprising, 1918–1919) As Prof. Swan suggests, it may be best for readers to deserves equal rank in a schematic listing alongside review the work themselves and make their own other, more properly national, uprisings against the judgments. I would advise, however, that they broad backdrop of Polish history. Professor Pula consult it free at their local library rather than thinks that it does, whereas I considered that the purchase it for reasons that will be apparent to them wojna polsko-bolszewicka (Polish-Bolshevik War, on examination. 1919–1921), a contest in which the very existence of the country was at stake, better served as a historical marker of the Polish national period immediately following World War I. It would have been only fair About the Authors of him to note that, whether or not the Greater Polish Uprising is included in the “Timeline of Polish Sally Boss is one of the founders of Sarmatian History” as he would have preferred, the powstanie Review. wielkopolskie is not missing from the book, as he Krzysztof Brzechczyn is Professor of Philosophy in insinuates, but is given status as a normal full article, the Institute for Cultural Studies at the University of one of six devoted to the various Polish national Adam Mickiewicz in Poznań. His books deal with the uprisings known as powstania. The powstanie diversity of development processes in various wielkopolskie is listed and described yet again on countries; most recently, in Poland and Mexico. In page 317 in the summary of Major Polish National addition to over a dozen books (some of them and Regional Uprisings. Exactly the same goes for coauthored or coedited), he has written over a the supposedly missing, according to him, powstania hundred scholarly articles and numerous popular śląskie (the Silesian Uprisings of 1919, 1920, and texts. As a recipient of fellowships and grants he has 1921). They are also both listed in the index. Just spent time at American, German, and Hungarian how many times, and in how many places do the universities. powstanie wielkopolskie and the powstania śląskie Edwin Dyga is the Chief of Staff to the leader of the need to be listed for this reviewer to notice them? Christian Democratic Party in the Legislative Council of New South Wales, Australia. His work has Among other important things omitted from appeared in journals of political and cultural review Professor Pula’s review I would like to mention the in Australia, the UK, the US and Europe. long, thoughtful, and informative foreword by Adam James S. Pula is Professor of History at Purdue Zamoyski. I am happy to let the Kaleidosope of University Northwest. Poland speak for itself and stand or fall on its own Peter Dale Scott is a Canadian-born poet, scholar, merits, among which I count the accessible style with academic, and diplomat. He was a Professor of which I believe most entries are written. The English at UC Berkeley, wrote eight collections of reviewer seems by temperament to be immune to the poetry and hundreds of political texts, among them humor of many of them. If Pula should ever venture such books as American War Machine: Deep to teach a survey course on Polish history and Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the culture, I think he would be challenged to find a Road to Afghanistan (2010) and The Road to 9/11: handier and more readable quick reference work for Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (2007). such a course. Besides use as a reference work, the To Poles he is mainly known as an early translator of Kaleidoscope can just as enjoyably be read page after Czesław Miłosz’s poetry. page, and I think any prospective student of Polish Oscar E. Swan is Professor of Slavic Languages and history and culture would greatly profit from doing Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. just that. I encourage readers of The Sarmatian Ewa Thompson is editor of Sarmatian Review. Review not to be put off from purchasing or consulting this innovative book on Poland on the basis of the present reviewer’s careless, mean- spirited, and inaccurate characterizations. For a more balanced review of the work under consideration, the reader might want to consult that of Agnieszka Jezyk See an important message about the next in the Slavic and East European Journal (Vol. 61, issue of Sarmatian Review on Page 2106. No. 1, 148-149). Oscar E. Swan, University of Pittsburgh
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