After the Transitions

Abstract

After the Transitions Krzysztof Siwczyk (bio) and Alice-Catherine Carls (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution FRANCIS MESLET, FORGOTTEN LIBRARIES SERIES (2023) / FRANCISMESLET.COM Translator's note: Almost thirty-five years have passed since the democratic awakening of central Europe, yet despite being praised today for its originality, eastern and central European literature is still not fully understood by Western readers. Krzysztof Siwczyk, a major Polish poet and accomplished actor of the post-1989 generation, examines the "disintegration" gunnysack created by a century of totalitarianism in his country. After affirming the death of Polish literature's noble novels of the "heroic past," he affirms the future preeminence of essays. To his reflective text is added a personal confession that combines Gombrowiczian satirical accents with poignancy to tell of innocence, ugliness, and cruelty in a truth-driven stream of consciousness that alone can conjure poetry.–ACC WE CAN CLEARLY SEE today from a cultural perspective that the symbolic year 1989 ushered in a specific kind of prosperity for the literature of this part of the world (see WLT, "After the Wall Fell," Nov. 2014). Interestingly, the traumatological prosperity of Polish literature—the "young" poetry and prose—flourished in Germany, which after the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification contributed with an open heart and mind to the rapidly rising European careers of such writers as Olga Tokarczuk or Andrzej Stasiuk. A relatively fluent transfer into target languages and the critics' significant interest—including the likes of Marcel Reich-Ranicki—led to judgments about the ways in which a specific kind of central European experience could, through its literature, contribute to enrich the spiritual heritage of the old continent, or at least of its postmodern and wealthy part that, through a happy alignment of political conditions, found itself on the right side of the Iron Curtain. Broadly defined, central European literature turned out to be a kind of "accursed share," to use the title of Georges Bataille's 1949 book, that "European literature"—also broadly defined—internalized as its own, hitherto invisible imago. The historical experience of a war waged by two totalitarian regimes—plowing through Europe while contributing to the collapse of Enlightenment myths—found its reward as the "black sun" of the twentieth century began to shine with full brilliance. Writers, many of whom had suffered an unwanted and forced quarantine in the camp of communist states, began to enter the canon of European literature. [End Page 62] The majority of them has already fallen on the trash heap of literary history for having missed the historical reset that is etched in our minds through photographs of meetings between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev or cross-stitched portraits of John Paul II, who called on the Holy Spirit to renew his homeland during his pilgrimage to Poland. The effectiveness and dynamism of the historical process are measured not by individual human beings but by galaxies of interstate interests or blocs of states sharing the same system like the one that happened in 1989. In fact, 1989 turned out to be a postmodern "Orwellian year" for Poland or, more precisely, its beginning. Literature was very much aware of it because it was not swept up in the fever that accompanied the social strengthening of the Solidarity movement. In my opinion, far fewer than the ten million Solidarność members were real democrats and committed citizens. In a country of forty million people, four out of five people were not mentally ready for change. It is precisely to this mute and politically indifferent majority that the most important texts of Polish-language writers who debuted after 1989 were devoted. In fact, to this day, one can hear disgruntled longings for a great contemporary novel that would explain to us who we really were as a society and what changes we have undergone in the last four decades of Polish freedom—a freedom brutally tamed today by small autocrats like Jarosław Kaczyński, a devotee of the new "Smolensk religion," whose cult launched like a supernova after the plane carrying his brother crashed in 2010. One thing is certain: four decades of democracy have not fundamentally altered our Polish tendency...