THE SARMATIAN REVIEW Vol. XXXV, No. 1 ______January 2015
Remembering Katyń in Baltimore
National Katyń Memorial, Baltimore, Maryland. Wikipedia Commons. January 2015 THE SARMATIAN REVIEW
The Sarmatian Review (ISSN 1059- 5872) is a triannual publication of the Polish Institute of Worth remembering: Houston. The journal deals with Polish, Central, and Eastern European affairs, while exploring their implications donations to for the United States. We specialize in the translation of documents. Sarmatian Review is indexed in the American Sarmatian Review Bibliography of Slavic and East European Studies, EBSCO, and P.A.I.S. International Database. From January 1998 on, files in PDF format are available at the Central and Eastern are tax-deductible. European Online Library (www.ceeol.com). Subscription price is $21.00 per year for individuals, $28.00 for institutions and libraries ($28.00 for individuals, $35.00 for libraries overseas, air mail). The views expressed by authors of articles do not necessarily represent those of the In this issue: Editors or of the Polish Institute of Houston. Articles are SR Data ...... 1881 subject to editing. Unsolicited manuscripts and other James Edward Reid, Justice Denied: in re Janowiec materials are not returned unless accompanied by a self- et al vs. Russia before the European Court of Human addressed and stamped envelope. Please submit your contribution electronically and, if requested, send a printout Rights (poem) ...... 1883 by air mail. Submissions and Letters to the Editor can be Warsaw 1944: Hitler, Himmler, and the Warsaw emailed to
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THE SARMATIAN REVIEW January 2015
Sarmatian Review Data
Advantages of having had an empire Amount of money the British earn annually by summer hosting of foreign students who want to learn English: 1.2 billion dollars. Source: Beppe Severgnini, “The Invasion of Britain,” New York Times, 16 July 2014. Are Belarusians really so close to Russians? In 2014, percentage of Belarusians who want to unify into one polity with Russians: 9.8 percent, a decline from 13.0 percent in 2012. Source: Grigory Ioffe, “Belarus’s Independence Day,” Eurasian Daily Monitor, vol. 11, no. 131 (18 July 2014). AIDS in Russia Number of confirmed cases in Russia of HIV virus in 2004: 170,000. Estimated number of such cases in 2014: 1.2 million. Percentage of new worldwide HIV infections occurring in Russia in 2014: 55 percent. Number of people injecting drugs in Russia in 2014: 1.8 million, or 2.3 percent of the country’s population. Other former Soviet republics where HIV infections have risen since 1991: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan. Uzbekistan. Source: “Why Are HIV Rates So High in Russia?” International Business Times, 13 September 2014
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Emigration from Russia The number of Russians emigrating in 2012–2013: five times higher than in the two years before Putin began a new six-year term in May 2012. Emigration in figures: 186,382 moved abroad in 2013 and 122,751 in 2012, compared to 36,774 in 2011 and 33,578 in 2010. Source: “Putin’s Ukraine gamble hastens exodus of Russian money and talent,” Reuters, 14 August 2014
For Susan Marie Turner JUSTICE DENIED il miglior fabbro
DEPOSITIONS NOT REVIEWED IN RE JANOWIEC ET AL BY THE COURT SUBMITTED BY VS RUSSIA I Leo Tolstoy II Anna Politkovskaia III Fyodor Dostoevsky Before the European IV Anton Chekov V Mikhail Bulgakov Court of Human Rights VI Anna Akhmatova VII Joseph Brodsky October 21, 2013 VIII Osip Mandelstam IX Alexander Solzhenitsyn X Nikita Khrushchev http://www.humanrightseurope.org/2013/10/court- XI Nikita Mikhalkov makes-final-ruling-on-world-war-two-katyn- XII Gary Kasparov massacre-complaint/ XIII Amy Knight
European Court of Human Rights Depositions Compiled by Response by Georgy Matyushkin: James Edward Reid
“The court does not have the conventional February 12, 2014 duty to investigate the events at Katyn.” Once again it is up to us poets to nail the guilty to the essential pillory. (Émile Zola)
DEPOSITION I
Leo Tolstoy, “J’accuse!”
Lev’s Decision “I trembled, expecting to be pursued.” No more birch leaves against the terrible gray sky a great stone on my chest crushing my struggling heart [Signed] a child’s voice pleading in the distance, “Natalya!” Frost again this morning Georgy Matyushkin my decision to flee Russian Deputy Minister of Justice prophet and crank Russian Envoy to the European Court of genius and idiot Human Rights the rising sun took longer October 21, 2013 to clear the same bad dream
1883 January 2015 THE SARMATIAN REVIEW paralyzing me and of all places, taking a deep breath telling me to escape too soon, in the elevator to my apartment. the nightmare bearing hard black iron crosses A dark blur of shadowy sound, long footsteps running down the hall, on its impossible machinery. I see the dirt under his nails, fingertips Soon? Three decades? Now? stealing around the closing door, They are smoking, and laughing, opening . . . and burning my manuscripts. The steel glint, the stal in his hard hand, “It seemed to Hadji Murád that someone the whispers under Moscow’s silence. was striking him with a hammer, and he so confident, he left the security camera running, could not understand who was doing it or when I was murdered at 16.01 h, October 7, why.” 2006, the President’s birthday. “These are the titles, how Omens or autumn you will be remembered heavier each evening. after we are both gone.” “It was Natasha and he loved her,” and I must not return. A Dirty War Once, it had made sense, A Small Corner of Hell until that one dream Putin’s Russia of their coming A Russian Diary to Yasnaya Polyana Nothing but the Truth and into my study. Za chto (“For What?”) I must run. “but the walls of our cells are impermeable” DEPOSITION II Anna Politkovskaia (1958-2006), “J’accuse!” DEPOSITION III Fyodor Dostoevsky, “J’accuse!” Za chto Tobolsk Carry my own food, A grey wind cuts stony soil in sealed packets. covering a land Refuse all food and water without summer or spring. from anyone I don’t know. In the dead of night Do not produce my ID frost coats the constricted buds until the official produces his. of dwarfed and anxious trees.
Hide my rolls of film Motionless silver branches under packets of dried porridge. in the broken moonlight race against the dawn. Bear witness to the birthday boy Bright flickering ice who seduced Bush with his eyes. drops from the limbs, as the fitful buds swell. Keep my sweet Ilya and Vera, The night air pulsates at a safe distance from me. Please. with secretions of blood and milk the color of bone. After Beslan, Grozny, Starye Atagi, I survived it all, even poison. Yet, here it is, The taste of acetone
1884 THE SARMATIAN REVIEW January 2015 and the texture of sand Ward Six fill her mouth. “It was hard work; the heavy downpour ruined There is no taste everything we managed to get done.” and no texture My clothes are in his cold embrace. soaked through Just an extraction by sheets of rain. of her warmth he cannot feel. I help a few men until my fingers are so cold, He leaves a pitiful pulse wrapped in wet rags, masquerading I can no longer move them . . . as flesh. DEPOSITION V A limb cracks in the silence Mikhail Bulgakov, “J’accuse!” as the blackness and ice harden into furtive shapes. The Heart of a Dog Rooting in the dirt in the alley Dying, the night is still, for mouldy bread rotting meat watching the abominable need pulsing with small worms. sharpen hunger again. Water? No, Igor’s pool of piss. My smell and taste are shot The House of the Dead to hell, but I’m still alive. At Tobolsk I saw I must be alive, because men chained to a wall. I’m an apparatchik now, Each man dragged and decide who lives. a chain I don’t care about the living seven feet long, most of the time, each has a bedstead by him . . . just at decision time.
Each man is kept Ivan and I are competing like that to see who can send for the years more zeks to the gulags. of an eternity. zaklyuchënnyĭ! DEPOSITION IV zaklyuchënnyĭ! zaklyuchënnyĭ! Anton Chekhov, “J’accuse!”
Surgery We yell it three times fast when we’re drinking vodka, I have come back over and over, and over again. with the painless Whoever stumbles first, needle and thread. buys all the drinks. Tell me yet again You can join the fun any time. where the pieces of your heart You may as well are scattered. I have your name
Written at Ohsweken, Ontario, Canada, Six Nations and know where you live. Reserve, May 24, 2013 January 5, 2014
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Heart of a Dog The shadows around her eyes The blizzard roars twitch, and slice crow’s feet a prayer for the dying deeper into her flesh. and I howl with it. 2014 DEPOSITION VII Bitter rain freezes Joseph Brodsky, “J’accuse!” your fingers your heart. To hear today—it could have been worse. In 1953 Stalin wanted to slash and burn DEPOSITION VI the Gulag archipelago across more of the scorched face of mother Russia— Anna Akhmatova, “J’accuse!” twenty million Russians burnt by the sun In the Courtyard of the Lubyanka weren’t enough. Saddest were those who died with Slave of Stalin “Do You Hear Voices?” tattooed on their foreheads, I didn’t, their faith and devotion freezing at least not until this afternoon. and thawing into descendants They were hovering in the air, who became apologists, pundits, and over on the Russian poetry shelves. TV anchors for the new little tsar. It was Akhmatova and Brodsky looking out at the snow falling “The death of one man diminishes me, through the tall north storm window, the death of a million is a statistic.” whispering about mother Russia, the Russia that could have been OKRANA/CHEKA/OGPU/NKVD/NKGB/MGB and those who could have been . . . . /KGB/FSB/
Mandelstam To a Tyrant (Odnomu tiranu from Mayakovsky Chast’rechi): Arresting these café Pasternak habituées—he started snuffing out world Bulgakov culture somewhat later. Tsvetaeva
Yevtushenko “So I guess you don’t get much sleep, do you?” Voznesensky Isaac Babel, to the two KGB thugs who were and all the disappeared driving him to the Lubyanka Prison. who could have been DEPOSITION VIII Requiem 1930–1940 Osip Mandelstam, “J’accuse!”
