'The Wind Howling Over the Roof of Lubyanka'

Can literature be legitimately “inspirational”? Can one be inspired – revived, roused, reenergized, morally rearmed – and not feel guilty about it?  Can a book render hope without resorting to kitsch? Or is inspiration exclusively the preserve of self-help tracts and greeting-card verse? I didn’t think so when young but some of the best books have a high inspirational quotient, usually without authorial straining. Think Dante, Montaigne, Dr. Johnson.

 

Aleksander Wat (1900-1967) was a Polish poet and one-time Communist hounded and imprisoned by Nazis and Soviets alike. In 1964 while visiting in California, he recorded lengthy conversations with his countryman, Czesław Miłosz. The transcripts were translated into English and published in 1988 as My Century (trans. Richard Lourie). Wat is a middling poet, a “futurist,” but his oral memoir is a necessary document from the most bloodthirsty century in history. In 1967, broken mentally and physically, Wat committed suicide in France.

 

In April 1941, Wat was in Lubyanka prison in Moscow, where he overhears St. Matthew’s Passion on the radio, prompting a joyous digression:

 

“In Bach’s music I also hear an earthly joy, dignified, like Bach’s family life, where people eat and drink – and like to eat and drink – a sense of life, life lived with decorum. Bach is religious music, but in Bach’s work, even in the Passion, religion and faith are hemmed in by all sorts of doubts. Anyway, all our problems and troubles certainly are better expressed in music than in words.”

 

Wat’s Bach-inspired rhapsody in Chap. 27 continues for several pages:

 

“If the human voice, manmade instruments, and the human soul can create, even once in all of history, such harmony beauty, truth, and power in such unity of inspiration—if this exists, then how ephemeral, what a nonentity, all the might of the empire might be, that might that a beautiful Polish carol says ‘quakes in fear.’ It’s a commonplace line, but I’m an old man and I stopped being afraid of the commonplace a long time ago—what the critics call a commonplace. That wasn’t a thought I had while listening to Bach because I simply wasn’t a ‘thinking being’ at that moment. I was listening. But that thought did come to me as the last chords were fading. With desperate nostalgia I tried to summon them back from memory, but to no avail. The only sound was the wind howling over the roof of Lubyanka.”

 

Geoffrey Hill resurrects Wat in section XV of The Triumph of Love (1998):

 

“Flamen I draw darkly out of flame.

Lumen is a measure of light.

Lumens are not luminaries. A great

Polish luminary of our time is the obscure

Aleksander Wat.”

Wat is inspirational in the sense that Solzhenitsyn, the Mandelstams and Vasily Grossman are inspirational.