A Warsaw Diary, 1978-1981, by Kazimierz Brandys Random House, 261 pp., $17.95 So many profound writers have emerged out of the darkness and oppression of Eastern Europe in the last two decades, and by comparison so much of our writing seems so frivolous, trivial, eccentric, neurotic, and self-indulgent, that melancholy meditations arise. Do wisdom, centrality, and great art come only through suffering, individual or collective? Must a person or a culture be deprived of a good such as liberty in order to be able to appreciate it? In the case of liberty, how can our culture foster the appreciation and responsible use of it, rather than the abuse and destruction of it? More than a decade ago, Jacques Barzun wrote that in Western culture today “the antinomian passion” (i.e., libertinism) “is the deepest drive of the age.”
By contrast, the “deepest drive of the age” in Eastern Europe is often for liberty and dignity, as the Polish experience shows, exemplified by this fine diary by the distinguished Polish novelist Kazimierz Brandys, who went into exile shortly after completing it. Brandys joined the Communist Party at the end of World War II in revulsion against the homicidal immorality of Fascism, but finally left the Party in the mid-1960s, thoroughly disillusioned by what he calls its “moral nihilism.” Brandys’s pensees do not have the isolated, heroic, existential, almost Pentecostal brilliance and beauty of Andrei Sinyavsky’s A Voice from the Chorus (1976); Poland is grey, not black, and offers some margin of liberty that persists even, one suspects, after the imposition of martial law in December of 1981. The world of Sinyavsky was the world of the Gulag; the world of Brandys was the world of censorship and harassment.
Comments