In the endless silence You were born with no knowledge of the prison yard of the ghosts of the slaves the nearly endless silence drowning below deck I am recognized. as water hissed its way into the rotting ark of the Tsar. A weathered peasant woman, And banished to Scythia, Ovid shouted her face shattered by grief a warning to you through the sea spray, and the undying bleakness but St. Petersburg was sinking of incomprehension, and you didn’t know how to swim. speaks to me, a whisper, The polestar led you into a web where “Anna? Can you write about this?” no Ode to Stalin could save you “I can.” from Demeter laying waste to Athens
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Paris and Moscow. Her ruins whispered, The Cancer Care Ward “When the revolution comes? How many more? How many more times will it be another lie?” Still on this side of the Acheron, and so still He exiled you to the sub-arctic light I do not hold out much hope, but I shall where transparent blades glinted inside the resistance. and flayed the last of the things Has it undone so many? you tried to keep close to you, and then tossed them out onto the ice. In the face of the odds after five years Others had chosen the easy way out, they pass the waiting area but you had only verses to confess down the hall to radiation. and no one to betray but yourself as swallows came keening silence The angry, across the last thalassa, the sea the sea the bald young woman whose archipelago closed over your head. with her hat cocked just so. You had been drowning for so long The tanned athlete you welcomed its last offerings who will not accept rather than face more of the past. something that does not play fair. After so many deaths, black blots The aged flowers who are sweet dropped filaments of steel silk, and waver on the edge. millions of arachnid legs scrambled They all make their way here. jittery steppes to find you scratching for food in a garbage dump at Vtoraia Rechka. The hall is quiet now, sky blue cables iron pipes Their sharp threads etched long illegible lines of and silver conduit overhead frost expose the sharp gut where poetry no longer lacerates what remains of the expanding hospital. of your heart. Out of radiation “Eyesight of Wasps” an old man pushes a wheelchair bearing his wife, and stops. Armed with the eyesight of slender wasps, sucking at the earth’s axis, the earth’s axis, He answers her faint plea, I feel everything that never happened to me, she is exhausted, pale, and I memorize it, but it’s all in vain. and he murmurs reassurance, (Second Voronezh Notebook) smiles, leans over her, and kisses her neck “You needn’t worry,” Akmatova said to me, and whispers many times, “something good is happening.” She had “I am waiting for you. For you, my love.” already heard vague rumors about the Party Congress at which Khrushchev read out his “the disease had come upon him, a happy man famous letter. with few cares, like a gale in the space of two (Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope) weeks. (The Cancer Ward) “I do not hold out much hope, but I shall try to DEPOSITION IX say what is most important in a short space— In Memoriam, Henry Kock namely, to set forth what I hold to be for the
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn “J’accuse!” good and salvation of our people, to which all of “J”accuse!, et encore, J’accuse! you—and I myself—belong.”
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(Letter to the Soviet Leaders) that? What kind of shit is that, when you have to keep people in chains?” “and I thought: What have I done? I put myself (Khrushchev, speaking to a wheat field in their hands again.” in baffled fury, quoted in Red Plenty). (The Oak and the Calf: A Memoir) “Most of all the blood. My arms are up to the elbows in blood.” DEPOSITION X (Mikhail Shatrov, quoting Khrushchev)
Nikita Khrushchev, “J’accuse!” DEPOSITION XI Eviscerating the Cancer Nikita Mikhalkov, “J’accuse!” 1956. The Khrushchev shokk. Grozny in filthy light A Bolshevik since 1918, under shit stained skies Nikita rises to speak RPG smoke trails from ruins at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Party. once were buildings A delegate from eastern Russia A film clip cuts across looks down and whispers to himself, jury deliberations. “Do not live by lies!” and is surprised A broken down army tank with a rag doll but remains expressionless Russian body and folds his hands to keep lolling in the death turret and some–– thing– from shaking with fear. – runs in the street Fragments, phrases, strike fear and whistle sharp long knives: The jurors try to justify “ abolition of the cult of the personality and judge their own lives. decisively, once and for all”
“ once and for all. . .” 50-caliber machine guns “violations of Leninist norms” burst brutal flame streaks “ grave perversions of party principles. . .” across what was once a street “ mass acts of abuse against socialist legality“ where it is running toward you
He raises his eyes, but not his head, Each juror convicts himself A delegate is clutching his heart with what passes for his truth gasping for breaths that do not come. And always rounding that corner Another is thrown back in his seat loping toward you now violently, from a heart attack. runs the recurring surprise Delegates are gasping in pain. of that strong black body Pages and medical staff rush in and carry away Stalinists in seizures Each juror condemns himself Boleslaw Bierut dies of a heart attack. to life imprisonment in Russia The bootlicking model Stalinist writer
Alexander Fadeev shoots himself. Always rounding that corner It was all over for all of them, the black dog lopes closer, except the lonely dying, larger and faster with some part for those who welcomed an end. of a body clamped in its jaws (Helen Rappaport, Joseph Stalin: A
Biographical Companion) The worst prison is the recurring
iron cell door of night and day “Paradise . . . is a place where people want to end up, not a place Running fast toward you now they run from. What kind of socialism is you finally see in its jaws,
1888 THE SARMATIAN REVIEW January 2015 a medal-beribboned chest Times, Op-Ed, March 28, 2013) and a human shoulder slab. DEPOSITION XIII And on the battlefield, Bolkonsky Amy Knight, “J’accuse!” gazes up at the immense blue sky. Where it’s . . . where it is . . . Will Putin’s Gunsels Play Chopin For Us? where it’s always midnight where the knife blade “We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons, is probing your heart. and destroy them” (Vladimir Putin, September 1, 2004) “Voilà une belle mort.” (Napoleon regarding Andrei Bolkonsky in War I am reading Hadji Murád and Peace) this evening by an open window July 31, 2012 at a friend’s house in Kingston. The summer rain is soft DEPOSITION XII the ivory keys settle under the hand of Gary Kasparov, “J’accuse!” this late message from Tolstoy. Black King Resigns Across the living room she is reading quietly The distant phalanx the way she did when we first met.
They walk north outnumbers us all, and toward the Winter Palace is constrained to march and peer at the bulk in silent black felt boots. of Tsar Nicholas grunting En passant est interdit over the body of a fifteen year old. murder at close range His glut of bastard offspring has is the one and only move reproduced his rape catechism this late in the game. proselytized the archipelago
exported his virus Until his last move for two hundred years to Chechnya, sends an ultimatum to the little black king where Hadji Murád rides the slate light of Gulag Nation. to the local headquarters of the Russian front. White Black The clock unwinds the rain on the back of his hands. 39 RxP K-N1 Breathing hard, 40 B-B4 K-R1 something is 41 Q-B Resigns something is White Queen to Bishop: Black resigns. something is wrong, the stars
wither the grain “I’m sure it’s reachable, but you might have to in the fields. No good break some rules to reach it.” (Kasparov on that can come, even from those hidden wealth, New York Times, April 27, 2014, who are good, he can feel it “Sanctions Revive Search For Secret Putin under the necessity, Fortune”) the way his spine tests “It’s like the mob. The only thing that matters is the heft of his ammunition belt. loyalty. The hit man must be loyal to the boss.
