The Exile and Return of Writers from East-Central Europe: A Compendium 9783110217742, 9783110217735

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction
Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century
Introduction
In the Vacuum of Exile: The Hungarian Activists in Vienna 1919–1926
Cosmopolitans without a Polis: Towards a Hermeneutics of the East-East Exilic Experience (1929–1945)
Kultura (1946–2000)
Polish World War II Veteran Émigré Writers in the US: Danuta Mostwin and Others
Irodalmi Újság in Exile: 1957–1989
The Hungarian Mikes Kör and Magyar Mühely: Personal Recollections
“We did not want an émigré journal”: Pavel Tigrid and Svĕdectví
Monica Lovinescu at Radio Free Europe
Introduction
Miloš Crnjanski in Exile
Gombrowicz, the Émigré
Paul Goma: the Permanence of Dissidence and Exile
Writing and Internal Exile in Eastern Europe: The Example of Imre Kertész
Kundera’s Paradise Lost: Paradigm of the Circle
Introduction
Life in Translation: Exile in the Autobiographical Works of Kazimierz Brandys and Andrzej Bobkowski
From Diary to Novel: Sándor Márai’s San Gennaro vére and Ítélet Canudosban
Exile Diaries: Sándor Márai, Gustaw Herling-Grudzin´ ski, and Others
“Is There a Place Like Home?” Jewish Narratives of Exile and Homecoming in Late Twentieth-Century East-Central Europe
Introduction
Herta Müller: Between Myths of Belonging
Post-Yugoslav Theater Exile: Transitory, Partial and Digital
Losing Touch, Keeping in Touch, Out of Touch: The Reintegration of Hungarian Literary Exile after 1989
Albert Wass: Rebirth and Apotheosis of a Transylvanian-Hungarian Writer
Instead of Conclusion: East Central Literary Exile and its Representation
A Timeline of Exile Movements, 1919–2000
List of Contributors
Backmatter

Citation preview

The Exile and Return of Writers from East-Central Europe

The Exile and Return of Writers from East-Central Europe A Compendium

Edited by

John Neubauer and Borbála Zsuzsanna Török

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

IV

Ü Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines

of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-3-11-021773-5 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

© Copyright 2009 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, 10785 Berlin All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed in Germany Typesetting: Dörlemann Satz GmbH & Co. KG, Lemförde Printing and binding: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen

Table of Contents

V

Table of Contents Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

XI

Chapter I Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

3

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. Who is an Exile? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. Exile and Writing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. The Home Cultures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4. The Dialectics of Exile and Homecoming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Nineteenth-Century Exile Traditions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Exodus from Hungary in 1919 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fleeing the Nazis: 1938–39 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Escaping and Homecoming in 1944–45 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Racing against the Dropping Iron Curtain: 1947–50 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1956 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1968 and Beyond . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Homecoming and New Forms of Exile after 1989 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5. Sites of Exile Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Istanbul . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Vienna . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Berlin: Intermezzo in the 1920s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Moscow: Exile under Stalin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Paris: its Exile Cultures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . London . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Munich . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Other European Cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New York and Academia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Toronto . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Buenos Aires . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Palestine/Israel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

4 4 11 13 19 20 24 27 31 38 38 40 43 44 46 47 55 58 72 81 83 84 86 91 94 96

VI

Table of Contents

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad: Publishing Ventures, Exiles Associations, and Audiences Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 In the Vacuum of Exile: The Hungarian Activists in Vienna 1919–1926 (Éva Forgács) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 Cosmopolitans without a Polis: Towards a Hermeneutics of the East-East Exilic Experience (1929–1945) (Galin Tihanov) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. Cosmopolitans without a Polis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. A Brief Case Study: Young Hegel and Lukács’s Options in the 1930s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. Homecoming: The Boomerang Doesn’t Always Return . . . . . . . . . . . .

133 136

Kultura (1946–2000) (Włodzimierz Bolecki) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. Genesis and Beginnings of Kultura . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Beginnings of Kultura (Italy) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Genesis: The Historical Tradition of Kultura . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kultura in France . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. The Editorial Staff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jerzy Giedroyc’s Profile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. Kultura’s Program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The First Assessment: The 1940s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kultura’s Relation to the “Emigration” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kultura’s Relation to the People’s Republic of Poland . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4. The So-called Kultura Line . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1947–55 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1956 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1965–1980 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1980–1989: Solidarity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kultura’s Main Ideas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5. Kultura: Writers and Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6. Kultura’s Achievements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

144 144 145 146 147 148 148 149 151 151 152 154 155 156 160 161 164 166 168 177

123 123 125

Table of Contents

VII

Polish World War II Veteran Émigré Writers in the US: Danuta Mostwin and Others (Bogusław Wróblewski) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. The Émigré Veteran Generation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. The East-Coast Novelists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. Chicago and California Poets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4. The Third Value . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

189 189 193 195 197

Irodalmi Újság in Exile: 1957–1989 (John Neubauer) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. Orientation: Politics and Readership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4. Contacts with Literary Life in Hungary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5. Modern World Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6. The East-Central European Literatures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7. Cultural Trends in Western Societies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

204 204 210 213 216 219 222 225

The Hungarian Mikes Kör and Magyar Mu˝hely: Personal Recollections (Áron Kibédi Varga) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230 1. Refugee Groups and their Cultural Life, 1945–1956 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230 2. The Hollandiai Mikes Kelemen Kör (1951) and the Magyar Mu˝hely (1962) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233 “We did not want an émigré journal”: Pavel Tigrid and Sveˇdectví (Neil Stewart) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. Biography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. Pavel Tigrid: the Writer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. Exile and “Gradualism” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4. Sveˇdectví : Poetics, Composition, and Historical Development . . . . . . 5. Sveˇdectví : Finances and Logistics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6. The Empire Writes Back . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

242 244 247 248 252 264 268

Monica Lovinescu at Radio Free Europe (Camelia Cra˘ ciun) . . . . . . . . 1. Personal Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. Media Position and Political Discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. Networking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4. Lovinescu and the Network in Action: the Tudoran Case . . . . . . . . . 5. Concluding Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

276 278 281 291 296 299

VIII

Table of Contents

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307 Milosˇ Crnjanski in Exile (Guido Snel) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. Exercises in Homelessness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. A Novel about London . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. Once more on Cooden Beach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4. Post Scriptum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

309 312 316 321 322

Gombrowicz, the Émigré (Jerzy Jarze˛ bski) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325 Paul Goma: the Permanence of Dissidence and Exile (Marcel-Cornis-Pope) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 342 Writing and Internal Exile in Eastern Europe: The Example of Imre Kertész (Susan Rubin Suleiman) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. Shapes of Exile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. Auschwitz and the Kádár Regime: Kertész on Internal Exile . . . . . . 3. After Communism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

368 370 374 379

Kundera’s Paradise Lost: Paradigm of the Circle (Vladimír Papousˇ ek) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 384

Chapter IV: Autobiographical Exile Writing Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 397 Life in Translation: Exile in the Autobiographical Works of Kazimierz Brandys and Andrzej Bobkowski (Katarzyna Jerzak) . . . . 400 1. Life in Translation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 404 2. Uninvited Comparisons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 409 From Diary to Novel: Sándor Márai’s San Gennaro vére and Ítélet Canudosban (John Neubauer) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 416 San Gennaro vére (Saint Gennaro’s Blood) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 418 Ítélet Canudosban ( Judgment in Canudos) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 418

Table of Contents

IX

Exile Diaries: Sándor Márai, Gustaw Herling-Grudzin´ski, and Others (Włodzimierz Bolecki) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 422 Eight Issues of Comparison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 424 “Is There a Place Like Home?” Jewish Narratives of Exile and Homecoming in Late Twentieth-Century East-Central Europe (Ksenia Polouektova) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 432

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 473 Herta Müller: Between Myths of Belonging (Thomas Cooper) . . . . . . . . 475 Post-Yugoslav Theater Exile: Transitory, Partial and Digital (Dragan Klaic) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. Historic Antecedents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. Pre-exilic Theater Life in former Yugoslavia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. Squandered Opportunities: the Roma Theater Pralipe . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4. From Exile to Integration: Théâtre Tattoo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5. Between Music and the Stage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6. Career Shifts and Turns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7. Double Track . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8. Excursions, not Returns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9. In the Internet Exile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10. Exiles as Mediators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11. Reconstruction and Normalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12. The Fading of Exile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Losing Touch, Keeping in Touch, Out of Touch: The Reintegration of Hungarian Literary Exile after 1989 (Sándor Hites) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. Closely Watched Connections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. Encounter of an Ambivalent Kind: Inside and Outside in the 1990s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. Redefining Exile, Redefining the Canon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

497 498 499 501 503 505 506 508 509 512 513 516 517

521 523 528 533

X

Table of Contents

Albert Wass: Rebirth and Apotheosis of a TransylvanianHungarian Writer (John Neubauer) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. Immigration, and Literary Debut in the US: 1951–52 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. Transylvanian Decline and Resistance: 1934–40 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. Against the “Intruders”: 1940–1945 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4. Perspectives from Exile in Europe: 1945–1951 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5. Fiction, Academia, Publishing: Florida 1957–98 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6. Legacy, Resurrection, and Apotheosis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

538 538 546 549 556 561 568

Chapter VI Instead of Conclusion: East Central Literary Exile and its Representation (Borbála Zsuzsanna Török) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Arrows into the Playfield . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Transnational Perspectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Times and Themes of Literary Exile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Grundbegriffe und Autoren ostmitteleuropäischer Exilliteraturen 1945–1989 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

579 579 584 586 591

A Timeline of Exile Movements, 1919–2000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 597 List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 605 Index of East-Central European Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 613

Preface

XI

Preface The present volume has been prepared with a generous grant from the Fritz Thyssen Foundation in Germany, which financed in 2007 research fellowships at the Collegium Budapest for most contributors of this volume. The editors wish to express their deep gratitute to both the Foundation and the Collegium for helping us making the book possible. Our project started with an exciting workshop on September 11–13, 2006 at the Collegium in Budapest, titled “Between Home and Host Cultures: Twentieth-Century East European Writers in Exile,” which was accompanied by a series of literary readings and discussions for the public at large. The purpose of this workshop was to establish the basic ideas of the planned research. We wish to thank Fred Girod, Secretary of the Institute at that time, who was the motor behind the project in its early phases, as well as all those participants of the workshop who helped launching the project but were for various reasons unable to participate in its later phases. They include Eva Hoffman, Seth Wolitz, and Mihály Szegedy-Maszák. Pasts, Inc., Center for Historical Studies at the Central European University in Budapest was the earliest laboratory to test hypotheses that Sorin Antohi, its first director, has put forward. The conveners of the workshop and organizers of the project envisioned at the very outset a coherent set of studies instead of a mere collection of essays. The contributions were coordinated and placed into a broad social and historical view of exile in the “home” and the “host” countries. Several of our original hypotheses and generalizations rapidly became questionable as we came to face a profusion of empirical data. We anticipated, of course, great differences between the experiences of those who fled the Nazis and the communist dictatorships. However, we have also discovered deep differences between national traditions of exile, traditions that kept on shifting, mostly in an asynchronous manner. Furthermore, it became gradually clear that we would have to devote considerable attention to what Galin Tihanov calls the “East-East Exilic Experience,” namely the exiles fleeing to Moscow rather than Paris or London, and, equally important, that many exiles who fled a suppression were at one point themselves suppressors. For these and a host of other reasons we tried to avoid idealizing exiles as stereotypical heroes, and

XII

Preface

attempted to include a broad scene that included personal and ideological conflicts between those in exile, between exiled writers and their home countries, and between exiles and their new environment. Given these premises, we have focused mostly on the personal and social experiences of exile, which find complicated records in diaries, letters, and memoirs, next to oblique reflections in fiction. After extended discussions, we agreed to read the formal and linguistic aspects of writing as indices of psychological, social, and historical states of mind. We should mention here two other aspects of the project’s evolution. The first is indicated by our very title, in which, at a rather late stage of the project, we have included “homecoming.” Though not all contributions deal with it, the topic has gradually become a second focal point: we felt the need to consider the problems of returning writers after World War II (both from Moscow and from the West), and, even more, to consider the repatriation of exile writers and their works, which has been an ongoing problem ever since 1989. The second aspect is one of terminology. Although we were from the very outset aware that “exile” was a historically and ideologically loaded term, we realized only gradually how complicated it is to distinguish between exile in our strict sense of the word and various forms of modern alienation, for which “exile” is a frequent metaphor. We became particularly sensitive to the discursive fact that the exilic phenomena we discuss are unique as well as symbols of modern existential situations. We want to keep alive the latter quasiuniversal significance, but we wish also to resist an abuse of the term, as, we think, one should resist calling all modern systematic killings a “Holocaust.” We would like to take this opportunity to express our gratitude, next to the Fritz Thyssen Foundation and the Collegium Budapest, to a number of people who helped us along. Gábor Klaniczay, the Permanent Humanities Fellow at the Collegium was an important mediator between the project and the Collegium; Éva Gönczi, the new Secretary took a very kind interest in our project and was always an excellent discussion partner; Imre Kondor, the Collegium’s former Rector, often played the devil’s advocate and stimulated us thereby. Rita Páva did enthusiastic research for us and Diana Kuprel prepared an excellent translation of Włodzimierz Bolecki’s article on Kultura. László Boka, Research Director at the Hungarian National Library repeatedly helped us both within and outside his library. Ted Anton (Chicago) kindly provided us material on the Culianu affair, and Mária Korász at the Somogyi Library made available for us a crucial document on Albert Wass. Last but not least, the editors would like to thank the contributors to this volume. They all showed great enthusiasm for the project and patiently

Preface

XIII

responded to the avalanche of questions and suggestions concerning both their own work and those of the others. We are proud of having their innovative, informative, and well-written contributions.

XIV

Preface

Chapter I

3

Introduction The following essay explores the concept of exile, delineates the specific features of literary exile from twentieth-century East-Central Europe, and offers an outline of its historical, geographical, and institutional dimensions. It provides a general map for the specialized essays that follow it. Though conceived and written by John Neubauer, the text owes much to the other contributors. Some participated in weekly discussions at the Collegium during the fellowship year, with others I have been engaged in e-mail exchanges. Their help was crucial in overcoming my own linguistic and cultural limitations, which will remain, of course, solely responsible for my errors and misinterpretations. A few persons I would especially like to thank. Borbála Zsuzsanna Török, co-editor of this volume, contributed in many fruitful discussions more than I can list here; in particular, I wish to single out her contribution to the section on “internal exile.” Włodzimierz Bolecki kindly allowed me to include his text on the complex figure of Józef Mackiewicz. Marcel Cornis-Pope contributed important passages and ideas on Mircea Eliade, Romania, and East-Central Europe. Darko Suvin’s eloquent reflections on exile gave my article, and the whole project, important impulses, especially concerning terminology and theoretical reflection.

4

Chapter I

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century John Neubauer

1. Who is an Exile? “‘I’m not an emigrant,’ she says almost gaily, ‘I’m an exile.’ […] ‘What’s the difference?’ ‘Elementary […] I can’t go back home. Emigrant girls can’” (Sˇkvorecky´, The Engineer of Human Souls 187)

Dieu est né en exil (God Was Born in Exile) claimed a book published in 1960, though the subtitle clarified that this was a fictional diary of Ovid. The title was meant seriously, however, because the diaries record not just Ovid’s yearning to return to Rome, but also his gradual alienation from his metropolitan home, which he now comes to see as a decadent, dictatorial, and irreligious society, doomed to decline and fall. The fictional Ovid gradually opens himself towards the culture of his Getae hosts, above all through his servant Dokia, who does not become his concubine because, as Ovid learns towards the end of the story, her secret lover is the garrison’s Roman commander, from whom she has a child. With the help of Dokia’s friends and relatives, Ovid takes an extensive trip in the region south of the Danube delta and he gets to know there peaceful, industrious, and humane “barbarians” who regard Zalmoxis, a legendary social and religious reformer, as their only true god. For the Getae, death means the return of the immortal soul to Zalmoxis. Discarding gradually the Greco-Roman deities, the fictional Ovid slowly converts to a god born to him in exile, a curious blend of Zalmoxis and a new Messiah-child from Bethlehem, about whom he receives an eyewitness report. The double figure of Zalmoxis/Jesus rises on two margins of the Roman Empire, as it were in exile, and Ovid foresees that a monotheistic god will ultimately topple Rome’s rule and religion, which are now in the hands of Augustus, an emperor who had declared himself divine. In a both personal and cultural sense, the novel implies that a morally good life is impossible under a dictator; only exile can offer hope for a renewal. Ovid’s own hope is tempered by his awareness that his decline will prevent him from seeing the new world. Much of the book’s attraction lies in its poignant psychological portrayal of

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

5

hope and resignation in Ovid. What role, if any, his personal and literary eroticism may have in the coming new world, is left open. Towards the end of the book, Dokia marries her Roman commandant and, imaging the biblical flight to Egypt, they flee with their daughter to the Dacian/Getae country north of the Danube. In this case, as in so many other works written in exile, the “novel of the novel’s history” is as interesting and relevant as the book itself. Dieu est né en exil won the coveted French Prix Goncourt in 1961, but Vintila˘ Horia, a Romanian exile writer then living in Madrid, was finally forced to decline the honor when it became known that in Romania he had been sentenced in absentia to a life term in prison because of his war-time political engagement. Knowing this, we recognize in Ovid’s admiration for the superior DacoRoman tradition a tempered reflection of Horia’s former right-wing ideology: modern Romania embodies Ovid’s hope for a Christian/pagan belief in Zalmoxis/Jesus and a new world beyond Rome. Should Horia’s past have mattered in selecting his book for the award? Were the members of the jury simply naïve or neglectful in carrying out a “security check?” Were those who attacked Horia and the jury, led by the French communist daily l’Humanité and joined by Jean-Paul Sartre, perhaps blind to the fact that communist court condemnations were “show trials?” These and other questions were raised in a thoughtful article of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on April 2, 2007 by the novelist and essayist Richard Wagner, himself a Banat-Swabian exile from Romania, who was allowed to leave Caus¸escu’s empire in the 1980s, together with other members of the Aktionsgruppe Banat. The article was occasioned by a petition that Horia be rehabilitated, submitted by a number of respected Romanian writers and intellectuals, both in the country and abroad, among them Ana Blandiana, Paul Goma, and Monica Lovinescu. The Horia case, as well as the comparable one of the Hungarian-Transylvanian writer Albert Wass (see the article on him below), indicates that studying exiled twentieth-century writers is no mere exercise in historical scholarship, for the often unfathomable and unimaginable past of East-Central Europe continues to cast a shadow on its present culture, politics, and cultural politics. Though few writers go into exile today, the past of the exiles and the region’s exilic past are haunting revenants, old repressions that surface under new conditions. We hope to shed some light on exile as well as on the region by taking a historical approach to the phenomenon. As a fundamental human experience, exile is inscribed into the Bible’s banishment from Paradise, as well as into untold other religious and secular myths. In the history of Europe, people have been repeatedly forced to leave

6

Chapter I

their home due to religious persecution, ethnic and minority suppression, capricious rulers, petty local politics, and many other acts of violence. Next to forced displacements of whole groups, many forms of individual ejections existed, from the Greek practice of ostracism (a temporary banishment by popular vote without trial or special accusation), through Roman, medieval, and Renaissance practices of banishment (see Randolph Starn). In Webster’s Third and other dictionaries of the English language, exile is defined, therefore, primarily a “forced removal from one’s native country: expulsion from home.” This expulsion from home need not mean removal to another country: it also includes internal exile, the forced removal of a person to some remote part of an empire, as was the case with Ovid’s banishment to Tomis, Napoleon’s to Elba, or Dostoevsky’s to Siberia. In the twentieth century, various countries sent their people into an internal exile that involved confinement to a certain village but not to a camp. The twentieth-century forms of exile differ from its earlier manifestations. In a history of mentalities, we may employ here the term transcendentale Obdachlosigkeit (transcendental homelessness) that the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács coined in 1916, amidst a war in which most people, including Lukács’s close friend Béla Balázs, enthusiastically offered their blood for their national and ethnic Heimat. For Lukács, Obachlosigkeit went well beyond the war and typified modern existence in general: according to Die Theorie des Romans, homelessness meant banishment from a transcendental home, as well as from ancient Greece, where, so Lukács claimed, the transcendental had been immanent in the social structure. Following the German idealist tradition, Lukács believed that in ancient Greece individuals had substantial relations to their family and state, because these were “more general, more philosophical, closer and more intimately related to the archetypal Heimat” (26). However, following Hegel, Lukács believed that the security Greece had offered to its citizens became suffocating later: “We can no longer breathe in a closed world” (27). If the epic world of Homer embodied a transcendental Geborgenheit (shelteredness), the modern novel manifested homelessness: “The form of the novel is, like no other one, an expression of transcendental homelessness” (35). While Lukács’s theory and historical interpretation are open to criticism, he was surely right in claiming that a sense of homelessness has permeated the worldview of many modern European writers and intellectuals, who became alienated from their native culture, and frequently departed from it all but voluntarily. Lukács’s personal sense of transcendental homelessness led him a few years later to join the Communist Party, and subsequently to flee from Hungary. In the Party and its ideology he desperately tried to find an escape

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

7

from homelessness. Ideological commitment or its opposite, namely a desire to free oneself from it, led to the alienation and voluntary exile of many other twentieth-century artists and intellectuals, including James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Samuel Beckett. We wish to distinguish this transcendental sense of estrangement and homelessness from the concrete social and political forms of twentieth-century exile and mass dislocation. Pre-modern exile concerned individuals or small groups of people. Starting with the Renaissance, however, masses of people came to be expelled, and the term “refugee” was introduced to designate groups of people who sought to escape persecution by asking for asylum in another country. Such were the French Huguenots, the French Acadians expelled by the British from Nova Scotia, and, later, the refugees (or émigrés) fleeing the French Revolution (Zolberg 5–11). In East-Central Europe, the dominant form of nineteenth-century displacement became political (rather than religious) exile; witness the exiles of the Polish uprisings in 1830 and 1863 and those who fled after the defeat of the 1848–49 Hungarian war of independence. In the twentieth century, the conditions of European exile have changed radically, and not only because of its massive numbers. As Aristide Zolberg writes, one of the hallmarks became the “the reinstatement of prohibition against exit, such as were common in the age of absolutism but now implemented by states with a much greater ability to control movement across their borders” (16; italics JN). Those who were able to escape found themselves in a new situation, because, as Hannah Arendt (and more recently Giorgio Agamben) has argued, nation states now governed human rights. Those who did not have a nationality reverted to a state of nature. Expulsion in the traditional sense became relatively rare in the twentieth century, though it was occasionally exercized in the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic, and at times also by virtually all East-Central European communist regimes. The methods varied from country to country. Some dissidents, for instance the Hungarian Squat Theater, were simply ejected; others, like the Czechs Jirˇí Grusˇa and Pavel Kohout, were denied reentry after a trip abroad; the Hungarian György Konrád was offered, but refused, the possibility to leave. The Romanians Paul Goma, Dumitru T¸epeneag, and Dorin Tudoran were allowed to exit after a protracted fight for a permit, whereas the Poles Leszek Kolakowski, Zygmunt Bauman, Jan Kott, and others were forced abroad by means of job deprivation, publication prohibition, and various sorts of harassments. Still, the mentioned cases were exceptions. Twentieth-century European dictatorships preferred to keep their critics, dissidents, and undesirable

8

Chapter I

elements at home rather than abroad, for at home they could be silenced, locked up in jails and forced labor camps, or simply murdered; abroad they could rally politicians and public opinion against the dictatorial regime. Our following definition reflects then the key historical fact that within the spatial and temporal coordinates of our study exiles were usually not ejected; they fled by their own volition in order to escape totalitarianism, minority suppression, and racial persecution: In twentieth-century East-Central Europe exile usually meant a self-motivated or, occasionally, forced departure from the home country or habitual place of residence, because of a threat to the person’s freedom or dignified survival, such as an imminent arrest, sentence, forced labor, or even extermination. The departure was for an unforeseeable time irreversible.

The criteria of irreversibility and “immediate threat to a person’s freedom or dignified survival” restrict our definition but include the major groups: the leftists who fled after the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919 for fear of a White Terror; the Jews, Czechs, and Poles who fled the imminent Nazi threat in 1938–39; participants of the Hungarian 1956 revolution who had to flee after its defeat; and most of those that left Czechoslovakia after the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968. To this core group of exiles we may add those to whom our central criteria of “immediate threat” and “no return” apply only partially: the émigrés and the expatriates. The latter retain their original nation-state rights and are spared an indefinite, possibly final, sundering from their native society, whereas émigrés “may share in the solitude and estrangement of exile, but they do not suffer under its rigid proscriptions” (Said, “Reflections” 166). As Leszek Kołakowski put it: More often than not, modern exiles have been expatriates, rather than exiles in the strict sense; usually they were not physically deported from their countries or banished by law; they escaped from political persecution, prison, death, or simply censorship. The distinction is important insofar as it has had a psychological effect. Many voluntary exiles from tyrannical regimes cannot rid themselves of a feeling of discomfort. […] A certain ambiguity is therefore unavoidable, and it is impossible to draw up any hard-and-fast rules to distinguish justifiable from unjustifiable self-exile. (188)

Since it remains unclear in this passage by what criteria a self-exile may be “unjustifiable,” it would perhaps be better to speak of a departure that is not primarily motivated by political pressure. Still, our distinction generally agrees with that of Kołakowski, if we insert between exiles and expatriates the émigrés. Like him, we emphasize that earlier exiles were ejected whereas modern ones usually enter a self-exile. Like him, we ask when political suppression becomes so unbearable that self-exile remains the only self-defense, and we

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

9

believe, like him, that no hard-and-fast rules can be established for this, partly because we usually have only the evidence given by the exiled person, which is subjectively experienced and may change with time. We are usually unable to determine, just how threatening the home conditions were for the person who left. For all these reasons, it is preferable to separate exiles and émigrés by an imaginary gray band rather than a sharp line. The socio-political conditions at the time of departure and the original intentions of the departing person are not the only factors that determine the status of a person. Émigrés or expatriates may suddenly turn into genuine exiles by making a provocative statement or engaging in a political act that turn them into an enemy of the regime at home. Eugène Ionesco, for instance, departed as an expatriate but became an exile that could no longer return to communist Romania when his play Le Rhinocéros came to be understood as an allegory of suppressive states like Romania. Émigrés may be dissatisfied with the cultural and political situation at home, but, in our view, they become exiles only if they are under imminent threat. If they leave legally and do not burn the bridges behind themselves, they are, strictly speaking, no exiles. Take, for instance, the Romanian Jewish writer Benjamin Fundoianu, who, having visited Paris in 1923, definitely left his country in 1935. His reasons included the growing anti-Semitism in Romania, but also his wish to write in a major language and to contribute to world literature. In this sense, he was strictly speaking no exile, though he became one when measures were taken against the Jews in Romania. Unfortunately, he was denounced in his presumed safe haven, and perished in the Holocaust. The eminent Serbian writer Milosˇ Crnjanski (see Guido Snel’s article on him below) quit the Yugoslav diplomatic service when his country was invaded by the Germans, and he stayed in London even after the war in a semi-legal fashion. He finally returned to Yugoslavia as a celebrated writer in the 1960s. Thus, Crnjanski shifted his status: he did not flee but became an exile due to the Nazi occupation of his country; after the war, he was an émigré rather than an exile, perhaps even an expatriate. Milan Kundera is also difficult to classify. Unlike the Hungarian exiles of 1956, he did not flee his country immediately after the suppression of the 1968 Prague Spring but tried to make the best of it. His life and freedom were apparently not immediately endangered, though he was kicked out of the Communist Party in 1970 (after an earlier ejection and readmission). When he finally concluded in 1975 that “normalized” Czechoslovakia was unlivable, he left and did burn the bridges behind himself by publishing regime-hostile texts abroad. Expatriates are easier to distinguish from exiles and émigrés because they leave without being existentially endangered; in principle, they can return

10

Chapter I

any time they want to. More often than not – as in the case of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett departing from Ireland, or Gertrud Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and other American artists settling in Paris during the interwar years – their unforced departure is motivated by a general sense of alienation from the home culture. That Joyce often stylized himself as an exile, and that exile was both a theme of his fiction and an attribute of his literary alter-egos are important for understanding the writer and his art, but classifying him as a genuine (rather than metaphoric) exile would water down the existential weight of the term as we use it. Similarly, East-Central European writers, artists, actors, and directors went to Paris and Berlin in the 1920s because they were attracted to the intensity of artistic and intellectual life there. They were not, strictly speaking, exiles; one of the exceptions was Bruno Jasien´ski, who quit Poland in 1925 due to harassments at home, and lived a destitute life in Paris until he was ejected because of his 1929 novel Je brûle Paris (I Burn Paris). The terms exile, émigré, and expatriate designate individuals or small groups; they carry a certain elitist connotation, though not in terms of material wealth. Such individual fortunes should be considered against the background of historical mass movements. During the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, masses of people fled religious persecution all over Europe, and in East-Central Europe, massive dislocations were caused by the Ottoman wars. As late as 1690, tens of thousands of Serbs left with the Patriarch Cˇarnojevic´ III their still beleaguered homes and resettled in various parts of Hungary. At least three designations refer to masses of displaced individuals in modern East-Central Europe: diasporic people, migrants, and forcefully repatriated people. The Jews (outside of Israel), the Roma, the Armenians, and other diasporic people were stateless ethnic groups throughout much of their history. They have been admitted to various modern states, but always tenuously and with restrictions. Some members of these diasporic communities acquired ambiguous multiple identities, while others have refused dispersion and either assimilated or displayed their marginality and otherness consciously and conspicuously. Migrants refer in our context to those masses whom deprivation drove to migrate from Europe to North America in the nineteenth and early twentieth century (migrant workers came in large numbers to Western Europe in the post-World-War II decades, but not to the region we are concerned with). While there were relatively few first-generation writers and artists among these economic immigrants of the New World, their ethnicsocial organizations became of considerable importance to writers who fled there later.

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

11

Exiles and émigrés become refugees if they ask for asylum abroad. Article 1 of the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (as amended by the 1967 Protocol) defines a refugee as follows: [A person who] owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it. (www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/o_ c_ref.htm)

Focusing on a refugee’s past status in the home country (or habitual residence), the convention defines what a refugee status in a host nation state is. This highly important question of legality will play a relatively small role in our volume. Having sharply distinguished between exiles and émigrés, we admitted subsequently that in concrete cases the choice of label is not always easy to make. To this “experiential” fuzziness we have to add in conclusion a linguistic/discursive one. In Polish, and to a lesser extent in Hungarian and other languages of the region, the terms “emigrants,” “emigration,” and their variants have often been used to cover also what we define in this volume as “exile”: our rational-transnational distinction occasionally clashes with historical discourse. In specific contributions to our volume it would have been pedantic as well as a-historical to insist on using “exile” instead of “emigration.” We allowed for inconsistency in order to accommodate national and historical variety.

2. Exile and Writing We spoke of exiles, émigrés, and expatriates as if all of them had been writers, though these constitute only a vanishingly small fraction of all those that leave their home. We did so, because, next to judicial records (which are scarce and often completely lacking), writers give the most thorough and extensive accounts of exile. As Dubravka Ugresˇic´ ironically remarks, “writers are those rare migrants who leave their footprints,” though they are statistically the most insignificant and unreliable witnesses (127). Millions survived or died in exile silently; writers have offered us not only stories of their lives but also literary works like Dante’s Divine Comedy that transcend the immediate events, personal feelings, and their articulations. Indeed, some of the most distinguished pre-nineteenth-century European exiles were writers. Next to the famous cases of Ovid, Cicero, Seneca, Dante,

12

Chapter I

Petrarch, and Machiavelli there were many exiled writers that became key figures within a national tradition. Perhaps the most distinguished eighteenthcentury Hungarian literary work was written by Kelemen Mikes, who followed his political leader, Ferenc Rákóczy, into an exile that led him into Poland, France, and finally Turkey. At Terkirdag/Rodostó he wrote between 1717 and 1758 some 207 letters to a fictional aunt, which constitute his Törökországi levelek (Letters from Turkey), a poignant literary masterwork that could be published only posthumously, in 1794. Torn out of their home environment and frequently separated from their family and friends, exiles settle in alien social and linguistic worlds that often restrict them to solitary confinement. This is particularly true of East-Central European writers (as well as actors), because the communities they settle in do not speak their language. Dante settled in another Italian culture, British emigrants usually went to other English-speaking parts of the world, East German writers could settle in West Germany; but East-Central European exiles – apart from ethnic German writers who lived in East-Central Europe (see Thomas Cooper’s article below on Herta Müller) – had to settle in foreign linguistic environments, in which, at best, they could occasionally find a minority subculture of their language. Although we intend to go beyond individual writers and their texts, for practical reasons we are unable to offer a systematic and comprehensive treatment of these exile and emigrant subcultures, which also include other artists, scholars, free-lance intellectuals, as well as various professional people and politicians. In Chapter II we do offer, however, case studies on literary exile cultures abroad. Businessmen, doctors, lawyers, engineers, and most academic people can continue to exercise their professions in exile, for these depend less on language. Painters and musicians can also get along with a rudimentary mastery of the host language. Writers, however, are not engineers (“of the soul,” as Stalin thought) but verbal artists who often have to make traumatic and existential decisions in exile concerning their métier. If they continue to write in their mother tongue, their readers will usually be restricted to the exile and émigré community of their language, for their works can reach neither the native readers they left behind nor the readers of their host country (as was the case with Sándor Márai, Witold Gombrowicz, and most other exile writers). If they adopt the language of their host country, their work becomes available to a larger, often global, reading public, but the switch often becomes the source of a life-long sense of inadequacy and inferiority, as in the case of Emil Cioran, Agota Kristof, and others. A number of writers – among them Milan Kundera, Andrei Codrescu, Jerzy Pietrkiewicz, Ota Philip, Libusˇa Moníková, and Jirˇí Grusˇa – switched with relative ease to a new language, and a few exile

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

13

writers from East-Central Europe could turn the exposure to several languages even into a source of artistic creativity. Having said all this, it remains difficult to demarcate exactly literature from other types of writing, and to differentiate between professional and occasional writers. Studies of writing in exile must go beyond imaginative literature and include autobiographies, correspondence, and other personal writings that are often produced by journalists, philosophers, essayists, historians, and other professionals. We have tried to keep our demarcations flexible.

3. The Home Cultures In contrast to essays and critical reflections, scholarly studies of exile have traditionally focused on a single country and a single linguistic community. This is justified inasmuch as exile and emigration are induced by national political and social conditions, but the results, which utilize a limited database, do not allow for generalizations. In the absence of a comparative international framework, such studies may not even reveal the full significance of the national phenomenon, for understanding a specific form of national exile may require, as in the case of a native language, knowledge of analogous and alternative possibilities. Hence our choice to study exile on a regional level. The transnational region we have chosen for our study includes the present states of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Croatia, and Serbia. Including other countries would have raised both serious practical difficulties and additional conceptual problems. The Russian Revolution of 1917 to the East of our region, and Hitler’s Germany to the West of it, forced masses of people into exile (usually termed émigrés in the Russian case), but the scale and the problems of these displacements fundamentally differed from the phenomenon we are studying here. The exiles from the Baltic countries and from the southern Balkan countries involved smaller groups, but their patterns were significantly different: in the Baltic countries: the threat and the actual Nazi occupation produced a massive Soviet forced removal eastward, but only a negligible exodus over the borders of the Soviet Union, whereas the reoccupation by the Soviet Union produced a small but significant exodus, mostly to Sweden, where only a handful of exiles fled from our region. In the Balkans, history also ran differently. There were no significant exile groups from Albania and the southern states of ex-Yugoslavia. Bulgaria represents somewhat of an exception, but we excluded it in order to keep geographic coherence. There are no fully satisfactory ways of labeling our region. Calling it Central Europe would have necessitated the inclusion of Austria and Germany,

14

Chapter I

whereas the Cold-War term “Eastern Europe” is too broad and now outdated. We have therefore adopted and modified for our purposes the term that has been used in Marcel Cornis-Pope’s and John Neubauer’s four-volume History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe. What, then, were the social, political, and historical conditions in these countries that gave rise to the exile of writers in the twentieth century? To take a step backward, we first note that none of the countries now occupying the region was fully independent in the nineteenth century. In the process of a national (re)awakening, each of them went through a struggle against one or several hegemonic powers that forced many patriotic writers into exile. The suppressors were in the first instance the powers to the East and West (Russia, Prussia, and Austria), but we ought to add that nations struggling for independence usually also suppressed their minority populations. This was the case with Hungary, especially once it became the junior partner of the Dual Monarchy. The situation radically changed, and to certain extent reversed itself, when in the wake of World War I the Dual Monarchy collapsed and Hungary lost two-thirds of its pre-war territory whereas a number of nation states – Poland, Czechoslovakia, Greater Romania, and the Kingdom of Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia – (re)emerged. The new national constellation and the redrawing of borders led to an unprecedented European phenomenon: millions of refugees, as well as persons who were expelled or exchanged in order to create homogenous national populations: In 1918 huge masses of refugees appeared in Europe, victims of the new-style nationstates – especially those consolidating their precarious existence in the postwar world. It was estimated in 1926 that there were no less than 9.5 million European refugees, including two million Poles to be repatriated […] 250,000 Hungarians, and one million Germans expelled from various parts of Europe (Marrus 51–52, based on Bryas 56).

World War II created an even greater humanitarian crisis: at the end of the war, millions of liberated concentration-camp inmates, released prisoners of war, refugees, and displaced persons from the Eastern parts of Europe were roaming around or lingering in DP camps. While the Western Allies managed to repatriate more than five of the seven million displaced persons by September 1945 (often, however, forcing them to go back to the Soviet Union: see Marrus 313–17), the situation worsened in the Eastern part of Europe, because another redrawing of borders led to the expulsion or voluntary departure of those that became unwanted in their home. Article XIII of the Potsdam agreement sanctioned, for instance, the “transfer” of Germans from Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary to Germany, a country that had just lost a significant part of its Eastern territory (now stretching only to the Oder-

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

15

Neisse line) to Poland. It is estimated that Hungary, one of the more liberal countries in this respect, expelled some 135 000 Germans. Many of the homes vacated by the expelled Germans came to be occupied in these countries by refugees that the Soviet Union had displaced by incorporating into the Ukrainian Soviet Republic Poland’s Eastern Borderlands, Czechoslovakia’s Carpatho-Ruthenia and Romania’s Bessarabia and Bukovina. Czechoslovakia forcefully “exchanged” also some of its Hungarians; Romania did not eject its Transylvania Saxons, Banat Swabians, and Hungarian Székelys (though many Romanian Germans were taken into Soviet and Romanian camps for many years), but its minorities dramatically dwindled in the following decades by voluntary or involuntary exits. Such massive and painful intra-regional removals gradually homogenized formerly multicultural areas by moving people from minority habitats to ethnically and/or linguistically “home” countries. We shall bypass these mass displacements in this volume, for they represent intra- rather than inter-regional forms of exile and emigration, and they involved relatively few mature writers. To be sure, many writers were displaced as young adults or as children of migrating families. The parents of Eva Hoffman moved in 1945 (the year she was born) from the Ukrainian L’viv (formerly the Polish Lwów) to Cracow (Hoffman 8); Aleksander Rymkiewicz and many others moved in 1945 to Poland, when Wilno became Vilnius, capital of the Lithuanian Soviet Republic; Włodzimierz Odojewski, born in Poznan´ but raised in the Polish/Ukrainian borderland, also moved to Poland; Paul Celan, Norman Manea, and other Romanians moved from the now Ukraine Bukovina to Romanian cities; Romanian and Hungarian writers moved back and forth according to the fortunes of Northern Transylvania, which went from Romania to Hungary (as the consequence of a Hitler-supported decision in Vienna) in 1940 and was returned to Romania after the war. The Romanian poet Lucian Blaga, who held a special university chair in Cluj, fled when the Hungarian troops marched in; he returned to Cluj in 1945 but was deprived of his chair by the communists in 1948. We shall bypass also those Romanian German writers (most prominent among them Heinrich Zillich), who voluntarily went “home” to Nazi Germany in the 1930s, but Thomas Cooper will discuss below Herta Müller, a prominent Romanian Swabian writer who was allowed to leave the Banat in the 1980s and experienced a complicated “homecoming” in Germany. The Hungarians still represent a significant minority in Transylvania and the Banat, but writers continued to transfer to Hungary both during the interwar years (e.g. Lajos Áprily and Sándor Makkai) and after 1945 (e.g. Miklós Bánffy and Áron Tamási).

16

Chapter I

Each East-Central European communist regime forced its own pattern of exile and emigration. Yugoslavia, expelled in 1948 from the Stalin’s international Cominform, subsequently became a receiver rather than exporter of exiles (Vladimir Dedijer, a follower of Milovan -Dilas, was an exception). Many exiles left the other East-Central European countries in the late 1940s to escape the communist takeover and consolidation of power, but this stream dwindled by 1950, and even the death of Stalin (1953) did not ease immediately the border control. The two windows of opportunity during the 1950–70 period –, after the defeat of 1956 Hungarian uprising and after the suppression of the 1968 Prague Spring – involved a host of prominent writers and intellectuals. Poland had a different history. A steady stream of Jews left after the government lifted the ban on Jewish emigration in 1958, and the exodus peaked again during the anti-Semitic wave in the Party (1968), as well as the declaration of martial law in the early 1980s. The rhythm of exodus was different again in Romania. Relatively few people left during the Thaw of the 1960s, but the numbers increased in the 1970s and 80s, when Ceaus¸escu’s regime became increasingly dictatorial. Though Ceaus¸escu made departure extremely difficult for native Romanians, he “generously” allowed Jews and Germans to emigrate by exacting substantial “ransoms” from Germany and Israel. We shall fill in this outline with a history of individual writers and intellectuals in the following section. Suffice to conclude here that the exile and emigration policies of the East-European satellite nations was by no means uniform, and, furthermore, that until the later 1970s and 80s the dissident writers and intellectuals of the various countries had little contact with each other. As Csaba Kiss remarks, East-Central European writers traditionally knew little about each other because they looked to Paris from Warsaw and Prague, Belgrade and Bucharest rather than to the neighboring capitals (126). Exactly this common attraction to the Western cultural centers (in case of the communists of the 1930s to Moscow) encourages us to treat exile on a regional basis. Those who remained at home dreamed of a world beyond the region’s western borders, while those who departed shared a romantic Heimweh coupled with a disdain for the Heimat. National differences determined only partly which of these feelings dominated. Those who were literally forced to flee from their homeland tended to suffer more from pain and nostalgia than the émigrés and expatriates who departed usually by their own volition. Sándor Márai, who was for all practical purposes forced out of Hungary, remained affectionately attached to it all his life, while the Polish Witold Gombrowicz and the Romanian Emil Cioran, who were not coerced to leave, had adopted sharply critical and ironic views of their country even before they had

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

17

left it. Witness Cioran’s Schimbarea la fat¸a˘ a României (The Transfiguration of Romania), which he published in 1938, based on views he had held already in Romania. Having an audience in the native language is an existential need for most writers. Émigrés and expatriates from East-Central Europe could, as a rule, hold on to their home audience until they became publicly critical of the political regime. Those who fled, instantaneously lost their opportunity to publish at home and were forced to consider alternatives: they could try publishing for a native reading public abroad, or they had to learn to write for a larger public in a new language. Smuggling books into the homeland was all but impossible during World War II; in the later years of the communist regimes, from the 1960s onward, it became possible in some countries (notably Poland, partly in Czechoslovakia), though it remained an unstable and unreliable source of income. Samizdat publications of exiled authors also surfaced in these decades, but they were of artistic and political rather than financial value. Those who survived exile and lived to see 1945 or 1989 could consider reestablishing their personal and professional ties with the homeland, but, as our articles in Chapter V show, this turned out to be in most cases immensely more complicated than it had been anticipated. Here we wish to touch merely on the clashes between returning exiles and those that claimed to have lived in “inner emigration” during totalitarian regimes. A brief reflection on the origin of the term may help us identify some of its complexity. The term came into use in the 1930s, by both those who fled Hitler and those who remained at home. In those years, Klaus Mann, Paul Tillich, Thomas Mann, and other exiles acknowledged the existence of an internal resistance to Hitler and felt in solidarity with it (Grimm 40–41). This changed during the war and its aftermath. To Thomas Mann’s great chagrin, several German writers who had stayed at home started to glorify inner emigration. As Frank Thiess wrote with a swipe at the exiles: inner emigration consisted of a community of intellectuals that remained loyal to Germany by not abandoning it and not watching it from a comfortable dress box abroad, but shared its misfortune with all sincerity (Mann, Die Entstehung 124; see also 119 and 168). Gottfried Benn, a leading poet, even made the outrageous claim that becoming a Wehrmacht officer was an “aristocratic form of emigration” (3: 942 and 8: 1960). As a result, Thomas Mann angrily came to deny that “inner emigration” had ever existed. The Frank Thiess/Thomas Mann controversy continued in the following decades, when German writers and literary historians came to argue about the relative values of exilic and “home” literature. Conservatives tended to over-

18

Chapter I

value the literature written in Germany under Hitler, while exiles and critics from the left came to regard claims to “inner emigration” as empty excuses. At a University of Wisconsin conference on exile an inner emigration Reinhold Grimm gave an excellent historical account of how “inner emigration” emerged as a concept, but in his subsequent examination of opposition to Hitler Grimm confounded inner emigration with dissidence, and once more obscured its meaning (see Snell 10–11). What implications does this first, specifically German, use of “inner emigration” have for its use by others elsewhere? Though it was coined to designate a phenomenon in Nazi Germany, we must allow for other meanings in other contexts, especially since it is not always clear whether the new use of the term was a “nomadic” variant of the German one or a new coinage, whose originator was unaware of the first German meaning. Comparative studies such as ours should remind us, however, that this usually positively connoted term had a decidedly negative meaning for German writers, critics, and scholars returning from exile. Just as many Frenchman claimed after the war to have participated in the resistance movement, many German writers who stayed at home constructed a self-image via “inner emigration” that prettified their often less than admirable attitude under the Nazi regime. We should also keep in mind a terminological rather than historical aspect of “inner emigration”: Grimm’s historically useful discussion does not carve out a conceptual space for it. Dissidence and internal emigration partially overlap, but they are surely not synonymous. Did, for instance, the Polish poet Stanisław Baran´czak automatically become, as he claimed, an inner emigrant rather than a dissident when he was silenced (Kliems, “Dissens” 209)? Facing censorship, dissidents try to assume an oppositional public voice and activity, whereas those in internal exile tend to withdraw from politics and even from the world. They are silenced, or they voluntarily fall silent, and their writing goes into the drawer of their desk, not to a (legal, samizdat, or foreign) publisher. Yet writers and scholars continue to confound dissidence and “inner emigration.” Ferenc Fejto˝, for instance, calls Milovan -Dilas’s prohibition to publish and frequent jailing a “belso˝ [internal] emigráció” (536), though -Dilas did publish his writings abroad, and he was an active dissident rather than a silent voice, even if the authorities tried to silence him. Even more complicated is the case of the Hungarian writer Imre Kertész that Susan Suleiman analyzes in our volume. Kertész had difficulty publishing during the postwar decades, and he felt isolated from the Hungarian literary establishment. Hence he claims that during the decades of Russian occupation he had been in a “de facto in inner emigration” (“Das eigene Land” 111). He did not completely fall silent, nor was he completely ignored, but for a long time he did not

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

19

receive the recognition he should have. Still, as Suleiman rightly argues, he was no dissident, and part of his isolation resulted precisely from his reluctance to join dissidents like György Konrád or István Eörsi. In other contexts, “internal exile” has been used to refer to people who were banished to a remote part of the same country (Siberia, Kazakhstan, or, as in Adrian Marino’s case, to Romania’s Baragan region). More recently, it has also been applied to people who fled from one member state of the former Yugoslav Federation to the other.

4. The Dialectics of Exile and Homecoming Dividing history into centuries is a convenient way to chop up time, but actual historical events seldom fit into prefixed calendar units. Is it justified then to single out twentieth-century exile, as we do in our volume? For practical purposes, twentieth-century exile actually begins only after World War I, and we shall therefore pass over in silence all but a fifth of it, limiting thus our treatment to what is sometimes called the “short” century. We do believe that the exilic experiences of the following eighty years (1920–2000) were radically different from those of earlier centuries, in terms of both scale and violence. The suffering of exiles in the nineteenth century pales in comparison to the pain of those that barely escaped the Holocaust and communist persecution. Could we not, however, distinguish within the twentieth century itself radically different exilic experiences? More than one answer is possible. We have chosen the twentieth century as our basic unit because we believe that, for all their differences, the Nazis and the communists have produced interrelated exilic forms and experiences. The two ought to be seen in light of each other, not because they were identical or even similar, but because understanding one necessitates the context of the other. The otherwise excellent encyclopedic study Grundbegriffe und Autoren ostmitteleuropäischer Exilliteraturen 1945–1989 (Basic Concepts and Authors of the East-Central European Exile Literatures, 1945–1989) by Eva Behring and her associates misses the opportunity of such a mutual illumination by focusing exclusively on the postwar exiles that fled from the communist regimes. Yet, those fleeing Stalin’s totalitarianism often had to settle in communities with exile and émigré social networks that were built by both those that had fled the Nazis and those that had supported them. The shared bitter experience of exile could not erase the difference in the worldviews and ideologies of these two groups. To put it perhaps all too sharply, those who fled the Nazis were mostly Jews and/or people with left-

20

Chapter I

wing political convictions, whereas most of those that fled after the war were either militant anti-communists, or reform communists who fled Hungary after 1956 or Czechoslovakia after 1968, deeply disillusioned by the betrayal of their ideals in political practice. Precisely the differences between the conditions of exiles fleeing the Nazi and the communist regimes warrant their joint study. The relationship between the first (Nazi) and the second (communist) waves of exile does not simply follow the arrow of time, revealing how the later phenomenon had been conditioned by the former. On a more theoretical level, in meta-reflections that attempt to systematize thinking about exile, we must draw on both experiences, as well as on the more recent European and global cases of exile, displaced persons, refugees, and asylum seekers. Modern theorizing on exile began with the work of Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno and other exiles fleeing the Nazis. Some contemporary authors, for instance the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, take Arendt’s ideas as their point of departure; others, for instance the Palestine-American Edward Said and authors interested in post-colonialism, choose to start with reflections on forced displacements outside Europe. Given our subject, the social and historical dimensions of the (East-Central) European experience and its theoretical implications, the approach of Arendt and the other pre-war exiles is of special importance to us. Yet we must reconsider their Nazi/Jewish based reflections, in light of the exilic experiences brought about by Communism, and the new technological modes of communication. In short, if fleeing the Nazis was a historical antecedent of exile from the communist regimes, the latter, in turn, should lead to a retrospective rethinking of what Arendt, Adorno, and other Nazi exiles wrote. Studies of concrete exile phenomena may follow the arrow of historical time, but theoretical reflections should point in the opposite direction today.

The Nineteenth-Century Exile Traditions General opinion holds that exiles and émigrés have traditionally gravitated towards Paris. Indeed, this was the city where many nineteenth-century EastCentral European exiles, émigrés, and expatriates settled, but their composition fluctuated and was never evenly distributed among the various nations. Note, for instance, that East-Central European exiles fleeing Russian repression flooded Paris in the nineteenth century, whereas after 1919 the city became inundated by émigré Russians fleeing the Bolsheviks. In what follows, we wish to show that Paris was a second, and sometimes even primary, home

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

21

for Polish and Romanian writers, but this does not hold for Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, and South-Slavic writers. After Poland’s second partitioning in 1795, Paris became the Polish political and cultural capital, and the city kept this role during the first half of the nineteenth century. Poland and France, both Catholic countries, had maintained close political and cultural ties for centuries. These ties became particularly close under Napoleon, whom most Poles supported in the hope that he would free the country from Russian oppression. As Czesław Miłosz writes, the most important single phenomenon of Polish Romanticism was, perhaps, “the Napoleonic legend, releasing as it did new forces of feeling and imagination” (History 207). Indeed, common anti-Russian sentiments fuelled French-Polish ties throughout the nineteenth century. In 1831, after the collapse of the November Insurrection against Russian domination, several thousand Polish officers, soldiers, and intellectuals immigrated to France. In 1843, Prince Adam Czartoryski set up the conservative “Monarchist Society of May 3” in the Parisian Hotel Lambert, which came to function as an informal government in exile. For several decades, Paris, rather than Warsaw or Cracow, was the center of Polish culture, and the national romantic tradition that emerged here was so powerful that Polish writers felt compelled to follow, oppose, or, as in the case of Witold Gombrowicz, to ridicule it ever since. Miłosz recalls in “Tak zreszta spelnila” that reading at the lyceum the grand prophetic texts of the Polish romantic exiles he came to believe (we should say prophetically) that he could achieve poetic greatness only if he too went into exile (Poezje 3: 79). However, the relationship of the major Polish romantic writers to Paris was not always simple. Adam Mickiewicz, the most important of them, was invited in 1840 to assume the first chair of Slavic language and literature at the Collège de France, but his initially very popular lectures came to an unforeseen early end in 1844, partly because the poet came under the influence of the Polish mystic Andrzej Towian´ski, but mainly because his distrust of the Church and the admiration he expressed for Napoleon in his later lectures embarrassed the French authorities. Juliusz Słowacki fled to France after the 1830–31 insurrection, but he was prevented next year from reentering because the French authorities considered his first collection of poems too patriotic. Nevertheless, he managed to live in Paris until his death in 1849. Cyprian Kamil Norwid, another leading Polish romantic poet, was expelled from Prussia in 1846 and lived much of his nomadic exile (1849–52 and 1854–83) in Paris, though mostly in poor health and in depravation. Zygmunt Krasin´ski, finally, also lived much of his emigrant life in Paris, against the wishes of his father, a pro-Russian general.

22

Chapter I

Polish literature was also present in nineteenth-century Paris through cultural institutions, two of which still function. The Société littéraire polonaise (after 1854 Société historique et littéraire polonaise), was founded in 1832 by Prince Adam Czartoryski, who also became its first President. Founded to combat Poland’s Russification and Germanization, the Société counted among its members not only such Polish cultural emblems as Chopin, Mickiewicz, and Józef Bem, but also distinguished French writers and historians like George Sand, Jules Michelet, Prosper Mérimée, and Alfred de Vigny. The Société initiated the Bibliothèque Polonaise with a call by Mickiewicz. Established in 1838, it grew in the following decades through major donations of books, manuscripts, art objects, and a variety of archival materials. In 1893, it became a subsidiary of the Cracow (later Polish) Academy of the Sciences and Letters. In the last decades of the nineteenth century there were actually more than sixty active ParisianPolish associations, clubs, and societies, among them Le Cercle Polonaise Artistique-Littéraire, an association of Polish artists in Paris. The primary aim of these organizations was to translate Polish literature into French, to stage theater performances in Polish, and to study the Polish language. Paris was also a Mecca of Romanian exiles, facilitated by the linguistic ties between Romanian and French. Although the Romanians had neither the critical mass nor the means to establish Parisian literary institutions that could compare with those of the Poles, they played a crucial role in the cultural and political awakening of their people. Most of the liberal Romanian “Westernizers” – including the important political leaders and writers C. A. Rosetti, Ion C. Bra˘tianu, Vasile Alecsandri, Alecu Russo, Mihail Koga˘lniceanu, Ion Ghica, and Ion Heliade Ra˘dulescu – fled to Paris after the defeat of the 1848 revolutions in the Romanian Principalities. Most of them contributed to Romanian literature (especially to the epistolary genre) in the French language. Heliade Ra˘dulescu, whose exile in Paris lasted nine years, underwent a significant evolution from his earlier revolutionary animus to a more traditionalist position. In Mémoires sur l’histoire de la régéneration roumaine (Memories of the History of the Romanian Regeneration; 1851), he concluded that the Romanian revolution had failed because it neglected the continuity of “national traditions,” though Moldova and Walachia were still separated at the time and did not always view themselves as belonging to a single nation. The original French version of Alecu Russo’s prose poem Cântarea României (Song of Romania; 1855) described a mythic rather than a real homeland. Twentieth-century exiles from Poland and Romania were thus able follow the trajectories and footsteps of their nineteenth-century predecessors, whom they regarded as writers that conceptualized and truly represented their national culture. This was not, however, the case with the Czechs, for

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

23

only two major Czech writers went into exile during the nineteenth century: Karel Havlícˇek Borovsky´ and Josef Václav Fricˇ. Havlícˇek, the first great Czech journalist, was twice tried for sedition and finally deported in December 1851 to the South-Tyrolean town of Brixen. There he wrote his Tyrolské elegie (Tyrolean Elegies) and two long satirical poems against Russian and Austrian absolutism, which circulated in manuscript form until they were published posthumously, in 1861 and 1870 respectively. Fricˇ, a leader of the radical students in 1848–49, was imprisoned in the years 1851–54, arrested again in 1858, and then released the following year on the condition that he leave the country. He lived in London, Paris, and Berlin before he could return to Prague in 1880. Havlícˇek and Fricˇ did not become symbols of an exiled Czech national culture as the romantic poets did for the Poles. Twentieth-century Czechs (except perhaps Kundera) tended to look at exile rather in terms of Viktor Dyk’s oft-quoted adage from 1921: not the homeland but those leaving it will perish (“Fenêtres”; qtd. in Sˇkvorecky´’s Moscow Blues 215). Only few Slovak, Hungarian, Croat, and Serb writers went into exile in the nineteenth-century, and those who did were usually drawn to the German/ Austrian, and, less frequently, to the English cultural orbit. They attended German universities and often published with German publishers. Miklós Jósika, for instance, a Hungarian-Transylvanian writer of historical novels, fled to Brussels to save his life after 1848–49; later he moved on to Germany rather than Paris because his wife and his publishers were German. Hungarian writers continued to pay secondary attention to Paris in the first decades of the twentieth century. To be sure, the greatest Hungarian modernist poet, Endre Ady, found a second home in Paris prior to World War I, and Lajos Kassák, the most important figure of the avant-garde, “pilgrimaged” there on foot in 1909 – an event he commemorated in 1922 with his long, and perhaps best, poem “A ló meghal, a madarak kirepülnek” (The Horse Dies the Birds Fly Away). However, when World War I broke out, the patriotic Béla Balázs symptomatically declared in the Nyugat: “Paris was our first great casualty. […] We no longer like Paris” (Aug. 16/Sept. 1, 1914: 200). When Kassák had to flee from Hungary in 1919, he settled in Vienna, not Paris (see Éva Forgács’s essay in this volume). Masses of poor people left East-Central Europe around the turn of the twentieth century to seek a better life overseas, but hardly any fled for political reasons. Those writers who left, temporarily or permanently, became expatriates rather than exiles, and they settled in Europe rather than overseas. Joseph Conrad, the most famous one of those who left permanently, traversed the world but settled in England. Some key figures of early East-Central European Modernism went abroad as temporary expatriates but returned later. Stanisław

24

Chapter I

Przybyszewski started to write in Berlin, but became the leading figure of Polish Modernism only once he returned to Cracow in 1898. The Hungarian Ady went seven times to Paris between 1904 and 1911 because of the lure of the city and of a married woman he called Léda. Perhaps only the Latvian Aspazia and Ja¯nis Rainis were genuine East-European exiles during the prewar period: they fled to Switzerland after the failure of the 1905 Russian revolution.

Exodus from Hungary in 1919 During and after World War I, masses of people were forcibly displaced, but, as mentioned, this involved only few writers. The first major twentieth-century exodus of East-Central European writers was not part of a larger mass movement of refugees. It consisted of artists and intellectuals of liberal, socialist, and communist persuasion, who feared, justifiably, the worst when right-wing extremists assumed power in Hungary and the country lost a substantial part of its population to the surrounding countries. The bloodletting in the country’s cultural life possibly surpassed the brain drain that followed the suppression of the 1956 revolution. A few words on the background of this first exile wave may be useful. The Hungarian anti-war and social protest started to gain momentum in 1916–17, as it became gradually evident that the central powers were losing the war. The March 1, 1917 issue of the leading journal, Nyugat, was confiscated because of Mihály Babits’s powerful anti-war poem. Oszkár Jászi’s journal Huszadik század became the organ of the young anti-war sociologists and political scientists who envisioned a Danubian Federation, whereas Lajos Kassák’s Tett and its successor Ma rallied the avant-garde writers and artists, who had revolutionary-utopian visions of a creative new humankind (see Éva Forgács’s article below). The Sunday Circle started in the winter of 1915. Dreamed up by Béla Balázs and led by György Lukács, it involved brilliant young intellectuals, such as the sociologist Karl Mannheim, the art historian Arnold Hauser, the philosopher Béla Fogarasi, the poet Anna Lesznai, the psychologist Julia Láng, the art historian Frederick Antal, as well as Emma Ritoók, Edith Hajós, and Anna Hamvassy. Leaning at that point towards a leftist philosophical idealism, the members became more radical in 1918–19 and assumed leading roles in the culture of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. The Galileo Circle, finally, was a radical but non-violent student organization at the university, with some members engaging in illegal action. The leaders included Jászi and the Polányi brothers Károly (its first President) and Mihály, both of whom became later highly respected Western intellectuals.

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

25

The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy led in October 1918 to a bloodless bourgeois revolution and a republican government under the leadership of Count Mihály Károlyi. The Hungarian Communist Party was founded on November 24, and its ranks quickly swelled with intellectuals and returning soldiers. In the December 1918 issue of Szabadgondolat, the journal of the Galileo Circle edited by Károly Polányi, Lukács still pondered Bolshevism’s “moral question,” but later that month he joined the Communist Party (Congdon, Exile 29–30). He was not entirely welcome. As József Lengyel remembers, a major conflict developed in the editorial offices of the communist paper Vörös Újság when Lukács and the “spiritual” group behind him offered their services. The group around Ottó Korvin, including Lengyel and József Révai, distrusted the idealism of the Lukács people, and could not understand why Béla Kun, the leader of the Party who had just returned from Russia, had accepted Lukács’s “help” (Visegrádi utca 101). Indeed, the Lukács circle was preoccupied with the Dostoyevskian question whether violence and killing could sometimes be justified, and several members, among them Ervin Sinkó, could not condone brutality, not even as a sacrifice for a future humane society. But Lukács, once he turned away from Dostoyevsky, steadfastly held on to a new anti-idealism. In March 1919, Károlyi could no longer resist the internal and external pressures and offered his power to the communists, who established a proletarian dictatorship under Béla Kun. Many writers and intellectuals supported the new regime, though most of them became gradually disillusioned by its violence and ineffectuality. Lukács, to be sure, became a highly effective Commissar of Education and Culture who appointed the best talents to the leading cultural institutions (Congdon, Exile 36–37). Jászi and his circle opposed all forms of dictatorship, whereas Kassák, a radical individualist, rejected the dominance of the Party and its politicians (see Éva Forgács’s article below). A word has to be said here of the unjustly neglected writer Ervin Sinkó, whose life and work will crop up repeatedly in our account. Born in Apatin, now in the Serbian Vojvodina, Sinkó started to publish during the war in the social-democratic newspaper Népszava, as well as in Kassák’s A Tett and Ma. He quit the Ma circle, together with József Révai, Aladár Komját, and others, to become a founding member of the Hungarian Communist Party. In May 1919, he succeeded as the military commander of the town Kecskemét in getting a mild sentence (ideological retraining) for the participants of a suppressed counter-revolutionary uprising. For this, he was sharply criticized later by Otto Korvin and his terrorist group called “Lenin Boys.” Though a fervent revolutionary, Sinkó abhorred violence. József Lengyel remembers him as “the most interesting person” of the Soviet headquarters,

26

Chapter I

“a very young boy who sported an enormous black beard and black shirt. He talked inordinately much but it was really interesting” (Visegrádi utca 174). After Kecskemét, Sinkó made the so called Soviet house in Budapest his home, and he became the center of a debate, which had, according to Lengyel, “no little influence on the politics of the Hungarian dictatorship” (175). The debate concerned Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov: Sinkó disliked him and took the side of Christ, whereas Lukács and his group sided with the Grand Inquisitor. Sinkó managed to win over some in the Soviet House. The “moralists” honored in him the repentant sinner, while Korvin called him an impostor siding with the counter-revolution (Lengyel 177). Sadly, the counter-revolutionary officers, whose life Sinkó saved in Kecskemét, perpetrated one of the worst bloodbaths during the White Terror in Orgovány. Korvin was arrested in Hungary and executed after a brief trial before the end of the year. Balázs dedicated a poem to his memory, but Sinkó reaffirmed in 1922 his continued opposition to Korvin’s ideology: “It is my belief that the inhumanity now expressed by the raging White Terror will not be eradicated from the hearts by a raging red terror taking its place” (“Az út” 66). Arthur Koestler, at the time only fourteen, remembers the Commune with surpring warmth and sympathy, though his father was owner of a small soap factory: “During those hundred days of spring it looked indeed as if the globe were to be lifted from its axis […] Even at school strange and exciting events were taking place. New teachers appeared who spoke to us in a new voice, and treated us as if we were adults, with an earnest, friendly seriousness.” Those were days of a “hopeful and exuberant mood.” The family fled when the Commune was defeated and Romanian troops took over Budapest (Arrows 62, 64, 68–69). Gyula Háy, just five years older than Koestler, had no role in the Commune, but the family thought it wise to send him to Dresden to study. Years later, Háy and Koestler met in Switzerland and held a joint wedding. Many exiles of 1919 were young writers and intellectuals, usually Jewish, who saw no possibilities to develop their talents in postwar and post-revolutionary Hungary. Some of them went to Germany, many of them became expatriates rather than exiles. The young Sándor Márai, neither a Jew nor a communist (though he did publish two articles in the Vörös Újság), went into emigration from his hometown Kassa (just becoming the Czechoslovak Kosˇice) to Leipzig, Weimar, and Frankfurt. As he recounts in his fictional autobiography Egy polgár vallomásai (Confessions of a Citoyen; 1934), he stayed a few years in Berlin before moving on to Paris in 1923, and finally returning to Hungary in 1928. He could not anticipate that he would be forced into genuine exile twenty years after these expatriate years.

