'Freedom Is Always Tragic'

“I believe that in such periods one should turn to the classics, to look at great paintings, to listen to the music. No power on earth could force me to read [Stalin’s] ‘The Short History of the Bolshevik Party.’ The only piece by Yosif Vissarionovich [Stalin] I always carry with me is his dissertation on language. Whenever The Pickwick Papers would not suffice, I open this work and my good mood comes back. It is a gigantic joke, a grotesque, a satire on rationalism.” 

Zbigniew Herbert’s interviewer, Jacek Trznadel, replies, “Not reading certain books can also be a kind of testimony.” and the Polish poet says: “These questions concern the depths of the human soul. I shall probably die unreconciled with the world. At least that is how I would like to die. I lack knowledge of this world. I did not receive it from the participants in this crime against culture. I didn’t get any answers.”

 

Irony is often a means of evasion, the last resort of the cowardly and unprincipled. It can also be a covert moral weapon. There’s nothing bullies and louts detest so much as mocking laughter. Swift understood this, as did Evelyn Waugh. The Polish style of irony as practiced by Herbert in his poetry and this 1985 interview is straight-faced and deadly. Herbert was a prickly man. Marius Kociejowski, who knew him in the 1980’s, characterized the poet as “the spiritual leader of Solidarity, although its members would no more be able to contain him than could the Communist regime.” A veteran of the Nazi and Soviet invasions, of the worst the twentieth century could dish out, Herbert possessed few illusions. He tells Trznadel:

 

“In times of terror every moral gesture is a risk – that’s obvious -- but it is also surprisingly funny. As if a knight in armor walked on stage in a contemporary play. A comic effect. Even today, when we agree that one should declare oneself on the side of truth and freedom, it sounds somehow embarrassing. But there was and is no other way. Freedom is always tragic. A free man is lonely.”

 

This shouldn’t be confused with self-pity. Herbert writes in his poem “A Life” (perhaps about the Stalin text cited above):

 

“Someone recommended a classic work — as he said

it changed his life and the lives of millions of others

I read it — I didn’t change — and I’m ashamed to admit

for the life of me I don’t remember the classic’s name”

 

[The interview, translated from the Polish by Jaroslav Anders, was published in 1987 in Partisan Review. Kociejowski’s remark is from “A Meeting with Pan Cogito” (The Pebble Chance: Feuilletons and Other Prose, 2014). “A Life” can be found in Alissa Valles’ translation in The Collected Poems 1956–1998 (2007).]