The boss must protect the hit man” (Joe Nocera The trees open to a clearing where on Kasparov and on Putin’s rule. New York Hadji Murád will negotiate,
1889 January 2015 THE SARMATIAN REVIEW with wet sabres. Safe and sound Who welcomes a guest the Chechen rides away pursued an envoy of peace by bloodthirsty infants with armed guards? intifadas the drunken Tsar can’t remember I look across the room at her, unleashing thankful we are here Cossacks, the president’s gunsels encircled in the far distance who lament the passing of the Gulags by what is unfolding beyond who would crush their own mother’s faces the unforgiving inevitability who will turn on each other at last of the shield of stone, listening and will not have to tour Russia’s dead to Chopin’s first Impromptu, op. 29 when there is no one left to ask how many more Slaves of Stalin, When Tolstoy heard it how many more Beslans, as he wrote this tragedy how many more apartment tower unlike the Medea bombings are enough? with no deus no machina but a record and a prophecy, Hexogen traces were found at the bombing sites. he knew what we become Hexogen is only available when we discard both. at Russian facilities controlled by the FSB. In his raw youth, Lev served in Chechnya These are the indelible fingerprints of his keys enlisted in the army, the keys to the Gulag Nation. 1851 the year On the 1999 bombing of apartment towers, to Murád came win the Russian election: “Finally, We Know and fell in a cold rain about the Moscow Bombings.” (Amy Knight, burnt by the sun (New York Review of Books, November 22, surrounded with little cover 2012). in a wet and muddy no man’s land I put two of my best men on it in the open where always kept their mouths shut no one should die alone about everything they’d done. for trying to end the terror. Oversaw the assignations In exile in Kazakhstan, Amerika, the bombings in Chechnya and in final irrelevance the sudden death in exile since his youthful letter, and it was only a phrase, They kept quiet about the money Solzhenitsyn still growls, invested it for their kids “Zhit ne vo lzhi!” and dressed in secondhand clothes knowing what “Do not live by lies!” But, who knows? So. Just in case, and saying it with your bare hands I sent Lev, who killed that bitch Anna brings you. to kill them both. Now. Who’s next? Amy? More lies spill overboard from the Russian Ark Lubyanka Ninth Circle Requiem they are dying faster than the negotiations falling away Long and deep inhuman sounds like spring snow in the Caucasus silenced by such a distant heavy door slamming shut,
1890 THE SARMATIAN REVIEW January 2015 ensures that the new silence Deposition II Politkovskaia is worse than the promise Anna Politkovskaia was a crusading journalist who in the last light flickering. reported on Russian atrocities in Chechnya until she was assassinated in her apartment building on Putin’s Doodling wolves in red ink birthday. birthday boy: Vladimir Putin. trading the Lubyanka Ilya and Vera: Anna’s children. for a Warfarin dinner Beslan: The September 2004 Beslan school massacre is not enough suffering occurred when heavily armed Russian security forces to wash away Lenin’s blood entered the school after three days of occupation by or Osip Mandelstam’s. armed Islamic separatists from Ingushetia and Chechnya. The truncated negotiations led to 354 Your mad father savagely deaths including 186 children, and notably beats you for eternity consolidated Putin’s power. all the arrests and you can’t Grozny: The Russian war in Grozny led to the stop the seepage of your blood consolidation of more power in the Kremlin. Starye Atagi: South of Grozny, Starye Atagi is now blood bursts from your mouth another Russian war zone in Chechnya. black blood from your black eyes “stal in his hard hand”: stal is the metal of the assassin’s handgun, and is the Russian word for Rage spurts from your nose “steel.” It was adapted by Joseph Dzhugashvili but no one, Nemo will help you during his rebranding as Stalin. bleeding and trapped in ice security camera: recorded the assassination, three in the ninth circle of hell bullets to her chest, and a “control shot” to her head. with the lives of others, forever. No one has been convicted of the murder. June 11, 2014 A Dirty War etc.: These are the titles of books published by Politkovskaia. “But the walls of our cells / are impermeable”: from AUTHOR’S NOTES Politkovskaia’s A Russian Diary: A Jounalist’s Final Katyn: one of the locations where Russian forces Account of Life, Corruption, and Death in Putin’s murdered Polish officers and soldiers and buried Russia, July 12, 2005. them in mass graves during the Second World War. Janowiec et al: Deposition III Dostoevsky http://www.humanrightseurope.org/2013/10/court- Tobolsk: One of the locations in Dostoevsky’s The makes-final-ruling-on-world-war-two-katyn- House of the Dead. While traveling west after serving massacre-complaint/ eight years of exile in Siberia, Dostoevsky stopped in Tobolsk, about 2,500 kilometers from Moscow. Deposition I Tolstoy Orlando Figes describes it as the ”provincial “I trembled, expecting”: Tolstoy’s Diary, October 28, backwater” where Tsar Nicholas, Alexandra, and 1910. their five children were sent in 1917 before they were “and burning my manuscripts”: “Soldiers burned all transferred to Ekaterinburg. There they were some of Tolstoy’s manuscripts when they arrived at executed at close range by a Bolshevik firing squad at Yasnaya Polyana.” William H. Gass, “Kinds of night. Killing: The Flourishing of the Third Reich,” Harper’s Magazine, August 2009. Deposition IV Chekhov “It seemed to Hadji Murád”: The Chechen leader “painless needle and thread”: Chekov, a physician, who attempted to negotiate peace with Russian forces once said, “Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature in the mid-nineteenth century in Chechnya, where is my mistress.” Tolstoy had served in the Russian army. “my fingers were so cold . . . I could no longer move (Hadji Murád, trans. by Aylmer Maude, p. 149) them”: A personal recollection of felling diseased “It was Natasha, and he loved her”. War and Peace, elm trees in a forest east of Galt, Ontario, during the p. 1112 (Pevear-Volokhonsky translation). winter of 1973–74. In the evenings, I read the first Yasnaya Polyana: “Bright Glade” was Tolstoy’s volume of The Gulag Archipelago. birthplace, where he wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina.
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Deposition V Bulgakov Deposition X Khrushchev apparatchik: A member of the Communist Party “Abolition of the cult”: Quotations are adapted from bureaucracy. Often derogatory. Khruschev’s Kremlin-shaking speech, as quoted in zek or zaklyuchënnyĭ: Prisoner in a Russian labor Helen Rappaport, Joseph Stalin. camp, or gulag. “Most of all the blood”: Frances Spufford, Red Plenty, London: Faber & Faber, 2010, p. 419. Deposition VI Akhmatova Lubyanka: The KBG’s dreaded Lubyanka Prison, Deposition XI Mikhalkov where torture and summary execution was the fate of “A film clip”: the repeated couplet throughout this many of the Soviet Union’s desaparicidos. deposition references the repeated image that haunts the jury deliberations in Mikhalkov’s film 12. Deposition VII Brodsky 50-caliber machine guns: the guns may be of higher “Slave of Stalin”: In The Gulag Archipelago caliber. Solzhenitsyn reports seeing zeks who had loved medal-beribboned chest: references the fate of the Stalin, with this phrase tattooed on their foreheads. Russian revolutionary hero Colonel Kotov in “The death of one man diminishes me, the death of a Mikhalkov’s Burnt by the Sun, as Stalinist torture and million is a statistic”: Attributed to Joseph Stalin. murder accelerate in 1936. “So, I guess you don’t get much sleep”: Quoted by “Voilà une belle mort”: Napoleon’s words upon Babel’s wife, Antonina Pirozhkova. regarding Andrei Bolkonsky’s body lying on the OKRANA/CHEKA/OGPU/NKVD/NKGB/MGB/KGB/ battlefield. (War and Peace, p. 291, Pevear & FSB: These acronyms chronologically list the Volokhonsky translation). changes in nomenclature for the sometimes- distinctive versions of the Russian secret service, Deposition XII Kasparov from Tsarist times to the most recent change from En passant refers to the capture by a pawn of an KGB to FSB under Putin, the former head of the opponent’s chess piece in passing. KGB. 41 Q-B: The move of the Queen to Bishop. In the 1971 chess match between Bobby Fischer and Boris Deposition VIII Mandelstam Spassky, Fischer’s forty-first move, Q-B, led Spassky banished to Scythia: In 8 CE Ovid was banished from to concede. Rome to Scythia, now a part of Russia, a very distant banishment at that time. See Delacroix, Ovid Among Deposition XIII Knight the Scythians. Lubyanka Ninth Circle Requiem: presents parallels Voronezh: Stalin initially banished Mandelstam to between the hell of the Lubyanka where Mandelstam Voronezh, in the area that the Greeks and Romans was originally imprisoned and Dante’s ninth circle of knew as Scythia. hell, where Stalin is surely imprisoned in aeternum. Ode to Stalin: Mandelstam’s desperate and failed In 1933, in his “Conversation About Dante” a few attempt to curry favor with Stalin. years before his imprisonment by Stalin, Mandelstam responded to the Inferno with a deep understanding Deposition IX Solzhenitsyn of the orderly nature and meaning of Dante’s lasting In Memoriam, Henry Kock: Written in a Hamilton achievement. Surely Mandelstam could not have hospital cancer ward, after driving my friend Henry imagined the chaotic and meaningless suffering and there for treatment. death he would face a few years later, in a cold hell J’accuse!: Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag that even Dante could not have imagined. Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Doodling wolves: “the last observed activity of Investigation, vols. 1–3. Stalin,” Gjertrud Schnackenberg, A Gilded Lapse of “And I thought: What have I done? I have put myself Time, NY: Farrar Straus, 1994, p.143. in their hands again”: (The Oak and the Calf). After Warfarin: a rat poison, also used medically as a blood the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan thinner. When consumed in high doses concealed in Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn traveled to Moscow to be food it leads to uncontrolled bleeding and death, honored, and booked himself into a hotel room. He reputedly the fate of Stalin according to some took an evening walk and discovered with alarm that sources. his accommodations were next to his “old sharashka” mad father savagely: Schnackenberg, p. 143. (prison slang for a research institute staffed by seepage of your blood: Schnackenberg, p. 99. prisoners) where he was first imprisoned. ninth circle of hell: Although betrayal now seems to be an increasingly endemic and oblivious choice, in the Inferno Dante placed those who betrayed others