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

27

Fleeing the Nazis: 1938–39 A few Romanian and Polish writers left their countries in the 1920s and 30s. The Romanians, among them Benjamin Fondane, Claude Sernet, Ilarie Voronca, and Emil Cioran, all migrated to Paris and were cultural rather than genuine political exiles, though for Jewish writers like Fondane the increasingly anti-Semitic climate in Romania was a deterrent to return. In contrast, the Polish writers Bruno Jasien´ski, Witold Wandurski, and Ryszard Stande were communists; they gravitated towards the Soviet Union and perished there prematurely in the purges.The great waves of exiles were set off by the German invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938 and of Poland on September 1, 1939, followed by the Soviet attack on Poland on September 17. The Czech and Slovak writers fled westward, with exception of the cultural historian Zdeneˇk Nejedly´, who went to Moscow. Frantisˇek Langer, Pavel Tigrid, Jirˇí Mucha, Viktor Fischl, Egon Hostovsky´, Theo Florin, and Vladimir Clementis (a communist, who protested against the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact) all fled to England or the US, some of them after a brief stay in Paris. The trajectory of Polish exiles fleeing westward was considerably more circuitous, for the direct route was cut off. They had to undertake dangerous and difficult journeys, usually via Romania or Hungary. The Skamander poets Julian Tuwim, Antoni Słonimski, Kazimierz Wierzyn´ski, and Jan Lechon´, as well as their friend and editor Mieczysław Grydzewski, fled via Romania. They went on to France, and were soon forced to flee further: Słonimski and Grydzewski landed in London, whereas Tuwim and Lechon´ were shipped from Portugal to Rio de Janeiro and went on to New York after a peaceful year in Rio. Their paths parted after the war: Tuwim returned to Poland in 1946; Słonimski, after some hesitation, in 1951, just when Miłosz bolted from his diplomatic post in Paris. The returning poet attacked the fresh exile in an open letter with “Stalinist rhetoric” (Shore 291–93), but in the years to come, Słonimski regained his sarcastic wit, directing it increasingly against the communist regime. Lechon´ stayed in New York but became isolated and finally committed suicide in 1956; Grydzewski stayed in London and became editor of the important exile journal Wiadomos´ci Literackie; Wierzyn´ski worked for Radio Free Europe and published first in the Wiadomos´ci, and later more at Kultura’s Instytut Literacki. Other exiles fleeing via Romania included Melchior Wan´kowicz, who went via Tel Aviv to Italy, and young Jerzy Pietrkiewicz, who went via France to England. A number of Polish writers fled to Hungary. Jerzy Stempowski went on from there via Yugoslavia and Italy to Bern, Zygmunt Haupt and Józef Łobodowski to France. Haupt managed to get to England, but Łobodowski was

28

Chapter I

arrested on the way in Spain. He was released in 1943 and remained there until the end of his life. Those who decided to stay in Hungary included Stanisław Vincenz, who went to Switzerland after the war, as well as Adam Bahdaj, Tadeusz Fangrat, Lew Kaltenberg, and Andrzej Stawar, all of whom returned to Poland after surviving the war in Budapest. Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna survived in Kolozsvár/Cluj, where she wrote her moving poem “Pogrom in Kolozsvar” on the deportation of Jews (Maciejewska 275–76). Finally, Czesław Straszewicz and Witold Gombrowicz were on the maiden voyage of a cruise ship when the war broke out. The latter stayed in Buenos Aires until 1963, whereas Straszewicz returned to France. Many communist and leftist Polish writers, including former futurists, tried to escape the invading German troops by fleeing southeastward to Lwów (the Austro-Hungarian Lemberg), which became the Ukrainian-Soviet L’viv as soon as the Soviet troops invaded Poland from the east. As Aleksander Wat remarks, this loveliest Polish city lost its beauty and was terrorized by November-December: “the Soviets had barely arrived, and all at once everything was covered in mud (of course it was fall), dirty, gray, shabby. People began cringing and slinking down the streets. Right away people started wearing ragged clothes; obviously they were afraid to be seen in their better clothes” (104). Tragic stories of Polish communists who vanished in the Soviet Union reminded the newcomers that Soviet-occupied Lwów was unsafe, even if you were a Polish communist or leftist. Wanda Wasilewska fared best. To be sure, her husband was “accidentally” murdered (probably by the NKVD), but she later married the Ukrainian writer Oleksandr Korneichuk, became a Soviet citizen, a member of the Supreme Soviet, a high-ranking officer, and Stalin’s favorite. She received three times the Stalin Prize in literature, and returned to Poland only for visits. Jerzy Putrament, and Jerzy Borejsza also found a place in the Soviet system; they returned to Poland with the Soviet-Polish Army in 1944 to become cultural functionaries of the communist regime. Julian Stryjkowski, Adolf Rudnicki, Adam Waz˙yk, and others accommodated themselves to the Soviet system, supported the communist Polish regime after the war, but eventually rebelled against it. Stryjkowski returned his Party membership book in 1956; Waz˙yk did the same in 1957, two years after lashing out at the system in his “Poemat dla dorosłych” (A Poem for Adults). Others did considerably worse. As Lwów and its surrounding area became incorporated into the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, the Polish writers who fled to a still Polish city came under pressure to approve publicly the annexation and accept Soviet citizenship (see Shore 158–60, Piotrowski 77–79, and Wat 97–123). Among those who briefly stayed in Lwów were the former futurists and avant-gardists Aleksander Wat, Anatol Stern, Władysław Bro-

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

29

niewski, and Tadeusz Peiper, all of whom turned into communists or communist sympathizers in the course of the 1920s. Wat founded and edited the important Marxist Miesie˛cznik Literacki (Literary Monthly; 1929–31) and was imprisoned for it, but by the time he got to Lwów he no longer sympathized with Communism, and the Soviet authorities regarded him with skepticism. He was welcomed in the new Writers’ Union and the Editorial Board of new Polish-Soviet newspaper Czerwony Sztandard (Red Banner), but for a short time only: Stern, Wat, Peiper, Broniewski, Teodor Parnicki, and others were arrested on January 23, 1940 by means of a grotesque provocation at a dinner party that was also attended by Boris Pasternak (Wat 118–23, Shore 165–69). In conversations with Czesław Miłosz shortly before his death, posthumously turned into the book Moi wiek (partial English translation in My Century), Wat movingly recalled his “Odyssey” through thirteen Soviet prisons and his banishment to Alma Ata. Stern was freed after three months, but Broniewski, a great poetic talent and one not to cave in during the interrogations, was kept in jail until August 1941. He was then exiled for five years to Kazakhstan, but upon the outbreak of the German/Soviet war he was allowed to enlist in General Anders’s Polish army. As a communist, he felt uncomfortable in Anders’s decidedly anti-communist army, and the commander dispatched him to the Polish Information Center in Jerusalem. A gentile and an atheist, Broniewski wrote there poetry, gave lectures, and cultivated contacts with Jews from Poland – and remained a convinced communist, in spite of his Soviet jail experiences. Early 1946 he returned to “liberated” Poland. Leo Lipski, who also fled to Lwów and reached Palestine by means of Anders’s army, stayed in Jerusalem and continued to write novels in the Polish language. Several other Polish writers who fled to Lwów and got into Soviet jails or camps were also released in 1941 to join Anders’s army. Parnicki got out of an eight-year jail sentence; Marian Czuchnowski, a former Cracow avant-guard poet, and Gustaw Herling-Grudzin´ski were in gulag camps and released 1941 and 1942 respectively. Herling came to fight with Anders’s 2nd Corps in Italy and gave an account of his gulag experiences in Inny ´swiat (1953; trans as A World Apart, 1986), while Czuchnowski reached London with Anders’s army via the Middle East. Three major writers stayed in Lwów, even after the German troops took ˙ elen´ski, the former over the city on July 4, 1941: the ageing Tadeusz Boy-Z ˙ elen´ski, who beavant-garde poet Julian Przybos´, and Halina Górska. Boy-Z came head of the French Department at the Sovietized university, was immediately shot by the Germans; Górska was killed by them in 1942, whereas Przybos´ was “only” arrested, and survived.

30

Chapter I

German troops occupied Hungary only in 1944, but the Horthy government had enacted laws that curtailed the rights of Jews already in May 1938, April 1939, and August 1941. In light of these laws, and the imminent war, many Hungarian writers of Jewish descent left the country in 1938–39. They included György Faludy, Endre Havas (the model of Arthur Koestler’s protagonist in Arrival and Departure: Koestler, Stranger 31), Ferenc Fejto˝, Pál Ignotus, Bertalan Hatvany, Tibor Tardos, Ferenc Molnár, and Andor Németh. With the exception of Molnár, all of these writers were of socialist or communist persuasion, and this was usually as decisive an impulse for departure as their Jewishness. Ignotus, for instance, had founded in 1936 the leftist literary journal Szép Szó with the financial help of Bertalan Hatvany, the editorial contributions of Fejto˝, and the participation of the great poet Attila József, who committed suicide in 1937. Fejto˝ fled the country to avoid arrest for one of his publications; the composer Béla Bartók, a prominent contributor to Szép Szó, departed in protest against the Jewish laws, the government’s general policy, and the imminent war. Serbians Milosˇ Crnjanski, Jovan Ducˇic´, and Rastko Petrovic´ quit the Yugoslav diplomatic service and stayed privately in London and the US. Mircea Eliade, whom the New York Time once called “exile from eternity,” remained a Romanian diplomat in Lisbon (1942–44) and adopted a positive attitude towards Salazar’s fascist regime. Only after opting for exile in 1946, did Eliade return to the idea that aspirations of the spirit, embodied in the figure of the enlightened intellectual, rise above history. He became involved in the anticommunist Romanian emigration in Paris, launching the journal Luceafa˘rul and formally breaking with the Romanian regime a few years later. We have to mention here a group that may well be the strangest of all exile formations in our study: the Romanian Iron Guard (founded 1930), the paramilitary political arm of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu’s Legion of the Archangel Michael (1927). The fascist, anti-Semitic, and pro-Nazi Legionnaires were both perpetrators and victims of bloody massacres and assassinations in fighting against centrists, leftists, as well as other right-wing formations. They came to power in 1940 in alliance with General Ion Antonescu, but after an unsuccessful coup and pogroms in 1941 Antonescu suppressed them with German consent. Several hundred Legionnaires fled then to Germany, where they were arrested and interned 1942–44 in a special section of the Buchenwald concentration camp (see Weber 107, and Ronnett’s apologist, pro-Legionnaire book). Weber, relying on data in Constantin Papanace’s pro-Legionnaire Martiri Legionari, evocari (Legionnaire Martyrs Remembered) showed that these fascists were mostly students and young professionals. This provides a background for the surprisingly large number of writers and intellectuals that our overview had to

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

31

associate with the Iron-Guard, whether they were actual members of it or not. Mircea Eliade and Emil Cioran sympathized with the Iron Guard in the 1930s. We know (see our passage on Madrid as a site of exile) that Horia Stamatu was in Buchenwald, and that Vintila˘ Horia was also in Nazi camps after his arrest in Vienna in 1944, due to Romania’s switch to the Allies.

Escaping and Homecoming in 1944–45 The Yalta conference of the Allied Powers in January 1945 formally divided Europe into Eastern and Western power zones, and the Potsdam Conference of July-August the same year confirmed the new international borders. Though full-fledged Soviet-style regimes were established in East-Central Europe only a few years later, we may regard Yalta as the date that split “émigré” cultures from “domestic” ones (see Marta Wyka). Of the several hundredthousand East-Central Europeans that found themselves in Western Europe at the end of the war – among them some two-hundred-thousand members of the Polish army attached to the London government in exile, and former inmates of German concentration camps – a high percentage refused to return to the Soviet-ruled countries. They stayed in Western Europe or went overseas, mainly to the USA and Canada, but also to South America and Australia. Gustaw Herling-Grudzin´ski, co-founder of the Paris Instytut Literacki and the journal Kultura, stayed in Italy, Tadeusz Nowakowski, who had been in German concentration camps and then, for two years, in DP camps, spent several years in Italy, England, and the US before settling in Munich as contributor to Radio Free Europe. Marian Pankowski, also a concentration-camp survivor, settled in Brussels as Professor of Slavic Studies at the Free University. The exilic wheel of fortune took an astonishing turn in 1944–45. While many returned home from Moscow, London, New York, and elsewhere, Nazi sympathizers, supporters of Nazi puppet governments, staunch anti-communists and anti-Semites now fled westward with the retreating Nazis to escape the advancing Soviet troops. The refugees from the East, including those from the Baltic countries and the Ukraine, did not foresee that they would have to spend tough years in DP camps before settling in a country that was willing to admit them. Escapes Of the handful of Nazi collaborators among the Polish, Czech, and Serbian writers, we should mention the Pole Ferdynand Goetel, President of the Polish PEN Club and of the Polish Writers’ Union in the interwar years, who

32

Chapter I

fled to London, and the Serbian Vladimir Velmar-Jankovic´. The latter served as assistant to the Serbian Minister of Culture and Religion in the Nazi puppet government, fled 1944 to Rome and, two years later, to Barcelona, where he started to write under the penname of V.J. Wukmir. His works have become available in Serbia after the collapse of Yugoslavia, but efforts by his daughter, the Serbian writer Svetlana Velmar-Jankovic´, to get him officially rehabilitated, ran into opposition. The situation was quite different in Slovakia and Croatia, two Catholic countries in which the Nazis installed Jozef Tiso and Ante Pavelic´’s Ustasˇe movement. These puppet governments enjoyed a certain popular support because they liberated the two countries from federations (Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia) in which they were the junior partners. Unexplainably, the analogous situations did not produce similar effects on writers. Apparently, no major Croatian writer supported the Ustasˇe and none fled subsequently to the West, whereas a number of Catholic Slovak writers supported Tiso, hoping that his regime would lead to a genuinely independent state. Most of these Catholic Slovak writers – among them Rudolf Dilong, Mikulásˇ Sˇprinc, Stanislav Mecˇiar, Ján Okál’, and Jozef Cíger-Hronsky – fled to Italy, and from there, with the help of the Vatican, to Buenos Aires and North America. Andrej ˇ arnov and Milo Urban were extradited by the Allies. The latter received only Z a reprimand at home, and lived in Croatia for several decades before returning to Czechoslovakia in 1974. As members of the Romanian Orthodox Church, the Romanian Legionnaires and their sympathizers could not count on Vatican help to escape. Most of them stayed in Europe, but quite a few of them, for instance, Alexander Ronnett, managed to immigrate to the Midwest in the US. Vintila˘ Horia, who was cultural attaché in Rome and Vienna during the war, spent several years in Italy (1944–48) and Argentina (1948–53) before settling in Madrid. Traian Popescu, who served in the Romanian Embassy of Slovakia during the war, escaped to Austria and from there, in 1947, to Madrid. He started there the proLegionnaire journal Carpatii with Aron Cotrus¸. Pamfil S¸eicaru, editor of the anti-Semitic Cuvântul (The Word) and supporter of Romania’s Jewish Laws, was condemned to death in absentia by a Romanian court on June 4, 1945. He lived in Madrid some thirty years before moving to Dachau, Germany. Horia Stamatu, a Legionnaire inmate of Buchenwald, went to study in Freiburg/ i. Breisgau, where he established in 1949 a Romanian exile and cultural center. Director of the Center became later Paul Miron, Professor of Romanian at the university and editor of the Jahrbuch Dacoromania, a nationally tinged journal, as indicated by its title. Stamatu himself spent a decade in Madrid (1951–61) before returning to Freiburg.

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

33

The right-wing Hungarian writers settled mostly in Germany, Argentina, Madrid, the US, and Canada. József Nyíro˝ fled to Germany, and, in 1952, to Madrid; his A zöld csillag appeared in 1950, the same year he founded the Hungarian publishing house Kossuth Könyvkiadó in Cleveland. Albert Wass (see John Neubauer’s article on him in this volume) went to the US in 1951, after several years in a DP camp and a stay in Hamburg. He later claimed that his admission was delayed for several years by “a woman called Rosenberg” in the State Department. Josef Mackiewicz was the most important Polish writer fleeing with the retreating German troops (on Mackiewicz, see Bolecki, who also wrote the present account on him). He had fought in the so-called Polish-Bolshevik war of 1919–20 as a volunteer soldier against Red Army troops, for he regarded this as a struggle for democracy, freedom, and the independence of his homeland, and a resistance against Bolshevik ideology. Mackiewicz embraced antiCommunism as a moral and philosophical world-view in the many articles he wrote in the 1920s and 30s about the USRR as a totalitarian state. During the Soviet occupation of Vilnius ( June 1940 – June 1941) Mackiewicz became a woodcutter and a carter in forests, for he refused to agitate against Western civilization and the Second Polish Republic. When the Germans took over Vilnius, they asked Mackiewicz to become the editor-in-chief of a German-supported Polish newspaper. Mackiewicz refused, but he published in it during the following months five articles (including two chapters of the novel he was writing) under his own name, about Soviet lawlessness, deportations, murders, and other atrocities. In 1942, Mackiewicz spread his two book-length manuscripts among Polish readers in the Vilnius region. The first one concerned the Polish government’s responsibility for the military catastrophe in September 1939, which led to accusations that he opposed and libeled it. The second manuscript was a novel about the Sovietization of the Vilnius region. Both manuscripts mentioned anti-Semitic Polish attitudes, which led to rumbles that he cast aspersions on his people. In April 1943, the Germans asked Mackiewicz to observe in the Katyn´ forest the opening of the graves of Polish soldiers killed by the Soviet NKVD in April 1940. Mackiewicz asked the authorities of the Polish Underground State (AK) for permission to participate in the inspection; the Head of the Polish Resistance in Vilnius consented, and gave him permission to be interviewed upon returning from Katyn´. Mackiewicz wrote a special report for the Authorities of the Polish Army in Warsaw. The interview with him, titled “Widziałem na własne oczy” (I Saw it with my Own Eyes), was published in June 1943 in Goniec Codzienny, a German-controlled Polish newspaper in Vil-

34

Chapter I

nius. This was the only way Mackiewicz could publicize in the Polish community of the Vilnius region that he was sure that the Soviet NKVD had committed the massacre. Unofficial accusations now emerged that Mackiewicz collaborated with the Germans, and he was probably sentenced to death upon the instigation of Soviet agents (though this is not documented in writing), but the Polish authorities, which knew him as a patriotic and anti-Bolshevik writer, refused to carry out the sentence. When the Red Army re-entered Eastern Poland in 1944, Mackiewicz knew that the communist authorities would execute him as a witness of the Katyn´ graves and a well-known anti-communist writer. He escaped to Italy in January 1945, where he cooperated as a journalist with the Polish Army. He published the collected documents about the massacre in The Katyn Wood Murders (German ed. 1949) and he gave testimony about it to a special commission of the US Congress. Mackiewicz also wrote on the extermination of Jews in the Vilnius region, claiming that the leaders of the Polish Army made many political mistakes during the last phase of World War II, for instance by downplaying the danger of Soviet ideology and the Soviet occupation of Poland, and by not informing the population about the Soviet deportation of Poles to concentration camps and the extermination of Polish soldiers and other citizens. While Polish émigré propaganda claimed that Poland had shared with the Allies a victory in World War II, Mackiewicz held that the war had been the worst catastrophe in Polish history. In response to these views, Mackiewicz opponents started to attack him as a German collaborator. They claimed, incorrectly, that he had been the editorin-chief of the German newspaper during the war, as well as a critic of the Polish Catholic Church and of the Vatican’s policy concerning the USRR and the communist system. Another wave of accusations started when Mackiewicz asserted in Sieg der Provokation (The Victory of Provocation; 1964) that the Germans treated Polish citizens better than the Jews. Characteristically, some émigré officials agreed with the Polish communists, because they considered Mackiewicz’s anti-Communism as evidence of his collaboration with the Germans. Czesław Miłosz, Gustaw Herling-Grudzin´ski, Aleksander Wat, Jerzy Giedroyc, and other outstanding Polish writers highly admired Maczkiewicz’s novels, and even his critics acknowledged that they were unique and eminent. Mackiewicz categorically rejected nationalist ideologies, which, in his view, destroyed the solidarity among the people of Eastern Europe and enabled the Bolsheviks and Nazis to conquer them. Maczkiewicz promulgated the idea of homelands, of historical regions shared by different nations; multicultural East-Central European homelands were to override borders between states.

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

35

Homecoming While the mentioned fascists and anti-communists fled in 1945, those communists who fled to Moscow before and during the war and survived the Stalinist purges could now repatriate. Next to communist politicians, who returned home with Stalin’s assignments, a number of communist writers came home as well: apart from the Czech Zdeneˇk Nejedly´ and a number of Polish writers, they were Germans, who settled in what became the German Democratic Republic, and many Hungarians, including Béla Balázs, Andor Gábor, Gyula Háy, Béla Illés, György Lukács, and József Révai. John Mácza stayed in Moscow as a teacher of aesthetics and art history, József Lengyel was released from captivity only in 1955, and the artist Béla Uitz continued to work in the Soviet Union until 1975. No significant Romanian, Croatian, or Serb writers had lived in Moscow during the war. Lukács claimed that 1945 was a “homecoming in the true sense” for him (Record 166). Was it, really? Did he forget his youthful insight that the condition of humanity in the modern world was “transcendental homelessness”? True, Lukács and Révai came to play important cultural and political roles after 1945. Révai became Minister of Culture (népmu˝velés) in the communist regime, a member of the innermost triumvirate that ruled with an iron fist during the Stalinist years. Lukács wielded less though still considerable power in silencing non-communist writers and forcing some, like Sándor Márai, into Western exile (see Szegedy-Maszák 123–25, and, as a counter-voice, Galin Tihanov’s article below). However, his star quickly faded. By 1949, Révai and his associates started to castigate publicly their erstwhile friend and fellow exile for ideological deviations and for preferring bourgeois writers like Thomas Mann to Soviet writers. Lukács lost political clout, and, once more, he had to confess in public that he had made “mistakes.” As to Balázs, he became an international celebrity but was deliberately ignored at home until his death in 1949. The Balázs manuscripts in the Hungarian National Library (Box 3) contain an exchange of letters from 1948, in which Révai sharply criticized Balázs’s and Zoltán Kodály’s Czinka Panna baladája (Panna Czinka’s Ballad) as “mistaken in its content, politically harmful, and therefore also an artistically failed piece.” Révai remained the potentate of culture in the Stalinist years (1949–53), but was forced into the background during the reform years that led to the revolution of 1956. As an opponent of the revolution, he fled for a second time to the Soviet Union in October; he returned in March 1957, but his name was so tainted that the Kádár regime had no use for him. The 1956 uprising brought Lukács (reluctantly) back to power as Minister of Culture; after a brief exile in Romania he was tolerated, but officially ignored. Háy towed the

36

Chapter I

line for several years after his return as Director of the Society for SovietHungarian Friendship, but he gradually turned into a reform communist and a follower of Imre Nagy. His satirical essay on the communist bureaucrats, “Why I don’t like Comrade Kucsera,” became an important ferment in the debates leading to up to the revolution. After its suppression, he was given a sixyear sentence, but released in 1960. In 1965, he went once more into exile – this time, however, in western direction, which allowed him to write and publish his memoirs. Writers who had fled to the West and returned to their home country after the war were received with suspicion, and many of them were arrested once the communists consolidated their power. In greatest danger were those who had some political or military role in the West during the war, for instance in the Czech or Polish exile governments and armies. The Polish authorities arrested many returnees, though Julian Tuwim, returning from New York in 1946, Roman Brandstaetter, returning from Israel in 1948, and Antoni Słonimski, returning from London in 1951, were well received and left unharmed. In 1945, Pavel Tigrid and Viktor Fischl returned from London, as did Ferdinand Peroutka from a concentration camp. Jirˇí Mucha followed in 1947. All of them were initially well received, but the 1948 communist takeover forced Tigrid, Fischl, Peroutka and others to escape once more. Tigrid received a journalist assignment abroad at the right moment and remained in Paris, Peroutka went to London, whereas Fischl immigrated to Israel and became a diplomat under the assumed name of Avigdor Dagan, although he continued to write in Czech. Mucha, however, sat in jail between 1948 and 1953. Even more tragic was the fate of the Slovak communists Theo Florin and Vladimir Clementis, who also returned from London in 1945 in order to enter Czechoslovak diplomatic service. Florin became the personal secretary of Clementis when the latter was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1948, but both were arrested in 1950 on trumped-up charges. Clementis was executed in 1952, whereas Florin was jailed and then released in 1953, after Stalin’s death. A number of writers living abroad accepted diplomatic appointments in the postwar years, but resigned when it became their task sell the Party line in the West. Milada Soucˇková became the Czechoslovak cultural attaché in New York in 1945, and resigned in 1948; her compatriot Egon Hostovsky´ entered diplomatic service in Norway in 1947 and resigned in 1949. Count Mihály Károlyi, the leader of the 1918 “pink” revolutionary government, returned to Hungary in 1946 and was appointed that year Ambassador to Paris. He engaged there Endre Havas, a writer of communist convictions who had been his personal secretary in London since 1942, Ferenc Fejto˝, who survived the

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

37

war hiding in France, and the writer and folklorist Zoltán Szabó. Cardinal Mindszenty’s trial in Budapest in 1949 and the subsequent trial and execution of the veteran communist László Rajk led, however, to the resignation of Károlyi, Fejto˝, and Szabó; the latter two asked for asylum in France. György Schöpflin, the Hungarian Ambassador to Sweden, resigned in 1950 and moved to London. Those former exiles who returned to Hungary after a diplomatic service abroad fared badly. To be sure, Károlyi remained a persona grata in Hungary, but Havas, who sent secret reports on his superiors to Hungary, obeyed a recall in 1950, was arrested the same year, and tortured to death in 1953. The dying, by now legendary, Ignotus was flown back by the Hungarian government in 1948. When he died in August 1949, his son, Pál Ignotus, cultural attaché of the postwar Hungarian government in London, flew home for his funeral, was prevented from leaving again, and arrested in 1949. In the notorious torture prison at Andrássy út 60 (today a museum serving questionable anti-communist propaganda), he kept a jail diary (Börtönnaplóm), in which he flagelated himself with aphorisms like the following: “Kellett neki London helyett Pest? / Megtanulta: aki mer az veszt” (“Did he want Pest rather than London? / He learned: he who dares loses”; September 5, 1949); “Pedig ha ma nézhetnék a / Tükörbe, […] Ennyit szólnék […] / Mindössze – Ökör te” (If I could look into the mirror today I’d only say: you blithering idiot; September 26, 1949). He was released and rehabilitated in March 1956, participated in the intellectual ferment leading up to the revolution, and departed for London when the Russians suppressed it – this time for good. The Romanians who quit diplomatic service included S¸tefan Baciu and Alexandru Ciora˘nescu. The former left in 1949 the post of Press Secretary at the Romanian Embassy in Bern, went to Rio de Janeiro and the US mainland before settling in Honolulu. The latter defected from diplomatic service in France and went in 1948 to teach at the University La Laguna in Tenerife. The last major writer to defect from diplomatic service was Czesław Miłosz, who quit in 1951 his post of Cultural Attaché at the Polish Embassy in Paris. Pál Ignotus was not the only Hungarian to return from Western exile after the war: György Pálóczi-Horváth, György Faludy, Tibor Tardos, Lajos Hatvany, Andor Németh and others not in service made the same mistake. Except for Andor Németh and the internationally famous Hatvany, all of them were jailed during the next years. Pálóczi-Horváth, for instance, returned in 1949 and was condemned twice (1950 and 1951) to fifteen years of prison. He was released after Stalin’s death in 1954.

38

Chapter I

Racing against the Dropping Iron Curtain: 1947–50 A few Hungarian exiles managed to cross the border before it closed down in 1948. Lajos Zilahy (1947), Sándor Márai (1948), and Miksa Fenyo˝ (1948), a former editor of Nyugat, succeeded, but Gyo˝zo˝ Határ was caught in 1950 and condemned for two-and-a-half years in prison. Among the Romanians who escaped were Miron Butariu (1947 to France), Constantin Virgil Gheorghiu (1948 to Paris), and Gherasim Luca, who was arrested at the border the first round but succeeded in his second attempt in 1952. He went via Israel to Paris, where acquired later a remarkable reputation (see the Paris section below). The Czech escapees included Ivan Blatny´, who came to England in a visiting delegation of Czechoslovak writers. He asked for and received asylum, but became schizophrenic by 1954 and destroyed many of his poems. The distinguished poet and translator Jan Cˇep adventurously crossed the border to Bavaria and moved on to Paris. In the years 1951–55 he was again in Munich, working for Radio Free Europe, but returned in the end to Paris. The Slovak Imrich Kruzˇliak was imprisoned for a year before he was able to flee to Austria in 1949. The Romanian Virgil Ierunca and his future wife Monica Lovinescu left home with a fellowship and refused to return in 1948, as did the Hungarian László Cs. Szabó the same year. After a stay in Italy he moved in 1951 to London.

1956 The suppression of the Hungarian revolution forced many politically active writers into exile. For reform-communists like Tamás Aczél and Tibor Méray, supporters of Imre Nagy, staying at home would have surely meant years of jail, possibly execution. Indeed, Tibor Déry, Zoltán Zelk, Gyula Háy, István Eörsi, Tibor Tardos, Dezso˝ Keresztúry, and István Bibó were jailed for several years; Gyula Obersovszky and József Gáli were condemned to death and pardoned only as a result of international protest. György Faludy, György Pálóczi-Horváth, and Pál Ignotus went for a second time into exile. Gyo˝zo˝ Határ could now exit without getting arrested. With the exception of Méray, all these new Hungarian exile writers settled in England and the US rather than in Paris. Ágota Kristof, a young poet, went to French Switzerland. She continued to publish Hungarian poems in exile journals for a number of years, but once she sufficiently mastered French she embarked on the trilogy that was to make her famous: Le grand cahier (The Notebook; 1986), La prevue (The Proof; 1988), and Le troisième mensonge (The Third Lie; 1991).

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

39

Relatively few writers left East-Central Europe between 1958 and 1968. The Czech poet Jirˇina Fuchsová went to the US and launched in 1975 the Czech poetry publishing company Framar in Los Angeles. The Polish Marek Hłasko went legally to Paris in 1958, then asked for asylum in West Germany but went, briefly, to Israel. More important was the case of his compatriot Andrzej Stawar, a Marxist who survived the war in Hungary, became Gomulka’s adviser in 1956, but left Poland dying in 1961. He managed to finish before his death a text that the Polish exile journal Kultura published in October that year, and Time magazine called “the most devastating indictment of the Communist system since Milovan Djilas’ The New Class” (October 27, 1961), because it showed that Stalinist “Caesarism” still ruled in the Soviet Union. The Polish regime flew Stawar’s ashes back to Warsaw with pomp and circumstance, but erased all traces of his memory once the publication appeared and was smuggled back into Poland. Sławomir Mroz˙ek, the great satirical author of absurdist plays, left Poland legally in 1963, lived in Italy, and moved to Paris in 1968. He became an exile when he denounced the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia in Le Monde, but his Emigranci (1974) confronts with biting satire an intellectual and a worker, two squabbling members of the exile community. When Jaruzelski proclaimed martial law in 1981, Mroz˙ek forbade publication and performance of his works in Poland. In 1989 he moved to a ranch in Mexico, where he started to write his diary; he moved back to Cracow in 1997. As our timeline in the Appendix shows, Petru Dumitriu, Andrei Codrescu, and Ion Ioanid were among the few Romanian defectors during the Thaw of the 1960s. Dumitriu left in 1960 for Germany but then moved to Paris and started to write in French. Codrescu left in 1965, and went via Italy to the US, where he quickly established himself in the counter-culture (see our section on the US as exile host country below). The dissident writer Ion Ioanid, who was in and out of jail between 1953 and 1969, escaped in 1969 during a trip to Switzerland and subsequently worked for Radio Free Europe in Munich. His I˘nchisoarea noastra˘ cea de toate zilele (Our Everyday Jail; 1991–96) is one of the most impressive revelations of prison life behind the Iron Curtain. Some Polish writers trusting Gomulka’s reform Communism moved back to Poland, Jerzy Sito, a controversial translator of Shakespeare, returned in 1959; Melchior Wan´kowicz, who was unhappy in the US, returned home in 1962 but was arrested there in 1964 with other protesters and given a threeyear jail sentence.

40

Chapter I

1968 and Beyond Two rather unconnected major events took place in 1968 that set off new waves of exile: the Prague Spring and an anti-Semitic campaign within the Polish Party. Josef Sˇkvorecky´, who was in Berkeley during Czechoslovakia’s invasion, returned but left again on January 31, 1969, only a few days after Jan Palach immolated himself in Prague. After several shorter appointments, he became professor of English literature at the University of Toronto, and launched with his wife Zdena Salivarová, in 1972, the Sixty-Eight Publishers (see the section on Toronto below). Antonín Brousek, who also left after the military invasion, settled in Germany but kept publishing Czech poetry with the Sixty-Eight Publishers. Ota Filip received in 1969 an eighteen-months sentence in Prague. After his release, he did physical labor for a living and wrote for samizdat as well as German publishing outlets. When the authorities finally expelled him, he settled in Munich and adopted German as his primary language of writing. Milan Kundera, who first advocated staying at home, was finally unable to bear the situation and left the country for France in 1975 (see Vladimír Papousˇek’s article on him below). Kundera, perhaps the most important Parisian East-Central European author in the final decades of the century, started to write in French in 1993. Two distinguished writers of the next Czech generation, Jirˇí Grusˇa and Libusˇe Moníková, followed Ota Filip, not only by settling in Germany but also by adopting German as their main language of writing (Kliems Stummland). In contrast to the exiles of the 1940s and 50s, there has, indeed, been, a marked tendency among the later Czech exiles and émigrés to adopt the language of the host country: Kohout, Grusˇa and Moníková started to write in German, Linhartová and Kundera in French, and Jan Novák in English. Grusˇa, co-founder and editor in Prague of the journal Tvárˇ (Face), started as a lyrical poet in the early 1960s and became engaged in a series of confrontations with the authorities once he switched to prose. His first novel was labeled pornographic; the underground circulation of his next novel Dotazník (The Questionnaire; ms 1975) brought him instantaneous success abroad but led at home to his brief arrest in 1978 and a prohibition to publish. Dotazník is a fictional curriculum vitae, written in answer to a bureaucratic communist questionnaire for job seekers, but it is also a response to the dogma that novels must satisfy the criteria of Socialist Realism. Grusˇa’s narrator repeatedly comments on the questionnaire and directly addresses the “Comrade” who demands its completion. Grusˇa’s protagonist goes beyond Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy by telling not only how he had been conceived but also what he observed from his mother’s womb. He freely drifts back and forth over

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

41

centuries of family and general history in a racy and erotic style that often slides into sheer fantasy. Grusˇa, a signatory of Charta 77, was allowed to exit from the country in 1980 when he was invited to the US, but was subsequently prevented from reentering Czechoslovakia and deprived of his citizenship. He settled in Germany and came to write even German poetry. After 1989, he became Czechoslovakia’s Ambassador to Germany and Austria, Minister of Education in Czechoslovakia, and President of the International Pen Club. Libusˇe Moníková left Czechoslovakia legally in 1971, by marrying a German. After studying and teaching comparative literature, she started in Czech but completed in German her first story, Eine Schädigung (A Damage; 1981). Her most important novel, Die Fassade (The Façade), came out in 1987 and won that year the prestigious German Alfred-Döblin Award. It is about four artists who are fancifully restoring the Renaissance palace of Litomysˇl, the birthplace of the composer Bedrˇich Smetana and the site where Magdalena Dobromila Rettigová, author of the first cookbook in Czech, had died. In the lengthy sixth chapter of the first part, Moníková reconsiders the Czech national awakening by putting her artist-restorers on stage to play some of its leading figures: next to Smetana and Rettigová, we see the scientist Jan Evangelista Purkyneˇ, who went to high school there, and the historian Alois Jirásek (Kliems, Stummland 104–108). The play’s historical commentary mirrors the playful and irreverent redecoration of the palace façade. Indeed, Moníková’s voluminous picaresque novel brims with humorous episodes and countless learned puns and allusions. She calls the fictional castle actually Friedland (Fry´dlant)-Litomysˇl to fuse the Czech tradition with the German one (Kafka visited the castle in Friedland). The first part of the novel is titled Böhmische Dörfer (Bohemian Villages), not just to indicate the place of the action but because the German phrase also refers to things completely incomprehensible and alien (=“it is Chinese to me”). The second part, titled “Potemkin Villages,” refers to the fake villages that Potemkin is said to have built to deceive Empress Catherine. In the novel, it covers the hilarious adventures of the Czech artists in Siberia: en route to an assignment in Japan, they get stuck in native communities and in a Kafkaesque Soviet bureaucracy overseeing a friendly scientific institution. The Soviet scientists are portrayed with sympathetic irony, but this, together with political allusions in the first part, made the novel unpublishable in communist Czechoslovakia, though Moníková was allowed to return for visits. She died prematurely in 1998. The Polish Jews who were ejected from their academic jobs in the 1960s included Zygmunt Bauman and Jan Kott. Leszek Kolakowski, who took a “revisionist” and humanist approach to Marxism in the late 1950s and the 60s, was forced to leave because he had been expelled from the Party and deprived

42

Chapter I

of his university chair. Kazimierz Brandys, Janusz Głowacki, Stanisław Baran´czak, and other Polish writers left when General Jaruzelski declared martial law in 1981. Adam Zagajewski left a year later, after he had received an official prohibition to publish because of his involvement in dissident activities. Romania’s Thaw in the 1960s, overrated in the West because of Ceaus¸escu’s relative independence from Moscow (for instance, by refusing to participate in the joint invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968), came to an abrupt end after Ceaus¸escu visited North Korea, Vietnam, and Mao’s Chinese cultural revolution. In the so-called Theses of ( July) 1971 he reasserted strict Party control, for instance by reestablishing an index of books and writers. As a result, the trickle of Romanian exiles swelled in the 1970s, with some prominent dissident writers, though the government did everything to throttle the exodus. The playwright and poet Gheorghe Astalos¸ left in 1971 for Paris, where he became known for both his plays and his volumes of poetry – in French. Dumitru T¸epeneag, a founder in the mid-60s of a surrealist group called “Aesthetic Onirism” that had to disband in the wake of the 1971 Theses, became a bold critic of Ceaus¸escu’s regime at home and even on Radio Free Europe (see Camelia Craˇciun’s article below on Monica Lovinescu). Finally, his citizenship was revoked during a trip abroad in 1975, and he had to ask for asylum in France. Virgil Ta˘nase, another leader of the Oniric group and the director of the National Theater of Ias¸i, published in 1976 his first novel at Flammarion in Paris., The regime offered a passport for him and his wife, and they took the opportunity. Paul Goma settled in Paris in 1977, after serious confrontations with the government (see Marcel Cornis-Pope’s article below). Petru Popescu escaped in 1977 to Los Angeles, where he became a successful novelist and screenplay writer. The Romanian exodus continued in the 1980s. The first major figure was Ion Caraion, who asked in 1981 for asylum in Lausanne, after decades of persecution at home. His first book of poetry was banned; he was charged in 1950 with trying to publish abroad, and was subsequently stripped of his civil rights, deprived of his property, and given a life sentence of hard labor on the Danube-Black Sea canal. Released in 1955, Caraion was rearrested in 1958, sent to work in copper mines, and was freed in 1964 under a general amnesty. He lived only five years in the West, isolated and mistrusted, before he died. Dorin Tudoran went on a hunger strike in April 1985 when his application for emigration was rejected; he stopped forty-two days later, when he was granted a passport, partly due to protests from human-rights groups abroad (see Camelia Craˇciun’s article below on Monica Lovinescu). Nina Cassian and Norman Manea, two Romanian Jewish writers, went to New York in 1985 and 1986 respectively.

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

43

Romanian exiles in the West were still in reach of Ceaus¸escu and his secret police. Monica Lovinescu was beaten in Paris by two agents on November 18, 1977, whereas Ta˘nase and Goma were ordered to be murdered in 1982. The attempt misfired when the Securitate officer charged with the task, Matei Pavel Haiducu, revealed the matter to his French colleagues. The resultant simulated kidnapping was worthy of a spy comedy, but but a good excuse for French President François Mitterrand to cancel his planned trip to Bucharest. Whether Ceaus¸escu wanted to have the Hungarian Transylvanian writer Albert Wass also be murdered in the US, as the writer claimed, remains unclear. All Romanian writers suffered under Ceaus¸escu’s stricter ideological policies, but writers from the German and Hungarian minorities became additionally victims of his increasing nationalism. The Aktionsgruppe Banat of young German (Swabian) writers was officially banned in 1975, but Rolf Bossert, Johann Lippet, Herta Müller, William Totok, Richard Wagner, and others were allowed to leave Romania in the 1980s as undesirable minority dissidents. Müller (see Thomas Cooper’s article on her below) and Wagner, who became highly successful writers in Germany, obsessively continued to return to the world of their dying ethnic community, for which they had no sympathy, and to the terrors of totalitarianism (see Wagner “Selbstdarstellung”). German society, their home as well as their place of exile, remained problematic for them, because their worldviews sharply differed from those dominant in the German refugee organizations. Bossert committed suicide in 1986. Last but not least, we have to mention here the very special case of the Serbian writer Danilo Kisˇ, who moved in 1979 to Paris, mainly because of a campaign and a court case against him in Yugoslavia on charges of plagiarism. Since he left by his own volition, under pressure but not vitally threatened, and since he could return, he was not formally an exile, though it has been claimed, with some justification, that his departure initiated the waves of exile from ex-Yugoslavia a decade later.

Homecoming and New Forms of Exile after 1989 The conditions of exile radically changed when the East-Central European countries became finally free of communist regimes and Soviet domination. With the exception of ex-Yugoslavia, the region is sending today expatriates rather than exiles into the world. All countries have started the difficult and often painful task of readmitting their surviving exiles and of reintegrating into their national literary canons the work of all who left. Jirˇí Mucha, Jirˇí Grusˇa, and Pavel Tigrid temporarily or permanently returned to Prague and

44

Chapter I

accepted government and diplomatic posts; Adam Zagajewski, Sławomir Mroz˙ek, Czesław Miłosz, and others cautiously and slowly returned to Poland, while others started to shuttle between a Western abode and a new one at home. For the Hungarian Sándor Márai, who committed suicide in 1989, the changeover came too late but the international success of his works that started in the 1990s was nothing short of sensational. Yet the return of the “prodigal sons” has often been painful, especially when movements to rehabilitate anti-communist writers who held fascist, right wing, or anti-Semitic views (e.g., Albert Wass, József Nyíro˝, Vintila˘ Horia), came to clash with democratic, socialist, or reform-communist worldviews. Such reintegration problems were often related to the revival of nationalism and chauvinism that actually dismantled two federal states, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. The particularly violent civil wars in former Yugoslavia have sent many new dissidents into the world, for instance, Dubravka Ugresˇic´ to Amsterdam, Slavenka Drakulic´ to Sweden (by marriage), Semezdin Mehmedinovic´ from Sarajevo to the US, and David Albahari to Canada. Predrag Matvejevic´, who chose, as he says, a “midway between asylum and exile,” now teaches at Rome’s “La Sapienza” University. Many “internal” exiles and émigrés were forced from one member state of the former federation to another, now independent one. Chauvinism, lack of a broad and receptive reading public, and anti-Semitism are prompting, once more, many writers to leave their home. Some settle in other East-European countries, others emigrate to the West or split their lives between home and abroad. Participation in two worlds has been made possible by new modes of communication. New forms of displacement and Diaspora often allow writers a marginal oppositional role at home. The very division between “domestic” and “diasporic” literature has changed its character, and whether “exile” is still a relevant term under the new conditions is open to question.

5. Sites of Exile Culture Ejecting Greek citizens by ostracism was probably the earliest European form of banishment, but a history of exile in Europe could arguably start with the Roman practice, for Roman laws provided the model for judicial proceedings that led to banishment in the Middle Ages and even beyond. In republican Rome, the Senate voted about sending people into exile, but in the Roman Empire autocratic Emperors or their secret arms decided on such matter.

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

45

Unlike Ovid, twentieth-century East-Central European exiles seldom settled in cultures they regarded as barbarian. As a rule, they were received by countries more developed and richer than their homeland, and, consequently, it is not always clear whether political, artistic, or economic factors were paramount in a person’s departure. Motivations for leaving are not, however, the main subject of the following section. Instead, we shall ask why writers went to one cultural center rather than the other, and how they acclimatized to it once they were there. Many writers moved, like nomads, from one center to another, out of restlessness or because of job opportunities. Surveying the most important sites of exile, we shall look not only at individual fortunes, but also at the exile associations and institutions. We shall ask, what contacts, if any, the exile groups from different nations had among each other, and we shall give attention to the host culture’s social and intellectual climate, its degree of hospitality, and its attitude towards the exiles. What traditional elective affinities or enmities existed between the home and the host countries? How did these define the trajectories of writers in exile? How restrictive was the political, cultural, literary situation of their host country? What, if any, impact did the exiles have on the cultural and educational institutions of their host country? What was the general reaction to the exiles? Did the host countries exploit the exiles for their own political agendas? Did the exile writers from Warsaw, Prague, Belgrade, and Budapest interact among each other once they arrived in Paris, London, or New York? Most of these questions have no general answer, and need to be discussed in terms of concrete historical, geographical, and political situations. Still, we note that exiles (as well as émigrés and expatriates) were seldom received with open arms by the host countries, in spite of much humanitarian rhetoric. Although led by Karl Renner’s social-democratic government, Austria was highly embarrassed by the Hungarians who fled there in 1919. Western European countries and the US were disturbingly reluctant to admit those who fled Hitler in the 1930s, and they were hardly more generous when it came to settling Holocaust survivors after World War II or admitting exiles fleeing the communist regimes during the Cold War. The great exception was in 1956–57, when in a wave of enthusiasm (propelled by a sense of guilt for not having helped politically and militarily) most countries opened their doors to the Hungarian refugees and helped many writers to start a new career. On a smaller scale, special measures were also taken after the suppression of the 1968 Prague Spring. Exiled writers had to overcome not only bureaucratic hurdles, but also political and cultural ones, which were often even more difficult to surmount. Leaving aside the obvious problems of general cultural adjustment, and those

46

Chapter I

directly related to writing, exiled writers from East-Central Europe often found themselves out of tune with the political attitudes of the Western intelligentsia and the larger public. Refugees of Hitler in the later thirties had trouble conveying their sense of impending disaster to their new neighbors, especially overseas, whereas those who fled the communist regimes often felt uncomfortable in the company of those French or Italian communists and their fellow-travelers who dominated the cultural scene. Last but not least, exiled writers and intellectuals were courted and often pressured by the CIA and other Western agencies to become informants. A number of writers, journals, and associations were supported by the CIA, often without their knowing since this was chanelled via the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a front organization for it (see Frances Stonor Saunders). Radio Free Europe, which provided a source of income for untold number of writers, was financed almost exclusively with CIA money between 1949 and 1971 (see Borbándi). A final word about our choice of cultural centers. For historical reasons we were inclined to start with the three imperial centers of the previous centuries: Istanbul, Vienna, and Moscow. This, however, proved to be impractical, for they carried different weights and functions in the twentieth century. We shall start with Istanbul, which used to be an important, although seldom justly recognized, center of exiles. Vienna’s key moment as an exilic center was in the years 1919–1922, when it served as a conduit for Hungarians fleeing rightwing terror. Moscow, in turn, became a highly problematic center for communist exiles who fled Hitler.

Istanbul Recurrent invasions by the Huns, the Mongols, the Tatars, the Magyars, and other nomadic tribes had destabilized East-Central Europe in the deeper past, but the most recent and lasting mark on the region was left by the Ottoman Empire, which ruled much of it, directly or indirectly, between the thirteenth and the nineteenth century. The Ottoman wars and occupations led to vast population displacements towards the north, i.e., present-day Hungary and and even Slovakia, and towards the west, the Habsburg territories. However, refugees often found Habsburg Austria, for religious as well as political reasons, no more desirable than the Ottoman Empire. The Hungarian and Transylvanian princes, who frequently shifted their alliances between Vienna and Istanbul, fled almost as frequently southward as westward. The greatest Transylvanian prince, Gábor Bethlen, fled twice to Istanbul in the seventeenth century; Ferenc Rákóczi and his followers found an eighteenth-cen-

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

47

tury refuge in Tekirda, near Istanbul; refugees of the 1848–49 Hungarian revolution found safe haven in Istanbul. Lajos Kossuth, Ferenc Pulszky, the Polish military commander Henryk Dembin´sky, and others moved subsequently to London and Paris, but Józef Bem, the Polish hero and military leader of the revolution, stayed in Istanbul and died there after converting to the Muslim religion. Polonezköy (or Adampol), in the Beykoz district of Istanbul, was established in 1842 by Prince Adam Czartoryski with the hope that it would eventually become, next to Paris, a second center of exiled Poles. He commissioned the Polish-Ukrainian writer Michał Czajkowski (Mykhailo Chaikovsky, or Sadyk Pasha), an exile of the 1830–31 Polish insurrection, to carry out a plan that never fully materialized but helped the Hungarian and Polish exiles of the 1848–49 revolution to settle in Turkey. We may add, though this falls beyond the limits set for this book, that several leading writers of the Bulgarian and Albanian national awakening lived and published in Istanbul, and it was in that city, and in Ankara, that German Jewish academic refugees (among them Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer) found employment during World War II. The Hungarian writer George (György) Tábori was journalist in Istanbul for a year during the war.

Vienna The second imperial metropolis, Vienna, played a different role in exile politics. In the nineteenth century, it was a magnet for writers, musicians, journalists, and scholars, some of whom were exiles. The great Serbian linguist and folklorist Vuk Stefanovic´ Karadzˇic´, for instance, fled in 1813 from the Serbian-Turkish wars to Vienna, and remained there for most of his life. Austria, eager to get the support of the Croats, Slovaks, Serbs, and Romanians in fighting the 1848 Hungarian revolutionaries, also offered a haven to those who had to flee the Hungarian insurgents. The leading Slovak poet Jan Kollár, who lived all his professional life in Pest as a Lutheran minister but supported the Slovak cause in 1848–49, fled from revolutionary Pest to Vienna and was given a professorship for his anti-Hungarian stance. However, he died already in 1851. In the last decades of the nineteenth century and the prewar years of the twentieth, there was a considerable influx to Vienna from the eastern provinces and from various parts of Russia. The first group included ethnic Germans from cities like Lemberg and Chernowitz, and regions like the Banat. Since they simply moved from the margins of the Empire to its metropolitan center, they should not be regarded as genuine exiles. The second category,

48

Chapter I

mainly Jews fleeing the pogroms in the Ukraine and Russia, were genuine exiles coming into rather that out of East-Central Europe. David Vogel, for instance, came from Satanov (Podolia) to Vienna, and wrote there in Hebrew Married Life (first published in 1929–30, in Tel Aviv), which many regard as Vienna’s first great city novel. Austria ceased to be an imperial power in 1918, but Vienna became for the rest of the century, often rather reluctantly, a major center and transit station for exiles from East-Central Europe. The first wave of exiles that inundated the city in 1919 consisted, as we noted already, of Hungarian writers and intellectuals who fled because they foresaw the atrocities and pogroms of a coming White Terror. These Hungarian exiles adhered to conflicting groups and factions. Béla Kun and the other communist political leaders arrived in a special train enjoying diplomatic immunity. The Austrian social-democratic government arrested them, but it resisted the demand by Hungary’s new government to extradite them. The communist leaders were allowed to depart for Russia, whereas the social democrats were permitted to settle in Austria. Most of the writers, artists, and intellectuals crossed illegally and continued to live without proper papers. Many of them, for instance Ervin Sinkó, lived in the flimsy barracks of Grinzing, which used to serve as a temporary hospital during the war and were now inhabited “by political refugees, Zionists, struggling artists, university students, indigents, rebellious predecessors of the ‘beat generation,’ self-appointed saints, philosophers, and messiahs – a weird medley of rootless humanity” (Zsuffa 123). Others did better. Béla Balázs moved with his wife into the Union Hotel and from there to Schloss Waisnix in nearby Reichenach to avoid being seen and identified. The filmmaker Sándor (Alexander) Korda moved into a luxurious hotel to impress those he was to deal with. Lukács and Korvin were ordered by Kun to stay in Hungary to rebuild the Party. Korvin was soon caught and executed, and Lukács retrospectively thought that Kun just wanted to get rid of him. Lukács himself was smuggled out in September, disguised as a chauffeur of a foreign officer, with the help of his wealthy father and Karl Mannheim. Balázs found Lukács in Vienna “a most heartrending sight – deadly pale, with sunken face, nervous and dejected.” He carried a gun for fear he might get kidnapped, for he was accused in Budapest of instigating murder on nine counts (Balázs, Napló 2: 358–59).He was briefly detained in Vienna, but then released and kept under surveillance. Fearing his extradition, his supporters published an appeal in the November 12, 1919 issue of the Berliner Tageblatt, which was signed, among others, by Richard Dehmel, Paul Ernst, Bruno Frank, Alfred Kerr, as well as by Thomas and Heinrich Mann.

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

49

Balázs jumped on a boat with his wife Anna Hamvassy late November, after the police found his diary in his abandoned home. He traveled with his brother’s passport, and with a fake moustache, eyelashes, and sideburns. Still shaken, he noted in his diary: “I had the hideous face of a Jewish-broker, with a monocle on my nose. Sad, isn’t it, that one can mask me like this? Perhaps somewhat of an unmasking? If not of myself, of the species” (Napló 2: 347; see also Éva Forgács’s article below). The shadowing of Lukács frightened Balázs so much that he avoided him, and this contributed to their gradual alienation from each other. Indeed, Balázs now wanted to avoid politics altogether. Communism, he wrote in his diary, was his religion, not his politics. From now on, he wanted to be only an artist – though he had pangs of guilt for avoiding his conspiratorial friends in need. The Communist Party rejected his membership, but he continued to pay his dues (Napló 2: 354 f). For Balázs, exile meant a crisis of his revolutionary and Hungarian identity. He embraced the war in 1914 with unusual patriotic fervor, suggesting in a Nyugat article that the war was “holy” and each war’s ditch of blood served the evolution of humanity (“Párizs-e vagy Weimar?” 200). He became an internationalist and an activist during the Hungarian Soviet Republic, whereas in Vienna he started to experience a deep tension between his Hungarian and Jewish ties, and sensing that he may become a wandering Jew he desperately tried to construct for himself a composite identity: I am not Hungarian, and instincts of race have no voice in me. However, I accompanied them along the path of metempsychosis, and I attached myself to them wholeheartedly; I assumed their language and clothes, I made mine and loved their cause (not that of the Hungarian lords but of Hungarianness, that mystical and indefinable something that glows in Ady’s songs and the kuruc tunes). I joined and loved Hungarian culture, concluded with it a pact of comradery, and I would have become just as good a soldier as Bem, Damjanich, or Guyon of the [1848] revolution. They threw me out now, and this hurts. […] However, this perhaps completes my fate: out here, I can love that Hungarianness more clearly, undisturbed, and in my own way. … My “home” cannot be located on a map. And if that is the case, so be it. … Conclusion: I am not an exile. […] I am not interested in their national-political life (Nonsense! Not true, either. How it hurt when I read “Bratislava” over the port of Pozsony, and how glad I was when the Viennese paper wrote that this is not yet final.) I do not look for their company: I am a wanderer, and a lonely, non-national foreigner (for the Jew is not nationless either); but Hungarian strings are strung over the lyre of my heart, and I relate in Hungarian songs what hurts. (Napló 2: 361)

Balázs adhered to this slightly maudlin self-image and self-pity to the very end of his life, though he often tried to overcome his isolation, at times, for instance under Stalin, at a price. As he wrote in his last, perhaps most beautiful autobiographical text: “That I was excluded from one community without be-

50

Chapter I

longing to another, that in my early childhood I was an outsider for every denomination and every community as an isolated lonely individual – this determined my conduct and my fate throughout my entire life” (Álmodó ifjuság 86). While Balázs continued to write Hungarian essays, fairy tales, and some uneven poetry, he succeeded faster and better than most other Hungarian exiles in getting integrated into German culture, thanks to his social grace and his excellent mastery of German. His early play, Halálos fiatalság (Deadly Youth; 1917) was panned in Nyugat, rejected by the Hungarian National Theater, and earlier also by some Viennese theaters, but was now staged on the Neue Wiener Bühne by Balázs himself under the title Tödliche Jugend (February 1920). It showed a group of young people threatened by nihilism, centering on a young pianist who cannot decide between her career and her love for a composer and finally commits suicide. The play had popular and a limited critical success, but Balázs realized that the young Viennese literati looked down upon its trashy sensationalism: “at home, the old officials hated me but the young generation was on my side. Am I to experience this here the other way round?” (Napló 2: 389) Still, Balázs enjoyed the good money he earned with his Viennese projects, which also included a book he wrote with the Danish writer Karin Michaelis and a regular column of film criticism he started late 1922 for the daily Der Tag (The Day). The reviews helped him to develop his book Der sichtbare Mensch (The Visible Man; 1924), a pioneering theoretical approach to silent films that established his international reputation and allowed him to move in 1926 to Berlin, the center of interwar German film culture. The very title indicates that Balázs treasured film as a medium that was able to reveal thoughts and feelings by means of faces, movements, and, above all, gestures. Images, he thought, disclosed the invisible better than words in literature. For this reason, Balázs highly valued close-ups, and he assigned a central role to the camera operator. Though Balázs used Eisenstein’s Potemkin in a Berlin lecture to illustrate this, Eisenstein himself took issue with his view, arguing that montage and cutting were more important. Several aspects of Balázs’s film aesthetics did not satisfy communist ideologues, who believed that material reality and class struggle determined psychology, and regarded the attention to close-ups and cameraman with suspicion, for they foregrounded subjective (at times deliberately distorted) visions of things, people, and events. For the same reason they were suspicious of Balázs’s interest in dreams and visions. Though he repeatedly rejected the capitalist film industry and affirmed his belief in a coming new society, his deviations from the dogmatic Party line got him into trouble, time and again.

