`An Obsesion with Allusion'

The late Ryszard Kapuściński was a rare wonder, a journalist whose work stands as literature. The Emperor, an account of the fall of Haile Selassie, and his other books were widely read as allegories of life in the Soviet Bloc. Censorship and harsher measures awaited writers who produced more direct accounts of life in the worker’s paradise. Necessity turned all honest writers into the children of Kafka.

I’ve read only the early chapters of Kapuściński’s recently published Travels with Herodotus, in the translation from the Polish by Klara Glowczewska, but already he has offered insights into the life of writers in a totalitarian regime. In 1951, as a student at Warsaw University, Kapuscinski studied ancient Greece but Herodotus was never mentioned. A Polish scholar had translated the Histories in the mid-1940s but the manuscript languished without explanation at the publisher. In late 1951, it finally was shipped to the typesetter but didn’t go to press for another three years and appeared in Polish bookstores only in 1955. Kapuściński speculates that Stalin’s protracted illness and death and the uncertainty of the subsequent thaw probably account for the delay in publishing what would seem an unlikely candidate for state censorship. A.J. Liebling, another journalist who produced literature, once wrote: “Inconsiderate to the last, Josef Stalin, a man who never had to meet a deadline, had the bad taste to die in installments.” Even in death Stalin wielded the power of fear:

“But Herodotus? A book written two and a half thousand years ago? Well, yes: because all our thinking, our looking and reading, was governed during those years with an obsession with allusion. Each word brought another one to mind; each had a double meaning, a false bottom, a hidden significance; each contained something secretly encoded, cunningly concealed. Nothing was ever plain, literal, unambiguous – from behind every gesture and word peered some referential sign, gazed a meaningfully winking eye. The man who wrote had difficulty communicating with the man who read, not only because the censor could confiscate the text en route, but also because, when the text finally reached him, the latter read something utterly different from what was clearly written, constantly asking himself: What did this author really want to tell me?”

Kapuściński’s gloss is useful in understanding the work of Zbigniew Herbert, who wrote poems about classical history, mythology and Dutch painters that simultaneously hovered in a zone of meaning rooted in his time and place. In “Why the Classics,” Herbert writes about another Greek historian, Thucydides:

“for this he paid his native city
with lifelong exile

“exiles of all times
know what price that is”

Only the dimmest of Herbert’s readers would fail to recognize the doubleness of his words. He was a rare poet who worked successfully in the particular and the timeless.Critics have noted that totalitarian regimes tend to value the written word more highly than democracies, and pay it the compliment of censorship. In a tyranny, every word is valuable and dense with potential meaning.