1892 THE SARMATIAN REVIEW January 2015 in the deepest pit of Hell, where suffering was the up on July 22, 1944 by Polish Communists, most intense. allegedly in Lublin but in fact in Moscow. The lives of others: In A Gilded Lapse of Time, Gjertrud Schnackenberg presciently used this phrase It may seem strange that the book starts with a in her poem for Mandelstam “A Monument In Utopia chapter on Belarus, but this is as it should be. It (Osip Mandelstam).” In 2006, the film The Lives of was here, under German occupation, that the Others (Das Leben der Anderen) opened in Germany. Wehrmacht began to use––mostly with other Its presentation of the lives of paranoia, under helpers––the strategy of wiping out entire meticulous, widespread surveillance and villages and towns to crush Soviet-supported imprisonment, would have been envied by Stalin, partisan resistance. These actions were carried surrounded as he was by blunt-force trauma out with the full knowledge of German military underlings and their often random brutalities. Hexagon is only available: enough said. commanders and were directed by two criminals: Oskar Paul Dirlewanger (1896– 1945)––a Nazi since 1923, Ph.D. in political Warsaw 1944: Hitler, science, member of the SS (Schutzstaffel, or Himmler, and the Warsaw Protection Units), and Bronisław Kamiński (1899–1944), born in Vitebsk. Dirlewanger Uprising formed a military unit out of renegades held in a German concentration camp; they were By Alexandra Richie. New York: Farrar, supposed to be “rehabilitated” by military Strauss and Giroux, 2013. 738 pages including service (sic). Kamiński’s father was of Polish illustrations and index. ISBN: 978-0-374-28655- descent and his mother was German. He was an 2. engineer working in the alcohol industry. His Anna M. Cienciala hatred of the Soviet system stemmed from his arrest and sentence for adherence to a “counter- lexandra Richie is already known for her revolutionary group”; the sentence was light, A book Faust’s Metropolis: A History of since it meant employment in a network Berlin (New York: Carroll & Graff, 1997), a distillery. He was sent to the Lokot area near runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in 1998. She Bryansk, where he offered his services to the married Władysław Bartoszewski, Jr. and now Germans in November 1941; they allowed him resides in Warsaw. Her book on the Warsaw to organize a militia to fight the partisans. The Uprising of 1944 is the most detailed account of militia grew into a brigade and retreated the Armia Krajowa (Home Army) two-month alongside the Wehrmacht to Poland. Both men fight to free the city from the Germans as the led their units as part of the German Army, wore Red Army stood by across the Vistula in the its uniforms, and were responsible for the eastern part of the capital, Praga, from mid- massacres of Warsaw civilians during the September onward. The Polish language version Uprising, accompanied by unheard of cruelty. with Zofia Kunert is titled Warszawa 1944 General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski (1889– (Warsaw: Grupa Wydawnicza Foksal, 2014). 1972) was in charge of the operations both in The year 1944 has different meanings for many German-occupied Belarus and in Warsaw. nations. In Western Europe it means liberation Richie’s book is based on broad German and from German occupation by American and Polish documentation, as well as secondary British troops, with the latter including Polish literature, published memoirs, and the author’s units. In Central Europe it means liberation by interviews with survivors. She shows that Hitler Soviet troops, but also the imposition of Soviet was determined to destroy the Polish capital and domination. For Poles, 1944 is the year of the closely followed the fighting––as reported by Warsaw Uprising against the Germans (August the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler––while 1–October 2) with the political aim of sitting in his bunker in East Prussia. The Führer demonstrating Polish independence against the devoted to this task forces that could have “Polish Committee of National Liberation” set strengthened his army in the west, particularly airplanes, and an almost indestructible armored
1893 January 2015 THE SARMATIAN REVIEW train that aimed its powerful guns with While the fighters and civilian population of enormously heavy shells at various areas of the Warsaw are honored in public memory for their Polish capital as the fighting progressed. bravery and endurance and there is a Museum of the Warsaw Uprising, a debate still rages among The first wholesale massacre of civilians took Polish historians as well as the public at large on place in the region of Wola, west of the city whether the Uprising should have taken place at center (map, 108). There, as the Polish Home all. Some, like Jan M. Ciechanowski (The Army was forced to retreat, Dirlewanger’s Warsaw Rising of 1944, London and New York: troops went house to house, looting, raping, Cambridge University Press, 1974), Piotr torturing, and murdering the inhabitants. Heinz Zychowicz (Obłęd ‘44, Warsaw: Rebis, 2013), Reinefarth (1903–1979), SS and police leader in and Rafał Ziemkiewicz (Jakie piękne the Warta region, ordered the first wave of death samobójstwo, Warsaw: Fabryka słów, 2014) in Wola. Nevertheless, he lived peacefully in openly condemn the decision to fight as doomed Germany after the war, was the mayor of a town due to the lack of military supplies. Most believe on the island of Sylt, and later worked as a the rising was inevitable given the circumstances lawyer; all investigations of his wartime activity of the time. On July 20, 1944, an attempt was were dropped. SS General Erich von dem Bach- made on Hitler’s life that wounded him but Zelewski, who was in charge of the entire seemed to presage a revolt against him by army German military action, gave testimony against officers. The German armies were in full retreat; the accused Nazi leaders at Nuremberg and thus German military and civilians were leaving escaped punishment. He was later tried for a Warsaw. The Polish-language Soviet murder committed in the Nazi Party purge of propaganda radio “Kosciuszko” called on 1934 and died in prison. As Richie shows, the Varsovians to secure the Vistula bridges on July massacres continued in every region of Warsaw. 29. Polish Prime Minister Stanisław The readers of this book will need nerves of Mikołajczyk, leader of the Polish Government- steel as they follow the fighting with its tales of in-Exile, London, who arrived in Moscow at the horror, suffering, and tremendous cost in Polish end of July, told Stalin about the Uprising on lives through each of Warsaw’s six August 2 and asked for Soviet help. Stalin said administrative districts. She devotes chapter 11 he had no knowledge of it, but that he would to a discussion of the policies of the Allies and give all possible assistance. At the same time, he Hitler in connection with the Battle of advised Mikołajczyk to meet with members of Czerniaków (map, 519). She calls it “The First the Polish Committee of National Liberation. Battle of the Cold War” because “two mutually The Polish premier met with them, but refused exclusive world views came into open conflict” to accept the majority communist government (475). In fact, there had been conflicts earlier they proposed––with Stalin’s backing, of course. east of Warsaw, but in view of the Western Back in Warsaw guns were heard in the eastern Allies’ pressure on Stalin to help the Uprising part of the capital, Praga, and interpreted as and his refusal, this struggle presaged the future signaling the arrival of the Red Army. Unknown cold war. It is estimated that about 200,000 to the Poles, however, this was only part of the people died, while most of the city center was vanguard of the First Ukrainian Front. It was in ravaged and then burned by the Germans, these circumstances that General Tadeusz Bór- including its historical buildings, museums, and Komorowski (1895–1966), commander of the libraries. The longest fight was in the Stare Home Army, gave the order to start the uprising Miasto (Old Town) district––the original city on August 1. location––whose beautiful old buildings were The Home Army in Warsaw numbered some completely destroyed. After the end of the war 40,000 men and women. They were woefully the survivors rebuilt them with painstaking care, underequipped because the original plan, code- along with the Royal Castle and the nearby part named “Burza”(storm), for multistaged of Warsaw. uprisings as the German armies retreated had omitted large cities. Bór had counted on Allied
1894 THE SARMATIAN REVIEW January 2015 help by air, especially the sending of the Polish Richie’s book is a substantial scholarly Parachute Brigade, but was told on July 30 by achievement. It is a fascinating, readable work courier Jan Nowak-Jeziorański––sent via Italy that will, hopefully, help spread knowledge of from London––that this was out of the question. the Warsaw Uprising, generally passed over in In fact, the Polish Parachute Brigade––formed silence by Western historians. It may be a long expressly to fight in Poland, was ordered by read for some, but well worth the effort. The Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery to support maps and illustrations are very good. One British airborne troops in crossing the Rhine into wishes, however, for a list of abbreviations, a Germany (Arnhem). Bór-Komorowski was name-and-subject index, and a timeline; the aware that Red Army commanders had arrested book has only an index of names. ∆ Polish officers after accepting their units’ help in liberating Wilno (Vilnius) and Lwów (Lviv); nevertheless, he expected Soviet help because The Use and Abuse of Memory Warsaw was the main transport hub between Interpreting World War II in Moscow and Berlin. He obviously did not Contemporary European Politics anticipate the destruction of Warsaw (see interview with Alexandra Richie, Edited by Christian Karner and Bram http://historia.newsweek.pl/zniszczenie- Mertens. New Brunswick and London: warszawy-tego-powstancy-nie-mogli- Transaction Publishers, 2013. 