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

51

That Balázs rapidly became a star screenplay writer in Berlin, was due not only to his book and to his newspaper articles but also to the personal ties he cultivated already in Vienna with German authors and Hungarian filmmakers. He befriended in Vienna Leonhard Frank, Robert Musil (who enthusiastically greeted Balázs’s film aesthetics), Arthur Schnitzler, the actress Helene Weigel (later Bertolt Brecht’s wife), and the composer Hanns Eisler; he was a habitué of Café Filmhof, where the émigré Hungarian filmmakers of great future fame gathered, among them Alexander Korda, who had already seventeen Hungarian films to his name, Lajos Bíró, Korda’s famous future screenplay writer, and Mihály Kertész, who already had made thirty-seven films in Hungary and became world famous as Michael Curtiz, the director of Casablanca and other film classics. Korda, Kertész, and the screenplay-writer László Vajda had been the directors of the nationalized film industry during the Hungarian Soviet Republic (Zsuffa 82). Korda was briefly arrested after its collapse and he departed for Vienna in the fall of 1919. Most of these film specialists had leftist orientations, but they were no card-carrying communists. Strict communists like Révai and Lukács thought that the film people were bad company for Balázs. Indeed, the communists looked with suspicion at Balázs’s successes in the bourgeois-capitalist world of Vienna and Germany. Lukács had a low opinion of Balázs’s recent literary works, and thought that his former friend was wasting his talent, which he gradually came to regard as thin anyway. Things got worse when Lukács disapproved of Balázs’s promiscuity and did not support his application for Party membership, remarking that his former friend could never commit himself totally, even though he repeatedly confirmed his communist convictions and participated in Party activities. Nevertheless, when Lukács’s Sunday Circle reassembled early 1921 in the Vienna atelier of the sculptor Béni Ferenczy (Congdon, Exile 52), Balázs became once more an active member, together with Lukács, Révai, Yelena Grabenko (Lukács’s first wife), the philosopher Béla Fogarasi, and the writer Anna Lesznai (who had just divorced Jászi). They were joined later by the art historian Charles de Tolnay, the economist László Radványi (the future husband of Anna Seghers), and the writers Andor Gábor and Ervin Sinkó. The Austrian writer Maria Lazar and Hanns Eisler also attended occasionally (Zsuffa 420). The central issue was to reexamine the communist revolution and their participation in it. Lukács was of the opinion that surrendering their individual ethics by merging it into a common ideology was a positive achievement, Lesznai and others disagreed (Karády 603), while Sinkó regarded such a surrender of the self as a modern-day unio mystica with god. Embracing an

52

Chapter I

ideology, the masses, or an impersonal unity, revealed a weakness and issued from of a desire to suppress the self (Karády 605). The sociologist and philosopher Karl (Károly) Mannheim had to go into exile, for Lukács had appointed him professor during the communist regime. After staying briefly in a refugee camp near Vienna, he left early 1920 for Freiburg, where he joined Wilhelm (Vilmos) Szilasi, an earlier member of the Sunday Circle, who was also professor during the Commune and later became Heidegger’s successor. In Freiburg, Mannheim wrote his unpublished one-act tragedy “The Lady from Biarritz” (Congdon, Exile 266) before embarking on the sociological projects that were to bring him world fame. Sinkó fled to Vienna in September 1919, went into hiding next year in Szabadka (by then Subotica), but was discovered in 1921 and “interned” to Austria (like the Serbian writer Milo Dor before him). Back in Vienna, he underwent a crisis of conscience: he published a poetry volume titled Fájdalmas isten (Suffering God; 1923) and a journal called Testvér (Brother; 1924–26), both of which attempted to fuse Christian and communist Messianism. His programmatic preface of Testvér – which published works by such illustrious writers as Balázs, Lesznai, Gide, and Martin Buber – defined, however, the journal as a literary publication whose “natural first task” was beauty: Testvér does not intend to be liberal in the sense of offering space to all valuable literature; neither does it want to turn, ungenerously, dogmas into obligatory programs. Instead, it wants to offer a gathering place for those who do not belong to any of the post-Nyugat urban [polgári] literary groups because their art does not lead through politics (1.1 [1924]: 6)

Sinkó’s income from publications in the journals Korunk (Cluj), Nyugat, and Századunk was so meager that his wife, Irma Rothbart, had to support them. She also turned temporarily to Christian ideas, wrote a letter about it to Lukács, and quit the Party on June 19, 1920. After several years in Vienna, the couple returned to Yugoslavia, where Sinkó wrote between 1931 and 1934 his voluminous roman à clef, the Optimisták (The Optimists), his fictional rendering of the revolutions of 1918–19, to which we shall return below Gábor’s trajectory ran the opposite direction. Having started as a brilliant young a-political cabaretist and translator, he participated in the reorganization of the theaters during the communist revolution without joining the Party. A brief arrest during the White Terror turned him into a communist (Sinkó, regény 415). Upon his release, he provided humanitarian help to those still in jail, and this endangered him so much that he finally had to flee from Hungary in 1920. In Vienna, Gábor became the leading voice of the radically

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

53

engaged communists. He wrote for the Bécsi Magyar Újság (Viennese Hungarian Daily), attacking the Hungarian government as well as the bourgeois-liberal orientation of the paper. In És itt jön Jászi Oszkár (And here comes Oscar Jászi; 1922) Gábor even attacked Jászi, who assumed the editorship of the paper in June 1921. He also published several volumes of poetry that attempted to put Party ideology into verse (for which Sinkó criticized him: regény 416–17). He became so radical that he was finally expelled from Austria at the request of the Hungarian government, and subsequently also from France. He settled for a few years in Berlin. The Hungarian communists of Vienna were torn between two factions. Béla Kun left for the Soviet Union in August 1920, but he wanted to keep the Hungarian Communist Party under his control from Moscow. This led to a clash in 1921 with Jeno˝ Landler, leader of the Hungarian communists in Vienna, who preferred to work through the Hungarian trade unions and the Social Democratic Party instead of the isolated and powerless communists in Hungary. Most of the Hungarians in Vienna, including Lukács and Balázs, disliked Kun and supported Landler. However, he died in 1928. Divided or not, the Viennese Hungarian communists furiously opposed two of their former allies, the radical democrats, whose main representative was Jászi, and the Activists, led by Lajos Kassák and his journal Ma. The latter group included Sándor Barta, Erzsi Újvári (Kassák’s sister and Barta’s wife), János Mácza, and, for a limited period, László Moholy-Nagy. Concerning the Activists, suffice to add to Éva Forgács’s article below one of Balázs’s vituperative diary entries, recorded after a conversation with Kassák in the editorial office of the Bécsi Magyar Újság. Balázs found Kassák “ghastly (kisértetiesen) stupid”: he had an “uncultured brain” and was as stubborn as the insane. He proudly claimed “he would not go after books, would not quote, and would not think with the brain of others.” Balázs thought he followed “watereddown slogans from sayings found in old and worthless books, words that were ‘in the air.’ ‘Revolution for the revolution! For revolution is life. Production of new ideas and art.’ And: ‘the artist is the most developed human being.’” I get sick of these stupid banalities Balázs added (Napló 2: 437). The Ma people seemed to him reprehensible for constituting an “association art,” a “spiritual share company.” Balázs’s old superciliousness and his haughty spiritual aristocratism would get the upper hand in facing Kassák (Napló 2: 438), but actually he was, just as Kassák, deeply entangled in the dialectics of “proletarian art.” Many of those who fled Hungary in 1919–20 held progressive or even radical political views, but were not communists and were only slightly or not at all involved the Commune. Being mostly of Jewish descent, they feared po-

54

Chapter I

groms during the coming White Terror, and they left Hungary as émigrés and expatriates, not yet suspecting that their departure would be permanent. The most prominent among them, Oszkár Jászi, had left for Vienna already on May 1, 1919, soon after the fall of Mihály Károlyi’s socialist regime. He continued to argue for land distribution and a non-violent social system, which brought him in conflict with Lukács (who disliked him already at home) and, as we noted, Andor Gábor. Under the editorship of Jászi, the Bécsi Magyar Újság gained further importance, though this bourgeois newspaper, the most important publishing organ of the Hungarian exiles and émigrés, survived only until December 16, 1923. It reported on politics, the arts, sports, the stock market, and even about Vienna’s social world. More importantly, it regularly reported on the White Terror and the trials of communists in Hungary, but in such a manner that it could legally be registered and distributed in Hungary. The brothers Michael and Karl Polányi were engaged in its publication, as well as Andor Németh, a fine writer and translator, who spent the war in a French camp for foreigners and subsequently became the press representative of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in Vienna. Németh advocated Kassák and the avant-garde in the Bécsi Magyar Újság, and he published with Kassák the experimental journal 2×2, which, however did not get beyond the first issue. The contributors of the Bécsi Magyar Újság came from the whole political spectrum of the Hungarian exiles save Révai, Lukács, and other communists in the underground. They included Balázs, Kassák, Mihály Károlyi, and the journalist György Bölöni, who assumed prominent communist positions in Hungary later in the century. Departure from Vienna was gradual. The popular writer Lajos Zilahy returned to Hungary as early as 1919, Kassák and Németh in 1926, and Anna Lesznai in 1930. Szilasi and Mannheim went, as we saw, to Freiburg. Jászi left for a US lecture tour in 1924, and accepted the following year a professorship at Oberlin College, Ohio. By then it became obvious that his ideas on Hungary and the Danube Federation could not be carried out in the near future. The largest group of Vienna exiles drifted over to Berlin during the 1920s. Lukács was expelled from Vienna in 1930. Gyula ( Julius) Háy, who just started a promising theater career in Berlin in 1932 (see below), fled to Vienna when Hitler came to power, but was jailed there for six months for his involvement in Vienna’s short civil war of 1934. In the second half of the 1930s, writers increasingly fled from rather than to Vienna. Ödön von Horváth, for instance, the brilliant Fiume/Rijeka-born dramatist, escaped from Vienna to Budapest when Nazi Germany annexed Austria. From Budapest he went to Paris, but before he could flee further a falling tree branch killed him on the Champs Élysées.

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

55

Vienna became once more a stepping-stone and an uncertain haven for East-Central European refugees and exiles during the Cold War, especially after the Austrian State Treaty reestablished its full independence in 1955. Soon afterwards, it received the Hungarian refugees of the 1956 uprising, quite a few of whom became permanent residents in Austria. The city remained a refuge during the following decades. For instance, in 1978 it hosted the Czech Pavel Kohout, a former communist and a co-founder of Charta 77, as a resident of the Burgtheater. At the end of his stay, Kohout was prevented from returning home and deprived of his Czechoslovak citizenship – and remained in the city.

Berlin: Intermezzo in the 1920s When the Viennese Hungarian exiles and émigrés migrated in the 1920s to Berlin, they met there a whole colony of Hungarian expatriates who had left the country legally and worked in the theater, the art world, the film industry, publishing, or some other cultural institution of the Weimar Republic. The first to leave Vienna for Berlin, was László Moholy-Nagy, who had no role in the Commune and left Hungary to develop as an artist. He soon recognized that Berlin, rather than Vienna, was the place to go, and he found there what he needed, including such friends as the portrait painter Lajos Tihanyi, the constructivist sculptor László Péri (who had an exhibition with him in 1922), and the art critic Erno˝ Kállai (see Éva Forgács’s article below), who left Hungary legally in 1920. When Moholy-Nagy briefly became the Berlin representative of Ma, the journal devoted much of its September 15, 1921 issue to his work, and Kállai provided the lead article on him (Congdon, Exile 151 f). Alexander Korda established himself in the film metropolis Berlin in 1923. He gradually brought over several other Hungarians, including Balázs, who arrived in May 1926, by now as the internationally acknowledged author of Der sichtbare Mensch. Balázs became the scenarist for Korda’s Madame wünscht keine Kinder (Madame Doesn’t Want Children; 1926), and he subsequently wrote the scenario for the now lost film Die Abenteuer eines Zehnmarkscheines (The Adventures of a Ten-Mark Note; 1926), which featured a banknote as the protagonist. Balázs criticized the capitalist film industry so vehemently that the UFA, the biggest German film company, became reluctant to work with him. In the next years, Balázs made two important contributions to film making. He rewrote the scenario of The Threepenny Opera when the author Bertolt Brecht and the director G[eorg] W[ilhelm] Pabst could not resolve their

56

Chapter I

differences (Zsuffa 184–87), and he helped Leni Riefenstahl, then still an unknown actress, to film Das blaue Licht (The Blue Light; 1932) – for which she never paid him, and did not even give him credit as soon as Hitler assumed power. Balázs published in 1930 his book on sound films, Der Geist des Films (The Spirit of Film), and the novel Unmögliche Menschen (Impossible People), whose first chapter already appeared earlier in the Nyugat. The novel portrayed how isolated Hungarian intellectuals and artists gradually engage with peasants and workers in revolutionary activities – a trajectory Balázs personally attempted to follow in Berlin by immersing himself in leftist and communist educational and theater projects. After working in Erwin Piscator’s theater, he became the artistic director of the communist Arbeiter-Theater Bund Deutschlands (German Workers’ Theater Alliance), staging “agitprop” performances – until his dismissal. He participated also in the Marxistische Arbeiterschule (MASCH), which the mentioned economist László Radványi, by now husband of Anna Seghers, started in 1925. Open to all for a modest fee, MASCH was committed to the Marxist-Leninist doctrine and propagated whatever the KPD political line happened to be. It’s Communist outlook notwithstanding, the school embodied, according to Radványi, the spirit of the Sunday Circle and the Free School of the Humanistic Sciences” (Congdon, Exile 84). MASCH involved Lukács and his wife (under the name of Hans & Anna Keller), Fogarasi, Gábor, and Balázs; Alfred Einstein, Egon Erwin Kisch, Ludwig Renn, Erwin Piscator, John Heartfield, Hanns Eisler, Walter Gropius, Bruno Taut, and Alfred Kurella were among the German lecturers. One of the new faces at MASCH was the young Háy, who, as we noted, went legally to Dresden to study architecture and then stage design (Geboren 87 f). He returned home in 1923 to try his hand at married life, but departed again in 1929, this time for Berlin. He applied for membership in the Communist Party of Germany; in MASCH he and performed various minor jobs because Piscator gave the lectures on theater (Geboren 105–106, 114 ff). By 1931, Háy had finished three plays and struck gold, for S. Fischer, a leading publisher, offered him a contract (Geboren 107–10), and managed to place Háy’s first play within two weeks at Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater. Háy’s most ambitious early play, Sigismund, was premiered in Breslau, and then staged under the title Gott, Kaiser, Bauer (God, Emperor, Peasant) on December 23, 1932, also in the Deutsches Theater, and with the best German actors. It dramatized Emperor Sigismund’s failed attempt at the Council of Konstanz to form an alliance with the Czech religious reformer Jan Hus, against a Church that was torn by rival claims to the papacy. Sigismund and his wife Barbara visit the imprisoned Hus. She is deeply impressed by the humane

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

57

love that emanates from Hus’s writings, but gets confused when Hus reveals in the conversation a violent revolutionary commitment to the poor and refuses to cooperate with the Emperor. Whether historically accurate or not, Hus’s words on stage offered a radical (and questionable) answer to the dilemma that tormented Lukács, Balázs, Sinkó, and the other Hungarian communist revolutionaries of 1919: “A ‘love of mankind’ that shies away from shedding blood for the benefit of mankind has nothing to do with mankind or love. It is idle talk” (Gott 55). As far as Emperor Sigismund’s proposed pact with the heretic is concerned, Hus maintains that (a clearly Marxian conception of) class struggle makes it impossible: “Emperor and Peasant cannot revolt jointly” (Gott 61). Herbert Ihering praised the play highly, but Alfred Kerr, the other leading Berlin theater critic, made fun of it, and the review in the official Nazi paper Angriff, probably written by Goebbels himself, accused Háy of distorting the history of the German People, admitting ironically “that Hay understands how to deprive people of their illusions” (Hay, Geboren 113). Due to organized Nazi disturbances, the performances had to be terminated as of December 29, and Háy had to flee from Hitler’s Berlin to Vienna within a few months. Gábor arrived in Berlin in 1925, after he had been expelled from Austria as well as France. He became active in the German Communist Party and its official newspaper, the Rote Fahne, whose chief cultural critic was Alfréd Kemény, a former associate and later opponent of Moholy-Nagy. Gábor became in 1927 a Berlin correspondent of the Soviet newspaper Pravda, and in 1929 an Editorial Board member of the newly-founded Linkskurve, a journal of the Bund proletarisch-revolutionärer Schriftsteller (International Alliance of Revolutionary Writers) that was financed by Moscow and led by the poet Johannes R. Becher. With the zeal of converts, the erstwhile bourgeois cabaretist, Gábor demanded in the Linkskurve a proletarian literature written by workers that would overcome the whole bourgeois-capitalist literary tradition. His position – reminiscent of the Proletcult movement that flourished after the Soviet revolution but became outdated by 1929 – was labeled “left-sectarian,” and Gábor was dropped from the Editorial Board upon instructions from Moscow – which were delivered to him by his fellow Hungarian exile, Béla Illés (Congdon, Exile 86–87). As we shall see, Gábor’s friction with the Germans continued in Moscow. For about ten years, then, Berlin seems to have been teeming with Hungarian exiles, émigrés, and expatriates. But where were the other East-European writers, artists, and intellectuals? Berlin was, of course, a favored city of the Russian émigrés, and some of the literati, for instance Shklovski, stayed there before returning to the Soviet Union. We also know that the Bulgarian Georgi

58

Chapter I

Dimitrov was there and then accused of the fire that burned down the Reichstag. However, very few writers and intellectuals came in those years to Berlin from the other East European countries. The Czechs and Slovaks, as well as the Poles, seem to have enjoyed their newly won independence and stayed at home, while the Romanians all went to Paris. To be sure, Romania, as well as Yugoslavia and the Slovak part of Czechoslovakia were represented in Berlin by their Hungarian minorities.

Moscow: Exile under Stalin The city did not admit exiles in the nineteenth century, only a considerable number of dissident Baltic and Bulgarian students, several of whom became leaders of their national liberation movements. Moscow, even more than Vienna, was a power center that sent people from various parts of the empire into exile, usually Siberia. The most important nineteenth-century East-Central European writer banished by Russia was the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz. Born on an estate in what is now Belarus, he participated as a student at Vilnius University in the Filomaci Society of young students and intellectuals, which advocated independence from Russia. The Filomaci were put on trial in 1823, but Mickiewicz was sentenced, unlike some of his friends, to banishment in Russia rather than imprisonment. When he was allowed to quit his strange exile in 1829, he left Russia for good and remained in West-European exile to the very end of his life. Two other Poles should be mentioned in this context: the playwright and translator Apollo Korzeniowski, who was sent in 1861 into Russian exile with his son, the future Joseph Conrad, for preparing the 1863–64 Polish uprising, and the paternal grandfather of the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who was sent in 1866 to Narim, near Tomsk, for participating in the same uprising. Conrad and Shostakovich were, thus, descendants of Poles sent into Russian exile. World War I and its aftermath set in motion waves of forced displacements from East to West. The first group consisted of captive soldiers of the Central Powers, who had been indoctrinated with communist ideology in POW camps and released to spread the revolutionary fire to their homelands in Central Europe. This group included not only politicians like the Hungarian Béla Kun but also writers like the Czech Jaroslav Hasˇek or the Hungarian Frigyes Karikás, who became the Hungarian translator of Hasˇek’s Sˇvejk in Paris. Russian emigrants fleeing the turmoil and the emerging communist system constituted an even larger group that included, for instance, Vladimir Nabokov.

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

59

The subject of the following pages will be another group of exiles, one that followed a trajectory from West to East, hoping to find a shelter in Stalin’s Moscow. As seat of the Comintern (Stalin’s international communist organization), Moscow offered a “haven” to exiled communist leaders such as the Bulgarian Georgi Dimitrov (as of 1935 General Secretary of the Comintern), the French Maurice Thorez, the Italian Palmiro Togliatti, and, of course, the Hungarian Kun. The range of communist writers who fled to Moscow was considerably narrower: next to Hungarians and Germans there were, as we saw, some Polish writers, but apparently none from Czechoslovakia, Romania, or Yugoslavia. Several writers from the latter countries visited the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 30s but found it, like André Gide in 1935, not quite to their taste. The Croatian writer Miroslav Krlezˇa came to the Soviet Union in 1925, but the Moscow chapter of his Izlet u Rusiju (An Excursion to Russia) recalls mostly his own childhood memories instead of giving an impression of the city and its people. His experience of Soviet society weakened his communist belief and he never considered settling in the country. The Romanian Panaït Istrati, who roamed around Europe and the Mediterranean as an expatriate, wanted to settle in the Soviet Union but became disillusioned during his visit in 1927–28. He returned in 1930 to Romania and joined the right-wing movement for the last five years of his life. Antoni Słonimski also visited the Soviet Union in 1932. His account, Moja podróz do Rosji, was not hostile, just honest, open, and self-questioning, but this was enough to alienate his communist and fellow-traveler friends, and gave him such a reputation in the Soviet Union that he wisely avoided fleeing there in 1939. Marci Shore has recently studied in Caviar and Ashes (2006) the fate of a Polish generation gravitating towards Moscow. Most of the poets came from the avant-garde (especially from Polish Futurism), and came to a tragic end in the Soviet Union. The first to leave Poland was Witold Wandurski, who coauthored with Stanisław Ryszard Stande and Władysław Broniewski Trzy salwy (Three Salvos; 1925), a volume of Polish revolutionary-proletarian poetry. Jailed in Poland in 1928, he went to Kiev upon his release in 1929 to work with a Polish theater. He was arrested in 1933, forced to confess to having worked with Polish fascists, condemned to death, and executed in 1934. Bruno Jasien´ski was celebrated in the Soviet Union after he was evicted from France in 1929, though Stande and several other Polish writers questioned the story of his persecution in Poland. Jasien´ski replied with a vicious attack on his onetime comrades (Shore 93–97) and quickly rose to eminence in the Soviet Union. He edited the Polish-language monthly Kultura Mas (The Culture of the Masses) but resigned when he was accused of “nationalist deviation,” and started to play a leading role in Soviet literary politics. He published in 1931 a

60

Chapter I

satirical play in Russian and linked up with the Hungarian writer Antal Hidas (Béla Kun’s son-in-law) in taking on, with Stalin’s help, the editors of Pravda (Shore 106–107). He played a key role in the famous first All-Union Writers’ Congress of 1934 and the Sovietization of Tadzhikistan. However, by 1937 he was fighting for his life against accusations of spying – and he lost: he confessed, recanted, and was finally shot in prison on September 17, 1938 (Shore 141–49). Stande, Jasien´ski’s former comrade, fled the Polish police in 1931 but and met with a similar fate in the Soviet Union: he was arrested in 1937 and murdered sometime in 1939. Indeed, all leaders of the Polish Communist Party (KPP) were executed in the Soviet Union in the late 1930s, except for one that sat in a Polish prison; the Party was dissolved by the Comintern in 1938. As mentioned, the Polish writers that fled later from Poland eastwards in 1939 survived, but, with the exception of Wasilewska, they saw only the inner walls of prison cells in Moscow. Hidas, who was also condemned in 1938 but survived (unlike his father-inlaw), seems to have been the only Hungarian exile writer who had contact with Polish writers of Moscow. This may not be surprising, if we consider that in spite of traditional bonds between Poles and Hungarians the two groups had different standings and compositions in the “Eastern” exile. For instance, many Polish writers fought in one of the two anti-Nazi Polish armies, whereas Béla Illés was the only Hungarian who actually fought as an officer (born in Ruthenia, he was considered a Ukrainian). The Hungarian contingent of writers, intellectuals, and artists, was the largest and most important one from East-Central Europe, because, of the exodus in 1919. We also saw that quite a few of these went to Berlin in the 1920s, and had to flee again when Hitler came to power. Some did come directly to Moscow from Hungary: the literary historian Erno˝ Czóbel, for instance, was imprisoned in Hungary and came to Moscow after his release in 1922, together with his wife, the poet and translator Sarolta Lányi. They may have been the first Hungarian writers arriving there. Others followed. Béla Illés, who fled from Hungary in 1919 and was expelled from Czechoslovakia as well as Vienna, arrived in Moscow in 1923. The couple Sándor Barta and Erzsébet Újvári broke with Kassák and moved from Vienna to Moscow in 1925. The painter Béla Uitz, originally also in the Kassák group, came in 1926 from France. Lukács came to Moscow when was expelled from Austria in 1930. He started to work in the Marx-Engels Archives with Mikhail Lifshitz, but was sent to Berlin by the Comintern in the summer of 1931. He was expelled from Germany when Hitler came to power in 1933 and returned to Moscow via Czechoslovakia. Other key Hungarian exiles also came from Berlin to Moscow. Balázs arrived in 1931 upon an invitation from Mezhrabpom-film to

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

61

help with the film adaptation of Béla Illés’s popular novel Ég a Tisza (The Tisza [River] Burns). Gábor fled from Berlin in 1933. As we saw, Háy escaped from Berlin to Vienna, where he was arrested for a few months. He came from Switzerland to Moscow in 1935, as guest of the International Union of Revolutionary Theater, a Moscow-based organization founded in 1934 and led then by Piscator. Háy was on good terms with a number of other exiled German writers and intellectuals, including Bertolt Brecht and Friedrich Wolf, though not with Johannes R. Becher (Geboren 168–69), who later became Minister of Culture in the GDR. Háy rather liked “father” Wilhelm Pieck, later President of the GDR, but he sneered at the other exiled German politicians, who led a petit bourgeois rather than revolutionary life in Moscow. He reserved his nastiest remarks for Walter Ulbricht, who was still in full power in the GDR when Háy published in West Germany his memoirs (1971). Ervin Sinkó was a special case. After finishing his autobiographical fiction Optimisták, he moved from Yugoslavia to Vienna and then to Paris in search of a publisher. After many refusals he was invited through Romain Rolland’s mediation to Moscow, where, so he thought, his manuscript would surely find a publisher. Upon their arrival in May 1935, Sinkó and his wife were put up in one of Moscow’s best hotel and provided with great food and service. However, as soon as the first reader reported that the manuscript exuded a counter-revolutionary spirit (regény 151), the Sinkós were thrown out of the hotel. The manuscript received subsequently high praise from Kun, now member of the Executive Committee of the Comintern, from Alfred Kurella, a leading German exile, and from Gábor (regény 150–51, 317–20, and 426–27), but the publication promises were consistently rereneged by timid bureaucrats who shied away from controversial decisions in a world dominated by fear. Instead of revolutionaries and heroes Sinkó found in Moscow only functionaries who atrociously played “the eternal egg-dance of the immortal Rosencrantz and Guildenstern” (regény 111). The story repeated itself with plans for a German translation of the novel, with publishing a chapter of it in Littérature international, and with Sinkó’s various film projects. By the end of his stay, his powerful patron Kun became a liability. As to German contacts, Sinkó shocked the Arbeitsgemeinschaft deutscher Schriftsteller by arguing in a discussion that Nietzsche was no proto-fascist (regény 96–100). The Sinkós were expelled from the Soviet Union on April 14, 1937, allegedly because they had no income. His patron Kun was condemned in the Moscow trials in the spring of 1937 and died two years later.

62

Chapter I

Publishing in Moscow Exiled writers in Moscow had to overcome two major obstacles to survive: the scarcity of means and the political purges. In the 1920s, none of the two was yet life threatening. The Soviet government adopted an internationalist outlook because it wanted to foment revolutions worldwide. It established, next to the Comintern, a number of Moscow-based international cultural associations that were generously provided with funds to publish books and journals, as well as to invite prominent foreigners from the literary, theater, and film worlds. However, Stalin shifted from an internationalist to a nationalist policy by the mid-1930s. Publishing in German, English, or French was for a while still quite easy, but publishing books and journals in Hungarian was extremely rare: Illés’s Ég a Tisza (1929) and Lengyel’s Visegrádi utca (1932), both histories of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, were probably published with the support of Kun, who added prefaces to them. Balázs published a volume with two dramas and two thin poetry volumes in the 1940s, while Lukács put out only the essay collection Írástudók felelo˝ssége (Responsibility of the Clerks; 1944). Hungarians seeking a wider readership had to publish in Russian or German. Several books of Lukács and Balázs were, indeed, translated and published in Russian. Lukács put out a book on Marxism and nineteenth-century literary theory (1937), and one on the history of Realism (1939), which occasioned severe attacks on him. He actually did not master Russian, but as editor of the journal Literaturnyi Kritik he could easily find translators for his Russian books and articles. Balázs published a number of books, including some based on film scripts, and several very successful books for young people. The bulk of the books written by Hungarian exiles appeared in German, since it was a second mother tongue for most of them. Curiously, Lukács did not publish a single book in German during his Moscow exile. With the exception of the two mentioned books in Russian, his enormous output in those years appeared exclusively in article form. Some of them, for instance his study of the historical novel, he republished after the war as books. Balázs, Gábor, and Háy did publish books in German. In the case of Balázs, these were mostly based on his film scripts. Gábor published several translations, as well as short stories, which, as we shall see, occasioned a disturbing polemic. As to Háy, he published in 1938 his new play Haben (Have), which Lion Feuchtwanger praised in the preface as the first genuine socialist play, steeped in Marxism from within. Reading the play today, one tends to agree, however, with Brecht, who contested the praise (Hay, Geboren 215–19). Based on a true story, the play portrays how women in the Hungarian hamlet Tiszazug (which gave the Hungarian title to the play) married and then poisoned smallholders

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

63

to acquire their land. Not much of Marxism here. Háy’s Gott, Kaiser, Bauer was republished in Moscow, but neither of his plays made it to Russian stages. Moscow’s only literary journal in Hungarian, the Új Hang, appeared between January 1938 and June 1941. The first issue named Sándor Barta as Editor-in-Chief, and listed Balázs, Bölöni, Gábor, Lukács, Zoltán Fábry, and Sándor Gergely among its main contributors. Barta, a top functionary of the mentioned the International Alliance of Revolutionary Writers, was, however, soon arrested, and Gábor became the Editor-in-Chief. The change was discreetly passed over by naming in the masthead of the remaining issues only an unspecified Board. Further arrestations could this way be kept secret. Many of Új Hang’s contributions were of high quality, in spite of their ideological conformity. The journal could rightly claim in 1939 that it was “the only political and literary monthly published beyond Hungary’s borders,” though it was surely not the most outstanding literary journal of the Hungarian emigrants after 1919, as Endre Illés has claimed in a Hungarian study of 1977 (335). Lukács’s articles on Realism, on Balzac, on aesthetics, and on other topics became classics in the postwar decades. Révai, the ideological arbiter of Új Hang, mistakenly diagnosed a decline of the populists (népiesek) and of the Hungarian Arrow-Cross (Nyilas) Party, but he published selections of his important study on Endre Ady, which appeared in book form after the war. Furthermore, Új Világ printed four of Háy’s plays in Hungarian, and it published a regular column on Hungarian agriculture by Imre Nagy, the future Prime Minister during the 1956 revolution. Sándor Gergely, President of the Hungarian Writers’ Association after the war, published excerpts from his work on Dózsa György, leader of the great peasant uprising in 1514. Balázs prepared a screenplay from it after the war, but Gergely disliked it and the project fell through (Zsuffa 360). There were, of course, many all too tendentious pieces in Új Hang, and the omitted topics tell us as much as what was included. As time went on, more and more articles dealt with Soviet literature, while the texts on and by Western authors became rare and predictably biased. The Hungarian populists Gyula Illyés, Zsigmond Móricz, and Géza Féja were criticized, though only mildly, for the communists preferred the rural writers to the urban bourgeois ones. Új Hang reprinted without any commentary a translation of Molotov’s speech on the 1939 Soviet-German Pact, and it devoted its December issue to Stalin’s sixtieth birthday. To celebrate such anniversaries was obligatory, but within a narrow range writers could choose their mode of adulation. Lukács wrote on Stalin’s books in the capitalist countries, and on his view of the nationalities issue, whereas Balázs devoted to the occasion a poem with the following opening: “No human being has ever carried such burdens / treas-

64

Chapter I

ures of a vast heritage weigh you down / the bridge of humanity is on your shoulder, / the road to the future over a dark chasm; // No human heart was ever more heavy” (3). Was Balázs obliged to write this, as Zsuffa believes? The ideologically much more committed Sándor Barta wrote a comparable poem for the occasion, yet he soon disappeared in the purges. Could Balázs, who was more sophisticated and reflective than Barta, write such words with full conviction? Unlikely. Rather, I tend to believe, such repeated failures of sensibility were attempts to compensate for his well-known ideological “weaknesses”: his formalism, his psychologism, his affinity with the bourgeois glamour of the film world, and his penchant for a comfortable life amidst poverty. Similarly disturbing is an open letter that Balázs sent in the April 1938 issue of Új Hang to the Béla Bartók, whom he had sometimes accompanied to collect folksongs early in the century. Bartók was then eager to salvage remnants of a culture that would be inevitably destroyed by urbanization and technological civilization. It rings false when Balázs, who recognized in Bartók a genius superior to his own, gives in 1938 a doctrinal lesson to him. Returning from an “Olympics of Komi folk music,” he corrects the composer: folk art is doomed only in capitalism, for it flourishes under socialism (Új Világ 1938/4: 98). Could Balázs have been blind to the fact that the Russians artificially cultivated folk art among the minorities in order to suppress them politically? Could Balázs forget that his own interest in fairy tales was ideologically suspect? Regrettably, Zsuffa’s groundbreaking and invaluable study of Balázs refrains from asking such questions. By blaming Stalinist terror for all of Balázs’s artistic and human shortcomings, Zsuffa’s labor of love turns a Brechtian survivalist into an all-too tragic and clean hero. Hanno Loewy’s recent study is more willing to display the blemishes, but prudently disregards most of Balázs’s exile in Moscow, in part because Balázs had written his best works earlier. The years in Moscow and the few last ones in postwar Hungary reveal his sad artistic and intellectual decline, which still waits for a probing study. Journals in the German language were the best publication outlets for the Hungarian exile writers in Moscow, though their number and their lifetime were limited, and their editors feared original ideas because they were unable to guess what Stalin’s latest cultural line was. Factional strifes and tensions between the Germans and Hungarians, as well as among the Hungarians themselves, aggravated the situation. As we saw, Linkskurve was launched in 1929 with Soviet money, and edited by Johannes R. Becher, Ludwig Renn, and others. Gábor was removed from the Board for his “sectarian leftist deviation.” Lukács helped starting the monthly and he published in it a number of polemical articles on German

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

65

authors and trends in 1931–32; Balázs, however, was seriously attacked in the second issue of 1932 by a certain T. K. Fodor for overemphasizing in his Geist des Films capitalist and petty bourgeois ideas on film production. Linkskurve folded by the end of the year. Internationale Literatur, which had sister journals in French and English, was also edited by Becher, and Lukács served on its Board from 1932 onward. The journal published works by several Hungarian authors, foremost among them Lukács and Gábor. Balázs published here his “Internationalisten” (1936/10), a text he called a “film ballad,” and he affectionately greeted in the journal two years later the sixty-year old Herwarth Walden, editor of Der Sturm (1938/10). To his great consternation, the Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung subsequently refused an article of his, for traces of an alleged “fascist mentality” in the birthday letter. To make things worse, Internationale Literatur published Lukács’s article “Schriftsteller und Kritik” (Writers and Criticism), which sharply criticized “writers who utilize a single inspiration for serial novels, film scenarios, dramas, and opera librettos” (1939/9–10). Though Lukács denied it, Balázs justly thought that this was an attack on him. When he sent to the journal a rebuttal titled “Subjekt und Gattung” (Subject and Genre), Becher convened a meeting on January 13, 1940, which reprimanded Balázs and rejected his article. The subsequent private exchange of angry letters between Lukács and Balázs led to a final break between the erstwhile intimate friends, which particularly pained Balázs. Zsuffa has published lengthy excerpts from this correspondence (285–90), but the letters, preserved in the archives of the Hungarian Academy and the Hungarian National Library, have not yet been published critically and integrally. Das Wort, launched in 1936 to strengthen the spirit of a new Volksfront politics, proudly listed Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Willi Bredel as its editors, but the first two lived elsewhere and the local editors were restricted by Soviet advisers. The journal rejected several of Balázs’s feuilletons, but published in its 1938/3 issue his important “Zur Kunstphilosophie des Films” (On the Aesthetics of Film). Most of the famous debate about Expressionism was fought out on the pages of Das Wort in 1937–38 between German writers and critics. Lukács, who occasioned the debate with his 1934 “Grösse und Verfall des Expressionismus” (Greatness and Decline of Expressionism), contributed to it now only a closing essay that reaffirmed his commitment to Realism. He was not the only Hungarian communist to reject Modernism. Balázs’s broader sense of Realism allowed for fairy tales and folk tales, but he disliked Dada, Structuralism, Futurism, and even Surrealism, though he was fascinated by dreams. Gábor, in turn, relentlessly attacked the Avant-garde, though (or perhaps precisely because) he started in one of its brooding places: the cabaret. Das Wort was closed down in March 1939.

66

Chapter I

Hungarian authors also published in the Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung, which was actually edited by the Hungarian Károly Garai under the pseudonym Karl Kürschner. The journal became another battlefield on which internecine wars were fought out among the Hungarians, as well as between the Germans and the Hungarians. Balázs notes in his unpublished Istra diaries that Kurt Funk (code name of Herbert Wehner, later one of the leaders of the Social Democratic Party in the Federal Republic) spoke at a meeting about Balázs’s “insufferable arrogance” (28 verso). Háy reports on another clash. When Funk published in the Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung a critical review of Gábor’s collection of short stories Die Rechnung (Reckoning; 1936), Walter Ulbricht grasped at the opportunity to initiate an ideological purge of his own. Balázs wrote on March 28, 1937 a letter to Barta (then still President of the German Section of the Soviet Writers’ Union) in Gábor’s defense, and Lukács intervened at the key meeting. Ulbricht now turned against all Hungarian writers, but a note from Georgi Dimitrov (alerted by Jeno˝ Varga, Stalin’s top economic advisor) resolved the conflict deus ex machine: Wilhelm Pieck was made chair, and he shushed the turmoil (Háy, Geboren 219–21; Zsuffa 248 and 467). Barta and virtually the whole editorial of the Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung were arrested in February 1938, and most of them perished. The Bright New World of Film? Writing journal articles and publishing books was hardly enough to eke out a living in Moscow. Balázs and other Hungarian exiles attempted therefore to earn money in the film industry, which had, as everywhere else in the world, more money at its disposal. Sergei Eisentein and Vsevolod Pudowkin, two of the world’s greatest filmmakers, worked at the time in the Soviet film industry. Yet the experiences of the exiles in the Soviet film world were as disappointing as those in the publishing industry. As we saw, Balázs was invited to help filming Illés’s Ég a Tisza, which portrayed battles between Romanian troops and the army of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Mezhrabpom finally abandoned the expensive project after infights that involved Lukács, who defended it, and Kun, who opposed it (Zsuffa, 220–22, 458). Balázs subsequently submitted a plethora of ideas and scripts to various Soviet film organizations, but the film industry was in such turmoil that almost all of them finally ended in the wastepaper basket. Balázs’s script for a film on Mozart went through various revisions and evaluations, and though he received a contract for it, the film was finally rejected (Zsuffa 246, 293, 297). There were many other projects, including the mentioned “Internationalists” (Zsuffa 244, 246) and one on the Serbian/Hungarian relations titled “Blood on the Border” (Zsuffa 306 f). Balázs’s anti-Nazi script about a boy in the Third

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

67

Reich, originally titled “Hold out Charley” and finally released as Karl Brunner, was the only film to materialize, but, to his great chagrin, in a badly cut version produced in Odessa. Like all of Balázs’s anti-Nazi juvenile books, the film stopped circulating when Molotov and Ribbentrop signed their non-aggression pact, but was recovered from the mothballs when Germany invaded the Soviet Union (Zsuffa 253, 261, 279). The financial expectations that Balázs attached to his film projects materialized, however, when he brought successful law suits against film companies that broke their contracts with him (Zsuffa 270, 280). He earned good money also by converting his Mozart and other scenarios into plays and highly successful children books. As a result, Balázs could live comfortably, and he could even buy a dacha in Istra, some fifty kilometers from Moscow. Moving there with his wife in 1937, he wrote the poem “My House” on his idyllic life, which irked a many of his less fortunate fellow exiles (Zsuffa 252–53, 268). The Soviet film world was gloomy in those years. Sinkó reports that one day in 1937 he found the dejected Eisenstein in the room of the famous writer Isaac Babel, with whom Sinkó shared an apartment. A ranking Party Committee just stopped the filming of Bezhin Lug (Bezhin Meadow). As Babel told Sinkó subsequently, Eisenstein burst into his room like a madman, cursing, gnashing his teeth, banging his head with his fist, now crying and now laughing (regény 469). “Throw him out, or my heart will rend” Babel repeated to Sinkó a well-known adage, whose truth he just realized. He cooperated with Eisenstein, but could not help him. The film director had to confess his “mistakes” in International Literature before he could continue with other projects. Boris Shumyatsky, who had been the czar of Soviet film production and a patron of Balázs, confessed his “sins” with less success: he was deposed, accused of economic and political mismanagement, arrested, and finally shot. It is quite shocking therefore to read Anna Balázs’s remark that her husband’s memos made him “very trustworthy in the eyes of the GPU, and contributed to the unmasking of Shumyatsky, a skillful saboteur” (Balázs dossier Ms 5024/1 at the Hungarian Academy, 6). Complaining about the years he lost by filming Ég a Tisza, Balázs also writes on January 2, 1940 in his unpublished “Istra Diary” about a struggle he had against everybody in Odessa, including Shumyatsky: “At that time I fought an uncanny dark power, for I had not even an inkling […] that I was dealing with an organized counter-revolutionary force that reached all the way to the highest top”(13 verso). Could Balázs genuinely believe the official explanation that Shumyatsky, instead of being simply incompetent, was actually planning a counter-revolution with others? Mezhrabpom, the organization that had invited Balázs and helped others, was an arm of Willi Münzenberg’s Internationale Arbeiter Hilfe (IAH = Inter-

68

Chapter I

national Workers’ Relief), originally set up to provide food for the famished Russian population. It survived the great reorganization of the film industry in 1930, but was liquidated in June 1936. Sinkó had also received a contract for a film script from Mezhrabpom, but its successor, Mosfilm, broke the contract and rejected the script. The naïve Sinkó, encouraged by journalistic outcries against mismanagements in the industry, wrote an angry letter to Pravda, in which he mentioned that Babel helped him complete the script. Babel was panic-stricken when he learned about this, and he retrieved the yet unpublished letter from Pravda without consulting with Sinkó. Like Balázs, Sinkó initiated a lawsuit against the film company, but had a bitter disappointment: Babel promised to support him, but flatly denied in court ever having talked to Sinkó about the script, or knowing anything about it (regény 504–508). Babel’s fear overruled his friendship, and not without reason: he soon disappeared in the purges. Háy’s experiences with Mezhrabpom were lucrative, but also unproductive. Soon after his arrival, he received a contract for a yet unspecified subject, and he was also given an advance (Geboren 184). The Party’s Central Committee then decided, without asking him, that the film was to portray the “Volga Germans” living in their own autonomous Republic. Háy and Erwin Piscator, the chosen director, were even taken for a “field trip” to the Republic, but after several radical revisions (and new advances) the day of reckoning finally arrived: Mezhrabpom was dissolved and its facilities were given to a company making films for children (Geboren 194–99, 207–209). The final act of Háy’s tragi-comic film experiences was staged in Alma Ata, Kazakhstan, where Háy, Balázs, and other film people were evacuated during the war: Eisenstein started to film with his students Háy’s Haben, but the filming was interrupted by an order to do a film about Ivan the Terrible, Stalin’s model. Once more, the completed film about Ivan exposed Eisenstein to Stalin’s ire (Geboren 260, 263–65). Diaries and Memoirs over Terror We shall never fathom the logic of Stalin’s purges. Nor shall we know what any particular individual actually thought and felt in those years. About the reactions of exiles there is, in any case, a dearth of honest and reliable (or even unreliable!) material. Zuffa claims, with some evidence, that, apart from Soviet authors, “Hungarian writers have presented the most profound and diverse published portrayals of the period of the purges” (472). Indeed, the German writers left no comparable records behind. Still, the material is, understandably, thin. When Sinkó confided to a Hungarian comrade that he kept a diary, the man exclaimed: “My god! No other idiot among the two-hundred million in-

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

69

habitants of the Soviet Union would write a diary! … I merely ask that you refrain during my life and after my death from linking my name to your Moscow stay” (regény 15). Sinkó kept his word, and the respondent remains anonymous. Neither Lukács nor Gábor left any records that would indicate doubts about the system. Did they have none? Did they believe that all the disappeared and executed ones were enemy spies plotting to overthrow the regime as some of Balázs’s diary entries seem to suggest, or were they simply reluctant to take risks by recording those doubts? The only evidence we have about them are passages in Háy’s memoirs, which indicate that Gábor, whom he highly respected, frequently turned his caustic humor against the situation in the Soviet Union. Most of the Hungarian communist exiles were reluctant to speak frankly about their experiences in letters, diaries, memoirs, or autobiographical fiction. They were afraid, not only during their exile, but even after Stalin’s death, Khrushchev’s revelations, and Gorbatchev’s glasnost. Still, Sinkó’s diaries, Háy’s memoirs, Lengyel’s factual and curiously unreflective diaries, and Balázs’s still unpublished “Russisches Tagebuch” from 1932 and “Istra diaries” (started on January 2, 1940) offer us some fascinating insights into the conditions and the mentalities of the Moscow exiles. Of the four texts, written in different styles and genres, that of Sinkó offers the most insightful, exciting, and disturbing reading, for it records not only what he saw but also how he reacted to it, and how he reassessed himself as a result. Háy’s Geboren 1900 (Born 1900) – published after Háy went into his last exile in the 1960s – were written with hindsight and may not convey accurately his impressions, mood, and disposition back then. They offer, however, excellent character portrayals, good anecdotes, and plenty of information about events “behind-the-scenes” in a witty and sarcastic style. Both Sinkó and Háy reveal the gradual and belated “awakening” of a naïve communist believer, but their focalizations differ: Sinkó writes in a Dostoevskian manner about a soul tossed around in a physical and spiritual hell, whereas Háy, writing from a safe distance, brightens the nightmare by foregrounding its grotesqueness. Having no foot on the ground, Sinko’s diarist is stunned, perplexed, and hurt by endless personal and bureaucratic humiliations. Háy, like everybody else, must also have lived in fear and trembling, but he had a more secure position within the exile community and the Soviet hierarchy than Sinkó, and the temporal distance between experiencing and writing renders a much more stable autobiographical “I” in the text, which, in turn, precipitates in a more assertive and sovereign style. While Sinkó consistently questions himself and his beliefs, Háy tends to blame the others and the world at large. And Balázs? Hard to guess. As we saw, many of his published texts project the image of a firm and naïve believer; he is more critical in some unpublished

70

Chapter I

manuscripts, but his criticism is not directed against the system as such. Instead, he self-righteously protests against individuals and institutions that allegedly treated him unjustly, and such protests could be posed (as in the case of his comments on the film industry) as attempts to defend the system against its abuses. Nothing from Balázs’s Moscow years compares to the selfexaminations of his Vienna diaries. In Vienna, he assumed a German/Austrian identity but agonized about his Hungarian Jewishness; in Moscow, he was outraged that his name was absent from Becher’s list of German writers in exile (Zsuffa 275–76), and he was unhappy that his application for Soviet citizenship was rejected. In contrast, the Polish Jewish writer Aleksander Wat organized a massive resistance in 1943, when the NKVD tried to force the Polish refugees in Kazakhstan to exchange their Polish passports for Soviet ones. Wat almost miraculously survived the savage prison tortures, perpetrated by cellmates planted there by the NKVD (Wat 361–82). We get a sense of the differences if we compare what Sinkó, Háy, and Balázs wrote (and did not write) concerning the Stalinist attacks on Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which initiated a radical purge within the arts. The opera had been performed to enthusiastic crowds night after night when Sinkó arrived in Moscow; as a great honor, his host organization provided him tickets to the opera, which has meanwhile become a highlight of modern opera in general. However, an article in the Pravda attacked the opera on January 28, 1936, calling it decadent, wild noise, cacophony, and an operatic adaptation of Vsevolod Meyerhold’s avant-garde theater practice. The article concluded that this was a “game with serious things that may end badly” (regény 373–75). To his dismay, Sinkó found that the German translation of the article in the Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung applied, presumably unintentionally, Goebbel’s term Entartete Kunst to the opera. He was equally disturbed to see that former aficionados of the opera now hypocritically adopted Pravda’s vicious tone. They were joined by orchestrated protests of workers and peasants. Shostakovich was instructed to return to folklore, to compose in tune with the taste and culture of the “folk” instead of creating from “within” (regény 392). Háy reports on the affair by way of a café conversation with the theater director Gustav von Wangenheim and his wife (Geboren 203–206). Panicstricken, they had requested a meeting, for they were convinced that the Pravda article, surely inspired by Stalin, would have far-reaching consequences. The opera will be removed from the program, Shostakovich, this enemy of the people, will lose his job, his income, and his friends, and very likely be exiled to the countryside so that he can listen to folk songs. The main reason for panic was, however, personal: von Wangenheim made the fatal

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

71

mistake of recommending (in writing!) that Shostakovich be the composer of the film he was to make on Dimitrov. Von Wangenheim was sure that he would have to do a public penance in connection with the Shostakovich affair, and Háy was to avoid him, lest also getting into trouble. As most of Háy’s vignettes, his café conversation is well crafted, and emblematic of the social and political situation. It makes fun of Háy’s own naïveté, but it includes no critical or deeper reflections. What Balázs privately thought of the affair we do not know. However, he published a relevant article two years later in the Új Hang. Reporting on the preparations for the twentieth anniversary of the glorious October Revolution, he compared the two-year old Shostakovich affair with the new case of Vsevolod Meyerhold, who was accused not only of avant-garde stagings and unpopularity, but (oh the daring!) of celebrating the anniversary with a dramatization of Dame au camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils. “There is trouble with Meyerhold and there is no longer trouble with Shostakovich,” informed Balázs his readers at the outset (Új Hang 1938/2: 112). After doing public penance for his mistakes the composer was commissioned to write his Fifth Symphony for the anniversary, and this, composed in the “right” style, became an enormous success. Hence Balázs concluded: “No, nobody wants to suppress individuality here. Could Meyerhold not succeed in what Shostakovich had already succeeded” (Új Hang 1938/2: 115)? We may ask in turn, whether Balázs genuinely believed that Shostakovich’s genuflection affirmed Soviet artistic freedom. Unlike many of his Hungarian and German communist colleagues, and most friends of the Soviet Union in the West, Sinkó analyzed the pervasive fear that deformed characters and prevented meaningful human contact. However, like Háy, he did not immediately recognize why a certain official suddenly became unreachable. Indeed, he learned only after he left the Soviet Union that virtually everybody who was responsible for dealing with his projects disappeared in the purges, some of them while he was still in Moscow. Neither did (or could) he anticipate that some of Moscow’s most devoted Hungarian communists would also disappear. Foremost among these was, of course, Kun, who apparently took up Sinkó’s cause with great enthusiasm and warmth. His opinion carried great weight in 1935, but Sinkó did not know that his support became countereffective towards the end of his Moscow stay. Sinkó reencountered in Moscow Sándor Barta (regény 174–77). He knew him as an activist in Kassák’s Ma group, and as editor of the journal Akasztott ember (Hanged Man), which Barta started after his break with Kassák in 1922. Barta showed Sinkó one evening his mentioned poem on Stalin, which addressed the leader in the refrain as “our good father.” When Sinkó ventured

72

Chapter I

the opinion that he preferred the poems in Barta’s Akasztott ember, Barta smiled with an air of superiority: “I believe in Stalin” (regény 176). Whether he held on to his belief in prison and on his way to execution we shall never know. Károly Garai, editor of the Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung and one of Sinkó’s best friends in Moscow, asked him at the farewell: “You are not going to bring shame on us out there. Will you?” (regény 555) Was Garai afraid that his outspoken friend would become a “traitor” to a cause in which he, Garai, still firmly believed? Or was he afraid that Sinkó might say things about him in the West that could get him in trouble in Moscow? That fear sat deep in Garai’s faithful soul became evident to Sinkó early during his stay, when Garai emphatically advised him not to look for Sarolta Lányi’s address, for her husband was imprisoned. As it turned out, Czóbel returned from the Gulag several years later, but neither faith nor fear could save Garai: he died in 1942, during his second arrest (Sinkó, regény esp. 555 and 625). The purges also eliminated Ervin Bauer, Balázs’s brother and a leading biologist (see Miklós Müller). When Balázs heard about this in the summer of 1937, he wrote a letter to the German Section of the Comintern, for he felt “obliged” to inform them that his bad childhood relationship with his brother worsened in exile for political reasons: Ervin joined the “Kun Faction” (a bad connection by 1937), whereas Béla and his wife sympathized with the “Landler Faction.” Balázs lied by claiming he had no personal contact with his brother in the Soviet Union, but he courageously defended (unsuccessfully) the arrested Frigyes Karikás (Zsuffa 263 & 472). Of the remaining Hungarian exiles, József Lengyel was arrested in 1938 and “confessed” under torture that he was a spy; he was released from prison eight years later but was sent to Siberia in 1948, and returned to Hungary only in 1955. Even Lukács was arrested for a month; allegedly it was Mátyás Rákosi who successfully intervened to free him (Háy, Geboren 277).

Paris: its Exile Cultures As Pascale Casanova has shown with occasional exaggeration, Paris was until recently Europe’s cultural and literary capital. This is where the important literary trends originated, where writers and artists from all over the world oriented themselves about the latest literary trends and fashions, and most expatriates, emigrants, and exiles settled temporarily or permanently – if they were allowed to.

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

73

Exile in Interwar Paris The Hungarian Germanophiles of the Weimar Republic proclaimed “Unser Paris ist heute Berlin” (Today, our Paris is Berlin), but by 1933 the love had evaporated, and the exiles fleeing from the Nazis turned, once more, to Paris. Not without difficulties. The adventures that Sinkó had to face after his return from Moscow exemplify that exiles had to fear here not only the French bureaucracy but often the long arm of Moscow as well. Evicted from Moscow in 1937, he returned to Paris in May 1939 with debts and a still unpublished manuscript. He managed to place a few reviews and articles in communist and fellow-traveler journals, but after giving a carefully worded lecture about his Moscow experiences to “The Friends of the Soviet Union” he was baffled to notice that his accepted articles did not get into print. Finally, a distinguished lady discreetly informed him that his lecture did not please the comrades in power; but, she added, the said comrades would find opportunities to publish his articles and his book manuscript if he openly defended the Soviet trials and executions: vous serez lancé (you will be launched) she concluded. Sinkó found out later that the Moscow directives were transmitted to the French literary circuit by Louis Aragon, the powerful French communist poet (regény 600–609). Sinkó refused to comply: he escaped from France to Bosnia when the war broke out, and, after an Italian internment on Croatian islands, he joined the Yugoslav partisans. Tito’s break with the Comintern in 1948 permitted the publication not only of the novel Optimisták (1953) but also of his book about his Moscow experiences, first in Croatian translation (1955) and finally in the Hungarian original (1961). He became professor of Hungarian literature at the new established Yugoslav university of Novi Sad in 1959. We shall discuss separately the avant-garde Jewish Romanians who became an integral part of the Parisian scene. The other Romanians who came to Paris included Emil Cioran, who arrived in 1937, and Eugène Ionesco, who had already spent much of his childhood in France. He returned there to complete his doctorate in 1938, stayed in Marseille during the war, and moved to Paris afterwards. Several Romanians who survived the war became prominent on the French postwar cultural scene and recognized writers in the French language. As we shall see, others joined them after the war and came to play comparably important roles in French literature and culture. The East-Central European exiles reaching Paris in 1938–39 found the city and the country already crowded with exiles and émigrés from Germany, who were desperately trying to get permits to stay or visas to leave. These German experiences gave rise to novels such as Anna Seghers’s Transit and Lion Feuchtwanger’s Exil. Their portrayal of an inhuman French bureaucracy became a reality also for the East-Central European writers following them. Ferenc

74

Chapter I

Fejto˝, who fled from Hungary in 1938, encountered a “cold wind of foreigner hatred” at the police station when applying for a residency permit, but he still considered France more hospitable to potential émigrés than Switzerland, England, or the US (Budapestto˝l Párizsig 215). György Faludy, who also fled in 1938, rallies all his wit in My Happy Days in Hell to save his “love affair”: the villainy of the authorities and the unbearable atmosphere at the Préfecture failed to drive me to despair. My old friends who were more experienced in emigration than I was had warned me in good time that only communists and – to a certain extent – Catholics were loyal to their own kind, democrats never. I knew what to expect. I had sought asylum in France, not loyalty, and, though in the most heartless form possible, that asylum had been granted. When, after the outbreak of the war, the general loathing for foreigners increased, it found me and my fellow-emigrants utterly indifferent to it. The continuous insults drove us out to the margin of society and we knew it was useless to remind the French that we were all in the same boat. Thus conditions threw us together and our double exile – from Hungary and from French society – lent our friendships and conversations extraordinary intensity. We felt like a bunch of roving knights hopelessly in love with the same woman, but whether that woman’s name was Hungaria or Marianne was a secret we kept from each other and often from ourselves as well. Though we stopped wooing the lady we preserved our love for her, and remained haughtily true to that love, because love is one’s private affair and in no way concerns its object. (35)

Faludy’s unrequited double infatuation was further tested when the German troops took over Paris in 1939 and “her” lover had to decide whether to stay or, reluctantly, seek another separation or divorce. Faludy adventurously continued to Casablanca and he was, in due time, admitted to the US. Fejto˝ joined in February 1940 a hastily assembled and badly equipped volunteer unit of foreigners that the French officers treated with contempt. Luckily, he was declared unfit; the unit was used as cannon fodder in the battles at the Somme in June that year, and most of it, including the Hungarian writer András Hevesi, perished (Fejto˝ 268–70). Fejto˝ survived in Vichy-government territory, hiding for three years in a hut owned by André Malraux’s ex-wife. The Polish exile Andrzej Bobkowski (see Katarzyna Jerzak’s article below) was evacuated from Paris but returned to it and continued to record his observations, which he later published under the title Szkice piórkiem (Sketched with a Quill; 1957). Like Faludy, Bobkowski was enamored with the country but disgusted by its easy surrender: “I see France naked, lying in Toulon like a whore. She is waiting and smiling with resignation, opens her legs” (11. 9. 1940). Though Paris lost some of its luster after World War II, it continued to attract exiles from East-Central Europe and remained a center of exile publications. Those who fled the communist postwar regimes, had to confront the

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

75

Marxists and communists who came to dominate the French intellectual and artistic elite. They were hostile to critics of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe, at least until the Soviet crushing of the 1956 Hungarian revolution, often even beyond it. These ideological differences are portrayed in the autobiography of the Russian émigré Nina Berberova, The Italics are Mine (1969), as well as in Fejto˝’s account of his various conflicts with French communists or fellow-travelers, from Louis Aragon, Elsa Triolet (who was actually a Russian émigré), Romain Rolland, and Le Corbusier to Jean-Paul Satre and Simone de Beauvoir. At the request of Mihály Károlyi, Hungarian ambassador in Paris immediately after the war, Fejto˝ became chief of the Press Bureau at the embassy. Against his own convictions he defended at a press conference in 1949 the Hungarian trial against Cardinal Mindszenty (349–50), but when László Rajk, his childhood friend and former communist Minister of Interior, was arrested and tried, he resigned, asked for asylum in France, and wrote a series of articles on the matter for the journal Esprit. The publication of these articles was considerably delayed, however, for the French Communist Party got wind of their imminent publication and put great pressure on the editors to reject them, claiming that Fejto˝ was a fascist and an agent (373–74). Fejto˝ actually became a highly respected journalist and political scientist on the French and European scene, but the Left kept trying to discredit him, as Fejto˝’s account of his talks with Julien Benda (371) and Sartre (424–29) shows. The Hungarian Uprising of 1956 shook the faith of many a French communists, yet they were reluctant to receive the new exiles and accept their reports, as an anecdote in Endre (André) Karátson’s memoirs illustrates the issue. The young Karátson, recipient of a scholarship at the École Normale Superieur, was called soon after his arrival to the office of the great Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, to give a personal account of the events in Hungary. He spoke for about an hour and a half, while Althusser silently chewed on his pipe. At the end of Karátson’s account Althusser remarked, “vous êtes un fasciste” (you are a fascist), pushed him into the corridor, and slammed the door behind him (Karátson 1: 234). Paris continued to hold great attraction for the Romanian exiles and émigrés. Mircea Eliade, who chose to remain in the Romanian diplomatic service during the war, lived in Paris until he was invited by the University of Chicago in 1957. Ionesco became an international celebrity when his first play, Cantatrice chauve (The Bald Soprano), inaugurated in 1948 what became known as the “Theater of the Absurd.” Monica Lovinescu was sent from Romania to study but defected in 1948 (see Camela Craciun’s study below), and so did Lovinescu’s future husband, Virgil Ierunca. One of Lovinescu’s first jobs in

76

Chapter I

Paris was to translate under a pseudonym the novel La Vingt cinquième heure (The Twenty-fifth Hour) by her exiled compatriot Virgil Constantin Gheorghiu. It became a great international success and was made into a similarly successful film by the Turkish-born French director Henri Verneuil, with Anthony Quinn, Virna Lisi, and Michael Redgrave. The book follows the now hilarious now pathetic fortunes of a simple Romanian village youngster. A local policeman desires his wife and sends him into a concentration camp for Jews. From now on, a number of mistaken identities are forced upon Johann Moritz: he becomes a Romanian inmate in a Hungarian camp, a Hungarian inmate in a German camp, a Nazi camp guard, a DP camp inmate, and finally a “volunteer” to fight the Russians. Gheorghiu believed that we lived in the twenty-fifth hour to rescue the individual from the machinery of dictatorial systems. In 1963 he was anointed in Paris as a Romanian Orthodox priest. The Avant-garde The Parisian avant-garde movements had not only lively contacts with EastCentral European writers and artists but were to a considerable degree inspired and carried by exiles, expatriates, and émigrés from the region. Their contributions represent an important chapter in the history of Paris as an East-Central European cultural center. The contributions differed, however, from country to country. Lajos Kassák and his Hungarian Activists around the journal Ma flourished and attained international significance during their Viennese exile (see above and Éva Forgács’s article in this volume) but they withered after Kassák’s return to Hungary in 1926. In any case, the orientation of the Activists was, even during their peak years, German rather than French. A genuine Hungarian/French symbiosis came about only when Tibor Papp and Pál Nagy launched in 1962 the journal Magyar Mu˝hely (Hungarian Workshop), and in 1972 its French sister publication d’atelier (see Áron Kibédi Varga’s article below). What they call szöveg (text), is actually a hybrid between verbal and visual genres that often incorporates a wide variety borrowed elements. The artists and writers around the Magyar Mu˝hely worked in cooperation and exchange with the French avant-garde. The Czech avant-garde of the 1920s was strong and broad. However, the Deveˇtsil group and its poetists were oriented until around 1930 mainly towards Russian Constructivism. Only once the leading poetists became disappointed with events in the Soviet Union did they turn to André Breton and his Surrealism. Breton, who made several visits to Prague in the 1930s, held a high opinion of his Czech colleagues, yet none of these fled to Paris under the

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

77

threat of Hitler and the war. Most Polish avant-gardists held on longer to their communist creed; as we have seen, some of them fled to the Soviet Union already in the 1920s and early 30s, others in 1939. Many of them did not survive the purges. Of those who did return home after the war only Aleksander Wat made it to Paris in the 1960s, but he was by then seriously ill and distant from the avant-garde orientation of his youth. At the heart of the Parisian/East-Central European avant-garde symbiosis were Romanian artists and writers who emigrated or fled to Paris, following the footsteps of the sculptor Constantin Brâncus¸i and those of Tristan Tzara, who had arrived from Zürich’s Dadaist Café Voltaire in 1919. Benjamin Fondane and Claude Sernet [Mihail Cosma] came in the 1920s, Ilarie Voronca followed in 1931. All three of these writers immediately started to write and publish in French, and thus rapidly accommodated themselves within the Parisian avant-garde scene, though they continued to keep their Romanian ties and thereby performed an important bridge function in the interwar years. Fondane died in a concentration camp; Sernet and Voronca, also of Jewish descent, survived the war in France, but Voronca committed suicide in 1946. In Romania, a second generation of avant-garde writers with surrealist orientation gathered around the short-lived but important journal unu (1928–32). Returning in 1938 from a stay in Paris, Gherasim Luca and Gellu Naum founded a Romanian surrealist group, which could not develop public activities during the war, but produced manuscripts that were published in the immediate postwar years. Indeed, Sarane Alexandrian’s highly respected book on Surrealism and dream devotes a whole section to the Romanian surrealists (221–29). He praises their polemical and highly eclectic views on dreams, delirium, love, death, class struggle, and dialectical materialism, and calls the group “the most exuberant, the most adventurous, and even the most delirious one within [postwar] international Surrealism” (221). The group’s theoretical basis was formulated by Luca and Dolfi Trost in Dialectique de la dialectique. Message adressé au mouvement surrealiste internationale (The Dialectic of Dialectic. Message Addressed to the International Surrealist Movement), published in Romania in 1945. Since Surrealism in the West was still in shambles at that point, the message did not immediately reach its intended audience. The same is true of Luca’s volume, also published in 1945, in Romanian, which contained three texts that formulated his life-long concerns: Inventatorul iubirii, Parcurg imposibilul, and Moartea moarta (The Inventor of Love; I Roam the Impossible; The Death of Death). Things changed, when Luca’s second attempt to escape from Romania succeeded, and he reached Paris via Israel in 1952. Befriending and cooperating with Jean Arp, Paul Celan, Max Ernst, and others, Luca produced a number of publications that combined

78

Chapter I

images and texts; he cut images into squares and reassembled them in a new way (cubomania), and he worked out the reflections of his Romanian youth on violent erotic love, the overcoming of Oedipal drive (well before Deleuze and Guattari wrote on anti-Oedipus), freedom through creativity, and suicide (Carlat, Raileanu, and Alexandrian 227–29). In the later 1960s, Luca became a sort of international celebrity with his unique poetry readings, which were based on language destruction, simulation of aphasia, stuttering, and repetition. This led Gilles Deleuze to quip that Luca was “a great poet among the greatest: he invented a prodigious stammering, his own” (Dialogues 10). The newspaper Le Monde once reported: “To hear and to see Ghérasim Luca read is like rediscovering the primordial power of poetry, its prophetic force and subversive effect.” Luca terminated his life while preparing his Romanian texts for republication; he jumped into the Seine, and his body was found much later, – almost a replica of a suicide he described in Moartea moarta. Isidore Isou, another Romanian avant-gardist in postwar France, arrived already in 1945, at the age of twenty, full of ideas he already had formulated on the principles of Lettrism. He started the Lettrist movement with Gabriel Pomerand as soon as he arrived. Two years later, Isou published his historical view of poetry and music, Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et à une nouvelle musique (Introduction to a New Poetry and a New Music), which he then gradually extended to painting, architecture, dance, photography, film, and the theater. Isou’s historical scheme distinguished between “amplic” and “chiseling” phases. The amplic one, represented in poetry by Homer, establishes a paradigm within which subsequent ages produce new works. When the possibilities of the paradigm are exhausted, the chiseling phase starts to deconstruct it, so that in the end only shattered fragments are left, ready to be recombined in a new amplic phase. Isou regarded himself and his Lettrists as creators of a new amplic art, in which the elements no longer functioned referentially but as empty absolute signs – an idea that actually had already a long history in “absolute music,” symbolist poetry, and certain forms of abstract art. A number of poets and artists joined Isou’s Lettrist movement, though, inevitably, it soon had to face internal strife and defections. Isou also ventured into filmmaking, and his first film, Traité de bave et d’éternité (Treatise of Slime and Eternity), produced in 1951, won the “best avant-garde” prize, especially created for it at the Cannes Film Festival. In more than one sense, the poet Paul Celan from Czernowitz (today Chernivtsi in the Ukraine) could be included among the Romanian avant-gardists just discussed, and not only because he was a Romanian Jew who settled in Paris after he had survived the Holocaust. He came to know the Romanian surrealists immediately after the war, was a good friend of Luca, and, as in the

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

79

case of Isou as well as Luca, the transformation of poetic language was at the very heart of his work. Amy Colin goes so far as to claim that it was “not until Celan became friends with Roumanian avant-gardists in Bucharest (1945–47) that he acquired so deep a knowledge of their major poetic theories as to visibly shape his own mode of writing” (75). However, Luca, Isou and others unfolded the poetic ideas of their Romanian youths while switching from Romanian to French, whereas Celan, who wrote only a few texts in Romanian in the postwar years, held on to his German, even if he struggled to go beyond it for political as well as poetic reasons. Parisian Literary Institutions Ervin Sinkó’s futile efforts to publish his novel in France may suggest that the French editors and publishers were as hostile to the exiled writers as the police and the bureaucrats. However, Sinkó’s failure to sell his thousandpage Hungarian novel was a-typical. Though many other manuscripts in foreign languages were also rejected, some were accepted and published in translation (e.g. works by Virgil Gheorghiu and Kundera), and those who switched to French (e.g. Cioran, Horia, Ionesco, Fejto˝, Kristof, Isou, Luca, and the later Kundera) had reasonably good chances to publish with such well-established publishers as Gallimard, Corti, Plon, Fayard, and Seuil. Newspapers and journals were generally hospitable to exiled writers, save those that followed a communist or radical left-wing editorial policy. This was in good measure due to some outstanding mediators and translators, foremost among them François Bondy, Konstanty Aleksander Jelen´ski, and László Gara. Bondy, himself from the region, edited important journals; the Polish Jelen´ski, who arrived in 1939, published in 1965 an anthology of Polish poetry since the Middle Ages (Anthologie de la poésie polonaise), and he himself translated Miłosz, Karol Wojtyła (the later Pope), and Gombrowicz; Gara – who had lived abroad before the war, returned to Hungary afterwards, and left again in 1956 – put together a similar volume of Hungarian poetry (Anthologie de la poésie hongroise de XII. siècle à nos jours) already in 1962, a few years before he committed suicide. Publishing with French companies or in French journals could not, of course, fill the need of all exiled writers, partly because many of them did not master French sufficiently, and, perhaps more importantly, because many of them considered it their mission to write for a native audience both at home and abroad. Hence the emergence of exile journals and publishers, most of which were short-lived; those that survived lived on precariously at the edge of a financial abyss. To the printed words we have to add an important new medium that cultivated the native languages in spoken form: the radio. A

80

Chapter I

number of exiled writers, foremost among them Monica Lovinescu and her husband Virgil Ierunca, worked for Radio Free Europe and Radio France Internationale in Paris. As we shall see, many more exiled writers worked for the BBC in London, for the Voice of America in Washington D.C. or New York, and at the Munich headquarters (as well as elsewhere) for Radio Free Europe. We include in our volume separate essays on Lovinescu’s broadcasts and on the three leading Parisian journals from East-Central Europe: the Polish Kultura, the Czech Sveˇdectví (Testimony), and the Hungarian Irodalmi Újság (Literary Gazette). All three of them were started elsewhere and transferred to Paris: Jerzy Giedroyc moved Kultura from Rome to Paris in 1947, Pavel Tigrid brought Sveˇdectví from New York to Paris in 1960, and Tibor Méray assumed in 1962 the editorship of the Irodalmi Újság in Paris; the previous editor was György Faludy in London. To avoid duplication, here we merely interconnect these Parisian journals and situate them in a broader picture. One of the most striking facts about these otherwise excellent journals is that no regular contacts or exchanges existed between them. Each focused on its own native audience, which meant giving space to political and literary events in the world at large but devoting minimal attention to the neighbors in East-Central Europe – save in moments of political crisis, especially if they involved writers. This blindspot is particularly surprising, since none of the three editors was an ardent nationalist, carrying old political grudges against the neighboring countries. Indeed, Giedroyc and Kultura took the unpopular view that Poland must accept its 1945 borders and find ways to cooperate with its eastern neighbors. The most sensitive issue in this respect was the situation of the Hungarian minority in Transylvania; the persistence of old resentments prevented joint resistance against Caus¸escu’s regime even among exiles (see John Neubauer’s article on the Irodalmi Újság below). A galaxy of other East-Central Europe journals was also published in Paris, although the most enduring ones were published in Munich (the Hungarian Új Látóhatár), London (the Polish Wiadomosc´i and Kontynenty), and New York. The Parisian publications included the mentioned Magyar Mu˝hely; the Romanian Luceafa˘rul. Revista scriitorilor români în exil (Luceafarul [Evening Star]. The Magazine of Romanian Writers in Exile) edited by Mircea Eliade in 1948–49; and several short-lived journals edited by Virgil Ierunca, among them Caete de Dor: Metazica˘ s¸i poezie (Notebooks of Pain. Metaphysics and Poetry), Limite, and Ethos. Only Dumitru T¸epeneag’s Cahiers de l’Est, made a genuine effort to bring together the literatures of the East-Central European nations. Kultura had its own important publishing house, the Instytut Literacki, while the Irodalmi Újság started to publish books in the 1980s, and so did the Magyar Mu˝hely. However, only the Instytut Literacki became a major under-

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

81

taking. Paris did not become a center for publishing books in the other EastCentral European languages. Such ventures developed rather in Munich, Canada, the US, and elsewhere.

