Books in Brief: Kultura Essays

Kultura Essays, edited by Leopold Tyrmand (Free Press, 360 pp., $9.95). This is the third book produced by Mr. Tyrmand to come across my desk this past month. Though his principles of selection are a little unclear, this one is likely (curious typography notwithstanding) the most valuable of the lot—valuable not only for what is being said but also for the fact of its being said originally in the pages of a journal published by Polish exiles. The double value is explicitly recognized by the inclusion of Juliusz Mieroszewski’s long article (more than a quarter of the book) on “The Political Thought of Kultura” and is perhaps implicit in Zbigniew Jordan’s “Marxist Revisionism in Poland” (though Jordan, in Canada, and absent from Poland since World War II, seems a little removed from some of the other contributors). The best reading in the book, I think, is in some of the shorter pieces not about Poland—Aleksander Wat’s “The Death of an Old Bolshevik,” George Gomori’s account of Budapest in 1956, Gustav Herling-Grudzinski’s literary studies—but this reaction may be the result of my distaste for political science and my liking for good journalism. In any event, Mr. Tyrmand’s collection is worth looking into, and if one is seeking a discussion of modern art (there is one) and comes up instead with a history of Soviet duplicity (Miedzinski, “The Road to Moscow”), one can scarcely object to being reminded that “whoever, negotiating with [Moscow] brings honesty and good will … let him not expect he will be repaid in like currency.”

CH

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C. S. Horn

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Kultura Essays, edited by Leopold Tyrmand (Free Press, 360 pp., $9.95). This is the third book produced by Mr. Tyrmand to come across my desk this past month. Though his principles of selection are a little unclear, this one is likely (curious typography notwithstanding) the most valuable of the lot—valuable not only for what is being said but also for the fact of its being said originally in the pages of a journal published by Polish exiles. The double value is explicitly recognized by the inclusion of Juliusz Mieroszewski’s long article (more than a quarter of the book) on “The Political Thought of Kultura” and is perhaps implicit in Zbigniew Jordan’s “Marxist Revisionism in Poland” (though Jordan, in Canada, and absent from Poland since World War II, seems a little removed from some of the other contributors). The best reading in the book, I think, is in some of the shorter pieces not about Poland—Aleksander Wat’s “The Death of an Old Bolshevik,” George Gomori’s account of Budapest in 1956, Gustav Herling-Grudzinski’s literary studies—but this reaction may be the result of my distaste for political science and my liking for good journalism. In any event, Mr. Tyrmand’s collection is worth looking into, and if one is seeking a discussion of modern art (there is one) and comes up instead with a history of Soviet duplicity (Miedzinski, “The Road to Moscow”), one can scarcely object to being reminded that “whoever, negotiating with [Moscow] brings honesty and good will … let him not expect he will be repaid in like currency.”