284 pages. Index, przewidziec,artykuly,348965,1.html). In 1958 illustrations. ISBN-13: 978-1412851947. $34.73 when this reviewer asked the general in London on Amazon.com. what he would have done if the Red Army had come into Warsaw and tried to arrest him and Patryk Babiracki his officers, his answer was: “Of course, we would have defended ourselves.” orld War II had a profound impact on the Alexandra Richie sees the main reason for the W consciousness of Europeans. But why the Home Army’s military defeat in the arrival of sudden proliferation of allusions to it in recent new German forces led by General Otto Moritz politics? In the collection of essays under Walter Model (1891–1945) that also stopped the review, sixteen authors study those who have First Ukrainian Front vanguard east of Warsaw. been mentioning the war in European public life. She gives a brief account of the Warsaw The essays cover the entire postwar period, but Uprising and her views of it in an interview with they focus on the twenty-first century. This is the Polish-language edition of Newsweek cited part of this book’s appeal: both historiography above. In her book she discusses the lack of and memorialization of the war have been Western Allies’ help. Except for a few flights shaped by communism and the cold war to such from Brindisi, Italy, by Polish and South African a great extent that one must ask as the authors pilots, Warsaw received no supplies whatsoever. do: what new meanings, if any, have been The lack of substantial help was later justified attached to the war, and to what ends? by the British-U.S. critical need of the Red Army’s continued fight against the German Classic scholarly monographs on the subject Wehrmacht before as well as after the such as Jeffrey Herf’s Divided Memory or James Normandy invasion. This fact was the basis of Young’s The Texture of Memory place different the Western Allies’ decision in August 1943 to emphases on context and texts, and therefore consign Eastern Europe to the Soviet war theater represent more traditional explorations of and keep silent about Soviet arrests of European memory of World War II within the anticommunists in East Central Europe (Anna boundaries of the respective disciplines, in this M. Cienciala, “The Diplomatic Background of case history and art history. Furthermore, the Warsaw Uprising of 1944: The Players and Young’s study is remarkable in that it compares the Stakes,” The Polish Review, Vol. XXXIX, commemorative practices in four countries. In No. 4, 1994, pp. 393–413). contrast, The Use and Abuse of Memory studies
1895 January 2015 THE SARMATIAN REVIEW the ways in which the ear has been invoked in a latent “Europeanizing agent” by helping sustain dozen or so national and regional settings. The a common memory of German guilt. authors include political scientists, sociologists, Subsequent contributions carry forward one or linguists, historians and art historians. The result both of the book’s two central claims. Some is an array of original and rich case studies that show just how frequent and in some cases substantiate one of the book’s two chief sudden the discursive deployment of the war has arguments: that “the Second World War is now been in recent years and months. For instance, firmly embedded in many Europeans’ historical as Joseph Burridge demonstrates in chapter 2, (semi-)consciousness and life worlds, to the British parliamentarians arguing for the 2003 extent that it can be readily employed as an invasion of Iraq drew their rhetorical strength interpretive anchor” (6). from analogies to the appeasement of Hitler. In chapter 6 Paul Smith compellingly examines The editors’ second claim is both more Nicolas Sarkozy’s blatantly instrumental controversial and complex––the constant approach to history before and during his allusions to the war in European public life say presidency. This essay differs from the rest in something “about those present circumstances that the war is treated along with Sarkozy’s being discursively linked to the period of the other historical targets, such as colonialism, and 1930s and 1940s. . . [and] provide a glimpse recast in order to restore a sense of greatness to into what those enunciating them perceive to be the French narrative of national history. In key problems or defining issues in the here and chapter 8 Zinovia Lialiouti and Giorgos now: from European integration to power Bithymitris discuss how Greek-German tensions struggles within nation states, from during the recent economic crisis reactivated contemporary transnational controversies to Greek memories and discourses of the German secularism of the inequalities and injustices of occupation. The line between the “use” and our now inescapably global economy” (6). The “abuse” of history can be quite subjective and main tensions in the volume surface precisely in blurry, and the editors generally do little to the discussions of the bearing of the war on the problematize this distinction. At least these two globalizing present. The chief issue is, have the essays, along with Karner’s piece that features discussions of World War II served as a unifying the embattled Austrian Far Right’s self- or a dividing factor in European politics? comparison to the “new Jews” (chapter 10), In their opening essay Karner and Mertens set leave the reader with no doubt about what the stage by illuminating the urgency of the transpires. issue with examples drawn from recent Other authors address the key question directly European public debates. They also introduce by paying more attention to the integrative and Duncan Bell’s concept of “mythscape,” which divisive potential of the war in various European refers to a terrain on which people’s memories settings. In one of the more stimulating essays of are constantly contested and subverted. They the collection, Tanja Schult explores the reasons thereby distance themselves from the behind the removal of painter Dick Bengtsson’s scholarship that presupposes the existence of swastika-ridden paintings during a 2009 EU “collective memory” (the concept pioneered by summit in the Swedish Museum of Modern Art. Maurice Halbwachs, a student of Emile Systematically interrogating and then rejecting Durkheim). Not every contributor to the volume the official explanations, Schult finds that engages with the notion of mythscape directly, Bengtsson’s swastikas hovering in the corners of but all of them explore the process of the otherwise indifferent paintings created too contestation it aims to capture. much “uncertainty” about the very founding of In the first chapter Henning Grunwald surveys the EU which was, after all, “born out of the postwar European “memory regimes.” Grunwald memory of the war, its large-scale violence and argues that while national discourses of atrocity” (75). This leads the author to ask, “Is it remembrance did little to create a common reasonable to conclude that the incident at the European identity, they nevertheless served as a Moderna Museet confirms that a genuinely
1896 THE SARMATIAN REVIEW January 2015 rooted European memory based on World War more). Second, the book’s title is somewhat II and the Holocaust is still not part of European inaccurate: despite its ostensive emphasis on political practice?” (76) As Jovana Mihajlović “memory” (capacious in itself, as here it Trbovc and Tamara Pavasović Trošt includes acts of free recollecting, official and demonstrate in chapter 9, this conclusion holds unofficial commemorations, as well as true with regard to the states that emerged from politically driven manipulation), several authors the former Yugoslavia, each of which examine the fortunes of historical narration; popularizes a different textbook narrative about there is more truth in the first line of the which military groupings could be subsumed introduction, which leads us to expect “a book under the label of anti-fascist resistance. More about the presence of the past in the present” often than not, the essays reveal that the pan- more generally. Third, there are some European preoccupation with war is typographic inconsistencies—the historic site of underwritten by its different interpretations in Soviet massacre of Polish officers is variously various places and spaces on the Continent. rendered as “Katyn” (214), “Katyń” (215), and However, this insight neither diminishes The “Khatyn’” (236). Other errors of transliteration Use and Abuse of Memory as a collective include “Gasprom” (it should be “Gazprom”). scholarly endeavor nor exposes any flaws in the Finally, the writing is uneven. Some essays are European project. As Bjørn Thomassen and harder to read than others, though this reader’s Rosario Forlenza point out in chapter 7, squinting at a phrase such as “any discursive “attempts to reach a unanimous memory of construal of the War is part of an unending World War II events seem implausible and process of its recontextualization, rereading, and counterproductive. If this is so at the level of rewriting, as well as re-semiotization into national debates, the same point must be made various modalities and (sub)codes” (211) may with respect to Europe” (152). It is the process well point to certain side effects of of working through these memories that might interdisciplinarity: what seems constructive and count the most; the presence of the war in necessary to a linguist may come off as contemporary consciousness and its unnecessary jargon to a historian. simultaneous contestation—the European These issues aside, this is an important volume “mythscape”—might be the optimal possible for specialists and graduate students in many and desired state of affairs. disciplines. The essays remind us that each This reviewer has four complaints. First, more country has its own complicated history of the East European case studies would have war; invoking it from one single point of view strengthened the book. The two contributions seems both flawed and counterproductive. The by Anna Duszak on Poland (chapter 11) and editors resist channeling their conclusions into Tatiana Zhurzhenko on Ukraine (chapter 12) are facile generalizations and instead leave us with illuminating, but altogether do little to dispel the following hypothesis: “Do memories and another contributor’s erroneous notion that “it historical allusions gain in appeal and salience to would be difficult to find [a culture] that makes the same extent as the political blueprints on more ready use of history as a form of historical- offer lose in plausibility?” The year 2014 saw cultural shorthand, than France” (122). Take Russia violate the post-Cold War order in Poland, which has been intermittently invaded, Europe by annexing Ukraine’s Crimean conquered, or erased from the map. There Peninsula. As analogies to the past irresistibly history has served as a medium of national invite themselves into our present, this important survival. The use and abuse of historical question becomes even more timely and shorthand has been a permanent feature of pressing. ∆ Polish public culture, precisely because the stakes have been high (Zhurzhenko reminds us of Radosław Sikorski’s comparison of the recent Editor’s Note: Romuald (Roman) Rodziewicz (see pipeline deal between Germany and Russia to the book review on p. 1898) died in England on the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, but there’s plenty October 24, 2014. He was 101.