London For the nineteenth-century East-Central European writers and artists, London was apparently much less exciting than Paris. Next to Cyprian Norwid, who lived there briefly in the 1850s, we can mention only the Hungarian Ferenc Pulszky, who escaped from Hungary after the 1848–49 revolution (he was condemned to death in absentia in 1852) and enthusiastically helped in exile Lajos Kossuth’s political plans for a number of years. During his eight years in London, Pulszky became an important figure, even an authority, in the aristocratic and art-loving circles of the city, and this experience became invaluable for him when he was granted amnesty in 1866 and became for twenty-five years Director of the Hungarian National Museum, and President of the Literary Section at the Hungarian Academy. We should mention here also Joseph Conrad, though he was an émigré rather than an exile. After many years of voyaging, he settled in Kent rather than London City. There was no exodus of East-Central European exiles to London after World War I and during the interwar years. The refugees started to arrive, however, when the Nazi threat became ominous, and their number swelled when the German forces entered France. Exiles in France now desperately tried to escape further to England or, via Spain and Portugal, to the US. London became the seat of the Polish Government in Exile, which coordinated a huge worldwide army numbering 200 000 by the end of the war. As mentioned, the Polish writers Jerzy Pietrkiewicz and Antoni Słonimski came to London, and so did the Czech Frantisˇek Langer and Pavel Tigrid (a name he adopted in London), the Slovaks Vladimír Clementis and Theo Florin, and the Hungarian Pál Ignotus. György Mikes was a reporter in London for two Hungarian papers, and remained there. His book How to Be an Alien (1946) became an enormous success. The Serbian Milosˇ Crnjanski, lost his job as press attaché at the Yugoslavian embassy in Rome when Italy declared war against Yugoslavia. He came to London in 1941 and became a member of the Yugoslav Government in Exile. More important for us, he wrote a novel about exile titled Roman o Londonu (A Novel about London), which, however, was published only in 1971, after his return to Yugoslavia in 1965 (see Guido Snel’s article below).

82

Chapter I

London experienced a remarkable two-way exile traffic in the immediate postwar years. Langer, Clementis, Tigrid, Ignotus, Pálóczi-Horváth (in 1947), and Słonimski (in 1951) returned home, as did many members of the Polish Home Army and the Polish Government in Exile. Most of them were jailed, tortured, sent to hard labor camps without formal court decisions, or, as in the case of Clementis, executed. Zygmunt Ławrynowicz, Bolesław Taborski, Florian S´mieja, Tadeusz Sułkowski, and other Polish veterans settled as writers in London. Some went on to the US (see Bogusław Wróblewski’s article below). In 1945, Polish literature became institutionalized in London. An Association of Polish Writers in Exile was founded, and Mieczysław Grydzewski started the journal Wiadomos´ci (News), a rather conservative publication whose name suggested, however, a link ro the prewar left-wing Warsaw periodical Wiadomos´ci Literackie. Adam Czerniawski founded in 1959 the new journal Kontynenty (Continents; –1964), which rebelled against the émigré tradition and gained the support of Ławrynowicz and S´mieja, as well as the young writers Bogdan Czaykowski, Jerzy S. Sito, Jan Darowski, Taborski, and Andrzej Busza, some of whom lived in Canada. Since these writers wanted to reach readers at home, they allowed the publication of their texts in Poland, thus defying a 1956 resolution of the Association of Polish Writers in Exile that forbade its members to maintain any contact with communist Poland. The Oficyna Poetów i Malarzy (Publishing House of Poets and Painters), established and run by Czesław Bednarczyk and his wife, published poetry and prose, and subsidized the publications of young poets. Between 1949 and 1991, the Oficyna published about a thousand volumes of poetry and prose. The authors included Miłosz, Ławrynowicz, Taborski, Czaykowski, and Sułkowski, as well as Jan Brze˛kowski, Janusz Ihnatowicz, Stempowski, Marian Pankowski, Vincenz, and Tymon Terlecki. Jerzy Pietrkiewicz, who got a degree at the University of St. Andrews, became one of the best-integrated Polish writers in British literary life, especially once he started in 1951 to write highly regarded novels in English under the name Peterkiewicz. He became Professor of Polish and even Dean of the School of East-European and Slavonic Studies at the University of London. As Christine Brooke-Rose, his ex-wife, writes, when he stopped writing poetry in Polish and turned to the novel he underwent a slow “Jamesian shift in subject matter, from wholly Polish to partly Polish, to totally free and experimental” (18). The Hungarian László Cs. Szabó came to London in 1951 and worked at the Hungarian Department of the BBC until 1972. Zoltán Szabó moved from Paris to London in 1951, worked for Radio Free Europe there, and founded the pub-

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

83

lishing house Magyar Könyves Céh. Ignotus, Pálóczi-Horváth, and Faludy and others who returned to Hungary after the war were finally released in 1953, after several years of jail, torture, and hard labor, They fled to England for a second time after the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, and settled in London, together with Gyo˝zo˝ Határ, Mátyás Sárközi, and other “first-time” exiles. In the last decades of twentieth century, London and New York eclipsed Paris as cultural capitals, together with Berlin, which has experienced a remarkable artistic and intellectual renaissance after the fall of the Berlin Wall. These three cities seem now to be favored by displaced writers from all over the world.

Munich Next to Paris and London, Munich accommodated after World War II the most significant exile communities from East-Central Europe, in good measure because it became in 1949 the European seat of Radio Free Europe, which broadcasted programs for Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria in the following decades (Borbándi Magyarok). Radio Free Europe was secretly financed until 1971 by the CIA, and this funding supported a large number of East-Central European writers and intellectuals over the years. The Czech program was put together by Pavel Tigrid and was directed by Ferdinand Peroutka for a decade, starting 1951. Jan Cˇep worked there (1951–55), as did Ivan Divisˇ, Imrich Kruzˇliak (1951–80), and later Ota Filip. Directors of the highly polemical emissions of the Romanian program were Noël Bernard (1953–58; 1966–81) and Vlad Georgescu (1983–88); both of them may have been killed by Ceaus¸escu’s Securitate. Puddington notes that under Bernard’s directorship “the Romanian section was not infrequently cited for violation of the station’s strictures against vituperation and rhetorical excess” (47). A bomb targeted at the Romanian section exploded in 1981 at the radio’s headquarters. Stempowski, and Włodzimierz Odojewski, who asked for asylum in Germany in 1972, worked for the Polish program. Though the American chief officers promised a free hand to the “native” staff, conflicts were unavoidable in practice, mainly because the political orientation of the programmers and programs were very different. The Hungarian Department, for instance, was severely criticized for its inflammatory broadcasts during the 1956 revolution, and five staff members were dismissed after an internal investigation. Indeed, some Hungarian staff members were right-wing anti-communists, and this was one of the reasons why cooperation with the Hungarian Association of Writers Abroad was short-lived.

84

Chapter I

Important parts of the broadcasting were, however, prepared and broadcasted elsewhere: several program were prepared in New York, while Monica Lovinescu’s and Virgil Ierunca’s Romanian programs were broadcasted from Paris (see Camelia Craˇciun’s article below). Sándor Márai, who insisted on being a free lancer rather than an employee, sent in his weekly “Vasárnapi krónika” (Sunday Chronicle) from Rome (he traveled there from Naples); Albert Wass started a weekly column on American agriculture and the American way of life once he arrived in the US in 1952. Munich attracted many East-Central European writers and intellectuals, and not only because it was the seat of Radio Free Europe. It also became the seat of several journals and publishers. This is where the high-quality populist Új Látóhatár (New Horizon) was edited by József Molnár with Gyula Borbándi (see John Neubauer’s article on the Irodalmi Újság), but Bavaria was also where the Hungarian neo-Nazi Hídvero˝k (Bridge Builders 1948–62) was published. Molnár also ran a publishing house in Munich, but the most important one was Sándor Újváry’s Griff (also Újváry-“Griff ”), which published many original Hungarian books – for instance the second editions of two books that Sándor Márai wrote in exile: Ítélet Canudosban ( Judgment in Canudos) and San Gennaro vére (Saint Gennaro’s Blood) – as well as foreign books translated into Hungarian. The most important Romanian journals published in Munich were Apozit¸ia (1973–94; 2006–), a yearbook of the Romanian-German Cultural Society, and the Revista Scriitorilor Români (1962–90), a publication of the Societatea Academica Romana in Rome (founded in 1957). The latter defined its goal in the preface, as the cultivation of the autochtonous national tradition, with emphasis on folklore and religion. The European tradition was neglected (see Pfeffer).

Other European Cities Amsterdam, a city with a long tradition of hospitability to diasporic people, was in the 1930s the host of many German exiles and émigrés. Klaus and Erika Mann came here; Klaus edited the Die Sammlung (1933–35), a German exile journal published at the Querido Verlag that Emanuel Querido opened and the German émigré publisher Fritz Landshoff ran for exiles and émigrés. Landshoff survived the war, Querido and his wife did not. The German exiles that came to Amsterdam included the painter Max Beckmann, Anne Frank, as well as Wolfgang Frommel, Claus Victor Bock. Manuel Goldschmidt and others who launched journal Castrum Peregrini after the war. Compared to the large number of German refugees, many of whom went on to London or the

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

85

US, very few writers, artists and intellectuals fled to the Netherlands from East-Central Europe. When they became genuinely threatened in 1938–39, the Netherlands could no longer offer them a safe heaven. Hungarian students founded in 1951 the Mikes-Kelemen Kör in Amsterdam, a literary and intellectual association that fulfilled an important but tenuous role in the 1960s and 70s by bringing together Hungarians abroad with those who remained at home (see Áron Kibédi-Varga’s article below). During the 1990s, the city became the temporary, and often permanent, home of a number of ex-Yugoslav, writers, intellectuals, and artists, among them Dubravka Ugresic´. Francó’s Madrid needs to be mentioned, since it is here that right-wing writers, especially from Hungary and Romania settled. The Hungarian contingent included József Nyíro˝, János Vaszary, and Lili Muráti, Vaszary’s wife and a well-known actress. She became the announcer of the Hungarian broadcasts of the Spanish National Radio (1949–75), while Nyíro˝, Vaszary, and a number of other Hungarian exiles became contributors. The Romanian contingent in Madrid was greater and somewhat more distinguished than the Hungarian one, though equally burdened with a rightwing past. Vintila˘ Horia, George Usca˘tescu, Traian Popescu, Aron Cotrus¸, Pamfil S¸eicaru, Horia Stamatu and others moderated in exile their earlier violent anti-Semitism, emphasizing now their Christian spirituality and antiCommunism. Popescu founded with Cotrus¸ in 1954 the pro-Legionnaire journal Carpatii (The Carpathians) and a publishing house with the same name. Usca˘tescu came to Madrid during the war, edited the journal Destin (1951–72), and finally became professor of philosophy in Barcelona. Stamatu, whom we have mentioned as a Legionnaire inmate of Buchenwald, cofounded in Madrid the journals Libertatea Romaneasca and Fapta before going back to Freiburg. Apart from some conservative and right-wing eulogies, little has been written about the literary and intellectual content of these journals and about the right-wing Romanian exiles in general. One exception is a review of Stamatu’s poetry, whose genesis and consequences the reviewer, Ioan Petru Culianu, brilliantly and hilariously recounts in “O s¸ansa unica˘” (A Unique Opportunity). Having accepted the task to review Stamatu’s poetry, Culianu found that it contained, next to “atrocious banalities,” also pieces “whose beginning, middle, or (rarely) ending are decent or even memorable. Unfortunately, these parts never occur together in a single poem.” Culianu tried to camouflage his distaste by writing, as he says, an incomprehensible review. He wanted to be gentle, since he mistakenly concluded from a poem on Stamatu’s release from Buchenwald that he was a Holocaust victim. The camouflage obviously failed:

86

Chapter I

For a time, not only I, but also several other persons received daily letters on the average of 54 pages each containing accusations, curses, calumnies, irrepeatable insults, and the most fantastic sexual hypotheses about me, my family, my origin, and my political opinions. The letters contained, in addition, long confessions followed by vigorous denials, meaningless photocopies of articles in insignificant newspapers which either praised or slandered him, photographs of the founder of the Iron Guard, and a complete medical report which specified that, although the state of S[tamatu]’s health was most precarious, he had no reason for alarm. […] The word “iron” in one of the poems I cited unleashed on S.’s part a furious defense of 45 pages against the insinuation that he had been a member of the Iron Guard. Even stranger, however, was his idea that the word cuipearca˘ (mushroom), contained in a poem I cited, was another allusion to his affiliation with the extreme right and his deep veneration for the pompous German philosopher Martin Heidegger.

(Trans. Mac Linscott Ricketts) To “exonerate” Madrid, we ought to add that it not host right-wing exiles only. As we saw, the eminent Polish writer Józef Łobodowski was arrested in Spain while trying to escape to England during the war but he settled in Madrid upon his release, worked for Madrid’s Polish radio, translated works of Russian and Spanish poets, and published in the journals Kultura and Wiadomos´ci. Other European countries and cities also had their East-Central European exiles and emigrants. To mention a few: Stempowski, Kristof, Vincenz, Caraion, Dusan Sˇimko and others settled in various Swiss cities. Gustaw Herling-Grudzin´ski, co-founder of Kultura in Rome, lived from 1955 until his death in 2000 in Naples (see Włodzimierz Bolecki’s contribution below), the city where Márai also resided for a number of years. In contrast to the numerous Baltic writers, only few East-Central Europeans settled in Sweden. They include the Hungarian Géza Thinsz, the Romanian Gabriela Melinescu, and, in the 1990s, the Serbian writer Slavenka Drakulic´, who settled there through marriage.

New York and Academia In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, masses of Polish, Slovak, and Hungarian immigrants arrived in Canada and the US, founding numerous social, religious, and artistic associations. There were no significant writers among these immigrants, and the prominent East-Central European writers who visited the New World during the first decades of the twentieth century (e.g., Tamási and Cˇapek) did not stay. This changed in 1939–40, when many who fled the Nazis and the war sought an overseas safe haven. The lucky few

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

87

who were actually admitted, often arrived after highly adventurous and circuitous journeys via Africa and Latin America. The writers who settled in New York included the German-Czech Johannes Urzidil, the Poles Kazimierz Wierzyn´ski, Julian Tuwim, and Jan Lechon´, as well as the Hungarian Ferenc Molnár and the Czech Egon Hostovsky´. The postwar East-Central European immigrants to the US significantly differed from the prewar exiles, both in their composition and in their pattern of settling. Those who arrived in the immediate postwar years to the US and Canada were not exiles in the strict sense of the word but mostly stateless or displaced persons with differing political convictions. Next to Holocaust survivors, there were Polish war veterans who did not wish to return home (see Bogusław Wróblewski’s article below), and in the following few years displaced persons arrived from European DP camps, many of whom had a rightwing past but were admitted because of the Cold War and intensified antiCommunism in the US. Among the latter were a number of Catholic Slovak writers who supported Tiso’s fascist government during the war, as well as Hungarians (e.g., Albert Wass), and Romanian nationalists (e.g., Alexander Ronnett, a politically active anti-communist physician). Most of these gravitated to the rural and suburban towns of the Midwest rather than to New York City, which Wass, for one, regarded as a “city of sin” ( Józan 1: 164) for its urban corruption, mostly blamed on the Jews. New York did not “profit” much from the influx of such right-wing exiles, but it welcomed East-Central European writers of a more democratic disposition, who left, mostly by their own volition, when the Stalinist regimes consolidated their power in 1947–49. Among these were the popular Hungarian writer Lajos Zilahy (1947), Miksa Fenyo˝, a former editor of Nyugat (1953–70), and the Romanian Miron Butariu, who escaped in 1947, came to New York in 1951, and moved on to Los Angeles in 1974. Sándor Márai moved from Naples to New York in 1952 because he was disappointed in postwar Europe. He remained a restless nomad, moving back to Salerno in 1967, and then to San Diego, California in 1980. The opportunities for exile and immigrant writers significantly improved in the US and Canada in the later 1950s, due to positions that opened at colleges and universities for writers in general and East-Central European writers in particular. German exile scholars had already played, of course, a crucial role at American colleges and universities prior and during World War II. In contrast to their European counterparts, the overseas universities had a tradition of appointing foreigners to their teaching staff. The new opportunities emerged from additional sources: writers could now profit from the boom in 1) language and literature programs, 2) East-European area

88

Chapter I

studies programs emerging in the 1960s, 3) burgeoning creative writing programs, and 4) Jewish, Holocaust, and Cultural Studies programs that developed somewhat later. New York City and its surroundings continued to be a favorite location of the new academic exiles. The Polish war veteran Paweł Łysek (see Bogusław Wróblewski’s article in this volume) was among the first writers to find a place in US academia in the postwar years. He became a librarian as well as a full professor of literature at Queens College of the City University of New York, all the while continuing to write novels in Polish. Jerzy Kosin´ski, a Polish Jew, was also unknown when he arrived in 1957, at age twenty-four. He studied with a scholarship in New York and published in 1965 his allegedly autobiographical novel The Painted Bird, which became a huge international success, bringing him lecture offers at the top East-Coast universities and a permanent academic appointment at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst (where the Hungarian Tamás Aczél assumed a professorship in 1966). The Polish theater critic and theorist Jan Kott – who became internationally known with his Shakespeare, our Contemporary, already published in Poland – left his country legally in 1966 to lecture at Yale and Berkeley, but decided not to return due to the crushing of the Prague Spring and the anti-Semitic campaign in Poland. He accepted a professorship at the State University of New York, Stony Brook (Long Island). Ágnes Heller, who was deprived of her Hungarian academic positions in 1973, immigrated to Australia in 1977, and came in 1986 to the New School of Social Research, where she was appointed Hannah Arendt Professor of Philosophy in 1988. The Romanian Norman Manea, also a Manhattan resident, became Distinguished Professor of literature and writer-in-residence at Bard College, in mid-state New York. All these writers and scholars, as well as the many others exiles who found academic jobs in the US, had to master the English language as a job requirement. Teaching became for many of them a major impulse to start writing in English, though several of them continued to write also in their native language. New York attracted also non-academic writers. Ferdinand Peroutka, regarded by some as the father of Czech journalism, escaped in 1948 and lived from 1950 permanently in New York. The Hungarian poet József Bakucz lived after 1956 much of the time in New York. Ferenc Körmendi, who left Hungary already in 1932, came from London to New York after the war and was in the years 1954–61 the New York Director of Radio Free Europe. Péter Halász, a frequent contributor to the Irodalmi Újság and other Hungarian journals, also worked intermittently for the radio station, and he published a New York novel, Második Avenue (Second Avenue) in 1967. Another Péter Halász was ejected from Hungary with his theater group in 1976. His Squat

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

89

Theater became famous when it started to perform in a storefront on 23rd Street in 1977. The Polish Janusz Głowacki, author of the international stage success Antigone in New York (1992), fled to the US because of the Polish Martial Law in 1982. He settled in the Big Apple, though his view of the city was not very flattering: “elegant people there first go to the gym and then to yoga to meditate about where to eat, buy or sell something. For example a Gucci purse, a nuclear missile, a dog, an island, or crude oil” (Z głowy 230; trans. K. Jerzak). Many writers found academic appointments elsewhere in the US. Milada Soucˇková, author of modernist prose texts and member of the Prague Linguistic circle, taught between 1950 and 1973 Czech literature at Harvard University, the University of Chicago, and the University of California, Berkeley. Elie Wiesel, who acquired international fame with his autobiographical accounts of the Holocaust, moved from Paris to New York in 1955; he became first Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York and then Mellon Professor at Boston University. Czesław Miłosz was appointed in 1960 Professor of Polish literature in Berkeley, while Stanisław Baran´czak – co-founder of the Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR) and the underground journal Zapis – became Professor at Harvard in 1981. Leopold Tyrmand, who came to the US in 1967, first worked for the New Yorker (1967–71) and other journals, and subsequently entered academia: after teaching at the State University of New York, Albany and Columbia University, he became the VicePresident of the newly founded conservative and religious Rockford College Institute in 1976. The Czech Arnosˇt Lustig, who fled from Prague to Israel in 1968, became Professor of Literature, Film, and Jewish Studies at the American University in Washington D.C. When Mircea Eliade accepted in 1958 the Chair of History of Religions at the University of Chicago, his life became further fragmented. He described in an interview the exilic province as a decentered, ruptured world that can find its coherence through myth and a unifying language: “In exile the road home lies through language, through dreams” (Ordeal 89). But through which language? Through a primeval one? Through his native Romanian? French? English? In Chicago, Eliade published his major scholarly work in English, but he regularly returned to Paris to publish memoirs and essays in French, and he kept writing novels and short stories in his native Romanian. The issue of language and a redeeming national myth are central to Eliade’s politicalphilosophic novel Pe strada Mântuleasa (The Old Man and the Bureaucrats), begun in Paris and completed in Chicago. Its protagonist, an old school teacher called Zaharia Fa˘râma˘ (Zaharia ‘Crumb’), beguiles his communist interrogators with labyrinthine stories of the past. His “‘Arabian Nights’ in a

90

Chapter I

Stalinistic world” ensure the storyteller’s survival; more importantly, they retrieve a much-needed cultural-historical memory wiped out in Romania. In the last years of his life, Eliade helped the career of his younger compatriot Ioan Petru Culianu, whom we have already mentioned. Culianu went in 1972 from Ias¸i to Perugia with a fellowship – and never returned. He studied at the Catholic University of Milan (1973–76), taught Romanian at the Dutch University of Groningen (1976–85), defended a thesis at the Sorbonne Paris on the major Western myths of dualism in 1987, and published the same year his most original study, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. Eliade helped him to come to the University of Chicago on a visiting appointment in 1986, and Culianu returned there as Professor in the History of Christianity and the History of Religions. His astonishing publishing record includes editing Eliade’s manuscripts and completing unfinished encyclopedia projects. However, he refrained from looking too closely and openly into his mentor’s rightwing past. Culianu became increasingly involved in politics. Six months before Ceaus¸escu’s fall he anticipated the death of the dictator in his fictional story “The Intervention in Jormania,” while a second story of his, “Free Jormania,” attributed theatricality and conspiratorial plots to his assassination and its aftermath. Culianu scathingly attacked Romania’s new regime in a series of articles in the New York exile journal Lumea Libera˘ (Free World) and the Italian daily Corriere della Sera. Whether his grotesque murder in a toilet of the University of Chicago on May 21 1991 was a revenge of the Legionnaires, of the Securitate, of Romania’s new leaders, or of some murky alliance between some or all of these, remains a painful question (see Anton). Culianu’s friend Andrei Codrescu, who left Romania in 1965, blended perfectly into the blooming hippy cultures of Manhattan and California, until his cultural commentaries for the Baltimore Sun, his contributions to the National Public Radio, and his poetry and essay volumes gained him a Distinguished Professorship of English at Louisiana State University in New Orleans. Home and homecoming figure prominently in Codrescu’s writings and dreams (see Ksenia Polouektova’s article below), but he is also thoroughly at home in America. He writes in a brilliantly humorous style that sounds indigenous, though it provides also perspectives from abroad. Witness the iconoclastic account of his naturalization in “Born Again,” part of a volume revealingly titled In America’s Shoes (1983): “I stood in the windowless womb of the Justice Department’s Immigration and Naturalization Bureau, waiting to be born American. The Nixon-Mitchell style of impenetrable anti-terrorist architecture resembled exactly the V.I. Stalin style of the 1950s in Eastern Europe” (1).

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

91

Henrik Grynberg, a Polish Holocaust survivor, is among those distinguished writers who did not enter an academic career, although he acquired an M.A. in Russian Literature at the University of California in Los Angeles after “jumping ship” from the touring State Jewish Theater of Warsaw in 1967. He worked for two decades at the US Information Agency and then turned full-time to the writing of essays, autobiographical texts, and fiction in highly crafted Polish. He set himself the task of giving voice to those that were murdered: “my subject is those who perished in despair that no one would speak up for them” ( Judaism 131).

Toronto Moving across the border to Canada, we find one of the richest ethnic cities of the continent, Toronto, where half of the city’s population is foreign born (among the highest percentage in the world). Though the immigrants come these days mostly from South- and East Asia, the city has an important East European tradition. Most of the more than 50,000 Polish displaced persons that Canada admitted in the years 1946–52 settled in Toronto and other industrial centers of Eastern Canada. Toronto was also where the famous Czech Bata Shoe Company moved its headquarters in 1960, after the nationalization of its operations in Czechoslovakia. The company has founded in Toronto a Bata Shoe Museum, and has supported Trent University and its Thomas J. Bata Library. The immigrant writers and intellectuals gave a strong impetus to literature and literary studies in Toronto. The Czech linguist and literary scholar Lubomír Dolezˇel and the Czech novelist Josef Sˇkvorecky´ became professors at the University of Toronto. Neither the Polish poet Wacław Iwaniuk, nor the Hungarian György Faludy were apponited at the university, but Faludy received an honorary doctorate whereas Iwaniuk worked at the City Hall. Faludy became a highly respected citizen of the city, and in October 2006 the small park across from where he used to live was named after him and decorated with a plinth of his profile. Faludy, back in Hungary by then, planned to attend but died shortly beforehand, at the age of ninety-five. Perhaps the best literary record of exile in Toronto is Sˇkvorecky´’s Prˇíbeˇh inzˇeny´ra lidsky´ch dusˇí (The Engineer of Human Souls), which appeared in 1977, and won the prestigious Governor General’s Award when translated into English (1985). The title is an ironic reference to a phrase that Stalin adopted from Yury Olesha: writers are the engineers of the human soul. Following to Toronto Danny Smirˇicky´ – the writer’s earlier fictional alter ego in Zbabeˇlci (The

92

Chapter I

Cowards; 1964) – The Engineer is a huge and complex tapestry that weaves together the young boy’s experiences under Nazi occupation, his fortunes under the communist decades, and his life in Toronto as a professor of English. The ruptures between time levels, sites, and ideological viewpoints are formally represented by means of a jumbled narrative chronology, variously dated letters from everywhere that interrupt Danny’s internal (“first person”) narration, and the use of dialects and jargons, including a highly amusing “immigrant English.” Danny and the other Czech immigrants love Canada but take a somewhat condescending attitude towards the “naïve” Canadians. Curiously, the Czech and Canadian cosmos of the novel does not include immigrants from the other East-Central European nations not even Slovaks. The Toronto scenes of The Engineer portray Danny’s classes, his encounters with his students in and around his classroom (including an affair with one of them), and scenes from Toronto’s émigré life. Danny does not seek out the émigrés, and he suspects most Czech visitors to Canada of being agents; but he is even further isolated from the Canadian and US students, whom he considers either naïve about history and politics, or blinded by leftist ideologies. Danny, a post-1968 exile from Prague, dislikes the Americans who fled to Canada in order to avoid being drafted during the Vietnam War, the revolutionary black communist Angela Davis, the anti-Vietnam war protesters, and the participants of the 1968–69 US urban riots. One of the many scenes of confrontation (407–18) brings together Danny, a Czech cello virtuoso who remained in Prague and now enjoys perks like the freedom to travel while criticizing the regime, an émigré Czech girl, and her partner, an American draft-dodger who became an eternal student. Whenever the (ex)Czechs complain about political suppression in Czechoslovakia, the draft-dodger responds, to their greatest chagrin, that things are quite similar in the US. The shouting match almost ends in a fistfight. Danny’s ironic but decidedly critical view of the American/Canadian dissidents corresponds to the position that Sˇkvoreckıy´ takes in essays and public statements. It reflects also the position of Márai and other émigré writers from East-Central Europe, though not the worldview of an Andrei Codrescu. In spite of its large ethnic communities and the presence of some important writers, Toronto has apparently not succeeded in establishing important literary journals. However, several important publishing houses came about with a broad spectrum of publications. Most important among these are the Sixty-Eight Publishers, founded in 1972 upon the initiative of Zdena Salivarová, Sˇkvoreckıy´’s wife and a novelist in her own right, which became the most important Czech exile publisher and, next to the Polish Kultura, the most distinguished exile publisher in the East-European languages.

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

93

Operating with modest means on a subscription basis, Sixty-Eight Publishers printed over 220 books by 1992, and accumulated a mailing list of about 12 000. The highly impressive list of books published by the Sixty-Eight Publishers includes some major works in Czech that won global acclaim in translation, as well as works written by Czech authors in a foreign tongue but retranslated by the authors themselves into Czech. Salivarová and Sˇkvoreckıy´ were eager to launch young talents, and though they did not publish books in English they were interested in reaching out to non-Czech readers in North America. Publishing in 1985 the original Czech Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (French publication in 1984) was perhaps the greatest feat of Sixty-Eight Publishers, but they devoted much attention also to the younger Jirˇí Grusˇa, Libusˇe Moníková, and Jan Novák. Grusˇa’s Dotazník (The Questionnaire), which had been circulating in manuscript form in Czechoslovakia, appeared in 1978, just a year after its well-received German version came out. Moníková published her Czech Fasáda (The Facade; 1991) also after success with its German original (Die Fassade; 1987). Jan Novák’s Miliónovy´ jeep appeared with a postscript by Václav Havel in 1989, after the publication of the original English edition, The Willys Dream Kit (1986) and its nomination for a Pulitzer Prize. Sixty-Eight Publishers brought out, of course, all of Salivarová’s and Sˇkvoreckıy´’s works in Czech, including her Hnu˚j zemeˇ (1994) and Honzlová (1973), as well as his Dveˇ legendy (1982), his two-volume Mirákl (Miracle; 1972), and his Tankovy´ prapor (The Tank Corps; 1980), which sold 7000 copies. Less known but important was István Vörösváry’s Hungarian VörösváryWeller printing and publishing enterprise (1963–) in Toronto, which published not only in Hungarian but also in English and other languages. The authors included Sándor Márai, and such conservative writers and politicians as Miklós Horthy, József Mindszenty, Imre Kovács, and Albert Wass. In Vörösváry, Márai found a friend as well as a publisher who was willing to bring out regularly his works from 1970 onwards. A Polish Toronto publisher was launched in 1978 upon the initiative of Wacław Iwaniuk and a number of writers from the war veteran generation. The Polski Fundusz Wydawniczy w Kanadzie (Polish-Canadian Publishing Fund), has put out a surprisingly large number of poetry volumes, including a bilingual anthology of seven Polish-Canadian poets, edited by Iwaniuk and Florian S´mieja (1984), Bogdan Czaykowski’s anthology of Polish poetry in emigration (2002), and a volume by Andrzej Busza.

94

Chapter I

Buenos Aires Argentina and Paraguay acquired a reputation for harboring ex-Nazis, but the Latin American countries (including Mexico and Central America) opened their doors also to many German and Jewish exiles fleeing Hitler, as well as to exiles fleeing the East-Central European communist regimes. We can list here only a few relevant cases; the tangled exile culture and politics of the continent would need comprehensive studies. The most prominent East-Central European writer who landed in Latin America was Witold Gombrowicz, who was on a cruiseship when the war broke out and remained in Buenos Aires until 1963 (see Jerzy Jarze˛bski’s article below). Gombrowicz published there, with the help of native speakers, two unsuccessful works in Spanish, but, more importantly, he also wrote in Buenos Aires some of his most important Polish works, including Trans-Atlantyk (Trans-Atlantic; 1953), which refocuses his view of Poland through his first experiences in Argentina. Upon returning to Europe, he wrote in his Diary: “So that when Argentina recedes behind me, dissolves, the Europe rising before me is like a pyramid, Sphinx, and an alien planet, like a fata morgana, no longer mine, I do not recognize it, I do not recover it in time and space” (3: 143). A more general vision of Polish presence in Argentina may be found in the novel Losy pasierbów (Fates of Foster Sons; 1958) by Florian Czarnyszewicz, who immigrated already in 1924 to Argentina. Michał Choroman´ski fled to Latin America at the outbreak of the war, but went on to Canada (1941–1944), and returned to Poland in 1957. Of the right-wing writers, the mentioned Romanian Vintila˘ Horia taught at the Universidad de Buenos Aires between 1948 and 1953, and returned then to Madrid. Most of the right-wing East-Central European exiles came to Buenos Aires from Hungary and Slovakia. The latter were Catholic writers who served in various official capacities in Jozef Tiso’s puppet government during World War II in the hope that Slovakia would permanently secede from the Czechoslovak federation. Of those who fled from Slovakia, Tido Jozef Gasˇˇ arnov were par, Milo Urban (editor of the Tiso daily Gardista), and Andrej Z captured by the Western military and returned to Czechoslovakia (Zˇarnov managed to escape in 1952). Others managed to get via Austria to Italy, where they received help from the Vatican to leave the continent. Mikulás Sˇprinc, Karol Strmenˇ, and Ján Okál’ entered the US, whereas, Rudolf Dilong, Stanislav Mecˇiar, Ján E. Bor, Koloman K. Geraldini, and Jozef Cíger-Hronsky´ (who was almost returned by the Italian authorities to Czechoslovakia) escaped to Buenos Aires. The city, in which a Slovensky´ spolok (Slovak Society) had been already in existence since the interwar period, now became a lively center of

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

95

Slovak literature and culture. Dilong moved in 1965 to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but the rest of them stayed. Cíger-Hronsky´, the most talented and active among them, founded and led in Buenos Aires the publishing house Zahranicˇna Matica slovenska (Matica Slovenska Abroad). He died in Luján in 1960, but was rehabilitated and reburied in 1993, in the Slovak national cemetery of Martin. In contrast to Gombrowicz, these Slovak writers made, apparantly, no serious efforts to contribute to Argentina’s and Latin America’s evolving modernist and postmodern literature. They continued to be preoccupied with Slovak literature, culture, and politics in the Slovak language. The Hungarian right-wing exiles that left their home for Buenos Aires in 1944–45 included György Oláh, who later moved to Córdoba, the actor Antal Páger, who directed the Hungarian Theater Company (Magyar Színjátszó Társulat) between 1948 and 1954, and Zita Szelecky, a famous Hungarian actress who joined Páger on stage. Both Páger and Szelecky returned to Hungary towards the end of their lives. The poet Márton Kerecsendi Kiss, who wrote in the 1940s screenplays for Páger and Szelecky, lived in Buenos Aires until 1957, and then moved to the US. Adorján Czanyó, another exile of 1944, published the paper Délamerikai Magyarság, later called Délamerikai Magyar Hírlap, and he ran the publishing house Danubio (1951–73), which published many of the more than two-hundred Hungarian books that appeared in Argentina between 1948 and 1968. The mentioned Toronto publisher István Vörösváry also started his publishing activities in Buenos Aires (see Kesseru˝) We ought to add that Bueno Aires had a large Jewish exile and emigrant population. It had, for instance, also a Tsentral farband fun Poylishe Yidn in Argentine (Central Association of the Polish Jews in Argentina), which (re)published works in the vanishing Yiddish language including Elie Wiesel’s Un di velt hot geshvign (And the World Remained Silent; 1956), the original text of his Night-Trilogy (Night, Dawn, and Day). Hatikva (Hope), a Hungarian language Jewish paper, appeared in the city between 1947 and 1972. We saw that the Salamander poets Tuwim, Wierzin´ski, and Lechon´ adventurously fled to Brazil when the war broke out. They moved on to the US, leaving hardly a trace in Brazil. In contrast, the Romanian S¸tefan Baciu arrived in Rio in 1949 and became an expert of Latin American literature, which led him then to teach in Seattle (1962–64) and Honolulu. Among the few other East-Central European writers who went to Latin America was the Polish Czesław Straszewicz He survived the war in France and England, and was sent in 1944 by the Polish exile government to Montevideo, Uruguay to head a Press Bureau there. His compatriot Teodor Parnicki was similarly made in 1944 Cultural Attaché of the Polish Exile Government in Mexico City, just shortly before Mexico, as most other countries, stopped recognizing this

96

Chapter I

government. Parnicki remained in Mexico City, however, eking out a poor living within the City’s Polish community. He returned to Poland in 1967. Mexico City was first and foremost a refuge for German exiles (e.g., Anna Seghers), but it also accommodated some East-Central European writers, among them the Prague German-Czech reportage-writer Egon Erwin Kisch. Andrzej Bobkowski went to Guatemala after the war, while the Hungarian György Ferdinandy, who left his country in 1956, came to teach in Puerto Rico in 1964.

Palestine/Israel Israel (Palestine) was for the displaced Jews of East-Central Europe not just a place of exile but, above all, an ancestral home to which they returned after many centuries of exile and Diaspora. Their last exile was paradoxically and simultaneously also a homecoming. While this was, indeed, a feeling that many writers shared when they came to Israel from East-Central Europe, appropriating the old/new homeland was often quite difficult for them, not only because of the new and often harsh social conditions, but, above all, because in Israel, as in the other host countries, the dominant language was different from their mother tongue, even if it was the language of their ancestors. In this sense, they did not come home but into an alien linguistic world, which many of them decided not to adopt; they continued to write in Polish, Hungarian, Romanian, or Czech, and, not unrelated to this, they often continued to write obsessively about their experiences in the world they physically left behind. We shall not include here the early Zionist settlers, mainly because they came from Russia and the Ukraine rather than East-Central Europe as we define it here. Some of them escaped pogroms, and should, in this sense, be regarded as exiles. We should mention, specifically, Arthur Koestler, who left Hungary, as we saw, in 1919, and abruptly discontinued his Viennese studies in 1926 to immigrate to Palestine. After three difficult years there, remembered in his autobiographical volume Arrow in the Blue (1952), he returned to Europe as a journalist. Only then did his career as a travel and fiction writer start. A number of East-Central European Jewish writers immigrated in the 1930s to Palestine; for instance Kafka’s friend, the German-Czech Max Brod, the mentioned Polish writer Parnicki, and his compatriot Roman Brandstaetter, who returned, however, to Poland as early as 1948 – after he was baptized in Rome in 1946. Leo Lipski, who arrived in 1945, portrayed in Piotrus´ his

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

97

loneliness in the new country, which he partly compensated, presumably, by maintaining lively contacts with the Polish exile journals in Paris and London. The exodus continued after the war, to what became Israel in 1948. Viktor Fischl arrived from Czechoslovakia that year and assumed the new name Avigdor Daga. He became a diplomat but continued writing. One year after the founding of the Jewish state, two important literary figures came to Israel: the Hungarian Ephraim Kishon [Kishont], who became an internationally celebrated satirist, not unlike his ex-countryman György Mikes in England. The other figure was the Slovak Leopold Lahola, a journalist, playwright, scriptwriter, and director, who made several internationally acclaimed films. After staying for several years in Israel, he moved to various parts of Europe before finally settling in Munich. His compatriot, the Aryan Ladislav Mnˇacˇko, married to a Jewess, undertook in August 1967 a trip to Israel, for which he was expelled from Czechoslovakia. He returned from Israel to Bratislava during the Prague Spring, only to leave again for Austria after the Soviet invasion. Several other writers also stayed only shortly in Israel. The mentioned Romanian surrealist and psychoanalyst Dolfi Trost (Alexandrian 225–26) went from Israel to the US and died in Chicago, whereas his co-author Gherasim Luca arrived in 1952 but moved on to Paris. The Polish Marek Hłasko stayed only very briefly; Zygmunt Bauman, who fled to Israel after he lost in 1968 his university chair in Poland, had a teaching stint in Tel Aviv but then accepted a professorship in Leeds. The Czech Holocaust-survivor Arnosˇt Lustig stayed in Israel only in 1968–69. Among those who remained permanently in Israel, we need to mention the Polish Holocaust survivor Ida Fink, who arrived in 1957 and continued to write Polish novels, exclusively about the Holocaust. Stanisław Wygodski, a survivor of Nazi camps, arrived 1968 to Israel. The Romanian Alexandru Sever was one of those whom Ceaus¸escu released in exchange of a ransom in 1976. Several other Romanian Jewish writers also settled in Israel and continued to write in Romanian.

Works Cited Alexandrian, Sarane. Le surréalisme et le rêve (Surrealism and Dream). Paris: Gallimard, 1974. Anton, Ted. Eros, Magic, & the Murder of Professor Culianu. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1996. Balázs, Béla. Der Geist des Films (The Spirit of Film). Halle: Knapp, 1930. Balázs, Béla. Der sichtbare Mensch, oder die Kultur des Films (The Visible Man, or the Culture of Film). Vienna & Leipzig: Deutsch-Österreichischer Verlag, 1924.

98

Chapter I

Balázs, Béla. “Istra Diaries.” Unpublished manuscripts at the Hungarian Academy of Science. Balázs, Béla. Napló 1919–1922 (Diary 1919–1922). Vol. 2. Budapest: Magveto˝, 1982. Balázs, Béla. “Párizs-e vagy Weimar?” (Paris or Weimar?). Nyugat 7.16–17 (1914): 200–203. Balázs, Béla. Unmögliche Menschen (Impossible People). Frankfurt/M.: Rütten & Loening, 1930. Behring, Eva, Alfrun Kliems, and Hans-Christian Trepte, ed. Grundbegriffe und Autoren ostmitteleuropäischer Exilliteraturen 1945–1989. Ein Beitrag zur Systematisierung und Typologisierung (Basic Concepts and Authors of the East-Central European Exile Literatures, 1945–1989. A Contribution to their Systematization and Typology). Stuttgart: Steiner, 2004. Benn, Gottfried. Gesammelte Werke (Collected Works). 8 vols. Wiesbaden: Limes, 1968. Berberova, Nina. The Italics are Mine. New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1969. Bobkowski, Andrzej. Szkice piórkiem (Sketches with a Quill). Warsaw: Cis, 2007. First ed. Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1957. French trans. Laurence Dyevre as En guerre et en paix journal 1940–1944 (In War and Peace: Journal 1940–1944). Paris: Noir sur blanc, 1991. Bolecki, Włodzimierz. Ptasznik z Wilna. O Józefie Mackiewiczu (Zarys monograficzny) (The BirdCatcher from Vilnius. On Józef Mackiewicz. Attempt at a Monograph). 1991 [under the pseudonym Jerzy Malewski]. Cracow: ARCANA, 2007. Borbándi, Gyula. Magyarok az Angol kertben. A Szabad Európa Rádió története (Hungarians in the English Garden. History of Radio Free Europe). Budapest: Mundus, 2004. Borbándi, Gyula. Nem éltünk hiába. Az Új Látóhatár négy évtizede (We did not Live in Vain. Új Látóhatár’s Four Decennia). Budapest: Európa, 2000. Broniewski, Władisław, Ryszard Stande, and Witold Wandurski. Trzy Salwy (Three Salvos). Warsaw: authors, 1925. Brooks-Rose, Christine. “Exsul.” Exile and Creativity: Singposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances. Ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman. Durham NC: Duke UP, 1998. 9–24. Bryas, Madeleine de. Les Peuples en marche: les migrations politiques et économiques en Europe depuis la guerre mondiale (People on the Move: Political and Economic Migrations in Europe since the World War). Paris: Pedone, 1926. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004. Trans. M. B. DeBevoise from La république mondiale des lettres. Paris: Seuil, 1999. Carlat, Dominique. Ghérasim Luca l’intempestif (Ghérasim Luca, the Untimely). Paris: Corti, 1998. Cioran, E[mil] M. Schimbarea la fat¸a˘ a României (The Transfiguration of Romania). Bucharest: Vremea, 1938. Codrescu, Andrei. In America’s Shoes. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1983. Colin, Amy. Paul Celan. Holograms of Darkness. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1991. Congdon, Lee. Exile and Social Thought: Hungarian Intellectuals in Germany and Austria, 1919–1933. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991. Congdon, Lee. Seeing Red: Hungarian Intellectuals in Exile and the Challenge of Communism. De Kalb, IL: Northern Illinois UP, 2001. Cornis-Pope, Marcel, and John Neubauer, ed. History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe. Three volumes to date. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2004–2007. Crnjanski, Milosˇ. Roman o Londonu (A Novel about London). 1971. Belgrade: Nolit, 1987. Culianu, Ioan Petru. Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. Trans. M. Cook. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1987.

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

99

Culianu, Ioan Petru. “O s¸ansa unica˘.” Lumea libera˘ nr. 105 (October 6, 1990). Unpublished trans. Mac Linscott Ricketts as “A Unique Opportunity.” Courtesy Ted Anton (Chicago). Czarnyszewicz, Florian. Losy pasierbów (Fates of Foster Sons). Paris: Libella, 1958. Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet. Dialogues. Paris: Flammarion, 1977. Dialog und Kontroverse mit Georg Lukács. Methodenstreit deutscher sozialistischer Schriftsteller (Dialogue and Controversy with Georg Lukács. A Methodological Debate of German Socialist Writers). Leipzig: Reclam, 1975. Eliade, Mircea. Ordeal by Labyrinths: Conversations with Claude-Henri Roquet. Trans. Derek Coltman. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. Eliade, Mircea. Pe strada Mântuleasa. Paris: Caietele Inorogului, 1968. Trans. Mary Park Stevenson as The Old Man and the Bureaucrats. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1979. Faludy, George. My Happy Days in Hell. Trans. Kathleen Szász. London: André Deutsch, 1962. Budapest: Forever, 2002. Fejto˝, Ferenc. Budapestto˝l Párizsig; Párizstól Budapestig (From Budapest to Paris; from Paris to Budapest). Budapest: Kossuth, 2007. Feuchtwanger, Lion. Exil. 1948. Berlin: Aufbau, 1957. Gábor, Andor. Die Rechnung und andere Erzählungen aus dem Dritten Reich (The Reckoning, and other Stories from the Third Reich). Moscow: Genossenschaft Ausländischer Arbeiter in der UdSSR, 1936. Gara, László, ed. Anthologie de la poésie hongroise du XII siècle à nos jours (Anthology of Hungarian Poetry from the Twelfth Century until Today). Paris: Seuil, 1962 Gheorghiu, Virgil Constantin. La Vingt cinquième heure (The Twenty-fifth Hour). Paris: Plon, 1956. Trans. Monique Saint-Côme [Monica Lovinescu] from the Romanian. Głowacki, Janusz. Antygona w Nowym Jorku (Antigone in New York). Dialog (Warsaw) 1992, vol. 10. Głowacki, Janusz. Z głowy (Off the Top of My Head). Warsaw: S´wiat Ksia˛z˙ki, 2004. Gombrowicz, Witold. Dziennik (Diary). 3 vols. Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1971. Grusˇa, Jirˇí. Dotazník, aneb Modlitba za jedno meˇsto prˇítele. Toronto: Sixty-Eight Publishers, 1978. Trans. Peter Kussi as The Questionnaire. Prayer for a Town and a Friend. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1982. Grynberg, Henryk. “We, the Jews of Dobre.” Judaism 53/209–10 (Winter/Spring 2004): 126–35. Grimm, Reinhold. “Innere Emigration als Lebensform” (Inner Emigration as a Way of Life). Exil und innere Emigration (Exile and Inner Emigration). Ed. Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand. Frankfurt/M.: Athenäum, 1972. 31–73. Halász, Péter. Második Avenue (Second Avenue). Toronto: Pannonia, 1967. Havlícˇek, Karel. Tyrolské elegie (Tyrolean Elegies). 1861. Prague: Havelka, 1921. Hay, Julius. Geboren 1900. Erinnerungen (Born in 1900. Recollections). Reinbek bei Hamburg: Wegner, 1971. Hay, Julius. Gott, Kaiser, Bauer (God, Emperor, Peasant). Zurich: Oprecht & Helbling, 1935. Hay, Julius. Haben (Have). Pref. Lion Feuchtwanger. Moscow: Verlagsgenossenschaft Ausländischer Arbeiter in der UdSSR, 1938. Heliade Ra˘dulescu, Ion. Memoires sur l’histoire de la régénération roumaine ou sur les événements de 1848 accomplis en Valachie (Memories of the History of the Romanian Regeneration; or, On the Events that Occurred in Walachia in 1848). Paris: Librairie de la propagande démocratique et sociale européenne, 1851. Herling-Grudzin´ski, Gustaw. A World Apart. London: Heinemann, 1986. Trans. Joseph Marek of the Polish Inny ´swiat. London: Gryf, 1953.

100

Chapter I

Hoffman, Eva. Lost in Translation. A Life in a New Language. 1989. New York etc.: Penguin, 1990. Horia, Vintila˘. Dieu est né en exil. Pref. Daniel-Rops. Paris: Fayard, 1960. Trans. A. Lytton Sells as God Was Born in Exile: Ovid’s Memoirs at Tomis. London: Allen & Unwin, 1961. Ignotus, Pál. Börtönnaplóm: próza dalban elbeszélve. Munich: Látóhatár, 1957. Trans. as Political Prisoner. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959. Illés, Béla. Ég a Tisza (The Tisza Burns). Foreword Béla Kun. Moscow: Publisher of Foreign Workers living in the Soviet Union, 1930 [1933!]. Budapest: Szépirodalmi, 1972. Illés, Endre. “Literaturkritik in der moskauer ungarischen Zeitschrift Új Hang” (Literary Criticism in the Moscow Hungarian Journal ‘Új Hang’). Wir Stürmen (We Attack). Ed. Miklós Szabolcsi. Budapest: Akadémiai, 1977. Ioanid, Ion. I˘nchisoarea noastra˘ cea de toate zilele (Our Everyday Jail). 5 vols. Bucharest: Albatros, 1991–96. Ionesco, Eugène. La Cantatrice chauve (The Bald Soprano). First performance 1950. Paris: Gallimard, 1972. Ionesco, Eugène. Le Rhinocéros. Paris: Gallimard, 1959. Isou, Isidore. Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et à une nouvelle musique (Introduction to a New Poetry and a New Music). Paris: Gallimard, 1947. Jasien´ski, Bruno. Je brûle Paris. Paris: Flammarion, 1929. Jelen´ski, Konstanty Aleksander. Anthologie de la poésie polonaise (Anthology of Polish Poetry). Paris: Seuil, 1965. Karádi, Éva. “A Lukács-kör Bécsben.” Magyar Filozófiai Szemle 31.3 (1987): 601–611. Karátson, Endre. Otthonok (Homes). 2 vols. Pécs: Jelenkor, 2007. Kassák, Lajos. “A ló meghal, a madarak kirepülnek” (The Horse Dies the Birds Fly Away). mek.oszk.hu/01400/01446/01446.htm Kertész, Imre. “Das eigene Land” (Homeland). Sinn und Form 49 (1997): 111–21. Kesseru˝, Judit. “Szabadságom lett a börtönöm”: az argentínai magyar emigráció története, 1948–1968. (My Freedom Became my Jail. History of the Argentinian Hungarian Emigration 1948–1968) Budapest: A Magyar Nyelv és Kultúra Nemzetközi Társasága, 2003. Kiss, Csaba G. “Central European Writers about Central Europe: Introduction to a NonExistent Book of Readings.” Schöpflin and Wood 125–36. Kliems, Alfrun. “Der Dissens und seine Literatur. Die kulturelle Resistenz im Inland.” Behring, et al. 205–85. Kliems, Alfrun. Im ‘Stummland.’ Zum Exilwerk von Libusˇe Moníková, Jirˇí Grusˇa und Ota Filip. Frankfurt/M.: Lang, 2002. Kodály, Zoltán.. Czinka Panna balladája. Libretto Béla Balázs. First night March 15, 1948. Koestler, Arthur. Arrival and Departure. New York: Macmillan, 1943. Koestler, Arthur. Arrow in the Blue. An Autobiography. London: Collins. 1952. Kolakowski, Leszek. “In Praise of Exile.” Robinson 188–92. Kott, Jan. Szekspir wspolczesny (Shakespeare our Contemporary). Warsaw: PIW, 1965. Kristof, Agota. La prevue (The Proof). Paris: Seuil, 1988. Kristof, Agota. Le grand cahier (The Notebook). Paris: Seuil, 1986. Kristof, Agota. Le troisième mensonge (The Third Lie). Paris: Seuil, 1991. Krlezˇa, Miroslav. Izlet u Rusiju (An Excursion to Russia). 1926. Sarajevo: Zdravko Colic´, 1973. Kundera, Milan. Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí. Toronto: Sixty-Eight Publishers, 1981. Trans Michael Henry Heim as The Unbearable Lightness of Being. New York: Harper & Row, 1984. Lengyel, József. Noteszeibo˝l 1955–1975 (From His Notebooks 1955–1975). Budapest: Magveto˝, 1989.

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

101

Lengyel József. Visegrádi utca (Visegrádi Street). Pref. Béla Kun (dated Moscow, January 16, 1932). Budapest: Kossuth, 1957. Lipski, Leo. Piotrus´. Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1960. Loewy, Hanno. Béla Balázs – Märchen, Ritual und Film. Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2003. Luca, Gherasim. Inventatorul iubirii, urmat de Parcurg imposibilul s¸i de Moartea moarta (The Inventor of Love, followed by I Roam the Impossible, and The Death of Death). Bucharest: Editura Negarea Negat¸iei, 1945. Luca, Gherasim. Línventeur de l’amour suivi de La Mort morte (The Inventor of Love; The Death of Death). Paris: Corti, 1994. Luca, Gherasim, and D. Trost. Dialectique de la dialectique. Message adressé au mouvement surrealiste internationale (The Dialectic of Dialectic. Message Addressed to the International Surrealist Movement). 1945. Mincu, Marin. Avangarda Literara˘ româneasca˘ (Romanian Literary Avant-garde). Bucharest: Minerva, 1983. 625–36. Lukács, Georg. Die Theorie des Romans (Theory of the Novel). 1916. Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1963. Lukács, György. Írástudók felelo˝ssége (Responsibility of the Clerks). Moscow: Publishing House for Foreign Literature, 1944. Lukács, Georg. Record of a Life. An Autobiographical Sketch. Ed. István Eörsi, trans. Rodney Livingstone. London: Verso, 1983. Maciejewska, Irena, ed. & introd. Me˛czen´stwo i zagłada Z˙ydów w zapisach literatury polskiej (Martyrdom and Annihilation of Jews in Polish Literary Works). Warsaw: Krajowa Agencja Wydawnicza, 1988. Mackiewicz, Józef. Sieg der Provokation: die Phasen der Entwicklung des Kommunismus in Russland und Polen und die Frage der deutsch-polnischen Beziehungen (The Victory of Provocation: Phases in the Development of Communism in Russia and Poland, and the Question of German-Polish Relations). Trans. Wolfgang Dohrmann and Artur Roland from the Polish. Munich: Korn, 1964. Mackiewicz, Joseph. The Katyn Wood Murders. Forew. Arthur Bliss Lane. London: Hollis & Carter, 1951. Trans. of Katyn – ungesöhntes Verbrechen. Zürich: Thomas, 1949. Mackiewicz, Josef. “Widziałem na własne oczy” (I Saw it with my own Eyes). Goniec Codzienny (Wilno) no. 577 ( June 1943). Rpt. in Bolecki 240–51. Manea, Norman. The Hooligan’s Return: A Memoir. Trans. Angela Jianu. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2003. Mann, Thomas. Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus (The Making of ‘Doctor Faustus’). Amsterdam: Bermann Fischer, 1949. Márai, Sándor. Egy polgár vallomásai (Confessions of a Citoyen). Budapest: Pantheon, 1934. Márai, Sándor. Ítélet Canudosban ( Judgment in Canudos). Munich: Újváry “Griff,” 1981. First ed. Toronto: Vörösváry-Weller, 1970. Márai, Sándor. Napló (1958–1967) (Diary 1958–1967). Munich: Újváry “Griff,” 1977. First ed. author, 1968. Márai, Sándor. San Gennaro vére (Saint Gennaro’s Blood). Munich: Újváry “Griff,” 1977. First ed. in German as Das Wunder des San Gennaro, 1957. First Hungarian ed. author, 1965. Marrus, Michael. The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford UP, 1985. Mikes, Kelemen. Törökországi levelek (Letters from Turkey). Ed. István Kultsár. Szombathely: n.p., 1794. Törökországi levelek és Misszilis levelek (Letters from Turkey and Fictional Letters). Ed. Lajos Hopp. Budapest: Akadémiai, 1966.

102

Chapter I

Miłosz, Czesław. Poezje (Poems). Vol. 3. Paris: Institut Literacki, 1982. Miłosz, Czesław. The Captive Mind. 1953. Trans. Jane Zielonko. London: Secker & Warburg, 1990. Miłosz, Czesław. The History of Polish Literature. 2nd. ed. Berkeley etc: U of California P, 1983. Moníková, Libusˇe. Die Fassade: M.N.O.P.Q. Munich: Hanser, 1987. Trans. John Woods as The Façade: M.N.O.P.Q. New York: Knopf, 1991. Trans. Zbyne˘k Petrácˇek as Fasáda. Toronto: Sixty-Eight Publishers, 1991. Moníková, Libusˇe. Eine Schädigung (A Damage). Berlin: Rotbuch, 1981. Müller, Miklós. “Ervin Bauer (1890–1938), a Martyr of Science.” The Hungarian Quarterly 46 (2005): 123–31. Novák, Jan. The Willys Dream Kit. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985. Miliónovy´ jeep. Trans. Jaroslav Korˇán. Postscript Václav Havel. Toronto: Sixty-Eight Publishers, 1989. Nyíro˝, József. A zöld csillag (The Green Star). Youngstown: Katolikus Magyarok Vasárnapja, 1950. Papanace, Constantin. Martiri legionari, evocari (Legionnary Martyrs Remembered). Rome: Editura˘ “Armatolii,” 1952. Pfeffer, Anke. “Die Zeitschrift RSR und ihre Funktionen im Exil” (The Journal RSR and its Functions in Exile). Rumänische Exilliteratur 1945–1989 und ihre Integration heute (Romanian Exile Literature 1945–1989 and its Integration Today). Munich: Südosteuropa-Gesellschaft, 1999. 81–89. Piotrowski, Tadeusz. Poland’s Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration with Occupying Forces and Genocide in the Second Republic, 1918–1947. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998. Puddington, Arch. Broadcasting Freedom. The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2000. Raileanu, Petre. Gherasim Luca. Paris: Oxus, 2004. Robinson, Marc, ed. Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile. Winchester, MA: Faber and Faber, 1994. Ronnett, Alexander E. Romanian Nationalism: the Legionary Movement. Trans. from the Romanian Vasile C. Barsan. Chicago: Loyola UP, 1974. 2nd ed. Chicago: Romanian-American National Congress, 1995. Russo, Alecu. Cântarea României (Song of Romania). 1855. Ed. and pref. Petre Hanes¸. Bucharest: Minerva, 1900. Said, Edward W. “Reflections on Exile.” 1984. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000. 173–86. Salivarová, Zdena. Hnu˚j zemeˇ (Manure of the Earth). Toronto: Sixty-Eight Publishers, 1994. Salivarová, Zdena. Honzlová. Toronto: Sixty-Eight Publishers, 1973. Saunders, Frances Stonor. Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War. London: Granta, 2000. Schöpflin, George, and Nancy Wood, ed. In Search of Central Europe. Oxford: Polity P, 1989. Seghers, Anna. Transit. Berlin: Aufbau, 1985. Shore, Marci. Caviar and Ashes. A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918–1968. New Haven: Yale UP, 2006. Sinkó, Ervin. “Az út” (The Road). Az út. Naplók 1916–1939. (The Road. Diaries 1916–1939). Budapest: Akadémiai, 1990. 64–152. Sinkó, Ervin. Optimisták: Történelmi regény 1918/19-bo˝l (Optimists: Historical Novel from 1918/19). 2 vols. 1953–55. Novi Sad: Forum, 1965. Budapest: Magveto˝, 1979.