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were ordered to stand down or, if they wished Polish Hero Roman further to pursue the fight, to leave the country Rodziewicz and continue the fight alongside European allies Fate of a Hubal Soldier in Auschwitz, on behalf of the Polish homeland and the Allied Buchenwald, and Postwar England cause. As a result of these orders many Polish pilots joined the British Royal Air Force,
earning the thanks and respect of much of the By Aleksandra Ziółkowska-Boehm. Lanham: British public, some of whom still remember the Rowman & Littlefield (Lexington Books), 2013. young men who came to fight for Britain. But xviii + 138 pages. Photographs. ISBN 978-0- “Hubal” and his independent detachment fought 7391-8535-3. Cloth. on, as did other irregular forces, to keep the
Polish cause of independence alive. Patricia A. Gajda Here is the story in detail. In late September 1939 Roman’s unit reached the Lithuanian he author does, indeed, write about the frontier. Nine of them, including Roman, turned Polish military hero Roman Rodziewicz in T back and sought out Col. Jerzy Dąbrowski this volume, but his wartime service is not its whom they found seriously ill. At a scheduled sole focus. She wishes to show the whole man briefing he disbanded the regiment. At this and examine his entire life as it unfolds in his point, Major Henryk Dobrzański announced that memoir as well as in his retelling. She had the he was assuming command. To protect their good fortune to meet with Rodziewicz on families, most members of the group assumed a multiple occasions, as the photo display between nom de guerre. The major became “Hubal,” pages 62 and 63 shows. She is pictured in the Capt. Józef Grabiński became “Pomian,” Ensign summer of 1974 in Warsaw at the table in the Zygmunt Morawski became “Bem,” Capt. home of Melchior Wańkowicz, the widely read Maciej Kalenkiewicz became “Kotwicz,” Lt. Polish raconteur, who sadly passed away within Modest Iljin became “Klin.” Sgt. Józef Alicki a fortnight of this visit. She is seated between kept his own name, as did Roman. Even readers Wańkowicz and Rodziewicz. The book was who have a facility with Polish names can be somewhat difficult to understand at first, owing thrown off course when the aliases are mixed to the front matter preceding its thirty-seven with genuine names. Roman’s journal records chapters. I found myself rereading the foreword, that “The Major [Dobrzański] leaves for the acknowledgments, and the preface in order Warsaw, to make contact with the commanders to discern whose voice and perspective I was of the Home Army.” He returns to a warm hearing in each. The first was that of Matt welcome from his men and promises surprises DeLaMater of the Military History Press, the for a Christmas feast. Roman captures a bit of short acknowledgments were written by the Hubal’s charisma and optimism in the notes he author herself, and the preface by the late Dr. commits to his journal. Marcus Leuchter of Houston’s Holocaust Museum, which beautifully frames the story that We learn that although Roman was born on his ensues. family estate, Ławski Bród, in the eastern borderlands of Poland that would ultimately be Leuchter puts the present volume into context, annexed by the Soviets, he spent the first ten recounting Poland’s fate in autumn 1939, years of his life in Manchuria. His father, invaded from the West by Germany on Antoni, a graduate of the Polytechnic University September 1 and, in little more than a fortnight, at Riga, taught at a technical college in Wilno. invaded by the Soviets from the East. Leuchter Because he covertly taught lessons in Polish states that it was Wańkowicz, who had written a history to his students he was exiled to Siberia, book entitled Hubalczycy (The Hubal Partisans) the fate of many who were perceived as political that made a romantic hero of Major Henryk dissidents in tsarist times. One is awed when “Hubal” Dobrzański, who disobeyed orders reading about Roman’s memories of life in exile when Polish forces could fight no longer and
1898 THE SARMATIAN REVIEW January 2015 as well as in his later years. The writing is crisp, be executed; the shooter then promptly refused precise, and evocative. to accommodate his wishes. Roman’s fate included imprisonment at Auschwitz and Roman remembers his father taking a pepper Buchenwald. As the author demonstrates, infusion that helped him survive his first bout of Roman Rodziewicz retained his honor and cholera during an epidemic. We see his mother humanity in the German death camps. The threat Natalia returning home to Poland for the of beatings did not frighten him, but the threat of summer, sometimes with her children (one of torture terrified him. He feared that he might not them being Roman) in tow. We see vivid images bear up under it and betray his friends and of the effects of the 1917 Spanish influenza on family. their small Manchurian town: schools closed, people wearing masks that reeked of camphor. Roman’s train arrived at Auschwitz at 7:00 a.m. In one scene we learn that Antoni won the in late October 1943. Here is how he describes sympathy and gratitude of his Chinese workers this in his memoir. He soon learned that minimal after publicly showing them respect while in the provisions were distributed to the prisoners. “I presence of a visiting group of critical can kill you, I can break your bones. I can do inspectors. Antoni became an engineer in the whatever I please with you. And for all this, I construction of the Trans-Baikal Railway, and get a Zulage (extra portion of bread and sausage) later the Chief Engineer of the Roundhouse. from the authorities.” This was part of his orientation at Auschwitz. The prisoners’ beds, Far from Poland, the Rodziewicz children were no more than planks, were grossly overcrowded. brought up with Polish lore and came to long for Mortality was rampant. The dead prisoners’ the day that they would see Poland for bunkmates did not reveal the death, hoping to be themselves. Roman had a special fondness for able to claim the dead man’s portion of food. his paternal uncle Leon, especially after the Bread became the coin of the realm in prison. It unexpected death of both of his parents. Leon could buy anything: cigarettes, alcohol, even loved bees and had a library devoted to the money. New prisoners were kept in quarantine subject on his estate. for three months. Chapter 25 is titled When the time came to consider military service “Numbered for Life” and recounts the tattooing Roman wanted to enlist in the Navy, but because of the number “165642” on Roman’s forearm. of the surfeit of volunteers for that service he When it was done, he was told to rub sand on was assigned to the Second Mazovian Light the spot so the ink could penetrate more deeply Cavalry Regiment. He loved horses and rode and the number would become more legible. He them well. As an enlistee, he had a choice and was clever enough to quickly learn the “system” decided to accept the appointment in the cavalry. in each camp and how he might benefit from it The chapters dealing with his journal show that in order to survive. At one point he was assigned his ultimate ambition was to become a to build barracks on a site called “Mexico.” gentleman farmer. In fact, several chapters When a veteran prisoner came in search of a provide very detailed explanations about dozen volunteers to “get the soup,” Roman was beekeeping; another chapter considers the eager to volunteer, knowing that getting the soup rearing of special Polish breeds of dairy cattle meant there might be an opportunity to get extra and hogs. Like millions’ of other Poles, portions. By then Roman weighed just short of Roman’s wishes in that regard were never 95 pounds, and extra soup was high on his fulfilled. agenda. Accounts of the war years reveal Roman’s Then he was transferred from one death camp to ability to keep his wits about him in the most another. The train ride from Auschwitz to difficult situations. When his cache of Buchenwald took four days. Everyone received underground newspapers was discovered, he a loaf of bread. Buchenwald was just as feigned no knowledge of them. When he was overcrowded and filthy as Auschwitz, but threatened with execution he laughed and Roman thought it was less of a nightmare. persuaded the German shooter that he wanted to Germans spared their own territory but did not
1899 January 2015 THE SARMATIAN REVIEW care about ruining Polish areas. In Buchenwald and allusions to his own works and to Polish Roman volunteered to work on a bomb disposal literature and world culture in general.” I also team. The work was dangerous but not hard, and agree that a translator cannot always let readers the Germans did not force them to hurry in their know about such intertextuality by means of a tasks. They received food in better portions and commentary or a footnote. Nevertheless, taste than at Auschwitz. As they repaired intertextual or cultural allusions shouldn’t be destroyed train tracks, they found abandoned eliminated just because of this inability. The warm clothing and food and took it for translator should know, recognize, and render all themselves: the police turned a blind eye to this allusions that are present in the original, even if appropriation. Roman also witnessed the they are very unlikely to be grasped by readers. American bombing raids toward the end of the This task results from the first and most war. Eventually he and other Polish prisoners important translation rule (you have written were sent to Dresden, a city in ruins, to clear the about it yourself), that is from the translator’s rubble and the tracks. duty to give readers “a similar range of opportunities for interpretation of the work as Roman survived the war and settled to civilian enjoyed by readers of the original.” life in England rather than returning to Soviet- occupied Poland. He married Patricia Dismoor, As for your rendition of Norwid’s maxim––it is an English officer’s daughter, on Christmas Day not the same as the original. Yours means half of 1952. In 1959 their son Leon was born, named what Norwid’s line stands for. It has no for his grand uncle. Roman’s friends and family connection to the human condition in it. In your in England knew nothing of his wartime version, only the association with reality and escapades, but when the film “Hubal” was truth is preserved. You only convey the basic shown in London he became a celebrity among meaning of the maxim (the mot juste postulate). them. He received a special invitation to the I am fully aware that “Polish and English have film’s viewing and met the Polish Consul different versification systems and that English Mieczysław Hara. He was also featured in The verse is not based on syllable count in the same Observer and in a television interview. As the way as Polish.” That is precisely the reason why Soviet grip on Poland lessened, Roman returned I always recommend shortening Polish lines in to his homeland on several occasions, visiting English translations. The specificity of the his family, Wańkowicz, and his “Hubal” friends. longer words in Polish and the shorter words in In January 2013 he reached his hundredth English requires this solution: make Polish birthday. His friends organized a celebration verses shorter in English in order to sound that featured flowers and champagne---and a natural and to avoid padding. This rule is special letter from Polish President Bronisław important especially when the Polish original is Komorowski. His children and friends came deliberately short (“Ogólniki” falls in this from Utah, Australia, and Warsaw. This chatty category). In such a case the translation should book records all of these events in an appealing retain the conciseness of the original. This can way. ∆ only be done by reducing the number of Translating Cyprian Kamil syllables rather than by multiplying them. Padding only “dilutes” the poem. Even if the Norwid’s Generalities number of syllables in the original and in the A Case Study of Cooperation translation is the same, in the English version (continued from September 2014 issue) there are words and phrases that do not exist in the Polish text. This dilutes the translation; the 22 July 2014 “perception of the reader” has nothing to do with Agata Brajerska-Mazur to Patrick John this simple fact. Corness: Thus your translation is simpler than Norwid’s I totally agree with your point that “Norwid’s poem because it offers readers only one poetry carries many associations, connotations, interpretation of a complex, multilayered Polish
1900 THE SARMATIAN REVIEW January 2015 text. Again, this simplicity has nothing to do artist’s understanding of reality; dignified, with the perception of the reader, but it has a significant, creative. Attempting to incorporate great deal to do with the perception of the these concepts and interpretations as succinctly translator. as in the original, I suggest: Thank you for improving the first version of Giving everything its fitting name. Do you find this a closer translation? I your translation as far as poezja and wymowa are understand rzecz in a universal, comprehensive concerned. I wish you had also eliminated the sense, i.e., as denoting more than just a concrete padding and corrected the maxim so that it could thing/object in the real world, but not excluding correctly convey Norwid’s meaning. the latter either. Danuta Borchardt has matter, Of the two new versions I prefer the first, the which I read as specifically denoting something rhymed one. The second one does not elaborate abstract. Am I right? This is why I propose on any of the poem’s features; it is simply a everything (as distinct from every thing [cf. word-for-word translation. Czerniawski (1) each thing; Czerniawski (2) 23 July 2014 objects; Mikoś each thing; Borchardt each matter]) as a comprehensive concept, Patrick John Corness to Agata Brajerska- encompassing abstractions, human situations Mazur: etc., as well as concrete objects. As Thank you for your latest response. I am glad for fitting, this adjective denotes what is right, that you are willing to continue our discussion of true etc., while also connoting your the translation of Norwid's “Ogólniki.” concept dignified, for example. I would like to re-emphasize at this point that I Your comments, as always, will be gratefully of course acknowledge your expert knowledge welcomed. of Norwid's works and your vast experience in the field of the translation of his works into 23 July 2014 English. It goes without saying that I benefit greatly from your analysis and criticism of my Agata Brajerska-Mazur to Patrick John attempts in this area. As you know, when Corness: presenting my translations of “Fatum” and “W Uff, what a relief! I thought about “Your words Weronie” I pointed out that I was able to must tell things as they deeply/profoundly are” produce translations that I think you found but your new solution is much better. And it is successful only by taking into account certain shorter too! In such cases I find the Polish guidelines you had set out in respect to these two proverb: “co dwie głowy to nie jedna” poems. I hope you will bear with me if I particularly appropriate. Waiting (im)patiently continue to work on “Ogólniki,” with the benefit for our further improvements. of your analysis (I believe there are aspects of 23 July 2014 English semantics worthy of further debate, but I will put them aside). Patrick John Corness to Agata Brajerska- A key issue is clearly the translation of what you Mazur: refer to as the maxim, in the last line of the Thanks, I echo your words: What a relief! I will poem. Acknowledging the limitations of a take it from there and try to come up with the discussion via email, can we take it a step at a next version of the complete translation soon. time, for now considering once again only the final line? 25 July 2014 Odpowiednie dać rzeczy – słowo! Patrick John Corness to Agata Brajerska- You wrote that in Norwid's work słowo has a Mazur: Christian (biblical?) connotation, “wielding the power of naming and creating,” and that Having established a final line that I think you odpowiednie (referring to słowo) means many find acceptable, I have prepared the following things: real, true, matching reality and the new version, following your advice to reduce the
1901 January 2015 THE SARMATIAN REVIEW line length. I await with some trepidation your 6 Aug 2014 assessment of this latest edition: Patrick John Corness to Agata Brajerska- By Way of an Introduction (Generalities) Mazur: When an Artist’s spirit in spring of life To attempt to rhyme even just some of the lines Absorbs its breath as do butterflies, is a tall order. The well-known paucity of All he may say is this: rhyming resources in English in general leads The Earth is round – it’s spherical! me to the conclusion that a choice usually has to But later, when amid shivery frosts be made between content/sense and rhyme Trees shake and petals1 fall, pattern. On the other hand, in response to your Then he must further add: first suggestion I believe it is more feasible to At the poles it’s somewhat flattened. emulate the regular structure of the poem in terms of line length. You suggested that we Supreme of all your charms – might “make the lines more or less even (but Yours, poetry! and yours, oratory! – shorter than the original).” There are nine One is eternally paramount: syllables in each line of Norwid's original poem. Giving everything its fitting name! Perhaps this regularity, natural to Polish, could be matched by adopting throughout a structure Translated by Patrick John Corness of four feet in English, a natural rhythm in that Version 4 (25 July 2014) language (iambic tetrameter, cf. Wordsworth's I wandered lonely as a cloud). I have attempted 28 July 2014 this as follows, hopefully without detriment to the “perfect sense” you found in my previous Agata Brajerska-Mazur to Patrick John attempt. What do you think? Is this progress? Corness: By Way of an Introduction (Generalities) The sense is now perfect, the structure of the poem is not that ideal. Maybe we should make When Artists’ spirit, in life’s spring, the lines more or less even (but shorter than the Absorbs its breath like butterflies, original) and try to rhyme some of them. This is The most that they may say is this: now a good translation, but I think we can make “The Earth is spherical — it’s round!” it a very good one. If I come up with a solution I will let you know, though right now I have little But later, come the shivery frosts, time to spare on Norwid due to other Trees shake and petals fall away, commitments. At any rate, the progress is visible And then they have to further add: and I hope we will deal with structural “Well, at the poles it’s somewhat flat.” difficulties soon. Surpassing always other charms – Yours, poetry! Yours, eloquence! – 28 July 2014 One golden rule will stay the same: Patrick John Corness to Agata Brajerska- “Give everything its fitting name!” Mazur: Translated by Patrick John Corness Thank you––very encouraging. I will consider Version 5 (6 August 2014) your latest proposals as soon as I get a chance. 6 Aug 2014 Agata Brajerska-Mazur to Patrick John Corness: 1 Here, as perhaps the closest means of rendering the I find this translation ABSOLUTELY diminutive kwiatki, I propose the literary device of PERFECT! I could never have thought of a synecdoche. better rendition myself. All the last week I was
1902 THE SARMATIAN REVIEW January 2015 trying to better the last version of your Europe], but they have also shaped Europe translation but in vain. And now such a pleasant domestically and provided a forceful script for surprise. CONGRATULATIONS! imperialistic policies” (193). 6 Aug 2014 The Legs of Izolda Morgan: Selected Writings, by Bruno Jasieński. Translated by Soren A. Patrick John Corness to Agata Brajerska- Gauger and Guy Torr. Prague: Twisted Spoon Mazur: Press (P.O. Box 21, Preslova 12, 150 21 Prague That's wonderful! Thank you, I really appreciate 5, Czech Republic), 2014. 163 pages. ISBN 978- your support, and thank you for guiding me to a 80-86264-40-0. Hardcover. better translation. I hope Ewa will publish it in asieński was a typical futurist of the 1920s, due course. Jpretentiously declaring that social structures should be destroyed and full anarchy introduced. As was the case with his Russian counterparts, MORE BOOKS his artistic manifestos now strike us as the Germans, Poland, and Colonial Expansion to games spoiled children play rather than the East: 1850 Through the Present, edited by conclusions reached after much reflection. Robert L. Nelson. New York: Palgrave Jasieński wrote poetry, prose, and manifestos Macmillan, 2009. x + 201 pages. Index. ISBN about “the futurization of life” (9). In one of 13-978-0-230-61268-6. Hardcover. them he declares his intention to “join Stanisław n excellent little book that lucidly details Brzozowski (an earlier literary rebel) in A the most vital aspects of Polish-German declaring a great clearance sale of old junk” relations within the time frame mentioned in the (10). In the anarchistic future world he title. The present is particularly well described in envisages, “everyone can be an artist” (13) and Oliver Schmidtke’s essay. The author points out everyone can enjoy “equality in erotic and disparities between the official discourse on family relationships” (14). This manifesto is Poland in Germany such as the inclusion of followed by a number of futuristic short stories Poland in the European family of nations, and that strike one as stale and dated. the media discourse that often resorts to Like the gay twenties in Paris and New York, stereotypes of Polish car thieves and so on, and futurism was a trend that combined innocence attaches that stereotype to the Polish national and carelessness with an unmatched character. Schmidtke concludes that “in post- demonstration of irresponsibility. Jasieński 1945 German-Polish relations the colonialist eventually left Poland for the Soviet Union legacy has remained a significant force––not so which he considered a futurist paradise. His much in terms of structures of domination but of untimely death there (he was executed in the stereotypical perceptions and seem to be almost Butyrki prison in 1938 at age thirty-seven) was a frozen in time” (190). Schmidtke considers this not unexpected coda to his chaotic life. to be “an astonishing example of the persistence While it is entertaining to page through this of collective memories” and of freezing the brief book, one wonders to what purpose and for Other in a classically Orientalist immobile whose money was it translated into English and image. However, the discourse of Germany’s handsomely published. Jasieński contributes political and intellectual elites is somewhat nothing constructive to the life of contemporary different in that these negative images are less humanity. His absurdities lost their bite long entrenched among the educated and the ago, just as did those of the Russian futurists. sophisticated. Yet the image of “a threatening With so much valuable Polish literature and inferior Polish neighbor” (191) is still remaining untranslated into English, why spend strong. so much time and money on Jasieński? (SB) Schmidtke concludes that “the colonialist structures did not only characterize European powers’ policies [toward countries outside