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

103

Sinkó, Ervin. Egy regény regénye. Moszkvai naplójegyzetek 1935–1937 (Novel of a Novel. Moscow Diary Notes 1935–1937). First Croatian ed. 1955. First Hungarian ed. 1961. Ed. István Bosnyák. 2nd ed. Novi Sad [Újvidék]: Forum, 1985. Sˇkvorecky´, Josef. The Engineer of Human Souls. Trans. Paul Wilson. New York: Knopf, 1984. Czech original: Prˇíbeh inzˇenyra lidsky´ch dusˇí. Toronto: Sixty-Eight Publishers, 1985. Sˇkvoreckıy´, Josef. Dveˇ legendy (Two Legends). Toronto: Sixty-Eight Publishers, 1982. Sˇkvoreckıy´, Josef. Mirákl (Miracle). 2 vols. Toronto: Sixty-Eight Publishers, 1972. Sˇkvoreckıy´, Josef. Talkin’ Moscow Blues. Ed. Sam Solecki. New York: Ecco, 1988. Sˇkvoreckıy´, Josef. Tankovy´ prapor (The Tank Corps). Toronto: Sixty-Eight Publishers, 1980. Sˇkvoreckıy´, Josef. Zbabeˇlci (The Cowards). Prague: Cˇeskoslovensky´ spisovatel, 1964. Słonimski, Antoni. Moja podróz do Rosji (My Trip to Russia). 1932. Warsaw: Literackie Towarszystwo Wydawnicze, 1997. Starn, Randolph. Contrary Commonwealth. The Theme of Exile in Medieval and Renaissance Italy. Berkeley etc.: U of California P, 1982. Szegedy-Maszák, Mihály. “The Introduction of Communist Censorship in Hungary: 1945–49.” History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe. Ed. Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer. Vol. 3. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2007. 114–25. Ugresˇic´, Dubravka. “The Writer in Exile.” Thank You for Not Reading. Trans. Cecilia Hawkesworth. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive P, 2003. Vogel, David. Married Life. New York: Grove P, 1989. Trans. Dalya Bilu from the Hebrew Haye nis´u#im. 3 vols. Tel Aviv, 1929–30. ˙ Wagner, Richard. “Die Aktionsgruppe Banat. Versuch einer Selbstdarstellung” (The Action Group Banat. Attempt at a Self-representation). Nachruf auf die Rumäniendeutsche Literatur (Obituary for the Romanian German Literature). Ed. Wilhelm Solms. Marburg: Hitzeroth, 1990. 121–29. Wagner, Richard. “Ein Schriftsteller im kalten Krieg?” (A Writer in the Cold War?). Neue Zürcher Zeitung April 2, 2007. English trans. available on the internet at signandsight.com on April 30, 2007) Wan´kowicz, Melchior. Bitwa o Monte Cassino (The Battle of Monte Cassino). 3 vols. Rome: Oddz. Kultury i Prasy 2 Polskiego Korpusu, 1945–47. Wat, Aleksander. My Century. The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual. Foreword Czesław Miłosz. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Ed. & trans. Richard Lourie from the Polish Mój Wiek. London: Book Fund, 1977. Waz˙yk, Adam. “Poemat dla dorosłych” (A Poem for Adults). Nowa Kultura, nr. 34 (August 21, 1955). Weber, Eugen. “The Men of the Archangel.” Journal of Contemporary History 1.1 (1966): 101–126. Wiesel, Elie. Un di velt hot geshvign (And the World Remained Silent). Buenos Aires: Tsentral-Farband fun Poylische Yidn in Argentine, 1956. Zolberg, Aristide R., Astri Suhrke, and Sergio Aguayo. Escape from Violence. Conflict and the Refugee Crisis in the Developing World. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989. Zsuffa, Joseph. Béla Balázs. The Man and the Artist. Berkeley: U of California P, 1987.

104

Chapter I

Chapter II Exile Cultures Abroad: Publishing Ventures, Exiles Associations, and Audiences

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

107

Introduction Exile is generally regarded as a solitary experience. Yet it has become increasingly also a social one, inasmuch as the growing number of exiles and émigrés tended to advance the formation of national associations, even governments, in exile, and they constituted a readership, which, in turn, made the publication of newspapers, journals, and books possible – even if only on a limited scale. The following chapter brings together essays on some of the most eminent literary journals and associations of exile. What we offer is, of course, only the tip of an iceberg, whose underwater bulk contains thousands of less important and often ephemeral publications, which may have had, nevertheless, their own temporal and local impacts at one point. Since we do not aspire to produce an encyclopedia or a lexicon, we refrain from burdening our volume with empty lists of names and titles. Nevertheless, readers will find shorter vignettes on various publishers and publications throughout the articles in this and other sections. Though writers in exile often utter pious words about the unity of their national literatures, the latter were, unfortunately, divided, not only into “home” and “exile” branches, but also into exile factions fighting each other. The sad truth is that ideological and political differences deeply divided the exile publications of each nation, and cooperation between journals of different nations seldom occurred, even if – as in the case of Kultura, Irodalmi Újság, and Sveˇdectví – the editors were “around the corner” from each other, and their outlook was liberal. Camelia Craˇciun’s article on the radio broadcasts of Monica Lovinescu concerns a new medium that was able to reach the home audience in many respects better. Waves in the ether could, in spite of jamming, cross borders much more easily than the printed word. The radio already served effectively during the war against Nazi Germany (starting October 1940, Thomas Mann, for one, delivered fifty-five radio addresses to the German people over the BBC). However, cultural and political broadcasting really came into its own during the Cold War, when the BBC, Radio Paris, Radio Free Europe, the Voice of America, and other radio stations started to broadcast programs for the countries behind the Iron Curtain. These programs involved a broad

108

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

spectrum of writers, and as a result, internal political frictions, as well as frictions with the controlling agencies, were frequent. Still, income from these programs provided a means of survival for many deserving writers. By the 1990s, the time of the ex-Yugoslavia wars, more personalized two-way modes of communications developed via internet, e-mail, and, most recently, blogging.

In the Vacuum of Exile (Éva Forgács)

109

In the Vacuum of Exile: The Hungarian Activists in Vienna 1919–1926 Éva Forgács

Among the many waves of exile throughout Hungarian history probably the one following the defeat of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919 drained Hungarian art and culture most. It was preceded by decades of peace, economic growth, and cultural prosperity before World War I, and a multi-faceted development of the arts, which also laid the foundations of Modernism. The 1919–20 exile and emigration of a great number of Hungarian artists, philosophers, writers, emerging filmmakers, and intellectuals put an abrupt end to the ongoing discourses and debates between the many different and often conflicting views and tendencies. One of these was the budding avant-garde’s conflict with the leading modernist forum, the journal Nyugat (1908–41). The sharp exchange between the proletarian free-verse poet Lajos Kassák and the erudite poet Mihály Babits in 1916 was an unusually articulate verbal duel about just how much radicalism and destruction of the classical forms could be accepted or tolerated in modern Hungarian poetry (see Forgács, “Dada in Hungary” esp. 66–67). The continuation of this debate would have certainly helped to hammer out opposing but equally relevant views on poetic forms and modernity in Hungarian literature. The post-1919 decimation of Hungarian Modernism put an end to all such debates, and the prospect of a multifaceted and multi-polar new culture of political and stylistic diversity with ongoing dialogues and debates between the many different groups and voices faded away. By the time some of the exiles returned to Hungary after a 1926 general amnesty, they found that hardly any room was left for the kind of avant-garde practices they had known prior to August 1919. Shaken by World War I, the ensuing October 1918 revolution, the inadequacy of Count Mihály Károlyi’s coalition government that emerged out of that revolution, and driven by a desire for social justice, almost the entire Hungarian intelligentsia participated is some way in the Commune. Few of them became communists by making a full ideological commitment like philosopher György [Georg] Lukács who converted to Bolshevism at the end of 1918, and served as Vice Commissar of Public Education during the Com-

110

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

mune, a position so that Lukács became de facto the Commissar (Congdon, 36). Many were self-conscious socialists like Lajos Kassák and most of his group; others were liberals as Oszkár Jászi and his circle around the periodical Huszadik Század (Twentieth Century), championing sociology; Jászi had reservations with regard to the communist dictatorship but felt that the time for action rather than theorizing had come. Many young artists, poets, and thinkers had not been committed to any political party or social organization, but enthusiastically plunged in various educational activities in order to be of use to the poor. In 1919 the word ‘Communist’ had no Stalinist connotations, as it resonated positively with the young idealists and radicals in post-WorldWar-I Budapest. Some of the artists exhibited their paintings during the Commune and a few of them designed political posters. Such activities stamped them as dangerous communists or fellow travelers in the eyes of the retaliating regime of Admiral Horthy, and they had to leave the country for fear of imprisonment or worse. In the wake of the Commune’s defeat, special commandos were sent out to sift through villages and farms to find communists in the hiding. Some of those who emigrated did not have to fear punishment, but simply did not wish to live under the new rule, which promised to eradicate even the vestiges of socialist and communist ideas, and free thinking in general. Many had to run for their lives in disguise (as poet Béla Balázs who wore a fake moustache), or smuggle themselves out under the protection of the night, as Kassák. Vienna was the first stop for all émigrés. Many traveled further West, to the cosmopolitan cultural metropolis Berlin where a sizeable Hungarian group of artists and art critics settled, or went later on to London (as painter and sculptor László Péri did, after his Berlin years), Amsterdam (where painter Dezso˝ Korniss spent several years), Moscow (where former Ma members Béla Uitz, János Mácza, Sándor Barta, and Erzsi Újvári immigrated and a contingent of Hungarian architects including István Sebo˝k and Tibor Weiner), and the United States (where, among others, former Bauhaus members Marcel Breuer, Andor Weininger, László Moholy-Nagy ended up). In the 1920s and the early 30s about thirty Hungarian-language periodicals were published in Vienna (some of them short-lived), reflecting the structure of the pre-1919 intellectual and political scene in Hungary (Deréky, “Vienna” 166). Émigrés in Vienna did not feel completely safe. They feared the agents of the Hungarian secret service and wondered whether the Austrian police protected them or cooperated with the Hungarian authorities. Hence they tried to keep a low profile. In December 1919 Balázs noted that his friend Lukács “looked heart wrenching. His face sunken, he is pale, nervous and sad. He is being watched and followed in the streets; he walks around with a gun in his

In the Vacuum of Exile (Éva Forgács)

111

pocket because he has good reason to fear that he might get kidnapped. In Budapest he is accused of instigating murder, on nine counts” (entry on December 4, 1919; Napló 2: 358–59). Balázs himself moved to Schloss Waisnix. He did not fear the kind of danger Lukács was in, but reflected on his new situation in terms of having become an obvious outsider, as if making his previously covered outsider position legitimate: “The question is this: have I been exiled when I ran abroad, or have I arrived home? […] The “aura of the far-away,” the feeling of foreignness gnawed at me already in my childhood like some kind of reversed home-sickness. … From the Hungarian foreignness where I was not understood and was scorned as a stranger I have, by all means, come home to be among people who understand and recognize me instantly. Still, what hurts?” (Napló 2: 358–59). Balázs’s musings point to one of the central issues of the post-1919 Hungarian exile: most of the émigrés had ethnic, religious, or class backgrounds that had set them apart of what had been considered mainstream Hungarian culture for at least a decade or a decade and a half before they actually left Hungary. But they were the emerging intellectuals. The group around Lukács and Balázs included mostly upper class Jews who wanted to raise Hungarian culture to a higher level, whereas the members of Kassák’s circle were mostly working class or lower middle class poets and artists, some of them also of Jewish background, who gave voice to a segment of the population that had not appeared on the intellectual scene before. Their exodus deprived Hungary of most of the next generation progressive modernists. In his Weimar Culture, the Outsider as Insider Peter Gay describes the Weimar Republic as a culture of outsiders, either because the prominent representatives of the culture were ethnically not German or because their views differed from the traditional, mainstream majority outlook. The outsider/insider dichotomy is particularly suitable because it reflects the constantly shifting criteria of both: the nation is a community that is the arbiter of its own definition and it creates an ever-changing consensus on who is in and who is not. In an age of nation-states, political views and views on a nation or nationalism in general were hardly separable, particularly at the time of World War I, when nations were pitted against nations and an internationalist attitude was tantamount to disloyalty to everything the word fatherland entailed. The emotional impact of patriotism was not only high – it was exalted to an ethical standard that denied legitimacy to groups and individuals who were not considered a genuine, historic part of the nation or who proved themselves unpatriotic by showing pacifism and internationalism. The artists and intellectuals who went into exile after the August 1919 defeat of the Hungarian Commune were also outsiders in Peter Gay’s use of the

112

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

term. They were Jews or socialists and/or communists coming from the working class, who sought to establish an international network of solidarity and a network with artists and thinkers who occupied similar outsider positions in their respective countries. The international republic of the avantgarde was, with few exceptions like the Bauhaus in Germany, an extremely thin network of outsiders that most of the insiders of the European national cultures did not even notice, or dismissed as extravagant and insignificant. Lukács and his friends, mostly assimilated Budapest Jews, formed in 1915 the Sunday Circle, a loose, by invitation-only group consisting of idealists seeking to graft German idealism and philosophical thinking onto Hungarian culture. Already their earliest publications were criticized for cultivating abstract thinking in the German and Viennese tradition, which was considered alien to Hungarian clarity and tenacity. They were also reproached for not using correct Hungarian style and grammar. Reviewing Lukács’s volume of essays A lélek és a formák (The Soul and the Forms; 1910) Elemér Kutasi wrote in the Huszadik Század: “One would never have thought that in our Hungarian language, a language made for concrete tangibility, the unambiguous, crystal-clear language of János Arany, it was possible to write a book so lost in obscure incomprehensibility, so inflated with tortuous, bloodless abstractions as that of György Lukács.” (qtd. in Congdon, Lukács 53.) The leading poet and essay writer Mihály Babits, who was also the highest authority in literary criticism, remarked in his review of the book that Lukács wrote “with the sense of superiority of an author who does not write for everyone but for the small group of the likeminded only […] introducing writers who are completely unknown to the Hungarian public” (Babits 1563). He praised the author for the subtlety of his ideas, but pointed out that Lukács’s orientation and education was typically German, or rather Viennese: “the writers he discusses are […] either Viennese or presently fashionable in Vienna. […] And finally the style – as subtle, as obscure, as abstract, and as German as the whole book” (Babits 1564). As elsewhere in Hungarian art and literary criticism, “fashionable” has a derogative sense here, meaning something superficial, cosmopolitan, and hype. This rejection touched sensitive chords, since Lukács and his friends were good Bildungsbürger, dedicated to fostering a great Hungarian cultural Renaissance, of which they were intent to be not only part but founders and leaders. Lukács responded to Babits by justifying the existence of a philosophical culture that had had no tradition in Hungary; for its development, he said, efforts had to be made not only by the authors, but also by the readers. In the subsequent exchange, Babits accepted this but insisted that Lukács’s obscurity

In the Vacuum of Exile (Éva Forgács)

113

was more a matter of bad style than philosophical profundity (Congdon, Lukács 53 and 54). In fact, Lukács and his friend Béla Balázs were not just bilingual: since their mothers came from Vienna and Germany respectively, their mother tongue was, strictly speaking, German. They read and wrote in German as fluently as in Hungarian. Both of them attended the private seminar of the sociologist Georg Simmel in Berlin in the early 1910s, and though they were rooted in Budapest, expecting to contribute to a great new Hungarian culture, they cultivated academic and other relationships in Austria and Germany, anticipating an international career. Lukács spent a long time in Heidelberg and expected to get a professorship at the University there. Though he lived in Budapest, he was somewhat isolated from the most important forums of intellectual life in his native city. He had a precarious relationship with the French-oriented Nyugat (although he occasionally published in it) because of his preference for the German cultural tradition. He also disagreed with the other important venue, the Huszadik Század, because their positivism was opposed to German metaphysical thinking. Lajos Kassák, the leading figure of the emerging Hungarian avant-garde, also operated in isolation from the main forums of Hungarian cultural life, albeit for different reasons. Kassák had come from a poor family in Érsekújvár (now Nové Zámky, Slovakia). He had to work very hard from his earliest childhood to support himself and to acquire every bit of his knowledge. He never forgot what his underprivileged youth meant. In a 1954 letter to the writer Tibor Déry (a rather belated response to Déry’s open letter to him in 1937) he still felt compelled to mention that he had always suffered for “not having had at home an education ‘for free’” (Déry 580 quotes almost all of Kassák’s letter). He moved to Budapest at a young age, joined the Socialist Party, and became an activist. He traveled on foot and penniless as far as Paris and Brussels; he wrote poetry and befriended one of the editors of Nyugat, Erno˝ Osvát. The independent and idiosyncratic Kassák did not fit into any existing category. He was a socialist who disagreed with the Socialist Party because of its support of the War, and he held jobs during the Hungarian Commune but strongly disagreed with the Muscovite communist leaders (“Levél Kun Bélának”). Kassák argued that he was rooted in the Hungarian Social Democratic Party and movement, while the Commune’s leader, Kun, had lived in Russia and represented a radicalism that appeared foreign to him. In his poetry he used a new kind of idiosyncratic expressive language that had no precedent in either literary Hungarian or the vernacular (Deréky, Vasbetontorony 32–34). When he launched in 1915 his first periodical, A Tett (The Action), he recruited a small group of poets and writers, and looked at German

114

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

examples and models that were closest to him, such as the anti-war Franz Pfemfert, editor of Die Aktion in Berlin, and the internationalist Herwarth Walden, editor and organizer of the gallery and publishing house Der Sturm. This virtual connection, which soon materialized when Kassák started to sell in his Budapest gallery the journal and the books published by Der Sturm, demonstrated the precarious position of the avant-gardes all over Europe, and indicated their distance from the views and attitudes of the majority in their respective countries. These progressive groups backed each other with their mutual contacts, exchanged publishing material and information, and trusted that the better society they hoped for would materialize. The pre-World War I. progressive Hungarian art world was, like the new literature, divided along the fault line between the post-impressionist Nyolcak (The Eight) group and the expressionist Activists ( János Mattis-Teutsch, János Schadl, József Nemes-Lampérth, Béla Uitz, etc.). By the time the art of the Nyolcak was just gaining acceptance amidst a wider audience and supported by a new generation of art critics, the Kassák-led Activists came up with a much more radical and, during the war time, politically heavily charged anti-war Expressionism. Hungarian culture was near to becoming multilayered, accepting, if reluctantly, the parallel existence of very different concepts, trends, political outlooks, and generational specifics in art, literature, thinking, and political views. However, it was then hit by the massive wave of emigration after August 1919. Interwar Vienna is often described as a boring, provincial outpost, a backwater that one had to leave behind for the cosmopolitan metropolis Berlin. This was not quite the case though. Vienna, the capital of a very conservative country, was governed by Social Democrats, who unfailingly won the elections from 1919 onwards and kept modernity and a rich cultural life alive. As historian Edward Timms writes: “the intellectual climate in Red Vienna […] during the 1920s can be pictured as a network of circles suspended between the competing ideological poles” of socialist-democratic and Christian-socialist views (105). It was a city of coffee houses, publishing hoses, music, criticism, art, and grand social life that few emigrants could, however, penetrate, because lack of connections or sophistication excluded them from the literary and musical salons of the Vienna elite, while being foreigners and modernist-progressives excluded them from the conservative-nationalist and the Pan-German circles. Each Hungarian group of intellectuals had its headquarters in a different Vienna café. Lukács, Balázs, and their old Sunday Circle friends Anna Lesznai and Tibor Gergely, met in the Atlantis Café on Schwarzenberg Platz or the

In the Vacuum of Exile (Éva Forgács)

115

Schloss Café near Park Schönbrunn, occasionally joined by the communist Jeno˝ Landler, former General of the Hungarian Commune’s Red Army, József Révai, former editor of the Commune’s Red Newspaper, the writer Tibor Déry, as well as by the Austrian writer Maria Lazar and the composer Hanns Eisler (Congdon, Exile 52). Aladár Komját and Béla Uitz, the communist editors of Egység, met in the Café Beethoven and the Schlösselhof Café, which were headquarters of an international leftist crowd. The publishers of the Bécsi Magyar Újság, Andor Németh, Ervin Sinkó, Oszkár Jászi, and their liberal friends also went to the Atlantis Café, although the communists and the liberals did not talk to each other. Kassák’s Ma circle, which was to split, met Wednesday afternoons in the Colosseum Café on the corner of the Währinger Strasse and Nussdorfer Strasse (Vajda 31–41). This culture of emigration was full of tensions and it split not only between Lukács’s circle and Jászi, but also between Lukács and the Kassák group. Their deep mutual personal dislike and conceptual difference originated from their different outlooks, esthetics, and cultures. Lukács and Balázs were somewhat better connected and better received by the local Viennese and the German culture than most other Hungarian contingents. In the Café Stöckl they had a chance to meet Robert Musil, Alban Berg, and other prominent Viennese intellectuals and artists (Timms 111; Congdon, Exile 101). They wrote for the Viennese, and on occasion, the Berlin left wing press. While in Vienna, Lukács wrote History and Class Consciousness, which was published by the communist Malik Verlag in Berlin in 1923, and Balázs, less committed to politics, wrote there his successful book on cinema, Der sichtbare Mensch (The Visible Man). Film director Alexander Korda and painter Aurél Bernáth also lived in Vienna exile for some time: the painters József Nemes-Lampérth and László Moholy-Nagy briefly passed through the city. In Vienna, Kassák struggled hard to keep his journal Ma going. He and his group – the painter Béla Uitz, the writers Sándor Barta, Andor Simon, the painter Sándor Bortnyik, the poet Erzsi Újvári (Barta’s wife and Kassák’s sister), translator Endre Gáspár and others – had to start from scratch. They were penniless. Some money came from donations, but most of it was earned by the self-sacrificing work of Kassák’s wife, performer and actress Jolán Simon, who slaved as a seamstress and did other lowly jobs. Amazingly, however, Kassák was able to bring out the first, elegantly printed double issue of the Viennese Ma as early as Mayday 1920. He opened the new volume with a bilingual appeal, “An die Künstler aller Länder” (To the Artists of all Countries), expressing his faith in a world revolution and the collective individual, which remained the eternal object of desire and struggle. On the back cover, the entire group signed as the “Hungar-

116

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

ian Activists” a short communiqué in which they stated that the new Christian-conservative regime in Hungary “cannot beat the new culture to death” and that writers and poets will keep on expressing themselves even if they have to use pseudonyms or fictitious initials as pen-names. They also announced the establishment of an account and requested donations. The next issue included Kassák’s “Letter to the Young Workers in Hungary!” a passionate but also strategic manifesto addressed to the “clearheaded twenty-year-old” who alone are entitled to practice the “dictatorship of the idea.” Kassák explained that “proletarian dictatorship is incompatible with a workers’ democracy,” and he put his hope in the young generation that, he believed, was the sole carrier of the eternal revolution. These emotionally charged but half-baked ideas were expressed in a heated expressionist language of pathos, political demagogy, and poetry. The programmatic articles, above all those of János Mácza on the proletarian theater (“Részlet” and “Színpad”), appeared to deny the defeat of the revolution and outlined a cultural life during a coming proletarian dictatorship. Many literary pieces of the first Vienna issues of Ma carried expressionist accounts of the revolution, based on memory and imagination. Kassák’s 1919 Éposz (The Epic of 1919), Sándor Barta’s Akasztott ember (Hanged Man), Erzsi Ujvári’s Próza 17 (Prose 17), and other pieces conveyed a utopian revolutionary faith and a desperate compassion with those who had been brutally victimized back in Hungary. The most significant poem among these was Kassák’s Máglyák énekelnek (The Bonfires Are Singing), which was also published in a volume of poems with the same title. This book was smuggled to Budapest by Jolán Simon on one of her clandestine trips, and reviewed in Nyugat by Lo˝rinc Szabó, in a tone that differed greatly from the one previously used with regard to Kassák, who occasionally published in Nyugat but obviously did not belong to its core authors. Though neither Kassák’s radical, expressive language nor his political views were acceptable for Szabó, he pointed out that “this book will not be banned for ever in Hungary,” and he highly praised its vitality. It appears that the changed political and cultural situation in Hungary and the dominant arch-conservatism of the 1920s sensitized Szabó to alternative voices, including the avant-garde. While he kept repeating that he had never liked Kassák’s writing and political views, he now he acknowledged that Kassák’s unusual book, which he called a piece of “prose, consisting of 100 or 200 poems” was a gigantic effort to embrace the whole flow of life, including harshness, filth, and a rough sense of beauty. For this, it was “better and more valuable” than “harping on the beauties of life.” Szabó’s review touched on a neuralgic point of Hungarian culture: the tradition of exile after defeated wars of independence and the subsequent cultural

In the Vacuum of Exile (Éva Forgács)

117

ice age. In 1711, the leader of the anti-Habsburg war, Ferenc Rákóczi, went into Turkish exile with his closest combatants; several leaders of the defeated 1848–49 revolution and war of independence, including Lajos Kossuth, chose exile. Records are scarce about the common participants of these wars, but we know that many of them either went into hiding within the country or escaped from it. After the defeat of the Commune, the question of going into exile or remaining in Hungary became central not only for the leaders but for most of those who could be accused of any kind of participation in the Commune. Szabó, a poet who remained in Hungary, felt compelled to comment on this issue by mentioning that Kassák’s book was written and published in exile. He also had to blunt the political edge of the book, shifting emphasis to its poetic value, and had to justify the standpoint of those who chose not to leave the country. “The way Kassák sees the events is as correct as it is wrong,” he wrote. “All members of the emigration have this same perspective. What is important though is that on every page of this book there is more life and poetry than in the entire anemic Academy” (Nyugat 552; JV 321). The January 1921 issue of Ma marked a turning point, as Kassák shifted focus from the Hungarian tragedy and embraced one of the most important contemporary international tendencies: Dada. With his “picture-poem” (his own term) on the front page, the January 1, 1921 issue of Ma carried a Dada manifesto by Sándor Barta, titled the Zöldfeju˝ ember (The Green-headed Man), essays on and by Kurt Schwitters, a poem by Schwitters, and poems by Ma’s authors that blended Expressionism and Dada. The next issue, of February 15, gave an account of Ma’s “Russian Evening,” at which the invited young Russian journalist Konstantin Umansky gave a talk and slide show about the new art in Soviet Russia. Kassák and others in the audience discovered this way Malevich, Rodchenko, Tatlin, and many other Russian artists who represented new tendencies, created abstract works, and an entirely new communist avant-garde art that was diametrically opposed to what Uitz, author of the account, rejected as “conservative proletcult.” Ma stepped up against bourgeois conservatism as well as the budding communist populism in art, thus representing a unique kind of socialist attitude that had never been accepted by any established political party in Hungarian politics. The politics of non-partisan progressive leftism was sustainable only in the vacuum of exile, where no pragmatic steps or compromises and other maneuvers and adjustments had to be made. The absence of an actual, live political context opened up the realm of utopian thinking at a time when social utopias were thriving all over Europe, from Moscow to Berlin. It was this political intransigence and increasingly utopian outlook that helped Kassák find his kin spirits in an also increasingly utopian European

118

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

avant-garde. He reached out to the Dutch avant-garde, published “Tactilisme,” one of Marinetti’s Futurist Manifestos (Ma 6.7 [1921]: 91–92), and in the same issue also reproductions of George Grosz’s drawings, as well as translations of poems by Iwan Goll and the Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck (Ma 6.7 [1921]: 94 and 98), along with samples of French and Italian avantgarde literature. He also established contacts with German and Hungarian authors living in Berlin. Kassák published in Ma the article “Világkép” (Worldview) on the art of “the revolutionary proletariat,” which was signed by the “Dutch Group of Activists,” a drawing by László Moholy-Nagy, Iwan Goll’s “Archipenko,” and Erich Mühsam’s “Az intellektuelek” (The Intellectuals). Most importantly, Kassák engaged as a regular contributor the art critic Erno˝ (Ernst) Kállai, who had just immigrated to Berlin from Budapest and used, for a few months, the penname Péter Mátyás. Kállai was a major gain for Ma, since he had a clear and well informed overview of the international art scene, and was in the middle of the new cultural capital of Europe, dizzying and cosmopolitan Berlin. What is more, he was able to sort out the many new trends in art and thought that circulated in the German capital, and conveyed the energy, expectations, and cultural complexity of the city. In 1920–21 Berlin was still chaotic. The grasp of the Social Democrats on power was far from recognized, let alone accepted by society as a whole. Revanchist nationalism as well as the Spartakist legacy of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg lingered, so did faith among leftist intellectuals that an imminent world revolution would bring global victory for Communism. The progressive artists’ community was much more ready to embrace Communism in Berlin than in Vienna. Kállai’s major contribution to Ma was the early understanding of the significance and relevance of Russian Constructivism. The Hungarians in Berlin had first-hand information of this development from Moscow, because the Berlin-based Hungarian art critic of the communist Rote Fahne, Alfréd Kemény, visited in December 1921 the Moscow INkHUK (the Institute of Artistic Culture), where Constructivism was launched a few months earlier. He gave a detailed account of it to his compatriots in Berlin (Botar 90–97). Kállai had already described prior to this the new, postwar European art scene as having put Expressionism behind and ready for a “new synthesis and new style in society, world view, and art” (Mátyás Péter 115). He called the new style “Objectivism,” describing, thereby Constructivism, as it were, avant la lettre. Although several Hungarian art critics were active in Berlin, Kassák worked with Kállai only. Kemény and Péri – an artist and a former actor who had cooperated with Kassák in Budapest – were on the other side of the di-

In the Vacuum of Exile (Éva Forgács)

119

vide that separated socialists from communists, while Kállai was a socialist sympathizer without commitment to any political party. Considering that Kassák did not speak German or any other language, his achievement to integrate his journal into the international avant-garde in a very short time, full of up-to-date and relevant information about current trends and events, was a real tour de force. Not only did he carry drawings by the Berlin based Swedish artist Viking Eggeling and a poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky, he also published an informative article about the Yugoslav avant-garde movement Zenitism by B. Tokin, one of the central figures of the group. He organized matinées and lectures, and, like Herwarth Walden with Der Sturm, he made Ma also into a publishing house. By the end of 1921, Kassák had published seven illustrated volumes, including Sándor Barta’s Dadaist writings, his own Bildarchitektur accompanied by his own linocuts, a book with László Moholy-Nagy’s works, and Erzsi Ujvári’s prose, illustrated by George Grosz’s drawings (see the complete list in Ma 7.1 [1921]: 151). Kassák’s espousal of Dada was provocative not only on the European scene where Dada was controversial, but, to an even greater extent, for his Hungarian readers. It is remarkable that although there were no Dada artworks or literature within Hungary, Dada was passionately attacked in these years as nihilistic and destructive in Budapest, Vienna, as well as in Kolozsvár (Cluj). Balázs in “Dada” (1920), Andor Német in “Az o˝rültek és dadaisták” (The Mad Ones and the Dadaists; 1921), Tibor Déry in “Dadaizmus” (1921), Iván Hevesy in “A dadaista világnézet” (The Dadaist Worldview; 1923) and Aladár Tamás in “A halott dada” (The Dead Dada; 1927) all rejected Dada. Hevesy reviewed for the Nyugat Sándor Barta’s Dadaist book, one of the Ma publications in Vienna titled Tisztelt Hullaház, a X. Parancsolat jólnevelt hullák számára. Egy kiskorú költo˝ szónoklatai a forradalomról, népszeru˝ tanácsok együgyu˝ embereknek, boldog antológia, csodálatos kongresszus (Highly Esteemed Morgue, the Tenth Commandment for Well-bred Corpses, the Stump Speeches of an Under-Age Poet about the Revolution, Popular Advice for People with Simple Brain Cells, a Happy Anthology, Wonderful Congress). There was evident furor against Dada in Hevesy’s review as well as in the other articles on Dada, regardless of whether they were written in exile or at home. They overlooked Dada’s political commitment as well as its wit, humor, and other merits. By 1922 Kassák had found Dada for a number of reasons unsatisfactory as the tenor of his journal. Dada was frivolous and anti-authoritarian, whereas Kassák was serious about his activity, his standing, and his journal; he established himself as an anti-authoritarian authority of the avant-garde. Although he never excluded Dada from Ma, in 1922 he moved on to embrace Construc-

120

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

tivism, and his Vienna circle soon split along the Dada/Constructivism fault line, which coincided with the divide between Communism and Social Democracy. By 1922, Constructivism, or rather its West-European version referred to as International Constructivism, had become the emerging “ersatzreligion” of the international avant-garde. This shift cost Kassák the disintegration of his group: in 1922 Barta split from Ma and launched in the spirit of the communist Berlin Dada his own journal, the Akasztott ember (Hanged man), using George Grosz’s drawings and illustrations. In the following year he launched a new journal, Ék (Wedge), but was unable to sustain its publication and quit Vienna with his wife Erzsi Újvári to immigrate to the Soviet Union, following Uitz, who had left for Moscow already in 1921. Ma’s shift to Constructivism materialized in a series of articles by Kállai, Kassák’s programmatic manifesto “Picturearchitecture,” his subsequent creation of constructivist paintings and drawings, and his ideological stance. “International Costructivism” became an umbrella term for geometric abstraction ca. 1921–24, a rationalist new aesthetics combined with kinetic spatial works and pragmatic design that Kassák turned into a solemn art of redemption. For him, Constructivism spelled ultimate purity and balance: the blueprint of the utopian perfection of the coming new communist world. Kállai’s series of articles gradually developed a similar concept of Constructivism, which culminated in his 1923 “Konstruktivizmus.” Kállai defined the idea here in the spirit of Kassák, as the “art of the purest immanence”: [Constructivism’s] collective nature is not an image of a chaotic society living for the present. It is a striving toward absolute equilibrium and extreme purity. It imposes laws that enter consciousness as the necessary, immanent principles of a transcendental vitality. […] The totality of these principles is structured into a system by the ideal of the new man who is economically organized in both body and mind (8; BW 436).

This moment of perfect conceptual nirvana could not last. Both Kállai and Kassák moved on to more pragmatic concepts and activities. Kassák kept on publishing books, including his 1922 picture album Új mu˝vészek könyve (Book of the New Artists), co-edited with Moholy-Nagy, and the 1926 volume of poems, Tisztaság könyve (Book of Purity). They were reviewed in several literary journals in Budapest – but the bubble of perfection they developed as their own particular concept of Constructivism reflects the intellectual isolation in which they – particularly Kassák and the Vienna group – lived during exile. For Kállai, who got increasingly involved with the Berlin art world, this was but a brief episode. Indeed, the international avant-garde was cut off from mainstream culture and was intellectually homeless. The Dutch avantgarde artist Theo van Doesburg and the Russian El Lissitzky captured the sense of the vacuum surrounding the entire nomadic international avant-

In the Vacuum of Exile (Éva Forgács)

121

garde by stating in 1922: “Today we are standing between two worlds, one of which does not need us, and the other of which does not yet exist” (“Declaration” 62).

Works Cited Babits, Mihály. “A lélek és a formák” (The Soul and the Forms). Nyugat 3.21 (November 1, 1910): 1563. Balázs, Béla. “Dada.” Bécsi Magyar Újság. November 4, 1920. Balázs, Béla. Napló 1919–1922 (Diary 1919–1922). Vol. 2. Budapest: Magveto˝, 1982. Balázs, Béla. Der sichtbare Mensch oder die Kultur des Films (The Visible Man or the Culture of Film). Vienna: Deutsch-Österreichischer Verlag, 1924. Barta, Sándor. Akasztott ember (Hanged Man). Ma 5.4 (1920): 38. Barta, Sándor. Tisztelt Hullaház, a X. Parancsolat jólnevelt hullák számára. Egy kiskorú költo˝ szónoklatai a forradalomról, népszeru˝ tanácsok együgyu˝ embereknek, boldog antológia, csodálatos kongresszus (Highly Esteemed Morgue, the Tenth Commandment for Well-bred Corpses, the Stump Speeches of an Under-Age Poet about the Revolution, Popular Advice for People with Simple Brain Cells, a Happy Anthology, Wonderful Congress). Vienna: Ma Publishing House, 1921. Barta, Sándor. Zöldfeju˝ ember (The Green-headed Man). Ma 6.3 (1921): 22–23 English trans. János Bátki, Benson & Forgács 324–28 Béládi, Miklós and Pomogáts, Béla ed. Jelzés a Világba. A magyar irodalmi avantgárd válogatott dokumentumai (Signal to the World. Sel. Documents of the Hungarian Literary Avantgarde). Budapest: Magveto˝, 1988. (Abbr. JV.) Benson, Timothy O., and Éva Forgács, ed. Between Worlds. A Source-book of Central European Avant-Gardes 1910–1930. Cambridge, MA: MIT P with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2002. (Abbr. BW.) Botar, Oliver. “Constructivism, International Constructivism, and the Hungarian Emigration.” The Hungarian Avant-Garde 1914–1933. Storrs: U of Connecticut & The William Benton Museum of Art, 1987. Congdon, Lee. Exile and Social Thought. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991. Congdon, Lee. The Young Lukács. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1983. “Declaration of the Faction of International Constructivists.” De Stijl.4.4 (1922): 62. Deréky, Pál. “Vienna.” Central European Avant-Gardes: Exchange and Transformation 1910–1930. Ed. Timothy O. Benson. Cambridge, MA: MIT P with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2002. 165–71. Deréky, Pál. A vasbetontorony költo˝i (Poets of the Ferroconcrete Tower). Budapest: Argumentum, 1992. Déry, Tibor. Itélet nincs (There is no Judgment). Budapest: Szépirodalmi, 1969. Déry, Tibor. “Dadaizmus.” Nyugat 14.7 (1921): 552–56 Dutch group of Activists. “Világkép” (Worldview). Ma 6.5 (1921): 56–57. Forgács, Éva. “Constructive Faith in Deconstruction. Dada in Hungary.” Crisis and the Arts: A History of Dada. Vol. 4: The Eastern Dada Orbit. Ed. Gerald Janecek and Toshiharu Omuka. Gen. ed. Stephen C. Foster. New York: Hall, 1998. 63–91. Gay, Peter. Weimar Culture. The Outsider as Insider. New York: Harper & Row, 1968. Goll, Iwan. “Archipenko.” Ma 6.6 (1921): 71

122

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

Hevesy, Iván: “A dadaista világnézet” (The Dadaist World View). Nyugat 16.15–16 (1923): 191–96. Kállai, Erno˝. “Konstruktivizmus.” Ma 8.7–8 (1923): n.p. English trans. János Bátki, Benson and Forgács 435–36. Kassák, Lajos. “An die Künstler aller Länder” (To the Artists of all Countries). Ma 5.1–2 (1920): 2–4. Kassák. Lajos. Tisztaság könyve (Book of Purity). 1926. Kassák, Lajos. “Levél a magyarországi ifjúmunkásokhoz” (Letter to the Young Workers in Hungary). Ma 5.3 (1920): 23–24. Kassák, Lajos. “Levél Kun Bélának a mu˝vészet nevében” (Letter to Béla Kun in the Name of the Arts). Ma 4.7 (1919): 146–148. Rpt. Benson and Forgács 230–33. Kassák, Lajos. 1919 Éposz (The Epic of 1919). Ma 5.3 (1920): 27–36, and Ma 5.4 (1920): 41–52. Mátyás, Péter [Erno˝ Kállai]. “Új Mu˝vészet” (New Art). Part II. Ma 6.8 (1921): 115. Kassák, Lajos. Máglyák énekelnek (Bonfires Sing). Vienna: Bécsi Magyar Kiadó, 1920. Kassák, Lajos, and László Moholy-Nagy. Új mu˝vészek könyve (Book of New Artists). Vienna: Fischer, 1922. Lukács, Georg. Történelem és osztálytudat (History and Class Consciousness). Berlin: Malik, 1923. Mácza, János. “Részlet a Teljes Színpad címu˝ dramaturgiából” (Excerpt from the Dramaturgical Study “Total Stage”). Ma 5.3 (1920): 12–14. Mácza, János. “Színpad és propagandaszínház” (Stage and Propaganda Theater) Ma 6.1–2 (1921): 13–14. Mátyás, Péter [Erno˝ Kállai]. “Új Mu˝vészet II” (New Art, Part II) Ma 6.8 (1921): 115. Mühsam, Erich. “Az intellektuelek” (The Intellectuals). Ma 6.6 (1921): 83 Németh, Andor: “Az o˝rültek és a dadaisták” (The Mad Ones and the Dadaists). Napkelet 2 (1921): 766–68. Szabó, Lo˝rinc. “Kassák Lajos: Máglyák énekelnek” (Lajos Kassák: Bonfires Sing) Nyugat 14.7 (April 1, 1921): 551–52. Rpt. Béládi and Pomogáts 321. Tamás, Aladár. “A halott dada” (The Dead Dada). Korunk (1927): 295–97. Rpt. Béládi and Pomogáts 468–70. Timms, Edward. Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist: The Post-War Crisis and the Rise of the Swastika. New Haven: Yale UP, 2005. Tokin, B[osˇko]. “Zenit, Zenitismus.” Ma 6.7 (1921): 100. Újvári, Erzsi. “Próza 17” (Prose 17). Ma 5.4 (1920): 38. Vajda, Sándor. “Bécsi éveim Kassákkal” (My Vienna Years with Kassák). Kortársak Kassák Lajosról (Contemporaries about Kassák). Ed. Ilona Illés and Erno˝ Taxner. Budapest: PIM, 1963.

Cosmopolitans without a Polis

123

Cosmopolitans without a Polis: Towards a Hermeneutics of the East-East Exilic Experience (1929–1945) Galin Tihanov

Introduction Spuren eines Lebens, the memoirs of the German communist Walter Janka, relate the story of his life as an exile who fought in the Civil War in Spain, then fled to France, and eventually reached Mexico, where he stayed over a much longer period of time, along with other exiles who would occupy positions of public visibility in the GDR, foremost among them Anna Seghers. Janka himself was to rise on the East Berlin cultural scene as the director of the Aufbau-Verlag, Lukács’s main GDR publisher. His memoirs hold an important lesson pointing to exile between the World Wars as a factor shaping the views of generations of left intellectuals on burning political issues: what should a fair society look like, how should Communism be installed and advanced in post-war Europe, and what was to be the place of minorities in the new social order. Janka suggests that there was a deep-running divide on these questions between those who spent their years of exile in countries with an unbroken democratic tradition, or at least in countries attempting to move away from dictatorial rule, and those who ended up in the Soviet Union, exposed to Stalin’s tyranny and dogma. The former believed in a one-state solution to the German problem; they aspired to a largely socialdemocratic form of government, and were adamant that a new Germany must undertake to redress the injustices perpetrated on the Jews. (Thus Paul Merker, a prominent German Communist exile in Mexico, argued that Jews should be compensated economically even where this could not be done for the communists and the other anti-fascists who suffered under Hitler, because the latter were persecuted for what they did, not because of who they were; cf. Herf 51–52). The Soviet-based exiles, Janka asserts, held diametrically opposed views on all these issues. They had allowed themselves to be indoctrinated with ideas of terror and authoritarian control, and this

124

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

obscured their sight and their recognition of the real needs of a future democratic Germany ( Janka 198–201). Leaving aside the possibility that Janka’s memoirs may well have served the purpose of retrospectively casting his own life in terms of a continuous devotion to democracy, there is probably a grain of truth in his observations. At the same time, he seems oblivious to the fact that many of the East-European exiles had arrived in Stalin’s Moscow with an already rich, multi-layered, and multi-coded cultural baggage, including exposure to, and active appropriation and advancement of, democratic ideas and a humanistic Western cultural canon. The years to follow would not erase this experience; they would transform and modify it, they would superimpose conflicting values and behavioral strategies, while at the same time preserving a core of cultural inheritance and memory that could not disintegrate even under the severity of a one-party dictatorial regime. In this paper, I offer some notes on exile and emigration as factors in the encounters of art, philosophy, cultural criticism, and political power in Soviet Russia under Stalin. While by now we possess considerable knowledge about emigration and exile from Eastern and Central Europe to the West in the 1920s and 1930s, we have tended to under-research and under-conceptualize the alternative destination. Seemingly less glamorous and lastingly tainted by the open glorification or silent acquiescence to Stalin and the purges, Moscow as a place of emigration and exile of Left East-Central European intellectuals in the 1930s presents a uniquely important trajectory, the study of which contributes to enriching and refining our understanding not just of the history of international communism, but also – and perhaps more importantly – of the formation of the intellectual and political elites that were to shape life in the Eastern Bloc after 1945. I focus on the intellectual careers of Georg Lukács and Béla Balázs, drawing also, to a lesser extent, on the lives of Ervin Sinkó, Gyula Háy, Aleksander Wat, and Bruno Jasien´ski, all of whom found themselves in the Soviet Union at the end of the 1920s or in the 1930s (for a complementary account see the introductory essay to this volume). In addition to tracing their fortunes under Stalin, I am also concerned to reveal the implications of their long stays in the Soviet Union for the subsequent roles they were to play in their home cultures. Do exiles ever truly come home, does the boomerang hurled by fate across time and space ever return? And how did these men of letters negotiate the many transitions and curves their lives took? How did they accommodate their previous experiences and cultural codes to the new environments, in Moscow and back home? These are the questions that inform my narrative. I begin with a broad outline of the conditions, the hurdles, and the limitations

Cosmopolitans without a Polis

125

of émigré life in Moscow in the 1930s, examining some of the difficulties which exiled intellectuals in Stalin’s Moscow faced in constructing and asserting their cultural and political identities. I then offer a brief case study of one of the major intellectual achievements by a Moscow exile, Georg Lukács’s book The Young Hegel, revealing the nature and the extent of Lukács’s compromise with Stalinism; in the final section I examine the complex dynamics of homecoming in the years after World War Two. Ultimately, my efforts are steered by the need to begin to lay the foundations for a hermeneutics of the East-East exilic experience.

1. Cosmopolitans without a Polis The “East-East exilic experience,” as I term this complex texture of events, actions, beliefs, mental dispositions, and attitudes exhibited during the long enforced stays of left intellectuals from Eastern and Central Europe in the Soviet Union during the 1930s, carried the deeper meaning of a tirelessly pursued, yet culturally and politically frustrated cosmopolitanism. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels had famously asserted the spirit of a proletarian cosmopolitanism that should envelop the awakening working class and lend its emancipatory ambitions a truly global scale. Proletarian solidarity was envisaged as a world-wide network that defeats the supremacy of a bourgeoisie profiting from an equally globalised mode of production. But by the mid-1930s cosmopolitanism was becoming a word of denunciation in Moscow; it was employed to stigmatize the enemy – without and within the Party, Soviet and foreign alike – as a rootless agent who evades Party control and gives the lie to the ever more vociferous propaganda of Russianness (see Martin 99–118). “Cosmopolitan” was often a concealed anti-Semitic qualification, reinforced by the revival of the mythology of Russian uniqueness, and by the ongoing fight against Trotskyism. During World War II, this line gathered momentum (in 1943, Fadeev warned in Pod znamenem marksizma against the “hypocritical sermons of groundless cosmopolitanism”; qtd. in Ronen 336), culminating after the War in the wide-ranging 1949 campaign against cosmopolitanism (see the articles of Azadovskii and Egorov). Instead, the official Party line promoted proletarian internationalism as a discourse reflecting the more desirable world-wide co-operation between various Communist parties and movements under the indisputable leadership of the Soviet Union. Internationalism, unlike cosmopolitanism, did not erase the boundaries between nations; it preserved a core idea of belonging, and left intact the assumption that foreign Communists and leftist sympathizers were

126

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

aliens in the Soviet Union. In Stalin’s hands, internationalism was little more than a smoke-screen slogan concealing the tactics of maximizing the benefits of nation-building at a time when the Soviets were still the only country where the revolution had triumphed. The resulting ambiguity – openness towards supporters from without, checked at the same time by a fundamental distrust and concerted policies of control and Russification – shot through and affected profoundly the life worlds of numerous East- and Central-European Left émigrés and exiles in Moscow during the 1930s. Some of them had gone to Moscow led by ambitions to better themselves and make it as literati and artists. Ervin Sinkó, for example, arrived in 1935 from Paris (and an economically precarious existence) on the recommendations of Romain Rolland, determined to find a publisher for his ill-fated novel The Optimists; Béla Balázs set foot in Moscow in 1931, driven by the desire to shoot his best film yet; Gyula Háy ( Julius Hay) went there in 1936 from Paris via Prague and Zurich, following an earlier invitation from Lunacharskii. None of these three writers-intellectuals achieved their immediate goals: Sinkó’s novel remained unpublished until after World War II; Balázs’s film The Tisza Burns was finished in 1934 but banned and never shown; Háy scattered his energy in journalism and commissioned work (see Sinkó, Zsuffa, and Hay). Others were forced into exile. The Polish-Jewish writer Aleksander Wat, in his youth amongst the founders of the Polish Futurist movement, fled Warsaw in 1939. He was arrested by the Soviet authorities in Lwów and spent most of the time until 1946 in Kazakhstan, where he was deported after being imprisoned in Kiev, Saratov, and Moscow. In 1941, he converted to Christianity in the Saratov prison, referring to himself henceforth as “a Jew with a cross around his neck” (Wat 360). Another Polish-Jewish writer whose early work shaped Polish Futurism, Bruno Jasien´ski, was twice expelled from Paris for communist propaganda and found safe haven in Leningrad in 1929, becoming closely involved in Soviet literary and political life and enjoying huge literary success until he was arrested in Moscow in 1937 (the precise year of his death in Vladivostok is still unclear: see Kolesnikoff 9 n. 14). Georg Lukács’s Moscow exile, from March 1933 to the end of August 1945 (with a brief spell in Tashkent), was the result of persecution and insecurity; he had been in Moscow in 1929–31, but was then sent to Germany to do illegal work and eventually fled Berlin when Hitler came to power. Lukács, Balázs, Sinkó, Wat, Jasien´ski and many others had brought to Moscow their stores of rich, multi-coded cultural experience. Balázs had just finished, with Leni Riefenstahl, The Blue Light, a neo-romantic Bergfilm, for which he wrote the script. Wat and Jasienski, as we have seen, had been shaping forces in the Polish Futurist movement. Lukács was steeped in Kant and

Cosmopolitans without a Polis

127

Hegel, possessed first-hand knowledge of Weber, Simmel, and their writings; he had written on German, Austrian, Hungarian, English, French, Scandinavian, and Russian music, theatre, and literature, and tried to make this baggage work for the proletarian cause after he became a communist. In Austrian exile, he penned the so-called “Blum Theses” (1928), a document outlining a strategy for the Hungarian Communist Party, soon to be discarded by the Comintern as making too many concessions in favor of a democratic rather than a dictatorial pathway to socialism. Lukács’s line in the “Blum Theses” was associated by his critics with his earlier book Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (History and Class Consciousness, 1923), hailed by some as the first work of Western Marxism, intensely disliked by others as an act of apostasy from the orthodoxies of Leninism (and criticized repeatedly by Lukács himself, especially in the 1960s). Lukács, of course, was not alone: he stood for a significant number of Communists from Central and Eastern Europe, educated just before or during World War I in their home countries and in Western universities and then spending considerable time in exile in the West, whose embrace of Communism did not mean a total abandonment of their previous intellectual inheritance. When he crossed the Soviet border in 1933, he faced the challenge of accommodating his Western and Central-European cultural baggage to the prevalent tenets of Stalinism. It was a difficult compromise, if not exactly a devil’s pact. In Moscow, Lukács, like so many of the other East-Central European exiles, was confronted with a pressing identity problem: was he Hungarian, Soviet, Russian, German, Jewish? Or did all these cultural codes interplay, shaping a multi-layered, flexible, yet vulnerable perspective on the surrounding world? With reference to language, Balázs’s answer to these vexing questions was recorded in his Moscow diary in January 1940: “a poet without a people and a homeland who must write in two languages and employ both without the perfection that befits a master” (qtd. in Loewy 380). Often deprived of the opportunity to write in their Muttersprache (mother tongue), these literati felt the loss of a more general sense of language comfort: they were bereft, to quote Jean Paul, of a Sprachmutter (language mother). (Lukács was here an exception confirming the rule: not being a creative writer himself, he felt much more comfortable with German as a vehicle for his ideas.) Politically, things were not any easier. Attempts to normalize one’s precarious situation were not always successful. Balázs arrived on an Austrian passport, applied in 1937 for a Soviet citizenship but was rejected, and became eventually a displaced person (Zsuffa 281). Lukács confronted the Soviet officials with even greater difficulties: a Hungarian by nationality, a Soviet citizen, and for eight out of his

128

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

twelve years in the Soviet Union a member of the German Communist Party, he was a Hungarian-Jewish intellectual writing mostly in German, a person impossible to pigeonhole. Arousing suspicion all along, he could not escape being taken into custody for two months in 1941 (see Sereda and Stykalin). These East-European exiles cut insecure and endangered figures on the Moscow cultural and political scene. None of them ever reached the inner circles of power; often they were not trusted even within the narrow confines of their professional environments, where their work was monitored, censured, and publicly attacked, not least by their Soviet peers. Eisenstein kept Balázs at a distance (Loewy 381); Shklovskii, at the time himself a hostage to the regime, stopped the publication of Lukács’s book The Historical Novel with a commissioned internal review (Tihanov “Viktor Shklovskii”). There was a growing sense amongst these exiled intellectuals that they didn’t own the political project they had subscribed to. They were cosmopolitan in their cultural background, beliefs, and aspirations, yet they had no polis to apply their civic ethos to, excluded as they were from the real political process. The situation was harder still for those of Jewish origin. While sometimes acknowledged, their Jewishness was often subject to salient restrictions. Balázs, for example, conceived shortly before leaving Moscow a play, to be titled The Wandering Jew, in which he hoped to capture his experiences of exile and emigration. Indicatively, the theatre section of the Committee on Art Affairs retitled the play to The Wanderer (Zsuffa 319). The officially acceptable face of foreignness was associated with membership of one of the organized sections of foreign writers that functioned as subsidiary groups of the Soviet Union of Writers, enabling the ideological control of the exiles by the Party machine. For the Hungarian exiles in Moscow, a natural centre of gravity was the German section, as many of them had spent considerable time in Austria or Germany, following the collapse of the Hungarian Republic, and had written extensively in German. Since the mid-1930s, about 35 German, Austrian, and Hungarian writers and critics writing in German lived in the Soviet Union. Between 1933 and 1945, 430 German-language periodicals were published in the Soviet Union, with the German Central Newspaper (Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung) reaching a print-run of 40,000 in the 1930s (Tischler 34; Pike). Significantly, Lukács and Balázs both understood themselves as figures of the German literary scene in exile. They never endeavored to master Russian to the point where they could become Russian writers (Lukács had his works translated by Igor Satz, the one time private secretary to Lunacharskii). Assimilation was not an option for them, partly because they could not identify fully with Soviet culture, and partly because of related peer pressures: Hugo Huppert, an Austrian writer in

Cosmopolitans without a Polis

129

Moscow exile and a translator of Maiakovskii, complained in a letter to Boris Pasternak that Johannes R. Becher spoke with unconcealed disdain of his (Huppert’s) fluent knowledge of Russian (Huppert to Pasternak, November 22, 1940, qtd. in Unfried 128; Bruno Jasien´ski was the only prominent exile to write in Russian). Given that some of the key-works of both Lukács and Balázs had appeared in the 1920s in German, it was far from surprising that Balázs’s pride was hurt when Becher did not mention his name in a report on exilic German literature in the influential Literaturnaia gazeta (The Literary Newspaper). In his desire to belong (even though he was on other occasions, as we have seen, rather hesitant about his place in either German or Hungarian letters), Balázs wrote to Becher on May 1, 1939 to remind him of his membership in the Austrian PEN Club and of having written in German for the past twenty years: “I am a German writer and feel that I will be a German writer as long as I can move a pen” (qtd. in Zsuffa 276). Similarly, Lukács firmly embraced the cultural canon of the Weimar Classic as a major plank of his own identity. He took pains to reject Ilya Ehrenburg’s view of the Germans as fascists and barbarians all through their history, seeking instead support in Stalin’s (provisional) verdict: “the Hitlers come and go, the German people remains” (Lukács, “Über Stalin hinaus” 217–18). This identification through language and cultural inheritance was not sufficient, however, in sheltering Lukács, Balázs, Háy, Sándor Barta, Andor Gábor, and many others from a deeper sense of exposure and insecurity. Seemingly, there was an extensive support network. On paper, at least, the 1936 Soviet Constitution provided in article 129 the right to asylum for three categories of foreigners: those who had to leave their homeland because of “defending the interests of the working people, or because of scientific activities, or because of national liberation struggles” (qtd. in Kurella 91; on the Soviet asylum legislation see Jarmatz et al. 21–24). In reality, however, the Constitution signaled an era of “rationing” the right of abode. It announced the victory of the policy of “Socialism in one Country” and gave a legal fillip to the processes of russification and nation-building that had been advancing since at least 1933 (see Martin). Indeed, as Studer and Unfried have shown, the influx of political émigrés and of foreign specialist workers had reached its apogee back in 1932; by that time ca. 10,000 political émigrés had been admitted, along with ca. 42,000 foreign specialists (45). Since the early 1930s, these numbers had been in decline, while the Party control over, and popular hostility to, foreigners was growing. Employment provisions were also cut back at the expense of émigrés and exiles. In the summer of 1937, the Institute of World Economy and World Politics and the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, both sheltering a significant number of émigrés and exiles, made staff cuts, mostly at the expense

130

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

of foreign associates. In June 1938, VEGAAR (Verlagsgenossenschaft ausländischer Arbeiter in der Sowjetunion), the cooperative publisher of foreign workers in the Soviet Union, was closed down; founded in 1931, it had employed 335 people and had published works of writers from forty countries a year before its closure (Studer and Unfried 66). Most crippling of all was the political and moral disorientation and loss of identity that followed the signing of the Soviet-German Treaty of August 23, 1939, which entailed a full relinquishing of the ideas and values of antifascism (Leonhard [78] reports that as a result of the Treaty the Left German emigré newspapers were replaced at the Moscow Library for Foreign Literature – to his dismay – by Nazi newspapers.) Lukács, along with many others, was severely hit by this radical change in Stalin’s foreign policy. The new line taken by the Soviet government was bewildering, offensive, and bitterly disappointing to him and to all those who had fled Nazi persecution and found safe haven in Moscow. Since arriving in the Soviet Union in 1933, much of Lukács’s energy (and that of his close friend Mikhail Lifshits) had been spent thinking through and establishing the intellectual genealogy of Nazism. More importantly, the policy of a united anti-fascist front had generated a new brand of broader leftist humanism that went beyond the constraints of narrow class ideology and played a crucial role in leaving behind the dogmas of vulgar-sociological approaches to culture. Literaturnyi kritik (Literary Critic), the journal with which Lukács was intimately associated in the 1930s, was the main promoter of change. However, in the autumn of 1939 the journal fell increasingly under attack, to be eventually closed down in December 1940. Lukács and Lifshits were accused of “vulgar humanism” (Loewy 387) – a preposterous qualification that should be interpreted in the context of their disdain for “vulgar sociologism.” At IFLI, where Lifshits taught in the 1930s, Lev Kopelev was charged in the spring of 1941 with “primitive antifascism,” a label used by Molotov to denounce communists who had remained critical of Germany after the Treaty (see Sharapov 78). With the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the ideological climate changed once again, but an inestimable psychological damage had already been inflicted on those who had flocked to the country of victorious socialism to seek protection from the evils of fascism. In a significant way, Lukács’s attempt to revive the tactics of a united democratic front after his return to Budapest, now just one of a number of competing blueprints for the political future of Hungary, was the continuation of his hopes and aspirations nurtured during the years of his Moscow exile, where the united front policies – promoted, abandoned, and then rehabilitated in swift and traumatic succession – had become so indelibly engrained in his political outlook.

Cosmopolitans without a Polis

131

Thus neither language, nor cultural inheritance or acquisition, nor indeed their political creed and commitment could lend the exiles an unassailable and self-assured identity. The efforts to (re)build one’s identity and assert one’s public role were suffering the corrosive effects of a dictatorial regime, but also those of a disheartening micro-power, displayed in its full force across the entire range of social practices. One was haunted by an atmosphere, as Lukács put it in hindsight, “of lasting mutual mistrust, an alertness directed towards everybody […] and a sensation of being permanently under siege” (Lukács, Marxismus 184). In Moscow, “at the heart of the world,” Ervin Sinkó was plagued by a sense of “loneliness and uselessness” (131). His Kafkaesque story of countless encounters with the institutions of Soviet cultural life reveals the frustrations of many leftist and communist émigrés who had to reconcile themselves to living in a society in which compliance and bureaucracy had ousted the spirit of the Revolution: “here the task of the revolutionary consists in far-reaching conformism […] It is not easy to be a revolutionary in the country where the revolution had triumphed” (Sinkó 116; Lion Feuchtwanger, writing in response to André Gide’s Return from the U.S.S.R., tried to justify conformism by presenting it as no more than the Soviet people’s “deep love” for their country: Feuchtwanger 58). For Sinkó, and for many other communists who shared his itinerary, Moscow in the mid-1930s was a city where reality seemed to be dissolving without hope. Distrust and anonymous opposition stood in their way; “an oppressive, impervious resistance […] a resistance so incognito that I cannot seize it,” as Balázs wrote in resignation (qtd. in Zsuffa 221). It is in this tormenting setting that we have to place, and judge to the extent to which one might be entitled to, the involvement of Lukács, Balázs and many others in the ‘purging’ sessions of the mid-1930s, where a repugnant witchhunting of fellow-exiles was unleashed (see e.g. Müller); in the vocal endorsement of Stalin’s 1936 Constitution [cf. Lukács’s article “Die neue Verfassung der UdSSR und das Problem der Persönlichkeit” (The New Constitution of the USSR and the Problem of Personality) published in 1936 in Internationale Literatur]; and in other acts of morally less than laudable conformity. Worst of all, former friends turned foes, brothers denounced their siblings. Balázs’s friendship with Lukács and Andor Gábor collapsed in 1940, following what Balázs believed to be a silent attack on him (he was not mentioned by name) in Lukács’s 1939 article “Writer and Critic.” Balázs thought to have recognized himself (surely justifiably) in Lukács’s discontent with literati who were prolific at the expense of quality, delivering to the public “half-fabricated products” and availing themselves – here was Lukács’s principal objection – with suspicious ease of different genres in order to convey the same idea (meant

132

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

were, according to Balázs, his drama and film script about Mozart). Balázs responded in kind: late in 1939, he disseminated a piece in which Lukács was not mentioned by name but everybody knew who was the “literary sociologist” accused of failing to recognize that “the novel of montage” was “no proof for the obliteration of the boundaries of genre by capitalism” (all quotations from Loewy 384–89, the best exposition of the 1939–40 polemic between Lukács and Balázs). At a discussion on January 13, 1940 the editorial board of Internationale Literatur (International Literature) disapproved of Balázs’s paper, as it was feared that it might add to the pressure under which Lukács’s theory of realism had already found itself after the attacks on Literaturnyi kritik were launched in 1939. In a bitter exchange of letters, Lukács accused Balázs of openly supporting the Soviet assaults on him. Balázs maintained that he had known nothing about these, except for Evgeniia Knipovich’s article (Knipovich, “Novaia kniga”) on Lukács’s book Istoriia realizma (The History of Realism), and yet at the same time he rushed to establish contact with Nikolai Vil’mont who was to denounce Lukács and Lifshits as revisionists of Marxism-Leninism and promoters of Spengler (Viliam-Vil’mont “Vozvedenie”). This is just one example of many, a story even sadder for the fact that earlier Lukács and Balázs had sided together in the important émigré debate on Expressionism. Balázs had endorsed Lukács’s position with a hint that Expressionism had a negative effect on the anti-fascist emigration. He had called post-World War I Expressionism “a symptom of uprootedness” that has returned to haunt the émigrés as a tragic symptom (qtd. in Zsuffa 262). By 1940, however, the trust between the philosopher and the film theorist was gone for good; Lukács remained hostile – sometimes even nasty – to Balázs also after 1945, with disappointing persistence. Failing friendships were part and parcel of the arid landscape of exile in Stalin’s Moscow; even more destructive was the humiliation entailed in self-preservation at the cost of betraying a family member. A scar for life, this enforced act of survival was a repeated occurrence in the 1930s, amongst Soviet and exile communists alike. Since 1934, Balázs’s brother, Ervin Bauer, had been a successful professor of biology at various Soviet research institutes (see Miklós Müller ). When Ervin was suddenly arrested in Leningrad in August 1937, Balázs (born Herbert Bauer), at the time an Austrian citizen and insecure amidst the waves of growing xenophobia, felt compelled to send a letter to the German Section of the Comintern, stating that he always had a bad relationship with Ervin and had not been in touch with him since coming to the Soviet Union (more on this episode see in the introductory essay to this volume). The often unspoken tragedy of exile was amplified by political divisions within the émigré political elites and by a calculating mentality that put one’s

Cosmopolitans without a Polis

133

career above the code of proletarian solidarity. Béla Kun disliked Lukács, whose “Blum Theses” he had severely criticized, and wouldn’t support even his requests for adequate housing; the Hungarian communist leadership in exile remained silent when Sándor Barta, former head of the International League of Revolutionary Writers and in 1938 still editor-in-chief of Új Hang (New Voice), was arrested and ‘purged’; Rákosi apparently intervened (through Dimitrov) in favor of Lukács’s release from Lubianka in 1941, but the gesture was designed to prevent future embarrassment in having to return to a post-war Hungary without one of its most prominent communist intellectuals (for evidence, see Hay 225; 263). The helplessness of the Hungarian Communist Party in countering Stalin’s terror issued in almost 80 percent of those who led the Hungarian Commune in 1919 being liquidated (To˝kés 261). Against this background, it becomes clear that the space for ideological maneuvering, for questioning the prevalent political direction, let alone for resistance, was indeed rather limited. In the following section, I wish to address briefly Georg Lukács’s most important philosophical work written in Soviet exile, his book on the young Hegel, and to reveal its contradictory position between an innovative, even radical, interpretation of Hegel’s place in the history of philosophy and a tacit glorification of Stalinism. I do so by placing Lukács’s book in the context of his desire for self-fulfillment in the rather precarious environment of the 1930s, where what looked as a public success was often the result of a careful manipulation of the talents of intellectuals under duress.