1903 January 2015 THE SARMATIAN REVIEW
Andrzej Maksymilian Fredro even though in other city states reason indicated that this should be done. Sparta survived for a (1620–1679) long time because it followed its own rules. A theorist of Polish Sarmatism When it abandoned these rules, things began to get worse until Spartans returned to their M. Fredro disappeared from school textbooks traditions, tore down the city walls and returned A. and university courses––and therefore from to a money-free economy. No nation lasts social memory––in Poland under partitions and in forever, but preservation of the national Soviet-occupied Poland (1945–1989). He theorized character allows it to last the longest. Polish the modern Polish state and wrote on personal morality, counseling Poles on how to win and how to interests can be realized only if the character of be virtuous. He disliked tyranny of the mob and the nation is cultivated by those who rule it. It tyranny of kings. He was an enthusiast of the would be disastrous to go against these republican form of government, similar to what the innermost characteristics––unless, of course, one Founding Fathers originally envisaged for the United wants to destroy the Polish nation. If Poland States. He made mistakes, but he also exemplified the were ruled “against itself,” so to speak, it would vigor and wisdom of public debates in seventeenth- be imperative to return to the old traditions and century Poland. The following excerpts have been rule her as she should be ruled––according to translated from Latin into Polish, and then from her character. Thus a good counselor to the king Polish into English. The Polish text can be found in should diligently study the nature of the Polish Zbigniew Ogonowski, editor, 700 lat myśli polskiej, Warsaw: PWN, 1979, pp. 317–322, 338–339. people, rather than wander away into alien lands or embrace odd philosophies, trying to cultivate From Scriptorum seu togae et belli notationum them on Polish soil. fragmenta [1660]: Poles cannot live without liberty: this is their deepest national characteristic. The gentler and t is obvious that liberty in Poland should not more tactful the king, the more faithfully Poles be mistaken for anarchy. Yet such is the serve him. In such a situation there are no I interpretation of those who do not revolutions and no assassinations. In Poland understand what the Polish Res Publica is all more can be achieved through generosity than about. These critics have weak brains and prattle elsewhere through threats, force, and fear––the nonsense, trying to see faults in a country they inevitable accompaniments to absolute rule. . . . do not in the least understand. Erroneous interpretations have also been offered by those Do not multiply threats if you know that others who mind primarily their own advantage, but are not afraid of you: if others despise your pose as impartial judges in public life. They are threats, the best course is to keep silent about masters of deception. They hate freedom and what you really think. Weigh your words love to caricature it. They like to attack the most carefully. virtuous citizens, those who struggle to preserve The person who listens to others with friendly freedom; they call these citizens nihilists, sympathy and answers questions politely gains simpletons, or barbarians. A similar eristic game power over human hearts and will meet with was played in Rome when the model citizen reciprocity. Those at the top of the social ladder Cato the Younger was called a simpleton. To who possess this ability become popular rulers. speak up for the preservation of ancient customs If you listen to what others have to say with a and laws is not an act of barbarism or stupidity; wrinkled forehead and patronizing impatience–– it is part of the struggle for the common good. . . even if you intend to do something good for the Each nation has a mysterious strain in it that fellow who is speaking, he will not be grateful to makes it what it is, and trying to unravel it is you and will treat your kindness as something fruitless. For instance, it would be futile to that you were obliged to do. One is less upset by fulminate against the Spartans because they a refusal dressed up in polite and friendly words were forbidden to deal in money and to build than a consent expressed in a contemptuous walls of protection around the city of Sparta, manner. Hence. . . the saying: “A person in
1904 THE SARMATIAN REVIEW January 2015 trouble experiences relief after talking over his marriages, colonization of thinly inhabited troubles with someone else.” Thus Fernando territories, and welcoming neighboring nations Alvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alba, made few to join in one state are means of increasing the friends because of his gloomy and proud population of the state. Of course there also are personality, and was disliked even by those for military conquests of nations or states, and the whom he did favors. possibility of them joining the conquering state with all the rights and privileges of the original Do not prattle about your achievements, and citizens (i.e., as co-citizens and not as the even less so about your plans for achievements. conquered). Demographic increase means more If you must punish somebody, make sure the taxes are collected by the Treasury. Thus the punishment is proportionate to the trespass. If Romans bestowed citizens’ rights on the you are lenient by nature, it is better not to Sabines, Volskis, inhabitants of Campagna, and punish the culprit at all, because weak Etruscans––just as Poles gave full rights to punishment does not prevent the trespass from Ruthenians, Lithuanians, and others. Thus even being committed again. . . . though we have diverse nations within the Polish Do not make excessive excuses before a person state, we have a common citizenship and would be unable to live separately from one another. In who accuses you of an offense. Making excuses is a sign of fear and submission; say rather than contrast, Athenians and Spartans treated the there is no reason for him to accuse you or for conquered nations as slaves, and as a result they eventually withered instead of growing into one you to justify yourself. . . . large and strong state. ∆ Is it better to be liked or feared? This question has elicited comments for many centuries; in my view, one does not truly love either God or man if one does not feel a kind of awe before the object of love, the awe that can also be described as deep respect. Do not humiliate yourself to About the Authors excess and keep reasonable limits in your charity Patryk Babiracki is an assistant professor of works; nor should you try too eagerly to gain history at the University of Texas at Arlington. someone’s favors. Act with dignity if you want Agata Brajerska-Mazur is an associate to acquire friends and if you want others to professor of comparative literature at the acquire you as a friend; show respect to others Catholic University of Lublin and the Maria and it will be shown to you. . . . Skłodowska-Curie University at Lublin. Anna M. Cienciala is a professor of history A just government brings demographic stability emerita at the University of Kansas. Her most and growth, whereas an unjust one diminishes recent book is Katyn: A Crime without population numbers. Italian historian Francesco Punishment (Yale University Press, 2007). Guicciardini rightly observed that the inhabitants Patrick Corness is a noted translator from of Pisa, tired of Florentine rule, preferred to Central European languages and a visiting sacrifice their wealth and lives (both men and professor of translation at Coventry University. women fought in the war against Florence), Andrzej Maksymilian Fredro is a seventeenth- rather than be subjugated by Florence again. century Polish writer. Who knows whether the Cossack wars in our Patricia A. Gajda is a professor of history at own country did not have the same source: the the University of Texas at Tyler. Cossacks have complained of harsh treatment by James Edward Reid is a Canadian writer. His the authorities, and they returned to peaceful life Page:
1905 THE SARMATIAN REVIEW January 2015
SUMMER STUDY-TOUR AT CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY
LUBLIN,
POLAND
* Five weeks in historic Lublin, with a JJuly 6 – August 8, 2015 course of Polish language (100 hours), Estimated costs: Five weeks in historic Lublin, with a $3,225.00 for Five Weeks, All Inclusive course of Polish language (100 hours) $2,475.00 for Two Weeks, All Inclusive at beginning, intermediate and advanced levels. Also available: three weeks and 6 credits: Polish Culture course (3 cr.) and Polish language (3 cr.), July 6-25, $2,761.00. Program fee includes:
* Lectures, films and cultural performances - Lodgings and all meals in Poland - Group travel in Poland * Excursions to Warsaw, Sandomierz, and - Lectures, language classes, performances other places of interest - 5 UWM credits for five week program - Health insurance * Optional trip to Cracow + Round-trip air transportation (Chicago-Warsaw) NOT included
* Also available: two, three, four-week This study tour is led by Dr. Michael courses as well as intensive and highly Mikoś, professor of Polish language and intensive two, three, four and five-week literature and leader of 33 study tours to language courses. Poland.
FOR DETAILED INFORMATION:
Call Prof. Michael Mikoś at 414-229-4151 or write: Dept. of Foreign Languages & Literature University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee TM P.O. Box 413 Milwaukee, WI 53201 [email protected] 1906