2. A Brief Case Study: Young Hegel and Lukács’s Options in the 1930s The Young Hegel, probably the most seminal work Lukács wrote in the 1930s, never became a canonical text; it was seen by official Eastern-European Marxism as too free and libertarian in its pronouncements, while Western Marxists and Hegel scholars believed it to be somewhat ideologically skewed and prejudiced, notwithstanding all its brilliance. We know from Lukács’s preface to the second German edition that the book was completed late in the autumn of 1938 (Lukács, The Young Hegel xi); and Record of a Life gives the second half of the 1930s as the time when the book was being written (Lukács, Record 101). Kadarkay asserts that the book goes back to a large manuscript of 1931, “Thermidor: The Young and Old Hegel,” which Lukács couldn’t publish at the time (349). Lukács does not mention the fact that the text – as yet unpublished and open to modifica-

134

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

tions – was defended as a doctoral dissertation (doktor nauk) under the title “The Young Hegel” (Molodoi Gegel’) at the Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet Academy of Sciences during Lukács’s long exile in Moscow. How far the text of the thesis overlapped with that of the book is an important question that has never been studied. László Sziklai was the first to reveal that the defense took place on December 29, 1942, with Lukács obtaining his doctoral certificate on August 28, 1943 (99). The viva committee was chaired by Pavel Iudin, an important figure in the Soviet philosophical establishment, well-disposed towards Lukács; it included, among others, the philosopher Mark Rozental, deputy editor-in-chief of Literaturnyi kritik and editor, with Iudin, of the influential and norm-setting Concise Philosophical Dictionary (Kratkii filosofskii slovar), which had undergone by the time of Stalin’s death in 1953 three editions. Thus, the outcome of Lukács’s public defense appears to have been largely predetermined by the favorable distribution of power and influence on the committee. It is also significant to keep in mind that Lukács’s defence took place very (perhaps even too) soon after he had joined the staff of the Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Barely four months had elapsed since his appointment at the Institute in August 1942 (cf. Lukács’s c.v. of January 23, 1945 in Sereda and Stykalin 128), and this timing does suggest that the whole event was carefully orchestrated, issuing in a public defense without a real scholarly discussion. Thus on the surface it all looked as a painless and straightforward promotion and public celebration of Lukács’s interpretation of Hegel. Behind this outer layer, however, an inescapable need to accommodate oneself to the imperatives of ideological life under Stalin was discernable. Lukács was being rewarded for being used. The Hegel emerging from his book was a contemporary of Stalin from the time after Trotsky and the Trotskyite line had been defeated, and with them also the romantic stage of the revolution. This Moscow Hegel of the 1930s was praised for doing away with revolutionary ideals that were thought to be impeding his ability to grasp the essence of history: “Hegel’s very abandonment of the revolutionary ideals of his youth enabled him […] to achieve […] a profound and true insight into the necessity of the historical process and the methodology of history” (Young Hegel 72). This silent alignment of Hegel with Stalin no doubt amounted to an intellectual sacrifice on the part of Lukács. Unlike other interpretations of Hegel during the 1930s, such as Kojève’s lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, Lukács’s reading of Hegel remained more predictable and also more inflexible in its resolute emphasis on the happy end of Bildung and the eventual victory of the Slave. The reason for this was all too clear: unlike Kojève, who was seen as influential in championing a Left interpretation of Hegel that mediated be-

Cosmopolitans without a Polis

135

tween Marxism and Existentialism without serving any narrow political allegiances, Lukács’s engagement with Hegel was shaped in no small measure by the relentless pressures of the Party orthodoxy, which he had little choice but to accept, having written more than a decade ago his ‘compromising’ book History and Class Consciousness and the ‘notorious’ “Bloom Theses.” After a spell of resilient struggle to defend his freedom as philosopher by reasserting the main theses of History and Class Consciousness, Lukács eventually succumbed to Stalinism. Later he reported in an interview that in Johannes R. Becher’s Moscow apartment, he, Becher, and Andor Gábor would often voice anti-Stalinist views (Siebert 327); in the same interview he claimed that his literary criticism at the time was essentially an opposition to Stalin, especially the article “Erzählen oder Beschreiben” (Narrate or Describe). However, in a more sober account of his relation to Stalinism, Lukács clearly states that throughout the 1930s he did not find it necessary to criticize or depart significantly from Stalin’s line (Lukács, “Über Stalin hinaus”). It was this subscription to Stalinism, however refined and subtle in Lukács’s execution, which in the end compromised his chance to exercise a wider influence through his interpretation of Hegel. In defining Lukács’s position, we have to bear in mind and to return once again to the different course of his intellectual formation and his CentralEuropean cultural inheritance that couldn’t simply vanish with his arrival in Moscow. In a recent book-length study, Károly Kókai has made a strong case for Lukács being essentially a Central-European intellectual, who turned for solution in succession towards the West and the East, failing in both directions (235–36). Lukács did not make it into German academia; his habilitation plans at Heidelberg were frustrated because of what Max Weber’s colleagues judged to be an over-essayistic, often unruly, writing style and an insufficiently systematic approach. Nor did he make it after all in Moscow, where he was constantly dogged by a lingering suspicion of elitism and foreignness, which barred his access to positions of real political and ideological power and culminated in his arrest in 1941. All this added to Lukács’s predicament during the 1930s and severely limited the choices available to him. After accepting the Comintern criticism of History and Classs Consciousness and volunteering self-criticism, his intellectual autonomy was substantially eroded; settling in Moscow only aggravated this process. True to his own philosophical schooling, erudition, and talent, he endeavored to lend Stalin’s dogmas some sophistication and flexibility, but his work, including his book on the young Hegel, bore all signs of a political and ideological compromise by a person eager to attain self-fulfillment in precarious circumstances. In The Young Hegel, this mixture of originality and dogma is particularly salient. On the one hand,

136

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

Lukács defies the established Soviet interpretation of Hegel by attempting to demonstrate that not just the mature and the late but also the young Hegel could be grasped as a harbinger of the Marxist method; on the other hand, his turn to Hegel bears the imprint of a reconciliation with Soviet reality and a benevolent attention to the role of the great personality in history. Hegel had glorified Napoleon and the terror of the French Revolution as necessary instruments of world history; he was the philosopher summoned by history to reveal the God-like nature of the politician. In the 1930s, Lukács’s approval of Hegel’s glorification of Napoleon amounted in turn to a silent approval and justification of terror, Stalin, and the Communist Party as embodiments of reason in world history. Paradoxically, one could perhaps see behind this reconciliation with Stalin, modeled as it was on Hegel’s veneration of Napoleon, a more complex motivation: not just a prudent tactical acceptance of the political status quo, but also a residual loyalty to bourgeois individualism, to its trust in the uniqueness of great personalities – all of which is so close to Lukács’s understanding of culture as based on the canon of exclusive individual accomplishments. Thus Lukács’s reading of Hegel was ridden with contradictions reflecting his own unstable – exilic – position during the 1930s, his multi-layered and multi-coded intellectual baggage, and his controversial political experience. He made use of, and allowed himself to be used in, the carefully orchestrated Soviet Hegel boom that was designed and steered to endow the ruling Marxist-Leninist ideology with the grandeur of a long-reaching intellectual tradition (see Tihanov Master 269–71). This scenario was to change dramatically only a few years later, when in 1944 the Party – no longer requiring Hegel’s added clout of intellectual legitimacy for its doctrine, or for its Leader’s standing, and certainly concerned amidst the War with populist propaganda more than with serious philosophy – declared an end to the “idealization” of the German thinker (Tihanov, “Revising” 94–95 n. 60).

3. Homecoming: The Boomerang Doesn’t Always Return “My heart is defenseless because it is at home”

This epigraph from Béla Balázs’ poem “Kegyelmezzetek” (Have mercy upon me!” (trans. and qtd. in Zsuffa 320), written as he was preparing to return to Budapest in the spring of 1945, encapsulates a whole range of emotions: from trepidation to sweet sorrow to anticipation and quiet hope. Balázs was pleading in this poem for mercy towards the prodigal son, realizing that the para-

Cosmopolitans without a Polis

137

mount desire to return home was making him exposed and vulnerable to the misgivings and assaults of those who had stayed behind. Unlike Sinkó, who went back to France in 1937 and then on to Yugoslavia where he settled and, under the protection of Miroslav Krlezˇa, rose to become a prominent cultural figure and founding Chair of the Department of Hungarian Studies at the new University of Novi Sad, and unlike Lukács who seemed to hesitate between Budapest and Berlin but would have actually preferred Vienna, Balázs headed for Hungary as his first and only choice. This, however, did not spare him the humiliating experience of constant neglect and undermining by the Party, even as he was at the height of his international visibility as film theorist (throughout his Moscow time Balázs had chosen to remain a member of the German Communist party, only joining the Hungarian Communist party in the summer of 1945). In 1946, his anti-Nazi children’s story Heinrich beginnt den Kampf (Heinrich Begins the Struggle) was stigmatized by the Communist paper Új Szó (New World) as “harmful pro-German propaganda.” The constant insinuations issued in Mátyás Rákosi advising Balázs that he should not publicly call himself a Communist, as this indents the Party’s reputation (Zsuffa 328). In the end, however strong his international reputation as film theorist after 1945 and however independent-minded his course of action, Balázs succumbed to Party-line platitudes, which would litter his film articles in the last years of his career – partly as a gesture of self-protection, partly because the exposure to an intellectually impoverished environment was taking its toll. Lukács’s return and his career in Hungary were marked by deeper ambiguities. The political turn of 1989 has triggered a reappraisal of his standing and contributions to Hungarian intellectual life; in the process, the complexities of his life after 1945 have been obscured, and a new orthodoxy of overlooking his difficult position in the ranks of the Hungarian intellect ual elite has ousted the previous, equally unsophisticated, frame of reference. Lukács’s relocation to Budapest was anything but inevitable. When before leaving the Soviet Union he was approached by the Hungarian Communist Party to get once again involved with Party work in Budapest, he wrote to Mikhail Lifshits: “I had hoped for semi-retirement in Hungary and to devote my life to scholarship, and then later to settle in Vienna […] The more I play the politician, the less I can realize my Vienna dreams” (letter of April 16, 1945; qtd. in Kadarkay 364). Lukács had indeed been invited to live in Vienna by his friend Ernst Fischer, the Marxist philosopher. In the end, he opted for Hungary and arrived in Budapest at the end of August 1945, aged sixty. He may well have meant it as no more than a temporary abode, but as both his involvement in Hungarian life and the counter-wave of enforced isolation, ne-

138

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

glect, and aggravation grew, he found the rest of his life inextricably entwined with the fortunes of his country. The foundational paradox of Lukács’s life after 1945 is that while he always enjoyed a measure of prestige and a fair share of the public spotlight, he nonetheless suffered inner isolation over prolonged periods of time. At the same time as he was protected and offered a way of life that on the face of it bespoke privilege and material comfort, he was also left with the bitter aftertaste of being used for party-political purposes, with his ability to resist or extricate himself from this process declining over time. Promoted and vilified in the same breadth, Lukács was a hostage to forces beyond his control, a loyal soldier of his Party (at times hovering at the margins or simply excluded from it) rather than a powerful policy-maker. The first couple of years looked all rather propitious: Lukács was elected a member of the provisional Hungarian National Assembly in April 1945 while still living in Moscow; upon his return to Budapest in August, he was appointed in November Professor of Aesthetics and Cultural Theory at the University of Budapest; and he was assigned a spacious apartment in one of the upmarket parts of Pest, overlooking the Danube. To be sure, his election to a professorship, on the recommendation of Tivadar Thienemann, a leading Hungarian intellectual and a former editor of Minerva, succeeded because of Lukács’s credentials as a “pre-eminent advocate of the German philosophy of spirit” (qtd. in Ambrus 416), not because of his work as a Marxist philosopher and literary critic. Yet Lukács saw as his paramount task the preservation of the continuity with his work from the Moscow years. In a way, he was determined to revive once again a united front policy, this time not directed against fascism but rather attempting to win over the skeptics amongst the intelligentsia, thus widening the support base of the Communist Party. That was an overriding duty, despite Lukács’s personal intolerance with bourgeois and populist writers (the Party had faired badly in the first general elections in November 1945, receiving an unimpressive 17 % of the vote, against 57 % for their rival, the Smallholders’ Party; figures in Zsuffa 326). Lukács translated the new imperative of a united front into a vision of “the unity of Hungarian literature,” as the title of one of his articles, written in 1946 and later included in his 1947 collection of essays Irodalom és demokrácia (Literature and Democracy), suggested. The desired unity was to rest on realism as a method of creative writing best suited to carry the values of democracy. Lukács was adamant that this was not to be “Socialist Realism” or “socialist democracy”; he recognized the contours of a new historical situation after 1945, in which a new, democratic culture was emerging all over Europe, “without it being accompanied by a change in the material basis of society, the capitalist economic order” (qtd. in Ambrus

Cosmopolitans without a Polis

139

421). Hence Lukács’s preparedness to give credit to writers in the populist camp (despite the fact that many of them were anti-Semites), heeding, as Ambrus and Szabó argue, the populists’ contribution to the literature of the interwar period, and, more importantly, working towards the vital – for the time being – alliance between the Communist Party and the National Peasant Party. Crucial in realizing the Party goal of gaining sympathy and trust amongst wider social circles was Lukács’s role as editor of Forum (the first issue appeared in September 1946), a literary journal designed to go beyond the populist-urban divide and to draw larger numbers of the intelligentsia into the Communist orbit. It was in the first issue of Forum that Lukács published the afore-mentioned programmatic article “The Unity of Hungarian Literature,” which asserted “the unconditional approval of democracy” – regardless of differences “in world view, in art, or in style” – to be the “subjective basis for the unity of Hungarian literature” (qtd. in Szabó 487). While it is true that Lukács was insensitive and even hostile towards István Bibó’s and Sándor Márai’s calls against the erosion of democracy from the Left (Szegedy-Maszák 118–21), in the latter half of the 1940s he nonetheless remained largely committed – over time, as we will see, against the grain of Party policies – to a wider view of democracy that would seek to integrate the work of writers from different social strata and of different political colors. It is at this significant moment that Lukács compared the Party-committed writer to a partisan, who is neither a commander nor a soldier in a regular army, and who is entitled to retain his autonomy, including his “right to despair” (a phrase for which Lukács was later repeatedly taken to task by the Party). Lukács devoted himself with unwavering energy to this new agenda of the unity of Hungarian literature; he contributed about thirty essays to Forum. Except for a period of time in his youth, preceding the publication of Die Seele und die Formen (1911), and then again – briefly – in the second half of the 1920s, Hungarian literature had never been so central to his work. But all these efforts were only possible in, and lasted whilst, a specific political constellation was in place. At the general elections in August 1947, a leftist alliance, in which the communists were the largest party, managed to obtain majority in Parliament. As a result, the platform of a united front was being actively reconsidered; in 1948, a merger between the social-democrats and the communists led to the formation of a single party, the Hungarian Working People’s Party. In retrospect, Lukács judged this event to be the turning point in the Party’s assessment of his usefulness (Lukács, “Über Stalin hinaus” 218; Urbán 435). In March 1949, the People’s Front was officially abandoned as a

140

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

Party line, and the people’s democracy was equated with “the dictatorship of the proletariat without soviets” (qtd. in Urbán 438). A month later, Rákosi commissioned a critique of Lukács, to be written by the philosopher and Party veteran László Rudas. Thus the “Lukács Debate” was opened, in the course of which Lukács’s literary policies, driven by the ambition to implement a united ‘realist front’ in Hungarian literature, were severely criticised. Lukács was also stigmatized as “cosmopolitan” (Stykalin 289–90) and as a thinker detached from the realities of class struggle, a seeker of a false “third way” between capitalism and socialism. The situation was exacerbated by criticism in Moscow from Lukács’s old foe, Aleksandr Fadeev, the powerful leader of the Soviet Union of Writers, who charged him in an article in Pravda of February 1, 1950 with disdain for contemporary Soviet literature and Socialist Realism. These pressures led to Lukács twice committing acts of self-criticism (the first of these took place in 1949 and was seen by Merleau-Ponty as a betrayal of the Marxist creed and, in hindsight, as a mistake by Lukács himself; cf. Record 143). Like Balázs, Lukács continued to travel abroad, his international schedule unaffected by the domestic strictures (in 1949, for example, Lukács participated in a Hegel conference in Paris, where he met Merleau-Ponty, Henri Lefèvre, Jean Hyppolite, Lucien Goldmann, and Roger Garaudy). In many ways, he continued to be a privileged Party member, but that was only a façade which the Party was careful to maintain while gradually emasculating him. Those quick to brand Lukács as a dictatorial presence in the years after 1945, ought to heed the facts: Lukács, after 1949, was reduced to a window-dressing dignitary whose international eminence was utilized to bestow on Hungarian communism the air of acceptability and decency, while his voice in the country was silenced through oppressive and humiliating maneuverings. Although Lukács was quietly rehabilitated by his seventieth birthday in 1955, the price to pay was too high. In 1949 Lukács had suffered a permanent and severe blow: having only recently returned from more than two decades in exile, eager to re-immerse himself in his own culture and to leave his mark on the topical debates of his time (regardless of his preference for Vienna as his future home), he had to abandon his studies of contemporary Hungarian literature, never again to return to the subject. An opportunity to write on his own literature was taken away from him, denying him the chance to embrace what he had lost during the years of exile. Thus the political watershed signaled by the establishment in 1948 of the Hungarian Working People’s Party was a watershed in Lukács’s intellectual life as well: he saw himself forced to give up the hope for full reintegration through an active presence on the Hungarian literary scene and to contend himself over the remaining twenty years of his

Cosmopolitans without a Polis

141

life with philosophy – or with writing on Soviet and German literature. Under the veneer of international success, after 1949 Lukács was a foreigner in his own culture, a situation exacerbated by Forum ceasing publication in August 1950. Lukács’s brief and hapless tenure as a minister for cultural affairs in Nagy’s 1956 government only came to highlight the lasting nature of his predicament. In the summer of 1960, Lukács wrote to the Hungarian Politburo, objecting vehemently to the isolation and marginalization imposed on him; as a consequence, he was offered to leave Hungary for good (at the age of 75) and settle in West Germany (Stykalin 208; early in the 1960s Lukács was invited to a Chair at the University of Manchester: Stykalin 318 n. 88). Thus his homecoming was never quite complete, ruptured again and again by reminders that his way of thinking and his rich intellectual baggage, informed as they were by multiple cultural codes derived from diverse settings and traditions – Austro-Hungarian, German, and Soviet – rendered him a stranger in his country. Nor was Lukács the only one to experience estrangement at home; in other cases, this sentiment led to more radical decisions: Háy, after returning to Hungary in 1945, was later sentenced to six years in prison and resettled to Ascona in Switzerland in 1965; similarly, Aleksander Wat, having returned in 1946 to Poland, only to be subjected to persecution in 1949–56, took permanent residence in Paris in 1959, where he died in 1967. The boomerang never quite returned … The reader will have noticed by now that this is not solely a piece of dispassionate research. At least as much, it has endeavored to recuperate voices no longer heard in their full range. The passage of time and the irreversibility of political change tend to impose their own rules of interpretation. Lukács, Balázs, Sinkó, Wat, and a myriad of other leftist exiles and émigrés in Stalin’s Moscow confront us with an experience that cannot be grasped unless we detach ourselves, albeit for a moment, from the habit of writing history with the victors in mind. Resisting and failing, fighting for a cosmopolitan dream while deprived of a polis of their own, longing for a global proletarian solidarity while driven into anomy and isolation in the capital of the World Revolution, losing and regaining identity as public figures and in the silence of writing, hostages to Stalin’s regime and believers in ideals that defy it, only few of these intellectuals returned home in more than a physical sense. The transformative power of their exilic experiences was truly overwhelming: their lives were enormously enriched but also tragically halved, the fruits of their labor left in danger of lingering unclaimed by posterity.

142

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

Works Cited Ambrus, János. “‘Return Home with Hopes.’” Hungarian Studies on György Lukács. 2 vols. Ed. László Illés et al. Budapest: Akadémiai, 1993. 2: 416–33. Azadovskii, Konstantin, and Boris Egorov. “‘Kosmopolity’” (‘Cosmopolitans’). Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 36 (1990): 83–135. Azadovskii, Konstantin, and Boris Egorov. “From Anti-Westernism to Anti-Semitism.” Journal of Cold War Studies 4.1 (2002): 66–80. Feuchtwanger, Lion. Moscow 1937. My Visit Described for My Friends. Trans. Irene Josephy from the German Ein Reisebericht für meine Freunde (1937). London: Victor Gollancz, 1937. Gide, André. Return from the U.S.S.R. (1936). Trans. Dorothy Bussy. New York: Knopf, 1937. Hay, Julius. Born in 1900. Memoirs. Trans. J. A. Underwood. London: Hutchinson, 1974. Herf, Jeffrey. Divided Memory. The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1997. Janka, Walter. Spuren eines Lebens (Traces of a Life). Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1992. Jarmatz, Klaus, et al. Exil in der UdSSR (Exile in the USSR). Leipzig: Reclam, 1979. Kadarkay, Arpad. Georg Lukács: Life, Thought, and Politics. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Knipovich, Evgeniia. “Novaia kniga G. Lukacha i voprosy istorii realizma” (G. Lukács’s New Book and Issues in the History of Realism). Internatsional’naia literatura 11 (1939): 205–10. Kókai, Károly. Im Nebel. Der junge Georg Lukács und Wien (In the Fog. The Young Lukács and Vienna). Vienna: Böhlau, 2002. Kolesnikoff, Nina. Bruno Jasien´ski: His Evolution from Futurism to Socialist Realism. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 1982. Kurella, Alfred. Ich lebe in Moskau (I live in Moscow). Berlin: Volk und Welt, 1947. Leonhard, Wolfgang. Der Schock des Hitler Paktes. Munich: Knesebeck und Schuler, 1989. Loewy, Hanno. Béla Balázs – Märchen, Ritual und Film (Béla Balázs – Fairy Tale, Ritual, and Film). Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2003. Lukács, Georg. Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (History and Class Consciousness). Berlin: Malik, 1923. Lukács.Georg. “Die Neue Verfassung der UdSSR und das Problem der Persönlichkeit. Aus einem Vortrag.” Internationale Literatur 6.9 (1936): 50–53. Lukács, Georg. Marxismus und Stalinismus. Reinbeck: Rowohlt, 1970. Lukács, Georg. Record of a Life. An Autobiographical Sketch. Ed. István Eörsi. Trans. R. Livingstone. London: Merlin, 1983. Lukács, Georg. The Young Hegel. Trans. R. Livingstone. London: Merlin, 1975 (First published as Der junge Hegel: über die Beziehungen von Dialektik und Ökonomie, Zurich and Vienna: Europa, 1948; second edition: Der junge Hegel und die Probleme der kapitalistischen Gesellschaft, (East) Berlin: Aufbau, 1954). Lukács, Georg. “Über Stalin hinaus” (Beyond Stalin). 1969. Blick zurück auf Lenin: Lukács, die Oktoberrevolution und Perestroika (Looking back at Lenin: Lukács, the October Revolution, and Perestroika). Ed. Detlev Claussen. Frankfurt/Main: Luchterhand, 1990. 215–22. Martin, Terry. “The Russification of the RSFSR.” Cahiers du Monde Russe 39.1–2 (1998): 99–118. Müller, Miklós. “A Martyr of Science. Ervin Bauer (1890–1938).” Hungarian Quarterly 46 (2005): 123–31. Müller, Reinhard, ed. Die Säuberung. Moskau 1936. Stenogramm einer geschlossenen Parteiversammlung (The Purge: Moscow 1936. Stenographic Record of a Closed Party Metting). Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1991.

Cosmopolitans without a Polis

143

Pike, David. German Writers in Soviet Exile, 1933–1945. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1982. Ronen, Omri. Iz goroda Enn (From the City of Enn). St. Petersburg: Zvezda, 2005. Sereda, V., and A. Stykalin, eds. Besedy na Lubianke (Conversations at the Lubianka). 2nd ed. Moscow: Institut slavianovedeniia RAN, 2001. Sharapov, Iurii. Litsei v Sokol’nikakh (The Lyceum in Sokolniki). Moscow: Airo-XX, 1995. Siebert, Ilse. “Gespräch mit Georg Lukács” (A Conversation with Georg Lukács). [Conducted in 1967] Sinn und Form 2 (1990): 321–31. Sinkó, Ervin. Roman eines Romans. Moskauer Tagebuch (Novel of a Novel: A Moscow Diary) Trans. Edmund Trugly, Jr. Cologne: Wissenschaft und Politik, 1962. Studer, Brigitte, and Berthold Unfried. Der Stalinistische Parteikader. Identitätsstiftende Praktiken und Diskurse in der Sowjetunion der dreißiger Jahre (The Stalinist Party Cadre: Identity-Bestowing Practices and Discourses in the Soviet Union in the 1930s). Cologne: Böhlau, 2001. Stykalin, Aleksandr. D’erd’ Lukach: myslitel’ i politik (Georg Lukács: A Thinker and Politician). Moscow: Stepanov, 2001. Szabó, Erno˝. “From the Program of Literary Unity to the Defensive: György Lukács and the Forum.” Hungarian Studies on György Lukács. 2 vols. Ed. László Illés et al. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1993. 2: 484–97. Szegedy-Maszák, Mihály. “The Introduction of Communist Censorship in Hungary: 1945–49.” History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe. Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries. 4 vols. Ed. Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer. Vol. 3: The Making and Remaking of Literary Institutions. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2007. 114–25. Sziklai, László. Georg Lukács und seine Zeit, 1930–1945 (George Lukács and His Times). Budapest: Corvina, 1986. Tihanov, Galin. “Revising Hegel’s Phenomenology on the Left: Lukács, Kojève, Hyppolite.” Comparative Criticism 25 (2004): 67–95. Tihanov, Galin. The Master and the Slave: Lukács, Bakhtin, and the Ideas of Their Time. Oxford and New York: Clarendon and Oxford UP, 2000. Tihanov, Galin. “Viktor Shklovskii and Georg Lukács in the 1930s.” The Slavonic and East European Review 78.1 (2000): 44–65. Tischler, Carola. Flucht in die Verfolgung. Deutsche Emigranten im sowjetischen Exil, 1933 bis 1945 (Flight into Persecution. German Émigrés in Soviet Exile, 1933–45). Münster: Lit, 1996. To˝kés, Rudolf L. Béla Kun and the Hungarian Soviet Republic: The Origins and Role of the Communist Party of Hungary in the Revolutions of 1918–1919. New York: Praeger, 1967. Unfried, Berthold. “Kommunistische Künstler in der Sowjetunion der dreißiger Jahre: Kulturelle Mißverständnisse und Konkurrenz” (Communist Artists in the Soviet Union: Cultural Misunderstandings and Competition). Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung 2000/2001. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 2001. 126–43. Urbán, Károly. “The Lukács Debate: Further Contributions to an Understanding of the Background to the 1949–50 Debate.” Hungarian Studies on György Lukács. 2 vols. Ed. László Illés et al. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1993. 2: 434–51. Viliam-Vil’mont, N. N. “Vozvedenie na prestol Osvalda Spenglera” (The Enthroning of Oswald Spengler). Internatsional’naia literatura 5–6 (1940): 288–303. Wat, Alexander. My Century. The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual. Trans. Richard Lourie. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Zsuffa, Joseph. Béla Balázs. The Man and the Artist. Berkeley: U of California P, 1987.

144

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

Kultura (1946–2000) Włodzimierz Bolecki

1. Genesis and Beginnings of Kultura After World War II, Kultura was the most important Polish émigré monthly publication; for decades; it was the only East-Central European émigré publication in the West that mattered. Its activities had a decisive influence on the rise and development of the Opposition in Poland in the 1970s, as well as on the emergence of both a publishing movement independent of communist censorship, and of dissident magazines such as the Russian Kontynent (1974), the Ukrainian Suczastnist (1961) and Widnowa (Modernity; 1985), the Czech Sveˇdectví (1956), and the Hungarian Magyar Füzetek that Péter Kende founded and edited 1978–89 in Paris (Kowalczyk Giedroyc; K. Pomian W kre˛gu). The contributors to Kultura were among the most prominent émigré writers, scholars, and journalists, as well as representatives of the intellectual elite from many European countries with communist regimes. Almost all intellectuals interested in Central and East Europe sympathized with it (G. & K. Pomian 127–58). Today, the term Kultura encompasses three different serials: (1) the monthly Kultura; (2) the book series Biblioteka Kultury (Library of Culture; 1953–), which featured works of literature, history, and journalism in three series (Documents, Archive of Revolution, and Without Censorship); and (3) the periodical Zeszyty Historyczne (Historical Notebooks; 1962–), which published articles on twentieth-century history. The publisher of all these was the Instytut Literacki (Kowalik, Danielewicz-Zielin´ska, Supruniuk vol. 1). The genesis of Kultura – the conception of its mandate and most important guiding principles – was tied closely to Poland’s history during the last two hundred years, while the beginnings of Kultura, and even the fate and choices of its editors, were linked to the end of World War II. The war brought EastCentral Europe under Soviet domination, the Baltic states ceased to exist, almost forty percent of the Polish territory was annexed by the Soviet Union, along with the major cities of Vilnius (Wilno) and L’viv (Lwów), while Poland gained part of a former German territory, including the major cities of Szczecin and Wrocław [Breslau].

Kultura (1946–2000) (Włodzimierz Bolecki)

145

The Beginnings of Kultura (Italy) The post-1945 Polish political emigration comprised primarily former soldiers who had fought against the Germans on all fronts and found themselves outside Poland. Where did these soldiers-emigrants come from? After the partition of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union (in accordance with the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of August 23, 1939), tens of thousands of soldiers were evacuated to the West, and as many soldiers were arrested by the NKVD in eastern Poland occupied by the Soviet Union on September 17, 1939. Thousands of them were murdered in the Soviet Union, while the remaining ones were sent to camps. The Polish Government in Exile (first in France, from 1940 in London) organized the underground Armia Krajowa (Home Army) in 1939 on the Polish terrain occupied by the Soviet Union and Germany. Three different Polish regiments were formed from the soldiers in the West and East: 1) the Western Polish Army under the Polish Government in Exile with soldiers who got away before Poland was partitioned by Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939; 2) the Polish Army named after Tadeusz Kos´ciuszko, formed of Polish citizens in the Soviet Union by Stalin; and 3) the Polish Army formed of Poles released from Soviet camps and prisons on the basis of an agreement reached in July 1941 between Stalin and Churchill. The latter, led by General Władysław Anders (who was also released from a camp), was given permission by Stalin to leave the Soviet Union in 1942. It joined the Polish forces in Palestine (1943) that had earlier fought in Africa and elsewhere, and became part of the Eighth British Army known in the East as the Second Corps (Habielski Z˙ycie). Among the soldiers in both regiments of the Western Polish Army were many intellectuals, writers, reporters, scholars, journalists, political activists, and diplomats mobilized in 1939. During the war, they carried out an intensive round of instructional, educational and cultural activities among the soldiers. Among them were the future founders of Kultura: Jerzy Giedroyc (lawyer, high-ranking member of the government before 1939, editor of two weeklies, diplomat), Józef Czapski, a painter and writer, Zofia Hertz and her husband Zygmunt, both lawyers, as well as Gustaw Herling-Grudzin´ski, a literary critic. In August 1947, General Anders nominated to the personnel of the Instytut Literacki Giedroyc, Herling-Grudzin´ski, Zofia and Zygmunt Hertz (Giedroyc Autobiografia; Ptasin´ska-Wójcik; Kowalczyk Giedroyc). The most important figure was Giedroyc, who was known in a narrow profession circle before the war, but not in the broader public. In 1942, he became the head of the Propaganda Office and of the Second Corps’ Kultura.

146

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

Czapski had previously worked in the Propaganda Office, while HerlingGrudzin´ski had worked for the Army’s publishers. The most important publication under the commander of the Second Corps was the weekly Orzeł Biały (White Eagle), together with a book series titled Biblioteka Orła Białego (ChłapNowakowa). When it became clear in 1945 that the agreements at the Allied Conferences of Teheran (1943) and Yalta (1945) would leave Poland to the Soviet Union, hundreds of thousands of Poles (mostly demobilized soldiers) decided to remain abroad. Poles who had lived in eastern Poland prior to the war had nowhere to return, for their lands became part of the Soviet Union in 1939. From the perspective of the exiles, the Soviet occupation simply replaced the German one. The Yalta agreement was for the Poles what the Treaty of Trianon (1920) had been for the Hungarians. The Polish emigrants in Western Europe were concentrated in two cities: London and Paris. After 1945, the London-based Polish Government in Exile continued to exist, with political parties, press, etc. This gave the emigrants a sense of legality and continuity with the prewar Polish state. The Polish postwar émigrés also settled in other countries of Western Europe, in both Americas, and in Australia. It became clear that so many Polish émigrés would need various forms of communication, and their own institutions for organizing intellectual life in the West. After his discharge from the army, Jerzy Giedroyc decided, therefore, to continue his publishing activities, with Polish émigrés as his audience. With a loan from the army, he bought a press (Officine Grafiche Italliane, or “Oggi”) and he opened in January 1946 in Rome the Instytut Literacki (registered under the name of Casa Editrice Lettere). Giedroyc quickly repaid the loan “so that he could freely criticize the exilic Polish politico-military establishment without being accused of ingratitude” ( Jelen´ski “Kultura”; Giedroyc ˙ ebrowski). Autobiografia; Kowalczyk; Ptasin´ska-Wójcik; Z

Genesis: The Historical Tradition of Kultura In creating the Instytut Literacki, Giedroyc consciously forged a connection with an identical situation 150 years earlier. After the partition of Poland by the imperial powers of Russia, Prussia, and Austria (1795), Polish soldier-emigrants in Italy (serving in the so-called Polish Legions of Napoleon’s army) created the Instytut Naukowy (Academic Institute) to preserve Polish national life abroad. It was in 1798 that a Polish national hymn, originally the song of emigrants, was written. The genesis of Kultura was therefore both his-

Kultura (1946–2000) (Włodzimierz Bolecki)

147

torical (deeply rooted in the Polish tradition of independence) and symbolic. It bears keeping in mind that the emigrants who remained in the West after 1945 regarded their fate as a continuation of the annals of the Polish emigration of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first two books published by Giedroyc were, actually, dedicated to the Legions of the eighteenth century. As Giedroyc stated in the founding document of Instytut Literacki: [Its] mandate is to provide émigré Poles with a selection of literary masterpieces, to demonstrate thus to them the many centuries of cultural tradition thanks to which we know that “a great nation may fall, but only one dishonored may disappear – a nation without a yesterday or today.” […] In the tradition of Polish Culture and the Polish fight for independence, Polish socio-political thought also played a far-reaching role […]. The Instytut Literacki considers it therefore special and important for our age to acquaint readers with its intellectual achievements and its evolution.

The goal of the Instytut Literacki was, according to Giedroyc, “to inspire the emigration to a movement of thought and action in the sphere of culture,” to organize Polish life according to the principles of political equality, social justice, respect for law, and the dignity of the human being. The time is coming when not only every political and social activist but every contemporary cultured Pole will have to know the books with which the Instytut Literacki is supplying its readers […] If the Instytut fulfills its task, perhaps we will have the right to repeat the words uttered 150 years ago [i.e., in 1798], words representing the act of establishing the Legion’s Academic Institute in Italy: “It is with the skills acquired here, and bearing the true and pure republican heart, that we shall return to our homeland and become more useful to it, than our forefathers who pilgrimaged around the world” (Kowalczyk Giedroyc). This formulation, which grew from the Enlightenment idea that social reforms could be achieved through educational, academic, and literary activities, became the actual program of Giedroyc’s Instytut Literacki.

Kultura in France At the turn of 1946/1947, Giedroyc decided to transfer the Instytut Literacki to France, with the permission of General Anders. The reasons were both economic (the drop in readership among soldiers, the Italian revenue service, which was strangely suspicious of firms showing a profit, Italian disinterest in the Instytut’s printing services) and, primarily, political: the pro-communist Italian establishment treated the Polish émigrés as “lepers,” as fascists who refused to return to a home country “liberated” by Stalin. In France, which had hosted many Polish émigrés since the eighteenth century, Józef Czapski’s

148

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

personal acquaintance with General de Gaulle secured the Instytut the French government’s favorable disposition (Giedroyc “Rozmowa”; Giedroyc Auto˙ ebrowski). biografia; Kowalczyk Giedroyc; Ptasin´ska-Wójcik; Z Giedroyc sold the printing press in 1947 and invested the money in a new office in Maisons-Laffitte, just outside Paris, to which the operations of the Instytut were transferred in November. (Due to the high rent, the premises had to be abandoned in 1954, but thanks to loans and contributions from readers a new house was purchased next year in the nearby suburb of Le Mesnil-le-Roi. The name of Maisons-Lafitte was retained.) The beginnings in France were very difficult, Giedroyc recalled: “The money we received from selling the printing house in Italy ran out quickly, though our costs were minimal. […] After that very difficult moments followed.” Czapski had to ravel twice to America to raise funds among Polonia and American friends. “It allowed us to survive the two, three most difficult years before we could stabilize” (Giedroyc “Rozmowa”; see also Jelen´ski “Kultura”; Giedroyc, Autobiografia; Kowalczyk Giedroyc). The villa purchased in 1954 houses today the Archiwum Instytutu Literackiego (Archive of the Literary Institute), one of the most highly valued Polish archives on the émigrés.

2. The Editorial Staff Jerzy Giedroyc’s Profile The main ideas behind Kultura connect directly to the Yalta Conference, which ceded control over East-Central Europe to the Soviets; but Kultura’s strategic setup can be understood properly only through a consideration of Giedroyc’s biography. The future editor of Kultura was born in 1906 to an old (part Russified, part Polonized) Lithuanian family in Minsk, where he spent his childhood and youth. He lived 1916–17 in Moscow, and moved in 1918 to Warsaw. Giedroyc had a good understanding of Eastern Europe and he recognized even before World War II that the region’s biggest problems were: (1) national conflicts, which the Bolsheviks and Nazis exploited to advance their totalitarian aspirations; and (2) ignorance of the region’s problems on the part of Western politicians. In Giedroyc’s opinion, then, the key was to establish relations among Poles, Ukrainians, Belarussians, and Lithuanians on new terms, and to gain independence for Ukraine and Belarus. These ideas were already presented in a prewar publication edited by Giedroyc, Polityka. Giedroyc’s hero was the creator of independent Poland in 1918,

Kultura (1946–2000) (Włodzimierz Bolecki)

149

Marshall Józef Piłsudski, who dreamed of a federation with Lithuania, Belarus, and the Ukraine, within the framework of a multinational reconstruction of the First Republic that existed from the fifteenth century until 1795, known as Jagellonian Poland. However, Giedroyc knew that certain countries had powerful aspirations to statehood after World War II and wanted to be treated as equals. For this reason, Kultura supported the concept that – within the framework of a future European federation – independent Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and Belarusians should live on the eastern lands of prewar Poland; the two cities that played a major role in Polish history and culture, Wilno and Lwów, should become the capitals of the independent states of Lithuania and Ukraine. This farreaching vision made credible Kultura’s political program to to build new relations among the elites of the Central European nations (Giedroyc Autobiogra˙ ebrowski). fia; Jelen´ski “Kultura”; Korek; Kowalczyk Giedroyc; Stron´ska; Z Giedroyc had much experience editing magazines: in 1929, he founded the Mys´l Mocarstwowa (Thought Among the Great Powers), which he later renamed to Bunt Młodych (Revolt of the Youth) and then to Polityka. These magazines attracted young, nonconformist intellectuals with conservative sympathies, who leaned equally to the left and to the right (Zbyszewski; Król; Korek). Giedroyc said of himself that he was by nature a “political animal.” He was not, however, a political activist. His title Editor was to underscore the exceptionality and exclusivity of his role. He was a shy man, a loner, who felt uncomfortable in making public speeches and had difficulties communicating directly with people. Nevertheless, by writing letters every day he succeeded in persuading approximately 2,500 writers from around the world to collaborate with Kultura and to form, as was sometimes said, an “invisible editorial board.” His correspondence numbers at least several tens of thousands of letters (Kowalczyk Od Bukaresztu), but Giedroyc never wrote a single article. His few-sentence commentaries, notes, and opinions in Kultura, often signed “Redaktor” (Redakcja, Obserwatorium), were limited to the most important current political affairs.

The Contributors The people at Kultura were the brothers Jerzy and Henryk Giedroyc (as of 1952), Herling-Grudzin´ski (1946–1947; 1956–1996), Czapski, Zofia and Zygmunt Hertz. From the beginning, faithful collaborators supported the editorial board, the most famous of whom were Maria Czapska ( Józef ’s sister), Juliusz Mieroszewski (as of 1950 a permanent member), Konstanty Je-

150

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

len´ski, Jerzy Stempowski, Czesław Miłosz (as of 1951), Witold Gombrowicz, and later Bohdan Osadczuk, Benedykt Heydenkorn, and Leopold Unger. Although three or four people formed the close-knit Editorial Committee that lived permanently at Maisons-Laffitte, and several hundred writers contributed in total, the person who actually decided on the contents of each issue, as well as the on journal’s profile and strategy, was Jerzy Giedroyc. Kultura had an editorial office but was the publication of one man (Zbyszewski; ˙ ebrowski). Jelen´ski “Kultura”; Kowalczyk Giedroyc; K. Pomian W kre˛gu; Z Following Mickiewicz, Kultura defined emigration as “a pilgrimage to freedom” (Herling-Grudzin´ski “Ksie˛gi”). The Kultura team recognized in its mission no division between personal and professional life. It created perhaps the last “phalanstery” in Europe (some compared it to a kibbutz), in which work and living shared the same space, and the publishing of magazines and books was the only content of a shared life ( Jelen´ski “Kultura”; Kowalczyk ˙ ebrowski). As Miłosz wrote: Giedroyc; K. Pomian W kre˛gu; Z Those who pick up the annuals of Kultura and the books published by the Instytut Literacki, and those who will pick them up in the future, should reflect for a moment on the kitchen pots, on the preparing of breakfast, lunch, and dinner by the three, four people responsible there for the editing, corrections, and distribution, on the washing up, on the buying (fortunately a simple enough task in France), and multiply the number of these and similar household duties by the number of days, months, and years. And also [as Miłosz remarks] on the strings and packing paper, on lugging, carrying, sending packages by post. The costs of living and eating are paid for by shared money, and the editor-in-chief and his three collaborators receive the same salary, almost the lowest French salary. […] All surpluses are invested in the publication of books ( Jelen´ski “Kultura”)

Destitute poverty; the daily threat of bankruptcy; counting every penny; four people for the entire editing, publishing, and administration of the magazines and books; and, on top of all this, helping out writers in need, looking for work for them, welcoming and hosting guests from Poland, thousands of petty matters and problems. A couple of people with minimal means were capable of accomplishing great work (Zbyszewski). Giedroyc emphasized that he did not have a personal life. “I think that if we lived in Paris, not to mention London, Kultura would not be able to exist. What we need is distance and isolation from people. In London and in Paris, we would not be able to get out of various meetings and visits, which take up a ridiculously amount of time. But above all: distance” (Giedroyc “Rozmowa”). As Jelen´ski wrote: “Only the closed circle of emigration allowed Kultura to survive so long on the same level, to evade being destroyed by weeklies or supplements in the large dailies, to evade being subsidized by a large publisher (or even more so by the state)” (“Kultura”).

Kultura (1946–2000) (Włodzimierz Bolecki)

151

This is why Giedroyc considered that the precondition for Kultura’s success could only be independence from sponsors, politicians, interest groups, lobbies, etc. Giedroyc repeatedly refused all financial help that would threaten Kultura’s autonomy (Giedroyc Autobiografia; Jelen´ski “Kultura”; Zbyszewski; ˙ ebrowski). Ptasin´ska-Wójcik; Z

3. Kultura’s Program The First Assessment: The 1940s The Instytut first focused exclusively on the publication of books, which was Giedroyc’s primary aim (twenty-six titles appeared in 1946–1947; thirty-five by 1953). “Knowing a bit about the prewar Russian emigration, I decided in advance that organization makes in the long run no difference in emigration; only words matter. One must think about creating some sort of publishing house. At the beginning I thought that only books would have a strong influence on the education of a readership” (Giedroyc 70). However, the closest collaborators, especially Herling-Grudzin´ski, quickly convinced Giedroyc that publishing a journal was a necessity (Giedroyc Autobiografia; Herling and Bolecki Rozmowy w Dragonei). Giedroyc and Herling-Grudzin´ski published in June 1947 the first issue of Kultura in Rome. The selection of material and the introduction, written by both editors, presented the main ideas that remained valid for the more than fifty years of the journal’s existence. The first issue contained Paul Valéry’s “Z kryzysu ducha” (La crise de l’esprit=The Spiritual Crisis) and Benedetto Croce’s “Zmierzch cywilizacji” (The Fall of Civilization), an excerpt from Arthur Koestler titled “Krucjaty bez krzyz˙a” (Crusade without Cross), polemical sketches on Marxism and Existentialism, a study of Lytton Strachey’s work, poems by Frederico Garcia Lorca, and excerpts from the memoirs and works of Poles in the Soviet Union. The common theme among the most important texts in this issue was the crisis of European civilization, the extreme manifestations of which were Soviet Communism and German nationalism (and its consequence, Nazism). Both led European culture to destruction and barbarism. The goal of the editors became to diagnose this situation and to search for ways out of the crisis, of which Central Europe was the gravest victim. The editors addressed not only the émigré Poles but also to readers in a Poland governed by the communists, in the hope of “strengthening in them the faith that the values dear to them were not crushed by the sledge-hammer of naked power.” Kultura saw

152

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

the need for an activist, even a heroic, stance to oppose the spread of pessimism and nihilism. The journal thus declared that “it wants to seek, in the world of Western civilization, this will to live without which the European dies, as once the leaders of ancient imperia did.” Kultura’s intellectual program became a battle to restore values in public life that were annihilated through World War II (Kultura 1947 nr. 1). Stempowski characterized the 1940s in his memoirs as the “years of uncertainty and apprehension, such as Europe had never witnessed since the times of the invasion of the barbarians and the fall of the Roman Empire” (Kowalczyk Giedroyc). According to the editors’ declaration: “European culture lost its consistency, its ability to resist and radiate. This period of postwar threat will not last for long. […] Kultura, finding itself at the very heart of Europe’s aspirations to cultural rebirth, wants to take advantage of this privilege and renew ties with the Polish intellectual movement in both Poland and the Diaspora” (Kultura 1947 nr. 2–3). Kultura directly translated its philosophy into (1) a political program that aimed at battling Communism, liberating the country from the Soviet Union, and regaining of Poland’s full independence; and (2) a social program that postulated building the foundations of a modern democracy and a modern society in a future Poland. The journal’s title thus had a symbolic meaning. Kultura became the name for all the intellectual activities that would help the émigrés to commence a battle for the democracy and independence of all East-Central European countries subject to the Soviet Union. According to Jelen´ski, “nothing at the time could predict the extraordinary success of Kultura, but even then we knew that the unusual passion [of Giedroyc], devoid of all personal ambition, would have a decisive influence on the fate of his country, the fate of all Central Europe (and, as I suspected, also on the fate of the entire world); this emerged as a cause more powerful than any sort of collective effort” (“Kultura”).

Kultura’s Relation to the “Emigration” One of Kultura’s main goals was to reach readers in emigration and in Poland. Giedroyc wanted Kultura to mobilize the émigrés dispersed in both hemispheres to think about the future of Poland and East-Central Europe. The editors hypothesized that, after losing the war, the émigrés would distance themselves from Polish affairs, and that their ties with the homeland would become merely emotional and nostalgic. Giedroyc feared that the matter of Poland and East-Central Europe would quickly cease to interest not only

Kultura (1946–2000) (Włodzimierz Bolecki)

153

foreigners but also Poles in the Diaspora. The consequence would be an acceptance of the status quo. Since he did not believe in émigré political parties, Giedroyc carved out for his monthly the role of integrating the émigrés and readers in Poland. The Instytut Literacki became an intellectual weapon to achieve political aims. Kultura’s activities were based on the conviction that émigré political institutions would gradually lose their significance; the fundamental task of intellectuals in the Diaspora should be to enrich the Polish cultural heritage and to provide readers in Poland, indirectly, with arguments that would mobilize them to resist Communism. “From the beginning,” recalled Giedroyc years later, “we established that émigré organizations do not exist […]The question of exerting influence by way of the word was for me the most important” (Giedroyc, “Rozmowa” 70,77). Kultura achieved this aim by initiating discussions on themes concerning the People’s Republic of Poland, and by systematically analyzing the situation in all of communist-ruled East-Central Europe. For ideological reasons, Giedroyc assumed a grudging attitude with respect to the Polish Diaspora centered in London. The feeling was mutual: We were not liked much among the émigré communities, especially the one based in London. […] Primarily, of course, for political reasons. There were relics of the government-in-exile there. […] The atrophy of everything; I am not speaking of thought or political strategy, just even of political tactics. […] A complete lack of imagination, imprisonment in the London ghetto. That is typical. They have their own parliament, their own cafés and restaurants, their own businesses; they live in a completely closed world. And that’s just fine with them. […] They consider me an imposter, because no one stands behind me. I was no Minister or Ambassador. I did not belong to any party. I do not have a venerable past. I was no colonel, I was only a first lieutenant during the war, and before that I was a rifleman. (Giedroyc, “Rozmowa” 72–73)

Kultura was convinced that the Polish institutions in Diaspora were incapable of elaborating their own political concepts. From its first issues, Kultura aspired thus to shape the readers’ political consciousness according to its own vision of a future modern, democratic, and independent Poland. Each issue featured texts that served as voices in an unending debate on Poland’s and Central Europe’s most important topics. Kultura became involved in politics, not by taking action, but by creating ideas, thoughts, and a vision, shaping the readers’ political imagination and sensitivity on issues of public life in Poland, Europe, and the world. Kultura had a distinct profile among the post-1945 émigré journals. The informational and journalistic sections addressed themselves to all readers; the essays and literature to the intellectual elite. While the other Polish émigré

154

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

magazines had no ambition to shape reality, Giedroyc created a journal with a clear ideological profile that expressed the editor’s position in concrete political, social, or cultural matters. While émigré journals did present pluralist viewpoints, Giedroyc sought out people who would provoke. He rejected the existing hierarchy and he proposed new ideas for Poles in the Diaspora and in Poland (Lewandowska; Kowalczyk Giedroyc). Thanks Kultura’s global network of collaborators, it could feature local chronicles of events. It documented, among others, the events in the Russian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Latvian, Belarus, and Ukrainian Republics of the Soviet Union. As a result, Kultura could present a diversity of topics and authorial experiences, as well as cultural and historical perspectives not represented in other émigré journals. It was always concerned with the popularity of Communism in the Western intellectual elite. One of Kultura’s distinguising traits was its vitality. It was edited in an unusually dynamic manner, featuring genres such as journalism, reviews, articles, views, polemics, letters to the editor, editor’s comments, etc. Almost every issue contained spirited political, social, and literary discussions, as well as viewpoints related to people’s outlook on life. Kultura did not publish articles exclusively concerned with the past; these were featured in the Zeszyty Historyczne. The Kultura articles dealt with current or future affairs. Without the influx of articles from Polish émigrés around the world, and after 1956 with increasing frequency from Poland as well, Kultura would not have been able to exist as a viable and relevant journal. Even though it had more than a dozen permanent collaborators, Giedroyc identified “Kultura’s line” only with Juliusz Mieroszewski’s texts (Habielski in Mieroszewski’s Finał klasycznej Europy; Giedroyc Autobiografia; Mieroszewski Finał klasycznej Europy; Korek; Kowalczyk Giedroyc; K. Pomian W kre˛gu).

Kultura’s Relation to the People’s Republic of Poland “As for imagining Kultura’s role,” Giedroyc recalled, “the model for me was Herzen’s Kołokoł [The Bell]. Starting with the second issue, it was a journal addressed to the homeland. […] Each émigré lives off the homeland’s lifeblood. Herzen’s Kołokoł could not have existed if it did not have a mass of correspondents in Russia itself ” (“Rozmowa” 76). Kultura’s editorial team believed that knowledge of the country and the preservation of ties with Poles living at home was decisive. After 1956, Giedroyc also spoke with ex-communists, who interested him not only as political opponents and representatives of the governing group, but also as repre-

Kultura (1946–2000) (Włodzimierz Bolecki)

155

sentatives of a new mentality in a new state, the People’s Republic of Poland. In opposition to the London émigré community, he treated communists as a real social power, and believed that they would remain politically active after the fall of the Soviet empire. One must separate the editors’ steady long-term aim from the changing conceptions that appeared in the articles. Kultura’s aim was to effect change in the communist camp by intellectual means. This is why Giedroyc reacted to events in Poland by including articles that dealt with current affairs; his ambition was to shape the opinion of the Polish intelligentsia under communist rule, which, exposed to primitive Party propaganda, was deprived of information, democratic models, and a freedom to exchange thoughts. Kultura realized this aim by initiating discussions on topics prohibited in Poland, analyzing the situation within the country and in all of communist-ruled EastCentral Europe. In Kultura, Communism was treated as a global problem that had to be battled with many allies, a profound knowledge of the enemy, and diversified methods. Most of the émigrés imagined life in the People’s Republic of Poland as a deviation from which Poland would reemerge unchanged as soon as the communist dictatorship and Soviet occupation disappeared. However, Kultura’s corps treated Poland’s transformation after 1945 as deep, even irreversible. Mieroszewski compared the communist revolution to a hurricane, after which the devastated region, even when rebuilt, would never be the same as before. He added, however, that “recognizing this fact in no way changes our relationship to the hurricane, which we consider a catastrophe.” The foundations of a democratic Poland had to be built in the People’s Republic. This was Kultura’s mission (Giedroyc Autobiografia; Gierdoyc & Mieroszewski Listy 1949–1956, vol. 2; Habielski Z˙ycie; Giedroyc & Mieroszewski; Korek; K. Po˙ ebrowski). mian W kre˛gu; Z

4. The So-called Kultura Line Although Kultura did not have a program in the strict sense, the fundamental ideas binding the editors and the strategic aims that they tried to reach (often called “the Kultura line”) remained constant. The tactics and notions for achieving these aims could, however, often change: Our position was subject to continual jolts. […] It was clear that one had to adapt to a situation with greater or lesser success, if only because it forced people to think about deciding, though it may not have had any influence on the course of events. This I consider to be probably Kultura’s most important role. Whether or not the various concep-

156

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

tions prove themselves or not has no great meaning. What is important is to cling to reality. (Giedroyc, “Rozmowa” 73)

The history of Kultura’s program can be divided into periods, each differing according to its political assumptions, assessments, postulates, selection of contributors, and, above all, tactics.

1947–55 According to Giedroyc, Kultura’s position during the first period was “uncompromisingly anti-Russian and anti-communist.” It can be subdivided into the periods 1947–50 and 1950–55 (Giedroyc Autobiografia and “Rozmowa”; Korek 11–62; Z˙ebrowski). Typical for this period was the journalistic work of Ryszard Wraga, who warned against the Soviet danger threatening the West. According to Wraga’s articles, Russia never participated in the evolution of universal thought. The Russian version of every Western idea, even the most revolutionary one, became reactionary. In Wraga’s opinion, Western Europe was in a crisis, incapable of opposing the Soviet ideological expansion. The only alternative became the US, which, however, was, in his opinion, an immature political power. James Burnham’s pro-American option in The Struggle for the World was excerpted in Kultura and published in 1947 as a book. While the theme of Western Europe’s moral crisis and its consequences was often treated in Kultura (Florczak), it was formulated most strongly by Andrzej Bobkowski, who left France for Guatemala in protest against Europe’s decadence, its acceptance of Bolshevism and Nazism. According to Bobkowski, the West betrayed the moral and ideological values it espoused, and was driven solely by economic-political interests. Moreover, it did not even have the courage to acknowledge its crisis. The consequence was an inability to oppose the expanding and strengthening power of totalitarian ideology – i.e., Communism – in World War II (Bobkowski, “Poz˙egnanie” and “List”; Giedroyc, Autobiografia 132–34; Giedroyc & Bobkowski). Stempowski reinforced this assessment by claiming that the Allies were guided during the war by a conviction of Western civilization’s superiority, and a contempt and colonial disdain for the East. For example, the Allies delivered East-Central European refugees on Austrian, Swedish, and Yugoslavian territories into the hands of the NKVD, which meant for them certain death or deportation. Stempowski also blamed the West for ignoring the ongoing Holocaust: the Allies knew of the extermination of Jews and Gypsies and did nothing to help

Kultura (1946–2000) (Włodzimierz Bolecki)

157

them (Stempowski, “Corona” 16; Stempowski Od Berdyczowa). Józef Mackiewicz presented the same thesis in his journalistic work and in his novel Kontra, which was published by Kultura in 1955. Aleksander Janta-Połczyn´ski’s reportage of his 1948 stay in Poland sharply criticized the West and the émigrés, and postulated that the changes in Poland be accepted. Janta’s claim that Poland could never count on the West and must therefore choose a pro-Russian stance evoked a storm of protest by readers and by the Polish émigré government. Giedroyc defended the publication of the reportage, for it unleashed a discussion that was possible only because of a Western freedom of speech. Wan´kowicz responded in 1949 that the Western crisis would last many years, but should not be treated as a transitional period, an “inter-epoch.” He surmised that Communism, which he viewed as primitive and destructive, would never fall on its own because it would disillusion the Russians. Only the US could bring about the new epoch, since it was the only state with the spiritual power needed to overcome the crisis (Giedroyc, Autobiografia 144–49). The texts in Kultura were literary, and gave people’s outlook on life rather than political evaluation; the journal tried to work out a constructive position for Europe, above all on its relationship to postwar Germany and the Soviet Union. One option was to create a European federation. Kultura first thought that a pan-European federation should be the precondition for a European balance of power. However, after 1950, when West Germany was becoming ever more powerful, Kultura changed its concept by calling for a federation of states in Central Europe that could become a regional defense against German or Russian domination, or against another German-Soviet pact. Kultura even proposed the creation of international military regiments of volunteers from Central Europe who would be stationed in the West. In the context of this federation of Central European states, Kultura proposed that the Poles should declare as a gesture of unity with the other Eastern European nations that they surrender the historic Polish cities of Wilno and Lwów. Kultura published various concepts of a new organization for postwar Europe. Alfred Fabre-Luce suggested the creation of a European empire under the leadership of France, based on the idea of colonialism (“Europa”). Raymond Aron proposed creating a single European body encompassing both the Western and Eastern parts; although he criticized Marxism and Communism, he also perceived many errors in the capitalist system. He saw a threat not only in communist totalitarianism but also in conquering the crisis by means of a gradual Americanization of the world (“Mit”). Giedroyc valued Aron’s position (Autobiografia 180). Jan Ulatowski presented another decidedly pro-European stance by claiming that the Polish Diaspora cannot

158

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

count on a federated Central Europe, because it does not lie in the interests of the West. He proposed working out a “third road,” which appealed to Giedroyc. Between 1950 and 1955, Kultura emphasized most strongly the necessity of forging a European federation and a pro-American option to combat Communism’s ideological expansion. At the beginning, its journalists counted on the complete destruction of Communism and underscored the mutual interests of Central Europe and America, hypothesizing that the US would win in a war. A fundamental shift occurred after the publication of George F. Kennan’s article “America and the Russian Future,” according to which the US would guarantee – even in the case of war – to maintain the Soviet position in Central Europe. Kultura criticized Kennan for regarding the Baltic countries, Belarus, and the Ukraine as belonging to the Soviet Union, but it declared that in light of the American position it was unreasonable to count on the destruction of Communism and the Soviet Union. Kultura’s pro-American stance weakened further with the publication of Samuel Sharp’s Poland, White Eagle on a Red Field (1953), which argued that the Poles do not and will not have influence over the fate of their own country, and that Americans should agree that the Soviet Union alone should determine Central Europe’s fate. The thesis showed that the Central-European Diaspora held unrealistic political hopes, and it nullified Kultura’s program. For this reason, the journal decided to support the confrontational stance of the new American President, Eisenhower, believing that a war with the Soviet Union was inevitable, and hoping that the American doctrine of “liberation” and “mass revenge” would lead to a change in the European status quo and the fall of Communism in the region. The doctrine changed in 1955, when the superpowers entered into a political dialogue (Korek 71–78). In 1950, Kultura became involved with the Congress for Cultural Freedom, whose founders were Arthur Koestler, James Burnham, Ernst Reuter, Sidney Hook, and Melvin Lasky. The aims of the Congress were similar to those of the Instytut Literacki (Laqueur). It demanded an ideology-free culture, and a Europe liberated from from Soviet dictatorship. Many intellectuals supported the Congress. Representing Kultura at the June 1950 meeting in Berlin, Czapski remarked that many young people were drawn to Communism, though the communist apparatchiks kill “every thought and every experience” in the human beings. He blamed the West: “Countries which suffered the greatest losses only replaced the Gestapo with the NKVD and other Secret Police. What could the youth of these nations think about the victorious allies?” Thousands of young people fled the communist bloc. The best aid would be to open a university for Central European refugees. “Do we not

Kultura (1946–2000) (Włodzimierz Bolecki)

159

understand,” asked Czapski, “that our indifference toward the inescapable barbarization of an entire generation of half of Europe is condemning Europe and us to death?” (Giedroyc, Autobiografia 156, 173–78; Kowalczyk, Giedroyc 128–29). Giedroyc subsequently enlisted the support of Burnham, who found US funds to open in 1951 the Collège de l’Europe Libre with a boarding school in Strasbourg. Although the school educated several hundred students of various nationalities, it contributed little to the cultural integration of Central Europe because it did received insufficient Western support. For example, fearing Soviet reaction, the Americans,did not allow Ukrainians to study at the school (Korek 98; Kowalczyk Giedroyc). The heir to the idea of the Collège de l’Europe Libre became after 1989 the Central European University, financed by George Soros. Thanks to the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Giedroyc forged closer ties with Manès Sperber, Jeanne Hersch, Raymond Aron, and Arthur Koestler, hoping to use the Congress to promote émigré writers. This was made possible thanks to Konstanty Jelen´ski, who became with Giedroyc’s support the head of the Eastern European section of the Congress’s General Secretariat. As a leader in the Congress, Jelen´ski was involved in organizing international seminars; together with François Bondy, he edited the monthly Preuves. Justifying Kultura’s position during the period 1950–55, Giedroyc wrote: American politics is not only American politics; in a certain sense, it is also British, Belgian, Dutch, Danish, and … Polish politics. […] This means that even nations of Great Britain’s stature are in a certain sense dependent on the United States. In this context, voicing the independence of Polish politics from America […] is complete and utter nonsense. We, the Emigration, are tied to America, just as the Western nations are tied to America, when American policy is proper and expedient, as well as when its policy is wrong. (Redaktor, Kultura 1955, nr. 1–2, 87–88: 143; Korek 82) I did not believe in a world war, but I was convinced that if the United States demonstrated decisively its power this could do much to change the arrangement in Eastern Europe. Today we do not attempt to persuade anyone to go to Vietnam to fight the communists. Does this mean we have changed our conviction? No, we changed only our policy and tactic, because the international situation has undergone a radical transformation. (Mieroszewski, “ABC polityki” Final 245)

Kultura published in 1951 Józef Maria Bochen´ski’s article “Zarys Manifestu demokratycznego” (An Outline of Democratic Manifest) with the signature of Kultura’s Editorial Board. The manifest of the Professor at Freibourg concerned the structure of future Poland, as well as its situation in Europe. It was based on the claim that a constant presence of freedom and equality will decide the history of Europe. This democratic tradition, claimed Bochen´ski, is foreign to Russian culture, for equality and freedom were transformed in Russia into a caricature of the European ideals. The communist system reverted

160

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

to mass slavery on a scale heretofore unknown. The acceptance of Bolshevism was a prelude to a Soviet occupation of the entire continent. In order to cast off Russian Communism, the European nations would have to integrate politically: “none of us is merely a Pole; [we are] also Europeans from the Polish canton” (3–17). In April 1951, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, West Germany, and Italy called in Paris for a European Coal and Steel Community, the precursor to the European Economic Union and today’s European Union. The “Manifest demokratyczny” was therefore the first – at the time merely symbolic – Polish call for a European Union. However, Polish political émigrés in the West were treated either as enemies or with suspicion. In September 1950, the public prosecutor’s office in Bern, Switzerland declared that the dissemination of Kultura, or even the possession of a single issue of it by an émigré, would be a prohibited political act. The prohibition was rescinded after Kultura’s interventions. Kultura attempted also to hammer out the foundations of a historic PolishGerman memorandum of understanding, which would have Germany declare the inviolability of the western Polish borders and its support of a federation in Central Europe. These plans, which were started shortly after the end of the war, bore witness to the far-reaching vision of Kultura’s contributors (Stempowski Dziennik; Mieroszewski “List,” “Niemcy,” and “O reforme˛”; Mackiewicz; Kowalczyk, Giedroyc 162–65; Korek 99–115). A PolishGerman memorandum of understanding could have encouraged Poland’s potential allies in Central Europe to accept the federation. The Hungarian conservative émigré politician Tibor Eckhard, for instance, rejected collaboration with the Polish emigration, saying that Hungary could not support Poland in a ˙ ebrowski). future Polish-German conflict over borders (Fejto˝; Korek 103; Z

1956 Giedroyc admitted that Kultura made one of its “biggest mistakes ever” after 1956 by believing the patriotic declarations of the Secretary of the Polish Communist Party, Władysław Gomułka, and giving him a “vote of confidence.” As Giedroyc wrote in a letter to Mieroszewski, he thought that “with cunning policy, we can win the battle for the émigrés’ soul and become for the Homeland, or rather Gomułka, a partner and a rather equal partner at that” (Giedroyc & Mieroszewski 435). It turned out that this “equality” with the communists was a fiction, and Giedroyc quickly had to acknowledge the error. It constituted also a loss of faith in Mieroszewski’s concept of evolutionism, which assumed that the

Kultura (1946–2000) (Włodzimierz Bolecki)

161

communist system would evolve naturally into a democracy. (Giedroyc, “Rozmowa” 79). After the bloody suppression of the Hungarian Revolt by the Red Army, and the events in Poland in the years 1956–58, Giedroyc became convinced that the so-called liberalization of the communist system was not an evolution but rather social engineering, that is, controlled change within a framework that communist powers tightly defined. Kultura withdrew its support for Gomułka at the end of 1957. “Polish communists,” Giedroyc wrote in a special letter sent to the readership in Poland, “had a literally historic opportunity to show the world that they were able to lead a democratic society. […] They had the opportunity to discredit the thesis […] that one cannot collaborate with communists; one can only fight them” (Korek 167–272; Kowalczyk Giedroyc; Zie˛tara). “Any step to democracy in Poland, wrote Mieroszewski, will be treated in Moscow as an act against the Soviet Union’s safety.” Nevertheless, Polish society has to demand democratic reforms in Poland, step by step. (“Lekcja we˛gierska”).

1965–1980 In 1965, Jacek Kuron´ and Karol Modzelewski, young revisionist Marxists, proclaimed in an Open Letter to the Party that the system was in crisis and that it was imperative to renew the idea of Socialism, because, in their opinion, Stalinism had rendered it hypocritical. They claimed that the Party bureaucracy lived off the workers, and they called for a proletarian revolution to overthrow the parasite. Kultura, which published this text in 1966, considered Kuron´’s and Modzelewski’s analysis more accurate than Milovan -Dilas’ wellknown The New Class (1955). Although the letter was not radical, it was the only critical analysis of Communism “from the inside.” Should Kuron´ and Modzelewski, members of the Party, put on trial, Giedroyc offered to send funds to help pay for their lawyers. Giedroyc acknowledged that the Polish United Workers’ Party (PUWP; in Polish PZPR) was successful in linking Stalinist totalitarianism to nationalism, and that potential reformers had lost most of their influence. For Giedroyc, it was obvious that evolutionism, which still had its proponents, would not lead to the desired outcomes. Kultura’s assessment was pessimistic: Polish society was intimidated and incapable of self-organizing. As Giedroyc wrote to Mieroszewski in 1963, the revolution was in a sense “more profitable for the Hungarians than the peaceful Polish October was for the Poles” (Giedroyc & Mieroszewski; Kowalczyk Giedroyc). In the mid-1960s, Giedroyc finally gave up the concept of evolutionism. Various methods had to be applied, but always in view of the most

162

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

important goal: the overthrow of Communism in Central Europe and the building of democracy (Korek). The student protests of 1968 and the workers’ protest and revolt in Gdan´sk in 1970 rekindled Giedroyc’s hopes. As a result of the protests and the March movement of post-revisionists, young intellectuals like Adam Michnik and Stanisław Baran´czak emerged, who soon became important contributors to Kultura and leaders of the opposition’s intellectual life. These young intellectuals came to an understanding with Giedroyc. They wanted to link the democratic opposition in Poland to the Diaspora (Friszke), for they believed that a critical dialogue with the Diaspora might awaken the intelligentsia at home. The partner for the revolutionary intellectuals could only be Kultura. The group nicknamed “mountaineers” smuggled Kultura books into Poland across the Tatra mountains, but they were arrested at the Polish-Czech border and a number of them were sentenced in an unprecedented trial (Karpin´ski; Kuczyn´ski; Korek; Kowalczyk Giedroyc; Ptasin´ska-Wójcik). According to Korek, the post-revisionists distanced themselves from the ideas of independence promoted by Kultura because they had no interest in the state. Instead of independence, they called for the liberation of society and the individual. Social justice, for the post-revisionists, was more important than the state. Giedroyc and the émigrés could not, however, imagine democracy without a sovereign state and an independence that would guarantee democracy. According to the post-revisionists, the most important battle against totalitarianism was not played out in the political arena, but in the cultural and scholarly arenas that create values and are the fundamental ingredients in social bonds and in a national identity based on universal principles. As Leszek Kołakowski wrote, society must first acquire by dint of hard work a democratic consciousness and teach tolerance in order to prevent a national dictatorship after the fall of Soviet totalitarianism (Korek). Kultura began to publish works by new contributors in the 1970s. One of the most prominent among them was Kołakowski, whom the communist government expelled from Poland. While working at universities in the West he began collaborating with Kultura by publishing there his famous essays and books. His essay, “Tezy o nadziei i beznadziejnos´ci” (Theses about Hope and Hopelessness) was discussed heatedly among the émigrés and, unofficially, in Poland. It constituted a fundamental reversal in the relationship between the mostly leftist intelligentsia in Poland and the Diaspora, leading to collaboration with Kultura. Giedroyc and the intellectuals in Poland soon found a common ground in assessing the social situation in Poland. Mieroszewski and Giedroyc were convinced that the intelligentsia had to cooperate with the workers if change was to occur in Poland. After the student strikes of 1968

Kultura (1946–2000) (Włodzimierz Bolecki)

163

and the massacre in Gdan´sk in 1970 (on which the official opposition did not take a position), Kultura dedicated much attention to the social atmosphere in Poland, believing that it would become even more radicalized. In the mid-1970s, Giedroyc foresaw an explosion of social dissatisfaction. Its progress and fallout, he claimed, would be more significant than in December 1970, because the PUWP had already lost trust. Warning that the consequences of a new workers’ protest would be catastrophic, Kolakowski agreed that the intelligentsia must support the workers: we should accept “that today there is no difference between the concerns of the workers and those of the intelligentsia, just as there is no difference between the matters concerning the nation and civil liberty. […] Here and now these competing claims are coalescing into one” (Kultura 1976 nr. 6; see also Kowalczyk, Giedroyc 227–240 and K. Pomian W kre˛gu). Recently recruited journalists like Zdzisław Najder (alias Socjusz), Czesław Bielecki (alias Maciej Poleski), and Jakub Karpin´ski (alias Marek Tarniewski) submitted by the mid-1970s their articles directly from Poland, where the situation was changing rapidly. Several opposition groups (KOR, ROPCiO, KPN, PPN) were formed, with their publishing houses and magazines. It was the heady birth of pluralism in many regions of Poland, as well as the fulfillment of Giedroyc’s expectations. The polemics about programs and activities soon started to appear in Kultura. Socjusz pointed to the relicts of revisionism in the new opposition programs. He polemicized with their theses, cautioning the opposition against establishing ties with any faction of the Party, even with those that were considered liberal and would be prepared to carry out their social objectives. He applied pressure, by arguing that the cause of Poland’s catastrophe was the communist system as such, and no specific group in the Party. The opposition should demand structural changes (Najder; Kowalczyk Giedroyc; Korek; Ptasin´ska-Wójcik). The theses of the so-called “polrealists,” represented in Kultura by Stefan Kisielewski (alieas Kisiel) provoked the sharpest polemics. They renounced Polish independence and claimed that a Poland neighboring on both Germany and Russia must decide that Germany was the foe and Russia a friend that would guarantee the western Polish border. In Kisiel’s opinion, neither evolution nor the fall of Communism would alter the regional balance of power. He proposed that the opposition should bypass the Polish communists and come to terms with the Soviet Union, and he imagined that the Soviet Union would, in return, become an eternal ally of the People’s Republic and agree to democratic elections in Poland. Giedroyc polemicized with the “polrealists,” invoking Kultura’s political credo that Poland, though it bor-

164

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

dered on the Soviet Union, was a neighbor of the Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and Belarussians rather than the Russians. Émigré journalists like Mackiewicz, and homeland ones like Socjusz also disagreed with the “polrealists.”

1980–1989: Solidarity The 1980 strikes confirmed Giedroyc’s predictions. They were planned by the opposition and brought the intelligentsia and workers together. But the opposition was ideologically divided for it included both the liberal-leftist Komitet Samoobrony Społecznej KOR (Workers Defence Committee, established in 1976) and the right-leaning Ruch Młodej Polski (Young Poland Movement), which fastened onto national traditions. Giedroyc appealed to the West for support in 1980, adding: “We do not expect wonder and applause from the West; that is not useful to us in the least.” Recalling that during World War II the West spoke of Poland as the “inspiration for the world” and yet surrendered it to the Soviet Union, Giedroyc reminded the West that declaring Solidarity as an “inspiration for the world” would invoke among émigrés nausea and the specter of the Yalta Conference. He expect concrete, enduring, and sensible solidarity. As long as Solidarity functioned legally (September 1980 to December 1981), commentaries on the situation in Poland filled Kultura’s pages. It demanded reforms in the socialist economy through the privatization of state industries. When the Soviet Communist Party’s politburo warned Poland in June that the “internal situation” (namely, the existence of Solidarity) threatened Poland’s independence, Giedroyc formulated unequivocal conditions to improve the Polish-Soviet relations: transparency, equality, and truth about the Katyn´ crime, the Warsaw uprising, and the fate of Poles in the Soviet Union (Kowalczyk Giedroyc; K. Pomian W kre˛gu). Giedroyc called the declaration of martial law on December 13, 1981 an “assassination by a licentious Party soldiery,” with Moscow’s agreement and encouragement. Kultura took a hardline position: by ushering in martial law, the Polish communists ruled out any national partnership. “The blow, which fell on us December 13, 1981 can be compared only with Hitler’s invasion or with the NKVD’s stunts in 1944–1945” (K. Pomian, “13 grudnia 1981” Kultura 1982 nr. 1–2, 12–16). The martial law was Soviet fascism. Kultura rejected Jaruzelski’s propaganda that the lesser evil of the martial law prevented the greater evil of a Soviet intervention in Poland. As Kultura’s journalists saw it, Solidarity’s unforgivable error in Soviet eyes was its very existence. HerlingGrudzin´ski, who regarded the theory of the lesser evil as a blackmail, devoted

Kultura (1946–2000) (Włodzimierz Bolecki)

165

many passages of his Dziennik pisany noca˛ (Diary Written at Night), as well as one of his best short stories, “Dz˙uma w Neapolu” (Plague in Naples), to the martial law (Herling and Bolecki, Rozmowy 56–65). The introduction of martial law, which signified a dramatic defeat of the hope that the communist system could evolve, generated in Kultura very heated discussions about Solidarity’s strategy in dealing with the communists. The émigrés and veterans took a radical position. Solidarity, wrote Giedroyc, was neither organizationally nor psychologically prepared for aggression and for risking to die. The lack of preparation was due not only to Solidarity’s ethos of peace, but also to the limitated repertoire of political battle methods: “If we want to avoid the massacre of the defenseless, we will have to be ready to respond to force with force” (Kowalczyk Giedroyc). In the very first months of the martial law, Kultura became the intellectual center of émigré discussions on the Polish opposition’s new program of action. From the perspective of émigrés, after 1981 it became most important to save the idea of Solidarity and the moral values that were essential for society to achieve its political identity (Socjusz). Early 1982, Giedroyc refused to publish a feuilleton by Kisiel on Solidarity’s understanding with General Jaruzelski. Kultura could not share the hopes of Solidarity’s underground government about a compromise with the communists, because it believed that the communists were interested only in Solidarity’s liquidation. In the 1980s, Kultura’s significance for an independent political and intellectual life in Poland increased dramatically. One reasons for this was the government’s decision at the inception of martial law to shut down all magazines and to remove those people from the editorial staff who were suspected of having oppositional leanings. In this context, Kultura became for the émigrés the most important, indeed the only, vehicle to discuss Polish affairs, and, for the first time on such a scale, for contributors in Poland as well. Thanks to the contacts that Giedroyc had established over the years it could publish dozens of Solidarity documents, programs of action, commentaries, polemics, and accounts submitted from Poland. Kultura’s publications during martial law forged, for the first time, a partnership between the émigré political communities and the opposition in Poland. It became a forum which allowed Solidarity activists and advisors to discuss issues with each other, and it was the only independent, severe, and meritorious judge of the publications and activities of the Solidarity leadership. Its familiar critical relation to people and events, government and opposition in Poland, its insistence on respect for democratic principles and values, its prominent contributors – all of these factors contributed to Kultura’s prestige and status during this period. By 1989, Kultura’s publications were still illegal, but they circulated freely in Poland.

166

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

Kultura’s Main Ideas We can summarize Kultura’s basic credo in terms of the following six points: 1. In fighting Communism, Poland and the nations of East-Central Europe must collaborate with each other and rely, above all, on one another. This collaboration entails activating the elite and undertaking efforts to reform the future independent states throughout the entire region. 2. Historical divisiveness and national stereotypes, which make understanding among the nations of East-Central Europe impossible, must be overcome. 3. It is necessary to work towards an understanding among all nations of East-Central Europe. The most important result of these ideas was the formulation of the concept of ULB (Ukraine–Lithuania–Belarus) by Kultura’s most important journalist, Mieroszewski. It proposed linking the idea of Polish independence to the regaining of independence by other East-Central European countries and the gaining of independence by those that had never had it (Ukraine, Belarus) (Mieroszewski “Rosyjski kompleks polski”). 4. A new stage must be reached in cooperation with the Germans, whom communist propaganda represented as a permanent threat to Poland. 5. There must be respect for pluralism in the world and ideologies (with the exception of the totalitarian ideologies of Bolshevism and Nazism). 6. Kultura played a major role in the documentation and analysis of historical and artistic Polish-Jewish relations. Articles, memoires, and books on the shared history of Poles and Jews, as well as translations of Jewish authors, appeared in the monthly itself, and in the books of Biblioteka Kultura and Zeszyty Historyczne. Giedroyc published articles about Polish-Jewish relations already in his magazines of the 1930s, noting the rise of anti-Semitic sentiments in Poland. After World War II, due to the genealogy of Kultura’s editorial team, many of the memoirs dealt with Polish officers of Jewish origin who, like Menachem Begin, played a major role after the demobilization of the Polish army in 1945 in the creation of the Israeli state and army. Another constant theme was the extermination of Jews by Germans on Polish soil (the German concentration camps in Poland in service of the Final Solution). Moreover, Kultura continually concerned itself with the existence of anti-Semitism among Poles, and devoted much attention to anti-Semitism in the Polish Communist Party in 1968 and the ease with which anti-Semitic communist propaganda was accepted by Polish society. Kultura led the battle against antiSemitism, emphasizing that it was a universal evil, that harms Poland because it shuts down contact with the West. Realizing its mission to reach a rapprochement between all nations forging the history of Poland, Kultura pub-

Kultura (1946–2000) (Włodzimierz Bolecki)

167

lished translations of Jewish poetry, for example the anthology Izrael w poezji polskiej (Israel in Polish Poetry) edited by Jan Winczakiewicz, and writings on Jewish writers and the history of Jews in Poland, for instance Aleksander Hertz’s book Z˙ydzi w kulturze polskiej ( Jews in Polish Culture), as well as the first documentary novel about Warsaw getto (Rymkiewicz, Umschlagplatz). It analyzed the political and social situation in Israel, noting the most important Polish-Jewish conferences and meetings. In an attempt to foster cooperation between Poles and Jews as quickly as possible, Giedroyc became in the final years of his life a patron in the establishment of a Polish Chair at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Thanks to these ideas and the articles representing all democratic currents, Kultura became, as Mieroszewski wrote, “a parliament of Polish thought in Diaspora.” Josef Mackiewicz sums up the situation well in “Niemiecki kompleks”: the pluralism of views in a mature society is like an open fan: “the more often the fan flings open more than 180 degrees, the better it demostrates the maturity, dynamism and thus richness of society’s thoughts. However, a fan twisted into a tight fist gives the impression of a being short cudgel.” It is difficult to characterize univocally Kultura’s political voice, as it published both left- and right-leaning authors, socialists and ex-communists, Catholics and atheists, conservative nationalists and progressive liberals. All authors linked anti-Communism with the hope of restoring an independent and democratic Polish state. Over a few decades, as the political situation in Poland and the generations of authors changed, the articles evolved from centrist (in the monthly’s first phase) to social democratic (in the final phase); however, the journal had a liberal character throughout its existence. A constant ingredient in Giedroyc’s strategy was to preserve a distance to all parties, groups, and political communities, an unwillingness to accept that any topic was a taboo, the constant “poking of a stick in an anthill,” the avoidance of relying on any authority, the decision to regard no institution or people as untouchable (Korek 327–34; K. Pomian W kre˛gu). One instance of this uncompromising critique concerned judging the Catholic Church. Kultura systematically published articles on Church and religion, which dealt with the place of the Church in a democratic society, with religion in relation to changing norms and phenomena of civilization, and with the specific role of the Church in the communist system. The authors were most often Mieroszewski, Mackiewicz, Antoni Pospieszalski, Dominik Morawski, and Herling-Grudzin´ski. The context for these publications was the Second Vatican Council, various attempts in the West to link Catholicism to Marxism, and the progressive movement “liberation theology.” In turn, the situation of the Church in the

168

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

People’s Republic of Poland was tied to the paradox of the “People’s Church,” considered in a shallow and conservative religious sense, but having fundamental influence on the preservation of national identity and the building of resistance against Communism. During the martial law, the Catholic Church was the only place where the opposition could meet legally, and organize material and financial aid for those repressed. The majority of the Kultura articles on the Church appeared in the column “On Religion without Unction,” which broached taboo topics and posed fundamental questions about the future of the Church as an institution, its relationship to Communism, the politics of the Vatican, its relation to other faiths, and the place of Christianity at the end of the twentieth century (G. Pomian vol. 2).

5. Kultura: Writers and Literature Though Giedroyc considered the European democratic tradition, its political ideals, and its cultural achievements as the most important weapon against Communism, he realized that to achieve his goals he needed writers, even if Kultura was not a literary magazine. Kultura’s Editorial Board thought that the collective life of the post-1945 Polish Diaspora (deprived of a nation like the Jews) would gravitate towards writing, for literature was from the eighteenth century on the fundamental form of collective life of émigré Poles. Stempowski, who wrote in 1955 that “literature is the only form of expression in emigration that did not submit when facing power,” was of similar mind. As long as émigré literature exists, it will appear that “some sort of national power stands behind the émigré political institutions.” If émigré literature disappears, “emigration will be a fait accompli and the Kremlin will wash its hands” (Kowalczyk Giedroyc). Kultura’s service to Polish literature has been unimaginably great. In its first decade, Giedroyc drew the most prominent émigré writers to the fold and he created in this manner a diverse, “invisible literary community” of émigrés. Thanks to Giedroyc, writers thousands of kilometers afar, who would have surely remained unknown in their countries of settlement, came to be published in Kultura. Giedroyc reached them by mail, persuaded them (sometimes it took several years!) to write for Kultura, proposed themes, inspired the publication of books, scrambled to get translations, honoraria, and prizes (he lobbied that Gombrowicz and Miłosz get a Nobel prize). Czapski, Stempowski, and some other older writers began to write again after the war only thanks to Kultura. The journal undoubtedly salvaged for Polish literature many exceptional writers, including Gombrowicz, Miłosz, Straszewicz, Bobkowski, and,

Kultura (1946–2000) (Włodzimierz Bolecki)

169

after 1956 in a certain sense, Herling-Grudzin´ski. Thanks to their publications in Kultura they became known among the émigrés, then in Poland, and even in the world. Giedroyc contrasted literature to political parties and similar institutions, which do not create moral models and do not inspire people to intellectual work, even if they are essential for organizing public life. Literature’s prominent place in Kultura expressed Giedroyc’s conviction that works of literature, and the ideas contained in them, shape people’s attitudes and are able to mobilize them to act on behalf of the community. This was Kultura’s credo. Giedroyc, like Herling-Grudzin´ski, repeated many times that he was raised on the work of writers interested in social and national affairs, among them Russian writers (e.g. Dostoyevsky, Wasilij Rozanov, Leonid Andreyev), English ˙ eromski, ones ( Joseph Conrad, Gilbert Chesterton) and Polish ones (Stefan Z Wacław Berent and Andrzej Strug). He believed in literature’s special mission in societies deprived of sovereignty (the most important Polish Romantic writers wrote in exile); he believed in the capacity of literature to shape social changes, shatter stereotypes, etc. (Giedroyc, Autobiografia 15–21, 163–171; Skalmowski; Gorczyn´ska “Giedroyc literacki”). Herling-Grudzin´ski’s 1945 remark about the writer Stanisław Brzozowski fits also Kultura: “thought and word are also deed, when they represent not escape, rest, consolation, and solace for ‘dejected and battered souls,’ but rather a courageous and manly stare straight in the eye of every reality, even the most threatening one” (“Nota o Brzozowskim”). Though he considered himself a “political animal,” Giedroyc never treated literature as a tool. He loved literature, he had an astute sensitivity to the psychology of writers (he understood that the most eminent of them did not want to mix creativity and politics), and above all, he had the talent of a diplomat, which enabled him to keep in close contact with many contributors (Giedroyc Autobiografia; Kowalczyk Giedroyc; Ptasin´ska-Wójcik). Although Kultura published and launched many of the most important émigré Polish writers, “Kultura literature” or “Kultura writers” never existed. Writers retained their distinctiveness and independence. They profited from the publishing and other benefits that Kultura offered (many of them lived for a certain period at Maisons-Laffitte), they were in awe of Giedroyc’s editorial and publishing accomplishments, but they never created a distinct group around the journal. Even though the views and concepts behind Kultura congealed in certain matters, relationships would as often as not deteriorate and lead to confrontations, and, in drastic cases, even to ruptures after many years of collaboration. In the second half of the 1970s, when an opposition emerged in Poland, political topics came to dominate Kultura’s pages, while literature and literary

170

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

criticism receded into the background. Jelen´ski could not come to terms with the politicization of the journal, for he regarded it above all a patron of cultural life. Hence he stopped writing for Kultura, and forged in the 1980s close ties with another émigré journal, a new intellectual almanac entitled Zeszyty Literackie (Literary Notebooks). Miłosz’s connections with Kultura weakened for similar reasons when Zeszyty Literackie was launched. Herling-Grudzin´ski left Kultura in 1996, though he had been publishing his diaries in the journal since 1971. Giedroyc demanded that he remove a passage in the new installment of his Dziennik pisany noca˛ that was sharply critical of politicians Giedroyc supported, and Herling-Grudzin´ski viewed this as an attempt at censorship. He broke off all contacts with Giedroyc, and started to publish all his texts in Poland, in Plus-Minus, the literary supplement of Rzeczpospolita (The Republic). Giedroyc published writers of all ages. The writers from the generation born at the end of the nineteenth century were represented by Stempowski, Czapski, Stanisław Vincenz, Wan´kowicz, and Stanisław Mackiewicz; the generation born at the beginning of the twentieth century by Gombrowicz, Czesław Straszewicz, Józef Mackiewicz, Miłosz, Zygmunt Haupt, and Kazimierz Wierzyn´ski; those born around 1920 by Herling-Grudzin´ski, Jelen´ski, Bobkowski, Marian Pankowski, Andrzej Chciuk, Leo Lipski, and Wacław Iwaniuk. In addition, Giedroyc helped launch the career of writers who grew up abroad and began to write in Polish during exile, such as Andrzej Busza, Bogdan Czaykowski, and Adam Czerniawski. After 1956, he published more frequently works by writers living in Poland, such as Marek Hłasko, Piotr Guzy, Sławomir Mroz˙ek, Janusz Szpotan´ski, Leszek Kołakowski, Bogdan Madej, Jacek Bieriezin, Stanisław Baran´czak, Kazimierz Brandys, Kazimierz Orłos´, and Adam Zagajewski. The writers who published in Kultura were linked by the historical experience of East-Central Europe (next to the ones mentioned above e.g. Henryk Grynberg and Leopold Tyrmand). The literature published by the Instytut Literacki was part (certainly the most important part) of émigré literature, and Kultura’s contributors also published in other publishing houses. The works published by Kultura were part of émigré literature, which differed from the literature published in Poland, as we shall now show. First, émigré literature was not burdened with “Socialist Realism,” which was a significant problem for the literature in Poland, both as a biographicoliterary experience and as a reaction to the Stalinism of the 1950s, between 1956 and 1990. Émigré writers did not encounter this problem. A second characteristic of émigré literature was remembering the fate of Polish citizens on the eastern lands of the Second Republic during World War II. The taboos

Kultura (1946–2000) (Włodzimierz Bolecki)

171

in Poland encompassed such topics as the Soviet occupation of Poland in 1939, the Soviet concentration camps, and the fate of Poles in the Soviet Union, especially the murders in the Katyn´ forest. For émigré writers, these were matters of historical truth and literary language. With a few exceptions, such as the work of Gombrowicz and Pankowski, émigré literature preserved remembered language; Miłosz, Józef Mackiewicz, Haupt, Stempowski, Vincenz and others salvaged memories of the Republic of many nations, cultures, languages, and religions. Starting with the mid-1950s, the language of literature published in the People’s Republic of Poland presented the so-called living post-Yalta speech, including the discourse of marginal groups, colloquial speech deviations from “official” or literary language, propaganda, or news-speak. Polish émigré literature after 1945 was a continuation of prewar literature. It was created mostly by writers who started in the 1930s and for whom writing in exile became an extension of their earlier work. Works of Miłosz, Gombrowicz, Herling, Mackiewicz, and many others illustrate this continuity beautifully. It was only after 1956 that émigré literature gradually came to be published in the Poland, in large measure thanks to the activities of Kultura. Between 1956 and 1976, the state publishing houses published, however, only few works by émigré writers. A radical change took place after 1976, when an illegal publishing market, outside the reach of the censor, emerged: the communists lost their monopoly over books. After 1976, émigré literature – mostly books published by Kultura, such as works by Miłosz, Gombrowicz, Herling-Grudzin´ski, Józef Mackiewicz, Wierzyn´ski, Stempowski, and Wat – reached readers at home and exerted a crucial influence on literature and criticism in Poland. From the start, literature was constantly present in Kultura and was represented by all genres and translations. Giedroyc published poems in every issue; however, the most important and recognizable genres were those of narrative prose: journalism, reportage, the narrative essay, short story, and the diary. Kultura also published sociological and philosophical texts, articles on the history of science on political theory, and other subjects. The essay and diary soon became Kultura’s “corporate symbols.” They made important achievements of today’s Polish literature possible in the discursive prose of diaries, essays, and that peculiar hybrid of autobiographical memoir and short story, cultivated, for example, by Gombrowicz, HerlingGrudzin´ski, Stempowski, Vincenz, Miłosz, Jelen´ski, Haupt, Józef Mackiewicz, Bobkowski, Tyrmand, and Kołakowski. In the 1980s, twentieth-century émigré literature became not only an active ingredient in a Polish literature that no longer distinguished between the

172

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

People’s Republic of Poland and émigré literature, it also became a way for an unexpected continuation. One can say that in the 1980s young writers took on issues which seemed, for those abroad, to have been exhausted a long time ago: the condition of émigré, the relationship between émigré and the homeland, or the intellectual responsibilities of an émigré writer. These themes, which the older émigré writers (such as Gombrowicz, Miłosz, Herling-Grudzin´ski, Wittlin, Józef Mackiewicz, Stempowski, and Jelen´ski) tackled, revived unexpectedly in the 1980s in the essays and poetry of writers born in Poland, like Marek Nowakowski, Stanisław Baran´czak, Adam Zagajewski, Wojciech Karpin´ski, Manuela Gretkowska, Bronisław Wildstein, and Janusz Rudnicki. Giedroyc never formulated a literary program of his own. Inviting writers to collaborate, he only asked that their work represent the highest literary standards, a variety of themes and political views, and that they distinguish themselves in their originality, even at the price of arousing the aesthetic or ideological indignation of the readership. Giedroyc preferred literature that had a clear social calling, touched on myths of collective consciousness, and provoked discussion. If he disagreed with the author, he would still publish the work of eminent writers, as was the case of Józef Mackiewicz and Gombrowicz. He encouraged writers to break conventions, shatter stereotypes, shape new view points, and demystify. He published writers for whom political freedom expressed itself in free speech. In an important column of Kultura, the “Wolna trybuna” (Free Tribune), Giedroyc featured comments on the exclusive responsibility of its writers. Kultura happily published young writers who were rebellious, considered controversial, but intellectually original, such as Marek Hłasko and Sławomir Mroz˙ek. As early as 1949, Giedroyc wrote about Kultura’s “ceaseless effort” to publish not writers who belong to the official literary establishment, but young writers who, independent of their age, tried to make their own way, without opportunism, with a hostile attitude to all stereotypes.” Kultura published works that were politically indifferent, but disliked those that were “politically submissive” (Ptasin´ska-Wójcik). In attracting the most eminent writers to Kultura, Giedroyc linked the problematics of literature with the issues of public life, such as it appeared in the books of Kazimierz Orłos´, Marek Nowakowski, Włodzimierz Odojewski, and Bogdan Madej. Articles about the most important writers and works of twentieth-century literature, discussions about the role of the writer in society, about the writer’s place within the community, about the relationship between art and reality, about the moral choices of writers and their consequences for literature were constantly present in the monthly, often in the form of essays by Miłosz, Józef Mackiewicz, Sławomir Mroz˙ek, Wojciech

Kultura (1946–2000) (Włodzimierz Bolecki)

173

Skalmowski, and Renata Gorczyn´ska. These themes also appeared in the diaries that Gombrowicz, Stempowski, and Herling-Grudzin´ski published monthly in Kultura. Characteristically, one of the first discussions in Kultura dealt with Miłosz’s 1951 decision to stay abroad, and the assessment he gave in “Nie” (No) of the of intellectuals’ place in the communist system. All of Miłosz’s books, especially Captive Mind, Gombrowicz’s Trans-Atlantyk and Diary, and Herling’s Upiory rewolucji (Phantoms of Revolution), A World Apart, and Dziennik pisany noca˛ introduced an intellectual dimension into émigré literature that was previously unknown, one that transgressed far beyond the current social and literary affairs. Another important discussion in Kultura dealt with the relationship of the émigré writer to Communism in Poland. Émigré writers living in London considered it the duty of émigrés to boycott all institutions in Poland, including the publishing houses. For its part, Kultura held on to its idea of transforming the attitude of the intelligentsia in Poland, and stated that the émigré writer must seek readers also in countries governed by communists. This discussion, which took place up until the mid-1970s, was actually without foundation because the communist censors, with negligible exceptions, forbade the publication of émigré books (Kowalczyk Giedroyc; Ptasin´ska-Wójcik). Giedroyc’s close ties with the Congress for Cultural Freedom were influential in raising the profile of the books published by the Instytut Literacki. Thanks to Jelen´ski, the periodicals subsidized by the Congress, which played such an important role in Europe, became interested in the work of Miłosz and Gombrowicz, as well as in several writers living in Poland. The critic François Bondy, who was affiliated with Kultura and was especially interested in the literature of East-Central Europe, served as facilitator. At the same time, the Biblioteka Kultury published with the Congress’ financial assistance Polish translations of books by Simone Weil, Raymond Aron, and others. When it came to be known in 1967 that the Congress was partly financed by the CIA, Giedroyc refused accepting all support coming form it. 1969 was an important date in Kultura’s history. That year two prominent writers affiliated with Kultura, Gombrowicz and Stempowski, had died. In place of their diaries, Herling-Grudzin´ski’s Dziennik pisany noca˛ began to appear. Mieroszewski died in 1976 (Habielski in Mieroszewski Final klasycznej Europy; Kowalczyk Giedroyc; Wandycz; K. Pomian W kre˛gu). At the same time, new collaborators joined: Kołakowski, K. Pomian, Wojciech Skalmowski (pseud. Maciej Bron´ski), Michał Heller (pseud. Adam Kruczek), Leopold Unger (pseud. Brukselczyk), Andrzej Chilecki. Kultura did not separate political from literary discourse. Political issues were presented through journalism as well as in the essays and literary nar-

174

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

rative forms. It was similar with moral, philosophical, and cultural issues, for example, in the work of Herling-Grudzin´ski, Miłosz, Kołakowski, and Stempowski. Faithful to Giedroyc’s conception, Kultura maintained close contact with writers and readers in Poland. In Kultura’s assessment, most writers after 1945 collaborated with the Communist Party and were corrupted by it. However, Kultura did not renounce contact with the writers who supported the Stalinist regime between 1945 and 1955, if they were willing to change their stance. For Kultura, the turning point in assessing the political views of the intellectuals was 1956. It welcomed all intellectuals who opposed the PUWP after 1956. However, the Editorial Board (Giedroyc, Herling-Grudzin´ski, Mieroszewski, and Hertz) had no illusions about the attitudes of most intellectuals in Poland: they considered them to be conformists incapable of making any gestures of opposition against the communist regime; many of them even supported the communists’ hostile attitude towards the émigrés. Giedroyc agreed with Stempowski that older writers took advantage of privileges that other professional groups did not have, while at the same time viewing themselves as martyrs. Up until the mid-1970s, the hypocrisy and cowardice of the intellectuals in the People’s Republic of Poland were unmasked mostly in the pages of Kultura. Herling-Grudzin´ski devoted much space to this topic in his essays in Dziennik pisany noca˛. “It is necessary to exert some sort of moral pressure on the literati in the homeland,” Giedroyc wrote to Stempowski in July 1956, “to prevent them from debasing themselves anew. […] We cannot allow literature to break the tradition of Strug and Z˙eromski.” But Giedroyc criticized not only writers in the People’s Republic of Poland: he also polemicized with émigré writers in London, whom he considered as talentless imitators of the romantics. Giedroyc conjectured that the articles published in Kultura would stimulate opposition against the communist regime in Poland and encourage writers to abandon their opportunism in relation to the PUWP. In the Polish ˙ eromski and Struga, writing was not a literary tradition, represented by Z craft but rather an ethos, a social and national mission on the basis of which writers would build their moral authority. For this reason, Kultura, most often in Herling-Grudzin´ski’s writing and Giedroyc’s correspondence, would speak of a rejection of this tradition by writers living in the communist system, inferring that they were subservient and cowardly. In Kultura’s opinion, it was incumbent on writers to make of themselves examples for readers and other citizens. In 1957, Kultura issued an appeal to intellectuals living in Poland: “We appeal to writers, journalists, and scholars – build up the pressure of public opinion, carry motions at meetings, write articles in the press de-

Kultura (1946–2000) (Włodzimierz Bolecki)

175

manding that the embargo on the literary and scholarly work of Poles abroad be lifted. Even if your protest does not bring concrete results, it will be a witness of the resistance of Polish culture against stupefaction” (Mieroszewski, “Dwa fortepiany”). Biblioteka Kultury was launched with Gombrowicz’s Trans-Atlantyk, S´lub (Marriage; 1953), Miłosz’s Captive Mind (1953), Zdobycie władzy (Seizure of Power), Dolina Issy (Issa Valley;1955), Pankowski’s Smagła pogoda (Stormy Weather; 1955), and Parnicki’s Koniec Zgody Narodów (End of the Understanding of Nations; 1955). The publications that followed, Leo Lipski’s stories in Dzien´ i noc (Day and Night), Miłosz’s Traktat poetycki (A Treatise on Poetry), Józef Mackiewicz’s novel Kontra, Gombrowicz’s Dziennik 1953–1956 (Diary 1953–1956), Andrzej Bobkowski’s Szkice piórkiem. Francja 1940–1944 (Pen Sketches: France 1940–1947, all in 1957 – were all difficult works. They shattered the national mythology and demanded a revision of Polish mentality. All of them ignited heated discussions among the émigrés. Today, each of these books belongs to the canon of twentieth-century Polish literature. Very early, in the mid-1950s, Giedroyc began to publish books written in the People’s Republic of Poland. In 1958, those books included Marek Hłasko’s Cmentarze (Cemetery) and Stanisław Rembek’s novel W polu (In Action). The profile of Biblioteka Kultury crystallized in the early years of the series. Giedroyc published authors of all generations, all writers with radical political and aesthetic views, practicians of various genres, and, above all, those that broached national taboos and stereotypes, posed existential questions, and searched for a new model of Polishness in contemporary civilization. After 1956, Giedroyc became the only independent authority for many writers in Poland, and Kultura the most important Polish publishing house. Symbolic were the visits by the eminent writers Andrzej Stawar and Aleksander Wat, who were affiliated with the communist movement before the war. Stawar, employing Marxism as a critical methodology already in the 1930s, published his anti-Stalinist journalistic work Pisma ostatnie (Final Letters) in the Biblioteka Kultura, and shortly died afterwards. Wat, who was a communist sympathizer before the war and was deported during the war by the NKVD, became the author of one of the most important Polish émigré books, an autobiography that unmasked the mechanism of the Soviet system entitled Mój wiek (My Age). This autobiography was one of the few eminent books that Giedroyc decided not to publish. It was soon translated, however, into French, German, and English. Up until 1956, contact between Kultura and the writers in Poland was infrequent because few people were allowed to travel outside the country. Kultura was under observation by the communist secret police, and every contact

176

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

was followed by repression. After 1956, visits by writers from Poland to the headquarters of Kultura became more frequent, and in the 1970s Kultura became a Mecca for Polish intellectuals (Ptasin´ska-Wójcik). Once Kultura’s support of Gomułka in 1956 led to disillusionment, it ceased to rely on the legal dissemination of émigré works in Poland. As Giedroyc wrote: Perhaps I am wrong, but it seems to me that Kultura paradoxically has become a source of discomfort [in the People’s Republic of Poland]. […] At any rate, I have observed a sharpening [of communist politics in Poland]. Kultura is undoubtedly under the fire from the censor. Its issues are regularly confiscated. [… As] you know, I was from the beginning quite skeptical about the right of circulation in the homeland. My minimal expectations were only that Kultura reach without difficulty magazines, libraries, universities, as well as journalists and literati. (letter to Jerzy Zawieyski of November 17, 1956, qtd in Ptasin´ska-Wójcik 136)

Giedroyc knew that the communist censor would not allow the import of any work that the PUWP considered as anti-communist. Kultura, therefore, began to employ sophisticated means of smuggling its books into Poland, for example, by replacing the covers with those of typical books of Soviet propaganda or by producing them in miniature format with very small type (comparable to the size of a cigarette package). One must remember that in the years when Kultura began its “long march” towards achieving a liberalization of Polish censorship, there were was yet no television, internet, photocopiers, video cassettes, tape recorders, or any other means of facilitating the dissemination of information and publications. Even the sale of typewriters was controlled. For this reason, the greatest threats to the governments in communist countries were literature and the public pronouncements of writers. Communists had a monopoly over their content and completely controlled the activities of the magazine editors and publishers. Kultura took up the fight to shatter this monopoly. Knowing, however, how brutal the system of communist repression was toward people demanding free speech, Kultura did not demand radical activities of writers. It did support all sorts of testimonies of resistance, aware that in a communist country every gesture of protest had a political, symbolic, and moral meaning, and, more than that, it became a model for others to imitate. Giedroyc thought that the only way to force the communists to liberalize censorship was to encourage writers in the People’s Republic of Poland to publicly protest against the restriction of free speech. Each such protest laid bare the falseness of the official ideology, and revealed the lies, and, above all, the repressive character of the communist power in Poland. In the 1950s and 1960s, writers who left Poland for a few weeks or permanently (Miłosz, Stawar, Hłasko, Wat, Kołakowski, Mroz˙ek, Herbert), began to

Kultura (1946–2000) (Włodzimierz Bolecki)

177

collaborate with Kultura. They risked having their works placed on the index of prohibited authors in Poland, which meant prohibition of publication and reviewing their books in the Polish press; once they returned, their passport could be withdrawn, they could be prohibited from leaving the country, and sometimes even dismissed from their job. In the 1970s, especially after the establishment of the so-called “underground press,” writers living in Poland would send Giedroyc their book manuscripts. Most of them, for example Kazimierz Orłos´ and Marek Nowakowski, published under pseudonyms; the best-known pseudonyms were Tomasz Stalin´ski (Stefan Kisielewski), Gaston de Cerizay (Stanisław Mackiewicz), Pelikan (Zbigniew Florczak), Socjusz (Zdzisław Najder), Marek Tarniewski ( Jakub Karpin´ski), Maciej Poleski (Czesław Bielecki), and Smecz (Tomasz Jastrun).

6. Kultura’s Achievements The communists ruthlessly fought Kultura’s work by means of political propaganda, the secret police, and disinformation, both in Poland and in the West. Nota bene, the titles of two of the most important communist weeklies in Poland, Polityka and Kultura, were borrowed from the two magazines created by Giedroyc ( Jelen´ski “Kultura”). The communists most violently attacked Kultura throughout the 1950s and 60s. The exception was 1956–57, when Kultura could disseminate its publications in Poland, even though it had no right of circulation. Library regulations were liberalized, and the postal service once again began to deliver Kultura and books about which the majority of readers had never heard earlier. Information about Kultura cropped up in the newspapers, and for a few months one could even import Kultura into Poland as customs were practically inexistent. As a result, Kultura penetrated into the consciousness of the Polish intelligentsia. However, shortly afterwards, when this liberalism ended, the communist papers began to criticize Kultura fiercely, criticizing it emphatically (no other manner of writing was permitted). As a result, Kultura, as an institution representing Polish exiles, émigrés, and enemies of the communist system, was treated by western public opinion (which was dominated by the left) with skepticism or indifference. In Poland, it was represented as an institution financed by the CIA to carry out espionage, while its editors and collaborators were depicted as corrupt, frustrated, and working on the basest of motives (Ptasin´ska-Wójcik). However, in the 1970s, a side-effect of these ritualized ideological attacks became obvious. Many people thought that since the communist were attack-

178

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

ing Kultura, it must be a good and important journal. A few, specialist libraries had a collection of the Instytut Literacki’s publications; however, special permission was needed to access them. Nonetheless, Kultura forged its own legend in the 1970s, based on its accomplishments, and such repressions in the People’s Republic of Poland as the trials of Hanna Rewska and the “mountaineers,” as well as the attempt to put Stanisław Mackiewicz on trial. Contrary to the communists’ intentions, these measures served to integrate the left-leaning intelligentsia in Poland into Kultura’s circle and to forge a positive relationship with the émigrés. The growth of interest in the publications of Kultura and in émigré literature in general was linked in the 1970s above all to generational changes and more frequent travels to the West. In 1976, an independent publishing market came about in Poland, primarily reprinting émigré publications. When Solidarity functioned legally (1981), access to Kultura’s publications and other émigré books was practically unrestricted, although formally still illegal, as in the years 1956–57. During the martial law, Kultura was accessible only through the distribution system of the underground publishing houses, at the risk of severe repression. (G. Pomian “Lata Solidarnos´ci”). Of particular importance was Radio Free Europe, which ordered every issue of the monthly and the Instytut’s most important books (Tatrowski; Machcewicz). For several decades, Kultura served as an informal center of research for Polish and East-Central European affairs, a publishing house, an archive, a library, and an office documenting the history of Polish emigration. Between 1947 and 2000, Kultura published 512 titles with a total print run of five million. The words that Mieroszewski wrote already in 1954 remained pertinent throughout Kultura’s whole history: Everything that was published whenever and wherever in Polish […] is collected, catalogued, and stored. Against the background of the current crisis in emigration, against the background of the decay and collapse of so many authorities and institutions, the fact that Kultura not only continues but is evolving takes on special significance. If our journal was dependent on leaders, heads of state and parties, and other so-called ‘agents,’ they would have buried it long ago. Happily, Kultura is dependent on a wide circle of Readers and friends. (“Budujemy dom”).

The publications of the Instytut Literacki were a primary source for independent magazines and publishing houses working outside the purview of the censor. In the years 1977–90, 1,073 volumes of reprints of émigré publications appeared in Poland, not counting magazines. Several hundred illegal magazines benefited from reprinting what Kultura published in article or book form years earlier (Supruniuk vols 1 and 2). Giedroyc gladly agreed to the reprint of Kultura’s books, insisting only that the copyright belonged to the

Kultura (1946–2000) (Włodzimierz Bolecki)

179

Instytut Literacki or that a payment of three percent of the profits be deposited to the account of the Kultura Fund in Poland. The most important publishers collaborating with Kultura were NOWA (director Mirosław Chojecki) and CDN (director Czesław Bielecki). The authority and trust that Kultura earned in exile meant that international organizations and Polonia institutions abroad entrusted Giedroyc with funds to assist in Poland. Giedroyc gave significant financial assistance to the Komitet Kultury Niezalez˙nej (Committee for Independent Culture) and the Fundusz Wydawnictw Niezalez˙nych (Fund for Independent Publishers) in Poland. All magazines that dealt with East-Central European issues benefited from Kultura’s financial assistance; they included the Niepodległos´´c (Independence), ABC, Nowa Koalicja (New Coalition), Obóz (Camp), and the Tygodnik Mazowsze (Mazovian Weekly). The latter was published from around the beginning of the martial law up until the elections in 1989, in a print run of approximately eighty thousand. Its editors launched in the Spring of 1989 the largest daily in Poland, the Gazeta Wyborcza (Newspaper of the Electorate). Most of the aid was directed to publishing houses in Warsaw, Cracow (which was the largest recipient of books and printing equipment), Wrocław, and Poznan´. In 1985–86, the program “Video” was launched in Paris, thanks to which current affairs were documented on films that were then distributed in Poland. From 1983 to 1987, when subscriptions to Kultura were at their height, Giedroyc helped several dozen magazines, publishing houses, and organizations annually. Their subscriptions fluctuated. As Mirosław Adam Supruniuk has calculated, the minimum monthly subsidy was thirty to fifty dollars; the organizations and the publishing houses received a one-time subsidy of thousand to five thousand dollars, or five hundred to thousand dollars monthly. These were very large sums then: the average salary in Poland was approximately twenty to twenty-five dollars. Kultura gave much support to Polish translations of scholarly and literary works, particularly from East-Central Europe, and mostly Russian and Ukrainian literary works. By simultaneously publishing books from the West and East, Giedroyc wanted to confront both experiences, and, above all, to show the East European experience. Kultura was a mediator between East and West; it was the first Polish publisher to issue many dissident Russian writers, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrej Sacharow, Andrei Amalrik, Andrei Siniavski, and Iuri Daniel. Kultura also published Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Eugenio Reale, Aleksander Weisberg-Cybulski, Simone Weil, George Orwell, Raymond Aron, Albert Camus, Graham Green, Aldous Huxley, Daniel Bell, Michel Garder, Jeanne Hersch, and Zbigniew Brzezin´ski, as well as Milovan -Dilas, Boris Pasternak, Borys Lewickyj, Mihajlo Mihajlov, and others.

180

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

Several issues of Kultura appeared as monographs in other languages: the Czech and Slovak issue of 1969/nr. 10 was dedicated to the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia; a special supplement in the years 1952–1953 and a monograph issue in 1984 were in German; issues in Russian appeared in 1960, 1971, and 1981. The special anthology “Rozstrzelane odrodzenie” (Executed Rebirth) was published in Ukrainian (Ławrynenko), and a Hungarian issue was in the works but did not appear. Giedroyc also rallied Czech, Polish, Russian, and Hungarian opposition activists to support declarations of independence for the Ukraine. Though Kultura was located in France, no issue was prepared in French; Poles belonging to the French intellectuals spread the word about Kultura’s significance ( Jelen´ski, Le Debat; K. Pomian, Les Amis de ‘Kultura’). In February 1990, the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich bestowed an international prize on Kultura and its Czech sister exile journal Sveˇdectví. The most difficult period for Kultura came, paradoxically, after the fall of Communism in 1989 and the lifting of censorship in Poland in April 1990. Kultura lost its privileged independent position, and became one of many uncensored periodicals that shaped Polish public opinion. Its voice ceased to be a reference point and the arbiter of national affairs. Kultura’s authors now published also in Poland, and the long-anticipated materialization of the monthly’s “political line” had to confront the lightning-quick political transformations in new Poland. In the new political system, Kultura took more and more often sides in Poland’s internal, often ideologized, discussions, while former contributors distanced themselves from it. From a journal focused on the exile, Kultura turned increasingly into a national journal, as attested to not only by the issues it dealt with, but also by the growing role of national authors. From a literary-societal monthly, it transformed itself into a political periodical, although the editors never gave up their cultural columns, especially that on literature (G. Pomian) One could now purchase Kultura in Poland’s kiosks as one could other newspapers and periodicals, but it could not increase significantly its readership. Nevertheless, the Polish intellectual elite read it, and so it was able to provoke and generate polemics in political and cultural affairs up to its very last issue. In 1993, for example, it published a questionnaire entitled “Pisarze niedocenieni/pisarze przecenieni” (Undervalued Writers/Overvalued Writers), modeled on a questionnaire in Le Figaro. It stirred up intense emotions by confrontating the private opinions of known critics with the official literary canon. Kultura now also became a subject of interest to historians and artists. Books began to be written about Kultura, anthologies were compiled of its articles (Tyrmand; Zostało; G.&K Pomian; G. Pomian), documentary films were made about it (Agnieszka Holland; Kuczyn´ski; Szczepan´ski), memoirs were

Kultura (1946–2000) (Włodzimierz Bolecki)

181

written by many writers (Zostało tylko słowo; O “Kulturze”;* Giedroyc Autobiogafia; Herling-Grudzin´ski and Bolecki Rozmowy w Dragonei). Giedroyc’s correspondence with Bobkowski, Gombrowicz, Jelen´ski, Miłosz, Stempowski, and Wan´kowski was published. Interviews appeared, scholarly articles, and bibliographies were published, conference sessions and exhibits were organized. By the end of the 1990s, Kultura was a symbol of the most valued heritage of the post-1945 Polish exile culture. After 1989, it became both trendy and amusing in political circles to confess to the systematic reading of Kultura, a matter that the post-communists Aleksander Kwas´niewski and Lech Wałe˛sa both admitted. Giedroyc kept his distance from these ritualistic declarations of recognition. His symbolic gesture was to refuse a diploma bestowed on him in 1989 by the Minister of Foreign Affairs for his service in disseminating of Polish culture abroad, and his refusal to travel to Poland after the fall of Communism. Giedroyc died in 2000. According to his wishes, Kultura stopped publication after his death. More than half a century of work made Kultura’s output the most important testimony concerning the exile attitudes towards Communism, independence, the fate of the East-Central European nations, international affairs, western perceptions of post-Yalta Europe, as well as the evolution of the communist system and society. Kultura also had a key role in acquainting Polish readers with western Sovietology, and western economic, literary, and cultural issues. For several generations of Poles, Kultura became a symbolic rescue boat, a raft that helped salvage the most valuable treasures of the national heritage after the catastrophe of World War II. “I am completely convinced,” wrote Baran´czak, “that if it were not for the books smuggled across the border, secretly circulated, borrowed for one night and feverishly absorbed, my generation would not have been capable of evading spiritual stunting.” Kultura, in Zbigniew Brzezin´ski’s opinion, was a symbol of historical continuity and a weapon in the political battle. Furthermore, it was highly successful in both arenas. As a symbol of historical continuity, Kultura kept independent Polish political thought alive in times of unprecedented darkness. Stalinism, even more than Hitlerism, was apparently capable of suppressing fires and demoralizing the spirit. Kultura was a shelter and a road sign for those who never lost hope in a free and democratic Poland. It became a symbolic continuation of the great exiles of the nineteenth century, preserving thus a tradition that connected the history of Poland to Paris (G.& K. Pomian 83). Kultura’s power lay, however, in its opening of a Polish public discourse about the future and about a new intellectual and moral challenge after World

182

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

War II, rather than about its ability to maintain historical continuity. Its Editorial Board and collaborators were witnesses to the contact between the eastern and western parts of Europe. Kultura confronted pre- and post-war Poland from the European perspective, and Western Europe from an EastCentral European one. Its contributors described Poland and East-Central Europe from the perspective that represented a cultural challenge to the Western world. Kultura showed a society imprisoned after 1945 in a monoethnic bell-glass of national Communism, which was shielded from the standards and issues of Western societies: openness, multiculturalism, and tolerance. Its more than fifty years of output turned out to be a unique connection between the historical experience of East-Central Europe and its opening onto modernity. Translated from the Polish by Diana Kuprel Works Cited Aron, Raymond. “Mit społeczen´stwa bezklasowego”(The Myth of Classless Society). Kultura 1948, nr. 8. Aron, Raymond. “Wielka schizma” (The Great Schism). Kultura 1949, nr. 9. Berberyusz, Ewa. Ksia˛z˙e˛ z Maisons-Laffitte (The Prince of Maisons-Laffitte). Gdan´sk: Marabut, 1995. Bobkowski, Andrzej. “List” (A Letter). Kultura 1948, nr. 9–10: 3–11. Bobkowski, Andrzej. “Poz˙egnanie” (Farewell). Kultura 1948, nr. 6: 82–93. Bobkowski, Andrzej. Szkice piórkiem. Francja 1940–1944 (Sketches with a Quill: France 1940–1947). Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1957. Trad. Laurence Dyèvre as En guerre et en paix. Journal 1940–1944 (In War and Peace: Journal 1940–1944). Paris: Noir Sur Blanc, 1991. Bochen´ski, Józef Maria. “Manifest demokratyczny” (Democratic Manifesto). Kultura 1951, nr. 9 (47): 3–17. Rpt. Giedroyc. Autobiografia na cztery re˛ce. Ed. Krzysztof Pomian, 4th ed. Warsaw: Towrzystwo Opieki nad Archiwum Instytutu Literackiego w Paryz˙u, 2006. 282–303. Burnham, James. The Struggle for the World. New York: John Day, 1947. Chłap-Nowakowa, Justyna. Sybir. Bliski Wschód. Monte Cassino. S´rodowisko poetyckie 2. Korpusu i jego twórczos´´c (Siberia, the Near East, Monte Cassino. Poet Community in the Second Corps and its Writing). Cracow: Arcana, 2004. Chrus´cin´ska, Iza. Była raz Kultura … Rozmowy z Zofia˛ Hertz (Once there Was Kultura … Conversations with Zofia˛ Hertz). Warsaw: Most, 1994. Danilewicz-Zielin´ska, Maria. Bibliografia. Vol 1. [Kultura 1958–1973. Zeszyty Historyczne (Historical Notebooks) 1963–1973. Działalnos´´c wydawnicza (Other Publishings) 1959–1973]. Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1975. Danilewicz-Zielin´ska, Maria. Bibliografia. Vol 2. [Kultura 1974–1980. Zeszyty Historyczne 1974–1980. Działalnos´c´ wydawnicza 1974–1980]. Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1981. Danilewicz-Zielin´ska, Maria. Bibliografia. Vol 3. [Kultura 1981–1987. Zeszyty Historyczne 1981–1987. Działalnos´c´ wydawnicza 1981–1987. Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1989.

Kultura (1946–2000) (Włodzimierz Bolecki)

183

-Dilas, Milovan. The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System. New York: Praeger, 1957. Fabre-Luce, Alfred. “Jak mogłaby powstac´ Europa” (How Europe Could Come Into Being). Kultura 1949, nr. 7. Fejto˝, Ferenc. “Horoskopy Wschodnio-europejskie” (A Horoscope of Eastern Europe). Kultura 1954, nr. 5. Florczak Zbigniew. “Podróz˙ na horyzonty” ( Journey towards the Horizonts). Kultura 1949, nr. 3. Friszke, Andrzej. Z˙ycie polityczne emigracji (Political Life of the Emigrants). Warsaw: Wie˛z, 1999. Giedroyc, Jerzy and Andrzej Bobkowski. Listy 1946–1961 (Letters 1946–61). Ed. Jan Zielin´ski. Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1996. Giedroyc, Jerzy and Jerzy Stempowski. Listy 1946–1969 (Letters 1946–1969). 2 vols. Ed. Andrzej Stanisław Kowalczyk. Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1998. Giedroyc, Jerzy and Juliusz Mieroszewski. Listy 1949–1956 (Letters 1949–56). 2 vols. Ed. Krzysztof Pomian. Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1999. Giedroyc, Jerzy and Konstanty Aleksander Jelen´ski. Listy 1950–1987 (Letters 1950–1987). Ed. Wojciech Karpin´ski. Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1995. Giedroyc, Jerzy and Melchior Wan´kowicz. Listy 1945–1963 (Letters 1945–1963). Ed. Aleksandra Ziółkowska-Boehm. Warsaw: Czytelnik, 2000. Giedroyc, Jerzy and Miłosz Czesław. Listy (Letters). Warsaw: Czytelnik, 2008. Giedroyc, Jerzy and Witold Gombrowicz. Listy 1950–1969 (Letters 1950–69), Ed. Andrzej Stanisław Kowalczyk. Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1993. Giedroyc, Jerzy. Autobiografia na cztery re˛ce (Autobiography for Four Hands). Ed. Krzysztof Pomian. Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1994. Giedroyc, Jerzy. “Rozmowa z Jerzym Giedroyciem sprzed dwunastu lat” (Interview with Jerzy Giedroyc held Twelve Years ago). Aneks 1986, nr. 44. Rpt. Zostało tylko słowo 60–85. Gombrowicz, Witold. Dziennik 1953–1956 (Diary 1953–1956). Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1971. Gombrowicz, Witold. S´lub (Marriage). Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1953. Gombrowicz, Witold. Trans-Atlantyk. Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1953. Gorczyn´ska, Renata. “Giedroyc literacki” (Literary Giedroyc). Jerzy Giedroyc. Redaktor. Polityk. Człowiek ( Jerzy Giedroyc: Editor, Politician, and Man). Ed. Krzysztof Pomian. Lublin: Maria Curie-Skłodowska UP, 2001. 67–88. Gorczyn´ska, Renata. “Wybór Zofii” (Sophie’s Choice) Zeszyty Historyczne vol. 145 (2003). Gorczyn´ska, Renata. Portrety paryskie (Parisian Portraits). Cracow: Literackie, 1999. Habielski, Rafał. “Jerzy Giedroyc a stosunki polsko-z˙ydowskie” ( Jerzy Giedroyc and Polish-Jewish Relations). Polska i z˙ydowska inteligencja pierwszej połowy XX wieku (Poland and the Jewish Intelligentsia of the First Half of the Twentieth Century). Ed. Dorota Krawczyn´ska. Warsaw: Instytut Badan´ Literackich, 2009 (forthcoming). Habielski, Rafał. “Laboratorium ‘Kultury’” (Kultura’s Laboratory). Wie˛z´ 2000, nr. 11. Habielski, Rafal. “Realizm, wizje i sny romantyków. O pisarstwie J. Mieroszewskiego” (Realism, Visions and Dreams of the Romantics. On the Writings of Juliusz Mieroszewski). Pref. in Mieroszewski, Finał klasycznej Europy 5–50. Habielski, Rafał. Z˙ycie społeczne i kulturalne emigracji (The Social and Cultural Life of the Emigrants). Warsaw: Wie˛z, 1999. Herling-Grudzin´ski, Gustaw, and Włodzimierz Bolecki. Rozmowy w Dragonei (Conversations in Dragonea). Ed. Włodzimierz Bolecki. Warsaw: Szpak, 1997.

184

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

Herling-Grudzin´ski, Gustaw. “Dz˙uma w Neapolu Relacja o stanie wyja˛tkowym” (Plague in Naples. Report on a State of Emergency). Kultura 1990 nr. 5: 22–39. Rpt. Herling-Grudzin´ski, Opowiadania zebrine (Collected Short Stories). Ed. Zdzisław Kudelski. Vol. 1. Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1999. 378–98. Herling-Grudzin´ski, Gustaw. “Ksie˛gi Narodu i Pielgrzymstwa Polskiego na nowej emigracji” (Books of the Polish Nation and its Pilgrimage to a New Emigration). Pref. to Adam Mickiewicz. Ksie˛gi Narodu i Pielgrzymstwa Polskiego (Books of the Polish Nation and its Pilgrimage). Rome: Instytut Literacki, 1946. 5–20. Herling-Grudzin´ski, Gustaw. “Nota o Brzozowskim” (Commentary on Brzozowski). Stanisław Brzozowski. Filozofia romantyzmu polskiego (The Philosophy of Polish Romanticism). Rome: Biblioteka “Orła Białego,” 1945. 5–12. Herling-Grudzin´ski, Gustaw. A World Apart. London: Heinemann, 1986. Trans. Joseph Marek from the Polish Inny ´swiat. London: Gryf, 1953. Herling-Grudzin´ski, Gustaw. Dziennik pisany noca˛ 1971–2000 ( Journal Written at Night 1971–2000). 7 vols. Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1995–2000. Volcano and Miracle. A Selection From the The Journal Written at Night. Sel. and trans. Ronald Strom. New York: Penguin, 1996. Herling-Grudzin´ski, Gustaw. Najkrótszy przewodnik po sobie samym (The Shortest Guide to Oneself). Ed. Włodzimierz Bolecki. Cracow: Literackie, 2000. Herling-Grudzin´ski, Gustaw. Upiory rewolucji (Phantoms of Revolution). Warsaw: Enklawa, 1981. Hertz, Aleksander. Z˙ydzi w kulturze polskiej ( Jews in Polish Culture). Paris: Instytut Literackie, 1957. Hertz, Zygmunt. Listy do Czesława Miłosza 1952–1979 (Letters to Czesław Miłosz). Ed. Renata Gorczyn´ska. Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1992. Hłasko, Marek. Cmentarze (Cemetery). Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1958. Holland, Agnieszka, and Andrzej Wolski. Kultura (film). Producer: Media Kontakt, Paris, 1985. Janta-Połczyn´ski, Aleksander. “Wracam z Polski” (I Return from Poland). Kultura 1948, nr. 12. Jelen´ski, Konstanty Aleksander. “Kultura: La Pologne en exil” (Kultura: Poland in Exile). Le Debat 1981 nr. 9. “Kultura: Polska na wygnaniu” (Kultura: Poland in Exile). Aneks 1981, nr. 24–25. Jelen´ski, Konstanty Aleksander. “Mandaryni, komunizm, koegzystencja” (Mandarins, Communism, Coexistence). Kultura 1955, nr. 9. Karpin´ski, Jakub. Taternictwo nizinne (Lowland Mountaineering). Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1988. Kennan, George F. “America and the Russian Future.” Foreign Affairs 29 (1950–51): 351–70. Kerski, Basil, and Andrzej Stanisław Kowalczyk. Wiek ukrain´sko-polski. Rozmowy z Bohdanem Osadczukiem (The Ukranian-Polish Century. Conversations with Bohdan Osadczuk). Lublin: Marie Curie-Skłodowska UP, 2001. Kłossowski, Andrzej. “Instytut Literacki w Paryz˙u” (The Instytut Literacki in Paris). Nowe Ksia˛z˙ki 1991, nr. 8. Kłossowski, Andrzej. Polskie oficyny wydawnicze na obczyz´nie (Polish Publishing Houses Abroad). Warsaw: Biblioteka Narodowa, 1993. Kolakowski, Leszek. “Tezy o nadziei i beznadziejnos´ci” (Theses about Hope and Hopelessness). Kultura 1971, nr. 6. Kopczyn´ski, Krzysztof. Przed przystankiem niepodległos´´c: paryska ‘Kultura’ i Kraj w latach 1980–1989 (Before We Got Independence: Giedroyc’s Kultura and Poland 1980–1989). Warsaw: Wie˛z, 1990.

Kultura (1946–2000) (Włodzimierz Bolecki)

185

Korek, Janusz. Paradoksy paryskiej “Kultury”. Ewolucja mys´li politycznej w latach 1947–1980 (The Paradoxes of the Paris Kultura: The Evolution of Political Thought 1947–1980). Stockholm Slavic Studies nr. 27. Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell, 1998. Kowalczyk, Andrzej Stanisław. Giedroyc i Kultura (Giedroyc and Kultura). Wrocław: Dolnos´la˛skie, 1999. Kowalczyk, Andrzej Stanisław. Od Bukaresztu do Laffittów. Jerzego Giedroycia rzeczpospolita epistolarna (From Bucharest to Laffitte. The Epistolary Republic of Jerzy Giedroyc). Sejny: Fundacja Pogranicze, 2006. Kowalik, Jan. Kultura 1947–1957. Bibliografia & wydawnictwa 1946–1957 (Kultura 1947–1957. Bibliography and Publications 1946–1957). Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1959. Król, Marcin. Style politycznego mys´lenia. Wokół “Buntu Młodych” i “Polityki” (Styles of Political Thinking. About Revolt of the Youth and Polityka). Paris: Libella, 1979. Kuczyn´ski, Adam dir. Screenplan Włodzimierz Bolecki and Wojciechowski Piotr. Tratwa “Kultury” (The Monthly Kultura as a Lifeboat). (film;3 x30 mins.). Producer Logos Media and Polish Television, 1996. Kudelski, Zdzisław, ed. Spotkania z paryska˛ Kultura˛ (Encounters with Giedroyc’s Kultura). Warsaw: Publishing Office Pomost, 1995. Kultura i jej kra˛g 1946–1986. Katalog wystawy czterdziestolecia Instytutu Literackiego. Biblioteka Polska. Paris 11 XII 1986–10 I 1987 (Kultura and its Circle1946–1986. Exhibition Catalogue for the Fortieth Anniversary of the Instytut Literacki in the Biblioteka Polska. Paris, December 11, 1986 – January 10, 1987). Paris: Les Amis de Kultura, 1988. Lublin: Marie Curie-Skłodowska UP, 1995. Laqueur, Walter. “Kongres Wolnos´ci Kultury” (The Congress for Cultural Freedom). Przegla˛d Polityczny 1997, nr. 33–34. Ławrynenko, Jurij, Rozstrilane widrodz˙enija (Executed Rebirth). Biblioteka Kultury no 37. Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1959. Leich, F.J. “Great Expectations: The National Councils in Exile 1950–1960.” The Polish Review 35.3 (1990). Leitgeber, Witold. “Polski Korpus Przysposobienia i Rozmieszczenia w s´wietle dokumentów brytyjskich” (Polish Cadet and Ordonnance Corps in Light of British Documents). Mobilizacja uchodz´stwa do walki politycznej 1945–1990 (Mobilization of Refugees to Political Battle 1945–1990). Ed. Leonidas Kliszewicz. London: Pol. Tow. Naukowe na Obczyz´nie, 1995. Lewandowska, Stanisława. Prasa polskiej emigracji wojennej 1939–1945 (Polish War Emigration Press). Warsaw: Instytut Historii Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 1993. Lipski, Leo. Dzien´ i noc (Day and Night). Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1957. Machcewicz, Paweł. Monachijska menaz˙eria. Walka z Radiem Wolna Europa (Political Menagerie in Munich. Battle against Radio Free Europe). Warsaw: IPN 2007. Mackiewicz, Józef. “Niemiecki kompleks” (German Complex). Kultura 1956, nr. 1. Rpt. Józef Mackiewicz and Barbara Toporska. Droga Pani (Dear Madam). London: Kontra, 1984. 82. Mackiewicz, Józef. Kontra. Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1957. Maurer, Jadwiga. “Moje lata z Kultura˛” (My Years with Kultura). Pamie˛tnik Literacki 1987, nr. 11. Mencwel, Andrzej. Przedwios´nie czy potop. Studium postaw polskich w XX wieku (Early Spring or the Flood. A Study of Polish Attitudes in the Twentieth Century). Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1997. Mieroszewski, Juliusz. “ABC polityki Kultury” (An ABC of Kultura’s Politics). Kultura 1966, nr. 4. Rpt. Finał klasycznej Europy 244–54.

186

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

Mieroszewski, Juliusz. “Budujemy dom” (We Build our House). Kultura 1954, nr. 10. Mieroszewski, Juliusz. “Dwa fortepiany” (Two Fortepianos). Kultura 1957, nr. 9: 3–6. Mieroszewski, Juliusz. “Lekcja we˛gierska (Hungarian lesson). Kultura 1956, no 12. Rpt. Mieroszewski, Finał klasycznej Europy 188. Mieroszewski, Juliusz. “List z wyspy” (A Letter from an Island). Kultura 1951, nr 2–3. Rpt. Mieroszewski, Finał klasycznej Europy 60–66. Mieroszewski, Juliusz. “Niemcy …” (Germans …). Kultura 1954, nr. 4. Rpt. Mieroszewski, Finał klasycznej Europy 128–37. Mieroszewski, Juliusz. “O reforme˛ ‘zakonu polskos´ci’” (On the Reform of the ‘Order of Polishness’). Kultura 1952, nr 4. Rpt. Mieroszewski, Finał klasycznej Europy 95–102. Mieroszewski, Juliusz. “Rosyjski ‘kompleks polski’ i obszar ULB” (Russian “Polish complex” and ULB region). Kultura 1974, no 9. Rpt. Mieroszewski, Finał klasycznej Europy 352–61. Mieroszewski, Juliusz. Finał klasycznej Europy (The End of Classic Europe). Sel., ed. and with pref. Rafał Habielski. Lublin: Marie Curie-Skłodowska UP, 1997. Miłosz, Czesław. “Był raz …” (There was Once …). Kultura 1980, nr. 3. Rpt. Zaczynaja˛c od moich ulic (Beginning with my Streets). Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1985; Zostało tylko słowo …; Krzysztow Pomian et al, O ‘Kulturze.’ Miłosz, Czesław. “Nie” (No). Kultura 1951, no 5. Miłosz, Czesław. Dolina Issy (Issa Valley). Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1955. Miłosz, Czesław. Traktat poetycki (Treatise on Poetry). Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1957. Miłosz, Czesław. Zdobycie władzy (Seizure of Power). Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1955. Miłosz, Czesław. Zniewolony umysł (Captive Mind). Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1953. Najder, Zdzisław. Ile jest dróg? (How Many Roads?). Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1982. Pankowski, Marian. Smagła pogoda (Stormy Weather). Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1955. Parnicki, Teodor. Koniec Zgody Narodów (The End of Understanding Nations). Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1955. Pomian, Graz˙yna, ed. Wizja Polski na łamach ‘Kultury’ 1947–1976 (Vision of Poland in the Columns of Kultura). 2 vols. Lublin: UMCS, 1999. Pomian, Graz˙yna. “Lata Solidarnos´ci” (The Years of the Solidarity Movement). Krzysztof Pomian, ed. Jerzy Giedroyc 169–180. Pomian, Krzysztof et al. O ‘Kulturze.’ Wspomnienia i opinie (On Kultura. Memories and Opinions). London: Puls, 1987. Pomian, Krzysztof, ed. Jerzy Giedroyc. Redaktor. Polityk. Człowiek ( Jerzy Giedroyc. Editor, Politician, Man). Lublin: Marie Curie-Skłodowska UP, 2001. Pomian, Krzysztof. “13 grudnia 1981” (December 13, 1981). Kultura 1982, nr. 1–2: 12–16. Pomian, Krzysztof. W kre˛gu Giedroycia (In Giedroyc’s Circle). Warsaw: Czytelnik, 2000. Pospieszalski, Antoni. “O religii bez namaszczenia” (Writing on Religion without Taboos). Krzysztof Pomian, ed. Jerzy Giedroyc 202–208. Ptasin´ska-Wójcik, Małgorzata. Z dziejów Biblioteki Kultury 1946–1966 (On the Kultura Books 1946–1966). Warsaw: IPN, 2006. Rembek, Stanisław. W polu (In Action). Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1958. Rymkiewicz, Jarosław Marek Umschlagplatz (Transfer Point [of Deportees]). Biblioteka Kultury nr. 435. Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1988. Sharp, Samuel. Poland, White Eagle on a Red Field. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1953. Skalmowski, Wojciech. “Prywatne lektury Jerzego Giedroycia” ( Jerzy Giedroyc’s Private Lectures). Krzysztof Pomian, ed. Jerzy Giedroyc 209–219. Stempowski, Jerzy. “Corona turrita.” Kultura 1948, nr. 5.

Kultura (1946–2000) (Włodzimierz Bolecki)

187

Stempowski, Jerzy. Dziennik podróz˙y do Austrii i Niemiec (Diary of Travels to Austria and Germany). Rome: Instytut Literacki, 1946. Stempowski, Jerzy. Od Berdyczowa do Rzymu (From Berdyczów to Rome). Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1971. Stron´ska, Anna. “Piłsudczyk, którego pokochała Litwa” (Piłsudski’s Sympathizer Who Was Loved by Lituania). Krzysztof Pomian, ed. Jerzy Giedroyc 221–34. Supruniuk, Mirosław Adam. Kultura. Materiały do dziejów Instytutu Literackiego w Paryz˙u. Bibliografia działalnos´ci wydawniczej 1946–1990 Uzupełnienia (Kultura. Materials on the Works of the Instytut Literacki in Paris. Bibliography of the Publishing Activities 1946–1990. Supplement). Torun´: Mikołaj Kopernikus UP, 1994. Supruniuk, Mirosław Adam. Kultura. Materiały z´ródłowe do dziejów Instytutu Literackiego [t. 2], Bibliografia przedruków wydawnictw Instytutu Literackiego w Paryz˙u w niezalez˙nych oficynach wydawniczych w Polsce w latach 1977–1990 (Kultura. Source Materials on the Works of the Instytut Literacki. Vol. 2. Bibliography of the Reprints of the Instytut Literacki, Paris in Poland’s Independent Publishing Houses 1977–1990). Torun´: Mikołaj Kopernikus UP, 1995. Szaruga, Leszek. Przestrzen´ spotkania. Eseje o “Kulturze” paryskiej (Meeting Space. Essays on the Parisian Kultura). Lublin: UMCS, 2001. Szczepan´ski, Ignacy, ed. Kultura. 41 mins. film. Producer: Polish Televison, 1994. Szczepan´ski, Ignacy, ed. Ostatnia rozmowa (Recent Conversations). 21 mins. film about Kultura. Producer: Polish Televison, 2004. Tatrowski, K. Literatura i pisarze w programie Rozgłos´ni Polskiej Radio Wolna Europa (Literature and Writers in the Polish Broadcasting Program of Radio Free Europe). Cracow: Universitas, 2005. Terlecki, Ryszard, ed. Aparat bezpieczen´stwa wobec emigracji politycznej i Polonii (The Actions of the Polish Communist Secret Police against the Polish Diaspora). Warsaw: IPN, 2005. Tyrmand, Leopold, ed. Explorations in Freedom: Prose, Narrative, and Poetry from ‘Kultura.’ New York: Free Press, 1970. Tyrmand, Leopold, ed. Kultura Essays. New York: Free Press, 1970. Ulatowski, Jan. “Inteligenckie herezje polityczne” (Political Heresies of the Polish Inteligentia). Kultura 1948, nr. 5. Wandycz, Piotr Stefan. “Mieroszewski i Mieroszewscy” (Mieroszewski and Mieroszewskis). Epilogue in Giedroyc & Mieroszewski Listy 1949–1956. Wan´kowicz, Melchior. “Klub Trzeciego Miejsca” (Club of the Third Place). Kultura 1949, nr. 6. Wat, Aleksander. Mój wiek (My Century). London: Book Fund, 1977. Winczakiewicz, Jan, ed. Izrael w poezji polskiej. Antologia (Israel in Polish Poetry. An Antology). Biblioteka Kultury nr. 26. Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1958. Wraga, Ryszard. “Ksia˛z˙ki o Rosji” (Books on Russia). Kultura 1948, nr. 4. Wraga, Ryszard. “Przymusowa praca w Rosji Sowieckiej” (Forced Labor in Soviet Russia). Kultura 1947, nr. 2–3. Zbyszewski, Wacław Alfred. “Zagubieni romantycy” (The Lost Romantics). Kultura 1959, nr 10. ˙ ebrowski, Marek. Dzieje sporu. Kultura w emigracyjnej debacie publicznej lat 1947–1956 (History Z of a Dispute. Kultura in the Émigré Public Debate 1947–1956). Warsaw: Towarzystwo Opieki nad Archiwum Instytutu Literackiego w Paryz˙u, 2007. Zie˛tara, Pawel. Emigracja wobec paz´dziernika. Postawy polskich ´srodowisk emigracyjnych wobec liberalizacji w PRL w latach 1955–1957 (Emigration in Relation to October. Attitudes of the

188

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

Polish Émigré Communities about the Liberalization in the People’s Republic of Poland, 1955–1957). Warsaw: LTW, 2001. Zostało tylko słowo … Wybór tekstów o “Kulturze” paryskiej i jej twórcach (Only the Word Remained … A Sel. of Texts about the Parisian Kultura and Its Creators). Lublin: FIS, 1990.

Polish World War II Veteran Émigré Writers in the US (Bogusław Wróblewski)

189

Polish World War II Veteran Émigré Writers in the US: Danuta Mostwin and Others Bogusław Wróblewski

1. The Émigré Veteran Generation When World War II ended, an estimated 2.4–2.6 million of the Polish citizens in 1939 found themselves outside the country, not including the Poles in the USRR. Most of them were in Europe, tens of thousands on other continents, and merely 1500 in the USA. These proportions changed significantly within a few years because of two main reasons: firstly, because of repatriation, i.e. voluntary or enforced return to the home country (Łuczak), and secondly, because the majority of Poles who did not agree to return to the communist Poland left for the other continents, mainly for the USA. (Figures in Habielski, Pilch, Kubiak et al., as well as in Mostwin’s Emigranci, Transplanted Family, and Trzecia wartos´´c) Because of World War II, about 150,000 Poles settled in the United States in the period from 1946 to the mid-50s. Most numerous among these immigrants – between 93,000 and 100,000, including family members – were those who had fought against the Nazis on various fronts around the world, and those who had participated in the Polish resistance during the wartime occupation. This is why they are generally classified as émigré soldiers or “veteranemigrants.” The term acquired currency largely thanks to Danuta Mostwin’s sociological studies Trzecia wartos´´c and Emigranci polscy. It should be stressed that the semantic range of this term is certainly narrower than of the term “wartime émigré” (also called “post-Yalta émigré”), which is used, for example, by Andrzej Friszke in his study encompassing the political life of the entire émigré community (Z˙ycie polityczne 12). There were three principal sources of the postwar veteran emigration from Poland. Firstly, there were Polish military units that fought together with the Allies on the western fronts (in 1945 there were over 200,000 soldiers in Western Europe; about 20,000 would eventually immigrate to the US, often with their families). Secondly, there were about 35,000 “displaced persons,” such as prisoners of war from the September 1939 campaign and the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, forced laborers and prisoners of concentration

190

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

camps, who found themselves in 1945 in areas controlled by American, British, and French troops. Thirdly, members of resistance organizations, and political activists who decided to leave the country between 1945 and 1947, after the communist takeover of Poland. The future trajectories of these displaced persons were often determined by their origins and their reasons for emigrating. Before arriving in the US, many of them spent some time in Britain, where the Polish Resettlement Corps was created in 1946 in order to make it easier for the Poles to adapt to the new life conditions outside their home country.

Arriving in the US, these veteran emigrants found they were part of a large ethnic minority of Polish-Americans consisting of two distinct groups: descendants of political refugees who started coming to America after the first partitioning of Poland in 1772 and continued after a series of unsuccessful national uprisings in the first half of the 19th century; and the other group consisted of economic immigrants that came in the period 1870–1914, and their descendants. US Polonia’s level of education and self-consciousness was not very high. Economic immigrants mostly came from the uneducated classes, while the sons and daughters of political immigrants largely assimilated but inherited old country customs from their parents and grandparents. The majority of them learned the basics of Polish language in Sunday schools. The local parish was very often the only social institution that brought together the members of Polonia, although it should be noted that a number of self-help associations and cultural organizations came into being at the turn of the century. This is particularly important since the economic immigrants did not actually come to America with a strong sense of ethnic identity. Attachment to the place from which they came – the village and the local church – was what connected them most vividly with the home country. Their ethnic awareness based on Poland’s history developed only after they had settled in America. In contrast to those earlier immigrants, the post-World War II veterans, a significant proportion of whom were commissioned and non-commissioned officers, were relatively well-, and often highly-, educated. 27 % of the “soldiers” had university degrees, 20 % had begun university studies, and 23 % had “liceum” (high school) diplomas. Among them were also quite a few writers and journalists. Their arrival in the US inevitably had a visible impact on the life of Polonia when they joined the Polish writers who had come to the US during the war years: Jan Lechon´, Kazimierz Wierzyn´ski, Józef Wittlin, and the scholar-historian of literature Manfred Kridl. Czesław Miłosz came to the US in 1960. Strictly speaking, these writers cannot be classified as “veteran immigrants” because they did not directly participate in the military struggle with the Nazis, although they can certainly be called “wartime immigrants.” All of them had established a literary reputation before the war, and they had

Polish World War II Veteran Émigré Writers in the US (Bogusław Wróblewski)

191

experience in living abroad before coming to the US. In contrast to the poets who started their literary career after having left the home country, these writers tried to settle at institutions on the East Coast. They also had strong support in London, where a friend of theirs, Mieczysław Grydzewski edited a prestigious emigration weekly, the Wiadomos´ci. Nevertheless, Jan Lechon´ could not withstand the pressures of émigré life and committed suicide in 1956 in New York. Kazimierz Wierzyn´ski was a great authority for young poets who immigrated to the US. Surviving correspondence shows that they frequently turned to him in literary and practical matters. In turn, they helped publishing Wierzyn´ski’s collected poems in 1959 by promoting special subscriptions. Traces of this can be found in Zbigniew Chałko’s archive in Chicago, now in the Warsaw Rising Museum. The post-World War II émigré veterans were the first since the time of Kos´ciuszko and Pułaski, who belonged mostly to the intelligentsia and were relatively well educated. These émigrés could have played an important role in American politics, had they not thought that they were only temporarily in the US, and had they not been creating “Poland outside Poland.” This position was supported by the Polish Government in Exile, which was created in London during the war. Though the US and Great Britain withdrew their recognition on July 5–6, 1945, it continued to exert significant influence on Polish consciousness abroad. A number of other important figures connected with international (and especially Polish-American) politics belonged to this group of émigrés. They include Jan Nowak-Jezioran´ski, an advisor of the US National Security Council, and Jan Karski, the legendary courier who brought the report about German atrocities against Polish Jews to the West. Lesser-known members of this group included, for instance, the historian Jerzy Lerski, professor at the University of San Francisco. In general, soldier-immigrants did not fully use their intellectual potential as Americans, but their generation provided a strong cultural support for the Polish ethnic group in the US. Only 2.8 million people acknowledged their Polish roots in 1960 – a few years after the main wave of the post-Yalta émigrés to the US came to an end. However, according to the Bureau of Census, more than 8.2 million people claimed to have a Polish background twenty years later (Mostwin, Trzecia wartos´´c 5). By 1980 the epoch of “Polish jokes” had ended. Apart from the general trend of discovering one’s roots, it happened thanks to the twenty-years presence of veteran émigrés in the US, the growing popularity of John Paul II (who also was a peer of the veteranémigrés), and the beginning of the anti-communist movement led by “Solidarnos´c´” (Solidarity).

192

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

The social situation and the public activity of the post-World-War II “veteran-émigrés” generation can be analyzed both through the documents of literary life (correspondence, émigré periodicals, and documentation of editorial work) and through interpretations of their literary works. We shall look at six writers: the poets Zbigniew Chałko, Jan Kowalik and Jan Leszcza, and the prose writers Danuta Mostwin, Zygmunt Haupt and Paweł Łysek. They shared three things: 1) their similar wartime experiences illustrate the three circumstances that led Polish veterans to immigrate to the US: Haupt and Łysek were army veterans, Chałko, Kowalik and Leszcza were “displaced persons,” and Danuta Mostwin was a political refugee as well as a veteran of the Warsaw Uprising; 2) born between 1907 and 1921, they were relatively young when they settled in the US; and 3) they had no literary reputations when they arrived in the US; all of them published their first books with émigré presses, which significantly shaped their artistic identities and their choice of audience. These criteria (common war and postwar experience, youth, and similar time and circumstances of literary debut) define the generational identity of a group of writers as first formulated in Kazimierz Wyka’s seminal study Pokolenia Literackie (Literary Generations). Especially applicable are his terms “generational unity,” taken from Karl Mannheim, and “generational experience.” This generation found itself under great pressure to assimilate. However, several of them resisted, seeking support in their ethnic group, especially in Chicago, where the Polish community was the most numerous. The process of assimilation ran more smoothly in the case of prose writers, and less so in the case of poets. Danuta Mostwin and Paweł Łysek had no great problems in finding work at East-Coast universities. Another prose writer, Zygmunt Haupt, found employment at Voice of America’s Polish section. On the other hand, poets Zbigniew Chałko and Jan Leszcza, who lived in Chicago and could not (or did not want to) write in English, were forced to take on bluecollar jobs to earn a living. Jan Kowalik is an interesting case because he worked at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, California as a physical laborer before he was appreciated as a bibliographer who undertook such useful US tasks as the bibliography of Helena Modrzejewska [Modjeska] or the American reception of Pope John Paul II. In 2001 I studied Jan Kowalik’s archive, which he entrusted to the Hoover Institution shortly before he died. I found there a collection of letters written to him by his younger friend Jan Leszcza. The letters recount a superb émigré epic. They show how at the outset in 1946 the two authors discovered a generational unity among themselves in DP camps. Their bond was strengthened by their common homeland Silesia, and, of course, their common love for lit-

Polish World War II Veteran Émigré Writers in the US (Bogusław Wróblewski)

193

erature. After a few months, they were on first-name terms and conducted heated discussions about literary life and literature, especially about the significance of literary tradition. In 1947, they also corresponded about organizational matters related to the Polish Literary Club they had founded. In 1948, they came to decide to emigrate, they exchanged bitter opinions about the American occupation zone and uncompromising judgments about Germans and their collective responsibility. The letters dating from 1949 show the gradual disintegration of the community, weakening literary activity, and preparations to travel further westward. In 1950, when Leszcza had to do hard physical work in his new home, Chicago, he complained that he lacked motivation to create and that he had difficulties with finding a poetic expression adequate to his new experiences. He also encountered problems while trying to build a literary community. Finally, he was invited to California, where he met with Jan Kowalik and found a relatively stable existence in Los Altos, CA, in 1959. Curiously, these poets settled in Chicago and eventually in California, while the prose writers found their place on the US East Coast. The reason may be fairly simple: the majority of educational and scientific institutions that dealt with European ethnic issues while preparing teaching and research projects were located on the East Coast; the experience and potential of well-educated European immigrants was then useful. Moreover, many bilingual PolishAmerican periodicals, radio stations, and other mass media functioned on the East Coast, and Polish immigrants could cooperate with them. Poets, however, sought self-fulfillment in the Polish language community, preserving as much as possible from pre-war times whatever harmonized with their traditional poetics. They were satisfied with monolingual Polish mass media, because lyrical expression is generally more difficult to transpose into a new language than narrative prose. Such a monolingual Polish community existed in Chicago, and when the poets moved to California they continued to sympathize with this center rather than with that of New York or Washington D.C.

2. The East-Coast Novelists The literary output of Danuta Mostwin, who resides in Baltimore, is the most extensive among the authors I am discussing. She wrote nine novels, two short story collections, and several volumes of sociological essays and studies, written both in Polish and English. For a number of reasons, Mostwin’s work is of key importance in verifying my thesis about the impact of the “veteran emigration’” in the shaping Polonia’s awareness of its ethnic identity in recent

194

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

decades. In the stories included in Asteroidy (1965) and in other works she describes typical Polish emigrants, often drawing on her experiences as a social worker in Baltimore’s Department of Social Services during the late 1950s. It was then that she got to know many turn-of-the-century economic emigrants, old and lonely people who had experienced many hardships in their lives. In her novels Ameryko! Ameryko! (1961), Ja za woda˛, ty za woda˛ (1972), and Odchodza˛ moi synowie (1977) she deals directly with problems faced by the generation of “émigré veterans,” following them from their arrival in America, through their assimilation in the new environment, to their children’s difficulties with maintaining their ethnic identity. Some of Mostwin’s texts were serialized in Polish periodicals published in the US and thus reached wider audiences. Further below I shall discuss in detail the subject matter of Danuta Mostwin’s writings and her way of thinking about the world, which are particularly significant for the overall picture of the “veteran immigrant” generation. Zygmunt Haupt, who lived in New York and Washington, D.C., was less prolific than Mostwin, but his work is of equal interest. Besides writing short stories and memoirs, which he published in Piers´cien´ z papieru (1963) and Szpica (1989), he also exhibited paintings in Baltimore, Atlanta, and other American cities. He worked for seven years at the Polish section of Voice of America, and he was for more than a dozen years an Editorial Board member of America, a monthly published by the USIA and distributed in Poland. His journalistic essays and extensive professional and private correspondence are a rich source of information about the position of Polish-Americans within American society. Upon the initiative of Andrzej Stasiuk and Aleksander Madyda at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun´, who are conducting research on Haupt’s literary work, Czarne publishing house has recently reissued both of Haupt’s books in Poland. Paweł Łysek started his studies in England after the conclusion of the war. He completed his studies in the US with an M.A. degree (1949) and an M.S. degree in Library Science (1951). As of 1952, he was a librarian as well as a teacher of literature at Queens College of the City University of New York, and he became full professor in 1974. Łysek organized a Polish Club at Queens College, and he started to write in the early sixties memoirs and novels based on the folklore of the Beskidy Mountains, from where his family came. Some of his works, for instance Twarde z˙ywobycie Jury Odcesty, are written in the Silesian dialect. He published reviews in Books Abroad and later in World Literature Today. In 1974, Łysek received the Award of the Kos´cielscy Foundation in Geneva for his novels. Contrary to Haupt, Łysek frequently returned to Poland, starting in the mid-sixties.

Polish World War II Veteran Émigré Writers in the US (Bogusław Wróblewski)

195

3. Chicago and California Poets Poets associated with the post-World War II “veteran emigration” usually followed the Polish literary conventions of the 1920s and 30s. Their “conservative” approach to poetry satisfied the expectations of the older Polonia audience, as well as of the new immigrants. Such was the poetry of Zbigniew Chałko, who lived in Chicago and published two volumes of poetry, Jaworowe niebo (1962) and Strofy staromiejskie (1977). During short research trips in the 1990s, Chałko’s widow opened his personal archives for me, and I was thus able to publish his collected poems in Dłon´ pełna snów (1997). His writings closely reflect the issues that were of direct interest to the largest group of Polish-Americans, namely the Chicago “Polonia.” Chałko was very active in organizing the cultural life of Poles in Chicago; he initiated, for example, the so-called Live Literary Dailies and was among the founders of the Home Army Veterans Club and the Friends of Warsaw Club. In his memoirs and poems he repeatedly wrote about Warsaw, and he assembled in his private library what was probably the biggest collection of Varsoviana outside Poland, a collection that was open to anyone interested in it. As a poet, Chałko was unable to see a bright side in émigré life: “With a foot losing track / foot like lead / we take root in foreign ground / for dream and eternity / snow makes the bed for us / from feathers of manic angles / the sky with a crunch falls down – the coffin’s lid” (Dłon´ 89). Jan Leszcza was Chałko’s close friend and collaborator when he lived in Chicago between 1951 and 1959. He published four volumes of poetry, two of which, Konie drewniane (1967) and Trzy ´sciany (1980), are particularly interesting. He also translated English-language poetry into Polish and maintained close contacts with Polonia activists in California and Chicago. Part of his literary output is still waiting to be published in book form. It can be inferred from the Leszcza’s mentioned correspondence that he was highly critical of the Polish émigré community in Chicago. He expressed his beliefs publicly in Live Literary Dailies, which he created together with Chałko and Józef Białasiewicz, a journalist belonging to the same generation. Leszcza translated American, German, and Czech literature into Polish, which appeared in émigré periodicals. He frequently asked in his poetry whether history has any meaning, which was typical of his generation: “The history will verify who existed and who did not / always horizontally blood runs and turns into water at once” (Trzy ´sciany 8). Jan Kowalik, who was the first of the “veteran émigré” poets to settle in California, published several poetry chapbooks in the US. In 1994 I collected them, together with his more recent poems, in Wiersze wybrane, a volume pub-

196

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

lished in Poland. No less important is Kowalik’s monumental five-volume bibliography, World Index of Polish Periodicals Published outside Poland since September 1939, which lists over 4,500 titles, including a significant number of periodicals published in the US. Kowalik also worked for several California radio stations and was on the editorial board of San Francisco’s periodical Migrant Echo. He also published several thematic bibliographies in English, for example a bibliography of Helena Modjeska (1977) and The Polish Press in America (1978), which were important for American culture in general, not only for the Polish immigrant cultural enclave. The predominant emotional feature of Kowalik’s poetry is an eternal longing for Poland: “Prepare an obolus / I want to die with the September / Poland under my eyelid / Charon will take me there” (Wiersze 104). Kowalik’s activities were unusual, for attempts to create institutions of émigré literary life (periodicals, meetings with the authors, literary groups and clubs, literary prizes) were usually limited to a Polish context. Poets of his generation rarely addressed their work to members of other ethnic groups. The greatest paradox is that these writers found themselves in a double exclusion: exclusion from the all-American culture, to which they condemned themselves by regarding assimilation as a treason of national ideals, and exclusion from the culture of post-war Poland, because communist censorship prohibited the publication of their works. Note that the same writers later consented to the assimilation of their children’s generation by expressing, for instance, pride in their children who became brilliant doctors (Mostwin’s case) or American army officers stationing in Europe within the NATO forces (Chałko’s case). However, if we regard American culture as a melting pot, and if we look at Polish culture from a long-term perspective, we can say that these authors belonged to both American and Polish culture, even though their impact on the latter was for a long time very limited: under the communist regime, neither their own works not critical studies on them could be legally published or circulated. Today the works of these émigré veterans are “brought back” to Poland, enriching the Polish literary tradition and revealing at the same time a particularly interesting dimension of American life since World War II. One would wish only for a faster and more ready recognition of the importance of the émigré culture.

Polish World War II Veteran Émigré Writers in the US (Bogusław Wróblewski)

197

4. The Third Value Danuta Mostwin’s literary output is closely connected with her life as a representative of the veteran émigré generation, but also with the scholarly work she wrote as a sociologist and social psychologist. Her first novels, Dom starej lady (The House of the Old Lady; 1958) and Ameryko! Ameryko! (America! America! 1961), dealt directly with the postWorld War II émigrés who refused to return to communist-ruled Poland and tried to adopt a new life away from the homeland, first in England towards the end of the 1940s, and later in the US. However, their adaptation remained incomplete, for they continued to live with a patriotic sense of heroic mission that propelled them during the war, hoping that the geopolitical situation would change. They were looking for short-term rather than long-term strategies of survival. Their social position in prewar Poland had been definitely higher than the one they came to occupy in the country in which they settled. The good general education they brought from Poland would have been sufficient to improve their situation in a new country if only their determination was higher, and they accepted the choice to emigrate for good. Mostwin lampooned this impasse in the novel Ja za woda˛, ty za woda˛(You and I Beyond the Water; 1972) with grotesque means of expression, especially in the crowd scenes that can be compared to the literary pictures that Witold Gombrowicz created in his famous novel Trans-Atlantyk (1953). The similarity between the two authors is visible both in worldview and literary technique. In Trans-Atlantyk, Gombrowicz saw the Polish Romantic tradition as a burden overpowering his contemporaries, depriving Poles of their own creative abilities. This was especially evident from abroad, from Gombrowicz’s Argentina and from Mostwin’s US. Mostwin’s next novel, Cien´ ksie˛dza Piotra (Father Peter’s Shadow; 1985), was completely different. Here, the characters’ history reaches back into the nineteenth century. The novel can be described as “historical,” for it contains no émigré themes, and the Romantic tradition returns in a slightly idealized way. Nevertheless, it retains an autobiographical element, for the novel tells a story of Mostwin’s family, and her ancestors serve as prototypes for her characters. At this time, the notion of a duality in Mostwin’s literary output surfaced in the critical literature on her writings. Ewa Nowakowska recognized Dom starej lady and Cien´ ksie˛dza Piotra as “extreme points” in Mostwin’s literary path (“Z perspektywy Broadway’u” 114). Alina Kochan´czyk sees the problem from a different perspective by considering writing about the distant past as a method to save one’s identity (see also Kochan´czyk’s “Long Journey Home”):

198

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

In the case of an emigrant cut off from the homeland heritage, the feeling of uprooting is reinforced. When the past is becoming unclear, an emigrant is deprived of a part of his being. Since the days of Proust we know that literature may be an effective aid in search of lost time. By the same token, the author of Cien´ ksie˛dza Piotra has used the creative power of memory in her own characteristic way. She made an attempt to “record” her life that was inevitably being pushed into the past by time; [it was] an attempt to reach the deepest sources of her tradition by means of literature. Looking back into the past considerably further than her memory could grasp, Danuta Mostwin reconstructed the family history on her mother’s side, seeking for everything that had been contributing to her sense of identity for years. ( “Słowo” 24)

Indeed, Danuta Mostwin’s subsequent novels – Szmaragdowa zjawa (The Emerald Phantom; 1988), Tajemnica zwycie˛z˙onych (The Secret of the Defeated; 1992) and Nie ma domu (There Is No Home; 1996) – fill the space between what is historical and what contemporary. It can be said that the six novels – over a half of Mostwin’s literary output – constitute a great saga of the author’s family. The story begins with the generation of great-grandfathers in the 1860s, and ends with the American present day of the “veteran émigré” generation in the 1960s. The short stories from the volume Słysze˛ jak ´spiewa Ameryka (I Can Hear America Singing; 1998) take the history of emigration up to the early nineties. Many critics and literary historians commented on the literary picture of emigration drawn by Danuta Mostwin. Stanislaus A. Blejwas expresses the most characteristic opinion: Mickiewicz and others writer-prophets under the influence of Messianism created in order to keep the spirit of the Great Emigration alive. The theme of their works was Poland, presented in a sentimental way as it was in Pan Tadeusz, or the current Polish political crises, “the history in the process of happening,” as Miłosz described the motifs appearing in Slowacki’s dramas. However, after 1863 – when peasants started to leave the Polish land for good – the phenomenon of emigration brought new, realistic themes. It gave writers a chance to present it in an epic way, as O.E. Rolvaag did in relation to the Scandinavians. On the other hand, Polish literature produced Henryk Sienkiewicz’s bitter melodrama Za chlebem and Latarnik – a solemn story about patriotic self-alienation. At the same time there was material for great literature. As Jerzy Jedlicki noticed in a different context, America became the topic of the most popular literary form – emigration letters. Nevertheless, Polish writers, including American writers of Polish origin, did not try to deal with the topic of emigration drama and cultural transplantation. Danuta Mostwin is the first writer whose works take up the opportunities created for literature by emigration and transplantation. ( “Przeszczepieni” 29)

The story of Danuta Mostwin’s family saga encompasses a period of over one hundred years. Its outcome is the moment at which political exiles after World War II turn into permanent emigrants to the US. After 1989 Poland gained full independence and democratically elected a new government. There were

Polish World War II Veteran Émigré Writers in the US (Bogusław Wróblewski)

199

no more political reasons to prevent one from returning home. But after forty years in exile one would have to build a new life from scratch. It would be difficult to leave loved ones in the US: the children who were born here and the friends who decided to stay. History, like Moses, led the Mostwin family out of Europe due to communism, but America did not become their “promised land.” Next to this saga, Danuta Mostwin has written many short stories that portray the generation of economic emigration, which came to the US earlier. They were gathered in the collections Asteroidy (Asteroids; 1965) and Odkrywanie Ameryki (Discovering America; 1992). Mostwin’s own experiences played a huge role in shaping both the saga and the stories. Since they are to a considerable degree autobiographical, it is important to reconstruct her biography in a few sentences. Danuta Mostwin was born in Lublin in 1921. Her father was an officer in the Polish Army. She lived in Lublin until 1930, later in Warsaw, where she finished in 1939 the Emilia Plater Gymnasium. During German occupation, she participated in the resistance movement and she studied medicine at the underground Warsaw University. In January 1945 she married Stanisław Bask-Mostwin, a courier of the Polish government in exile, who had been parachuted to occupied Poland a year earlier for a secret mission. His lot was the inspiration for Danuta’s novel Tajemnica zwycie˛z˙onych. Because communist special forces started to be interested in Danuta’s husband, the couple found its way illegally through Czechoslovakia to Scotland, where Danuta’s father was as an officer of the Polish armed forces in the West. In 1948 Danuta Mostwin obtained her certificate at the Paderewski Teaching Hospital School of Medicine. She left England in 1951 and settled for good with her husband and their son Jacek in Baltimore on the US East Coast. In Baltimore, Danuta Moswin worked as a social worker. She acquired an M.A. in the social sciences at the Catholic University of America in Washington D.C, and in 1971 a Ph.D. at Columbia University with a dissertation supervised by Margaret Mead. Her dissertation on the social adjustment of Polish immigrants in the U.S. after World War II was published in 1980 as The Transplanted Family. Between 1969 and 1980 she was professor of social work and family mental health at the National Catholic School of Social Service of the Catholic University of America. 1961–81 she ran mental health centers for families in the psychiatric hospitals of Johns Hopkins University and the Spring Grove Medical Center in Maryland. In 1980 Mostwin set up a family mental health specialization in the psychological department of Loyola College in Maryland. She retired in 1987.

200

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

The education she received, as well as her life and professional experience enabled Danuta Mostwin to become a master of psychological portraits in literature, not only in the case of protagonists, but also when representing minor characters. We remember her literary figures; we can recall their images long after we have finished reading, as if we had really met them. The portraits of characters created by Mostwin are versatile and synthetic at the same time. For her, a human being is a psychophysical unit, and a single characteristic gesture, grimace, word, or behavior says more about her figures than hundreds of analytical or descriptive sentences. Among her main characters, the female figures are most memorable. For example, she created in the novel Odchodza˛ moi synowie (My Sons Are Leaving; 1977) an expressive image of an alienated woman. Two aspects of her personality – personified in the Wanda and Róz˙a voices – carry on an argument in internal dialogues. This immigrant woman is so busy with her professional career in the US that she loses her chance for a successful emotional life. Subtle individual character psychology goes hand in hand with mastery in creating collective scenes. Although the individual remains the central point of the situation, a special atmosphere, typical of collective experiences is created around the individual, and this affects the reader as well. The most telling examples are the scene in which Ignacy Paderewski enters Poznan´ (Tajemnica zwycie˛z˙onych), Józef Piłsudski’s funeral (Szmaragdowa zjawa), and Stanisław Mikołajczyk’s arrival in Warsaw (Nie ma domu) – crucial moments in Poland’s twentieth-century history. Mostwin continues the best traditions of the great Polish women novelists, of Eliza Orzeszkowa in the second half of the nineteenth century and Maria Da˛browska in the first half of the twentieth). As Irena Sławin´ska writes: Certainly she is closer to Orzeszkowa than Da˛browska; but Mostwin’s horizons are broader, the scale of her experiences and observations are greater, and her intellectual formation is incomparable. Nevertheless, she is close to Orzeszkowa in being curious of every person, creative imagination, respect for every suffering. ( “Fascynujaca to przygoda” 34)

Essential knowledge about the sources of Mostwin’s writing can be gained from two volumes of sociological sketches published in Polish: Trzecia wartos´´c (The Third Value) published in 1985 (enlarged, uncensored ed. 1995) and Emigranci polscy w USA (The Polish Émigrés in the USA, published in 1991). “Third Value,” which characterizes the optimal spiritual condition of an exile, has meanwhile entered the register of important sociological terms. What does it precisely mean?

Polish World War II Veteran Émigré Writers in the US (Bogusław Wróblewski)

201

The American theory of the melting pot, in which all nationalities and cultural values are blended into one American mass, was inspired by inflexible Aristotelian philosophy. An émigré either adopted new values, cutting himself off from the past, and becoming a newborn man, an American, or – according to this theory – rejected melting in the pot, closing himself off in an “ethnic ghetto.” As a result, an émigré resembled an American from outside, afraid of being suspected of otherness, but internally he remained himself, unchanged. And, as a result, it frequently happened that his process of internal development stopped. […] “The third value” is a result of a creative, not a mechanical process. […] Process, which starts, but does finish, with the first generation of emigrants. This is a long process of creating one’s otherness. We experience it, contending with the dilemma of loyalty and difficulties in communicating with the environment, having to deal with the lack of satisfaction, as well as with unjustified – it would seem – feeling of guilt, before the third value starts to emerge. The third value is an intermediate form between identification with the home and the host countries. (Trzecia wartos´´c 18–19)

Twenty years later, Mostwin modified and broadened this definition significantly: The third value is energy generated as a result of the confrontation between the values of an individual and that of a new system. […] Confrontations and solving the crises are subsequent phases of learning, improving knowledge about the new system and about oneself. It leads to a new, richer way of thinking, increased independence and consciousness of one’s development. Consciousness of one’s own development and confrontation with oneself – this is the third value. The process of the third value is not limited to the situation of an immigrant. It may develop in a situation in which an individual is confronted with another, alien, and even hostile civilization, social structure, or philosophy. (Trzecia wartos´´c 235–36)

Mostwin takes up similar issues also in her works in English: in the abovementioned doctoral dissertation and publications in specialist periodicals, e.g. Social Casework and Migration World. It may be said that Danuta Mostwin herself is a living example of how “the third value” is formed. Her biography as well as her literary and scholarly output became a synthesis of elements from the Polish and American cultures. The effect of this synthesis is greater than just a simple sum of values that emerge from simultaneously functioning in two different societies. Jerzy Zubrzycki called this in “Whither Emigracja?” a synergy effect. Danuta Mostwin has managed to assimilate without losing her Polish identity, something that other young writers starting as Polish émigrés were unable to achieve. The sociological and anthropological dimensions of Mostwin’s work are connected with her important academic accomplishments. Equipped with methodological tools that she first tested in her doctoral dissertation, she conducted extensive surveys of US Polonia in 1970, 1984, and 1994, focusing on relations between the old and the new immigrants. The mere fact that she

202

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

undertook a serious study of the Polish minority in America probably influenced the ethnic self-awareness of many Polish-Americans. Many responses to Mostwin’s questions reveal that her research stimulated self-reflection in a Polish community on its way to the third value.

Works Cited Blejwas, Stanislaus A. “Przeszczepieni” (The Transplanted). Akcent 4 (1993): 29–32. Chałko, Zbigniew. Dłon´ pełna snów (wiersze zebrane). (Hand Full of Dreams. Collected Poems). Ed. Bogusław Wróblewski. Lublin: Test, 1997. Chałko, Zbigniew. Jaworowe niebo (The Sycamore Sky). London: Oficyna Poetów i Malarzy, 1962. Chałko, Zbigniew. Strofy staromiejskie (Old-Town Verses). New York: Poray, 1977. Friszke, Andrzej. Z˙ycie polityczne emigracji polskiej 1945–1990 (Political Life of the Polish Émigré Community), Warsaw: Biblioteka “Wie˛zi,” 1999. Gombrowicz, Witold. Trans-Antlantic (Transatlantic). Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1953. Habielski, Rafał. Z˙ycie społeczne i kulturalne emigracji (Social and Cultural Life of the Emigrants). Warsaw: Biblioteka “Wie˛zi,” 1999. Haupt, Zygmunt. Piers´cien´ z papieru (A Ring of Paper). Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1963. Haupt, Zygmunt. Szpica (Picket). Ed. Renata Gorczyn´ska. Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1989. Kochan´czyk, Alina. “Słowo o Danucie Mostwin” (A Few Words on Danuta Mostwin). Mie˛dzy Lublinem i Baltimore. Dorobek literacki i naukowy Danuty Mostwin. (Between Lublin and Baltimore. Literary and Scientific Output of Danuta Mostwin). Ed. Ewa Łos´ and Bogusław Wróblewski. Lublin: Muzeum Lubelskie, 1997. Kochan´czyk, Alina. “Danuta Mostwin: Long Journey Home.” Something of My very Own to Say. American Women Writers of Polish Descent. Ed. Thomas S. Gladsky and Rita Holmes Gladsky. Boulder, Colorado, East European Monographs. Distr. Columbia UP, 1997. 203–223. Kowalik, Jan. Modjeska. Bibliography. San José: American-Polish Documentation Studio, 1977. Kowalik, Jan. The Polish Press in America. San Francisco: R. and E. Research Associates, 1978. Kowalik, Jan. Wiersze wybrane (Selected Poems). Ed. Bogusław Wróblewski. Lublin: Norbertinum, 1994. Kowalik, Jan. World Index of Polish Periodicals Published outside Poland since September 1939. 5 vols. Lublin: Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski, 1976–88. Kubiak, Hieronim, Eugeniusz Kusielewicz, and Tadeusz Gromada, ed. Polonia amerykan´ska. Przeszłos´´c i współczesnos´´c (American Polonia. The Past and the Present). Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolin´skich, 1988. Leszcza, Jan. Konie drewniane (Wooden Horses). London: Oficyna Poetów i Malarzy, 1967. Leszcza, Jan. Trzy ´sciany (Three Walls). London: Oficyna Poetów i Malarzy, 1980. Łuczak, Czesław. Polacy w okupowanych Niemczech 1945–1949 (Poles in Occupied Germany 1945–1949). Poznan´: Pracownia Serwisu Oprogramowania, 1993. Łysek, Paweł. Twarde z˙ywobycie Jury Odcesty. London: Polska Fundacja Kulturalna, 1970. Trans. L. Krzyz˙anowski as The Hard Life of Jura Odcesty. London: Poets’ and Painters’ Press, 1980.

Polish World War II Veteran Émigré Writers in the US (Bogusław Wróblewski)

203

Mostwin, Danuta. Ameryko!, Ameryko! (America! America!). Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1961. Mostwin, Danuta. Asteroidy (Asteroids). London: Polska Fundacja Kulturalna, 1965. Mostwin, Danuta. Cien´ ksie˛dza Piotra (Father Peter’s Shadow). Warsaw: PAX, 1985. Mostwin, Danuta. Dom starej lady (The House of the Old Lady). London: Veritas, 1958. Mostwin, Danuta. Emigranci polscy w USA (Polish Immigrants in the USA). Lublin: Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski, 1991. Mostwin, Danuta. Ja za woda˛, ty za woda˛. (You and I on the Other Side of the Water). Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1972. Mostwin, Danuta. Nie ma domu (There Is no Home). Lublin: Norbertinum, 1996. Mostwin, Danuta. Odchodza˛ moi synowie (My Sons Are Leaving). London: Polska Fundacja Kulturalna, 1977. Mostwin, Danuta. Odkrywanie Ameryki (Discovering America). Lublin: Norbertinum, 1992. Mostwin, Danuta. Szmaragdowa zjawa (The Emerald Phantom). Warszawa: Instytut Wydawniczy Pax, 1988. Mostwin, Danuta. Tajemnica zwycie˛z˙onych (The Secret of the Defeated). London: Polska Fundacja Kulturalna, 1992. Mostwin, Danuta. The Transplanted Family. New York: Arno Press, 1980. Mostwin, Danuta. Trzecia wartos´´c. Wykorzenienie i toz˙samos´´c. (The Third Value. Uprooting and Identity). Lublin: Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski, 1995. Mostwin, Danuta. Słysze˛ jak ´spiewa Ameryka (I Can Hear America Singing). London: Polska Fundacja Kulturalna, 1998. Mostwin, Danuta. “In Search of Ethnic Identity.” Social Casework 5 (1972): 307–316. Mostwin, Danuta. “The Unknown Polish Immigrant.” Migration World 2 (1989): 24–30. Nowakowska, Ewa. “Danuta Mostwin. Z perspektywy Brodway’u” (Danuta Mostwin. from a Broadway Perspective). Pisarze emigracyjni. Sylwetki (Emigre Writers. Profiles). Ed. Bolesław Klimaszewski and Wojciech Lige˛za. Cracow: Uniwersytet Jagiellon´ski, 1993. 113–23. Pilch, Andrzej, ed. Emigracja z ziem polskich w czasach nowoz˙ytnych i najnowszych XVIII-XX w. (Emigration from Poland in Modern Times). Warsaw: Pan´stwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1984. Sławin´ska, Irena. “Fascynuja˛ca to przygoda” (Fascinating Adventure it Is). Akcent 4 (1993): 32–34. Wyka, Marta. Kultura polska po Jałcie (Polish Culture after Yalta). 2 vols. Warsaw: Niezalez˙na Oficyna Wydawnicza, 1991. Wyka, Kazimierz. Pokolenia literackie (Literary Generations). Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1977. Zubrzycki, Jerzy. “Whither Emigracja? The Future of the Polish Community in Great Britain.” The Polish Review 4 (1993): 391–406.

204

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

Irodalmi Újság in Exile: 1957–1989 John Neubauer

1. History The original Irodalmi Újság (Literary Gazette = IÚ) was founded in 1953, as the official publication of the Party-led Hungarian Writers’ Association. However, in the following years, it gradually assumed a critical attitude, and in 1956 it became a major organ of the critics of Hungarian Stalinism (see Földes). The growing criticism prepared the revolution of October 23, 1956, whose highpoint in print then became IÚ’s legendary November 2, 1956 issue. The issue, which contained, among others, Gyula Illyés’s poem “Egy mondat a zsarnokságról” (A Word about Tyranny), was reprinted in the October 1976 issue of the IÚ abroad, and integrally translated and published also in French and Italian. In Hungary, the IÚ was closed down by the Kádár regime that came to power after the revolution, and was replaced as of March 15, 1957 by the new journal Élet és Irodalom, edited by György Bölöni, a former exile. On the same day, the anniversary of the outbreak of the 1848 revolution, the IÚ reappeared, however, in Vienna, and the issues starting with the next one of May 15, were published in London. The May issue carried the poem “Qui tacent clamant” by the Polish reform-communist poet Adam Waz˙yk, addressed to the Hungarian writer Tibor Déry, who sat in jail since the suppression of the revolt: I was with you on the day at the Bem statue / you were jubilant under Hungarian and Polish flags. / I do not know which of you is still alive and which dead already, / when everything becomes silent only the fire rattles (ropog) In the great tumult, Déry, you looked for me / worried, on the phone, did anything happen to me? / And I heard still your voice at the parliament / Like a last cry lost in ether. We, conscience of history / are silent – state reason is this silent speech … / Where bitter smoke spreads on the ashes of those who rose / the final myth collapsed. But Bem’s memory is alive.

Arthur Koestler, who identified himself as “a British citizen of Hungarian birth, who writes in English but still smiles in his sleep in Hungarian,” sent the

Irodalmi Újság in Exile: 1957–1989 (John Neubauer)

205

message: “the mission of émigré writers is to build bridges. Much success to the builders” (9). There were, however, major obstacles in resuscitating the IÚ abroad, of which financing looked for a while the least difficult one. Many Hungarianlanguage journals and papers existed already all over the world, each catering to a specific audience. The Hungarian émigré community was deeply divided politically and along generational lines. Leaving aside the nineteenth- and early-twentieth century immigrants, three earlier generations had settled in Europe and North America: 1) the exiles that fled Hitler, mostly Jewish; 2) the exiles that fled from Hungary in 1944–45 with the Nazis, mostly conservatives and right-wing Nazi sympathizers, and 3) democrats of various sorts who fled in 1947–48 to escape the communist takeover (see Borbándi, Életrajz vol. 1). The leading conservative papers, the Hungária (Munich; 1948–56) and the Hídvero˝k (1948–62), adopted strong anti-communist and often anti-Semitic positions. Apart from a few loners like Sándor Márai, most of the 1947–48 Hungarian exiles were politicians, intellectuals, and writers of populist (népies) persuasion, who belonged to, or sympathized with, the Peasant Party or the Small Holders Party. Gyula Borbándi, József Molnár, Imre Vámos, and Sándor Borsos, four young followers of Imre Kovács, a leader of the Peasant Party, launched in November 1950 in Zurich the monthly Látóhatár. Next year, the journal moved to Munich, where several of its editors started their work for the newly established Radio Free Europe. Látóhatár became subsequently the leading Hungarian exile journal, with a literary, cultural, and political focus. Its editors maintained a populist outlook, but adopted a broadly democratic political platform, disregarding party politics and insisting on quality. With this outlook they gained the confidence not only of Zoltán Szabó and László Cs. Szabó but also of the doyen political scientist Oszkár Jászi, who had retired by then at Oberlin College in Ohio (Borbándi, Új Látóhatár 34–35), as well as of the exiled writers Sándor Márai, Lajos Zilahy, Miksa Fenyo˝, a former stalwart of Nyugat, and of several other non-populist writers. Jászi even expressed now a political confidence in populism (Borbándi, Új Látóhatár 80), and the journal, which treasured its association with him, presented a special issue for his eightieth birthday in February 1955. Látóhatár’s national agenda had little interest in renewing or developing Jászi’s ideas on a Danubian Federation, but it sufficiently appealed to Jászi’s two earlier associates, both of whom became leading intellectuals on the international scene: the brothers Karl and Michael Polányi. Karl, an economist, published in Látóhatár (1960) as well as in the IÚ (May 1, 1959) his recollections about Budapest’s radical Galileo Circle of students (1917–19), of which

206

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

he was the President. Michael, author of Personal Knowledge (1958), published two articles in Látóhatár (1954 and 1959), but he did not write the article he promised to the journal on Zilahy and populism (Borbándi, Éltünk 170). It was the IÚ that subsequently published longer articles by him in 1961 and 1965. We may also include in this group of non-literary prominence the world-famous classical scholar and mythologist Karl Kerényi, who also published in both journals. Hungarian populism, which was strongest in the interwar years, represented a broad political spectrum that ranged from right-wing nationalism and anti-Semitism to left-wing socialism and openness to others – sometimes with confusing inconsistency. Dezso˝ Szabó, László Németh, Géza Féja, Zsigmond Móricz, and József Erdélyi and others were strange political and social bedfellows, and the conflicts were evident even within most individuals. There were few Jewish populists, though Jászi and some of his earlier associates came to maintain, as we saw, good relations with the journal. Be it as it may, the journal’s populist-nationalist (even if ecumenical) orientation was probably the reason why, even with Jászi’s help, Látóhatár was unable to get financial support from the Congress for Cultural Freedom (Borbándi, Látóhatár 40), a CIA-financed funding agency, whose true background came to light only later. Arthur Koestler, a leader of CCF, may have played a crucial role here. Látóhatár’s standing and reputation did suffer as a result of mistakes made by some of its editors who worked for Radio Free Europe during the 1956 Rrvolution. The radio was accused of creating a false hope among the revolutionaries that a Western intervention would be forthcoming, but its main mistake was probably that it distrusted Imre Nagy and his reform-communist advisors. After a review of the broadcasted programs, Béla Horváth, József Molnár, and Imre Vámos, all of them editors of Látóhatár, were dismissed from the staff of Radio Free Europe on March 18, 1957. This incident may have contributed to the CCF’s decision to support other Hungarian cultural institutions. Pál Ignotus, who had escaped from Hungary in 1956, wrote on February 7, 1957 to Vámos, who was then still Editor-in-Chief at Látóhatár: The people who are behind the journals Monat, Preuve, Encounter (the money comes from the US, but not from the government) had two ideas: we should convene in Paris or London a congress of Hungarian writers, to substitute for and to speak in the interest of the muzzled Writers’ Association at home, and to discuss in general what we can do. Their second thought was to launch a Hungarian journal comparable to the Polish Kultura. They asked György Pálóczi-Horváth and myself to organize these two things. (Nagy 9)

Ignotus added that he proposed strengthening and expanding Látóhatár, but the potential financial backers (the CCF ) refused to fund an existing journal. He discussed then with Zoltán Szabó how the new journal could cooperate

Irodalmi Újság in Exile: 1957–1989 (John Neubauer)

207

with Látóhatár, and they concluded that the latter should give more attention to politics and the social sciences, whereas the new journal to literature and the arts (Nagy 9). Vámos answered on February 12 that he was skeptical about launching a new journal, for the Hungarian émigré community could barely support the existing one. Látóhatár had just become self-sufficient, but only by not paying the editors and honoraria. Vámos was unwilling to give up Látóhatár, and suggested to start a new biweekly (Nagy 10). On March 15–17, 1957, the exiled Hungarian writers met in London to establish the Magyar Írók Szövetsége Külföldön (Association of the Hungarian Writers Abroad). Ignotus, who was in Hungary a member of the Association’s Presidium, was elected President, and György Pálóczi-Horváth as Secretary (Borbándi claims that the Presidency was first offered to Lajos Zilahy; Életrajz 1: 519). The Board of the Association also included László Cs. Szabó, György Faludy, Béla Horváth, Imre Kovács, and Zoltán Szabó. The meeting also decided to launch the IÚ as its publication, and designated Faludy as its editor, authorizing him to appoint an Editorial Board. The Association announced that it will regard the Látóhatár also as its own organ (IÚ, May 15, 1957: 9). According to the Minutes, Ignotus, declared that the Writers’ Association planned to use the funds 1) to expand Látóhatár and publish it more frequently, 2) to start a new weekly in the form and the spirit of the Irodalmi Újság. Who was actually behind the CCF? The revelation that it was backed by the CIA became a great cultural scandal in the 1960s (see Saunders, who does not mention, however, the Hungarian involvement). The Hungarian writers somewhat naively accepted what they were told. As Pálóczi-Horváth reported, Ignotus and himself, found the CCF, which took the initiative and offered money, “innocent.” Its leaders claimed they served only cultural goals and were willing to put down in writing that they had no intention to exert any political or other pressure on the editors. The guidance of the journal would be entrusted to the leaders of the Writers’ Association. As to the identity of CCF, the two mediators concluded from publications and newspaper clippings that it supported scholarly and artistic movements, and provided scholarships: “We found nowhere any momentum that would be suspicious. The Ford Foundation is behind them. Should this become known, the Kádár people would say we work for American money. This is why they established a mediating body [the Hungarian Literary Gazette Ltd.] that oversees the Hungarian moneys” (Nagy 12). Faludy reports, however, in the second part of his memoirs that CCF’s Josselson repeatedly attempted to sway the political orientation of the IÚ: he suggested, for instance, that the journal take a Titoist line (Faludy, Pokolbéli 189), he repeatedly wanted to see some US-friendly ar-

208

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

ticles (229), and he was even willing to raise Faludy’s salary if he followed suit (192). Faludy claims that he never gave in. The London resolutions immediately ran into trouble. The CCF reiterated that its mission permitted only support for new initiatives (Borbándi, Éltünk 158); still worse, an in-fighting at Látóhatár split the editors the following year, and the dissident editors launched in October a new journal, Új Látóhatár. The old one, under the editorship of Vámos and Béla Horváth, gradually lost ground, repatriated to Budapest with the editors in 1962, and ceased publication a decade later (Nagy 31; Borbándi, Éltünk 129–72; see also Ignotus’s letters of May 16 and August 14 1958, in Borbándi, Éltünk 136, 139). As to the Irodalmi Újság, Faludy formed an Editorial Board consisting of Tamás Aczél, György Pálóczi-Horváth, Zoltán Szabó, Miklós Krassó, and Sándor András (Nagy 16), and the May 15, 1957 issue presented itself as the official journal of the Writers’ Association. The imprint listed Faludy as Managing Editor, but its Editorial Board differed from the above-mentioned list, and also from the list given by Borbándi (Életrajz 1: 467): it listed Tamás Aczél, László Cs. Szabó, Endre Enczi, Imre Kovács, György Pálóczi-Horváth (editor), Zoltán Szabó, and Imre Vámos. The postal address of the editorial offices was given as 25 Haymarket, London. Soon, however, power struggles started to darken the horizon of the new journal. Zoltán Szabó complained that a telegram to Franco, requested by the CCF (IÚ May 15, 1957), was not authorized by the signatories, whereas an angry Ferenc Fejto˝ alleged that Faludy wanted to censor his article (Nagy 17–18, 35). Faludy did ask, indeed, for more power, mentioning as a sign of his success that the IÚ had 2750 subscribers by November 14, 1957. Everybody admired Faludy’s poetic talent, but more and more writers expressed doubts about his organizing capability and political acumen, and requests came to de-centralize rather centralize power. Fejto˝, Tibor Méray, László Gara, and Endre Karátson wished to see greater variety in the journal, and they pleaded for delegating more power to the Parisian editors and contributors. In their eyes, the IÚ was too much of a London journal (Nagy 21, 23–27). Two Board members were removed without consultation with the editorial staff, and the Association did not intervene. A group that included András, Gömöri, Karátson, and Márton submitted seven demands, threatening to sever their ties with the journal. Cs. Szabó urged Faludy to list the editors ( June 2, 1958), whereas Ignotus, as President of the Writers’Association, suggested in August 1958 that the IÚ should be regarded as an organ of the Association, should devote more space to culture, should not bring any politically divisive material on the front page, and divide the responsibilities among the paid editors (Nagy 43–45; see also 46–51)

Irodalmi Újság in Exile: 1957–1989 (John Neubauer)

209

Problems at the IÚ were aggravated by conflicts at the Writers’ Association, which had 126 members by the time its Congress gathered on October 23–26, 1958 in Paris. The Congress decided to add Endre Enczi as Secretary to the London office, and to launch, with money advanced by the CCF, a publication series called Könyves Céh. The series became quite successful, and published, among other books, a selection of István Bibó’s essays in 1960 and Tibor Méray’s Búcsulevél in 1965. Due to internal squabbles, Zoltán Szabó resigned in the summer of 1960, both as editor of the book series and as Secretary-General of the Association (Borbándi, Életrajz 1: 465–66). Faludy claims in his memoirs that Szabó used every means at his disposal, from articles to letters and calumny, to turn the readers and the American sponsors against him (Pokolbéli 219). The editors of Új Látóhatár sided with Szabó, blamed Ignotus for the difficulties, and exited from the Association towards the end of 1960 (Borbándi, Éltünk 185). To make things worse, the CCF stopped supporting the Association on March 10, 1961 (Nagy 107). A substantial reduction in the subsidy of the IÚ early 1960 forced the editors to lower the salaries and honoraria (Borbándi, Életrajz 519). The subsidy stopped completely in 1961 (Nagy 135). The Writers’ Association quietly passed away, but the IÚ survived, if bruised. After some preliminary discussions about merging with other papers, for instance the Viennese Magyar Hiradó (Nagy 108–109), a mysterious supporter suddenly emerged and saved the journal (Nagy 112, 115), which then moved to Paris in February 1962, for administrative as well as financial reasons. Tibor Méray became and remained its efficient and self-sacrificing Managing Editor until 1989; Endre Enczi worked with Méray until his death in 1974. The move alleviated but did not solve the financial misery. Towards the end of the decade, inflation wreaked havoc (with the IÚ as well as the Új Látóhatár = ÚL). Méray was forced to announce in December 1969 a rise in subscription rate and a conversion to a monthly format. A call for additional support had some success, but Méray had to announce on December 15, 1971 a further reduction to six issues of sixteen pages per year. In 1972, a foundation was established for the journal in Switzerland. In 1973 (see the May/July issue), the journal shifted to a Canadian printer, which made twenty-page issues possible (1975.8–10: 3). An eloquent call for support stressed that the IÚ was the only Budapest-born paper abroad, but exaggerated the unity of Hungarian literature: it unifies the Hungarian writers, poets, scholars, critics who live abroad, and all those who believe in literary and political freedom and are the opponents of dictatorships on the left and the right […] Hungarian literature is one and indivisible (1969.20–21: 1)

210

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

2. Contributors Vámos rightly worried that the pool of talented émigré writers and the number of potential readers abroad were small. Writers at home could not (dared not) publish in the émigré papers until well into the 1970s, while writers abroad were on short supply and were in need of other jobs to earn a living. As a result, the IÚ had to share most of its core authors with ÚL. Still, we can mention here only the most important ones. Some of the IÚ’s older authors had already fled in the 1930s, but most of them had left Hungary 1947 or later. Of course, no Nazi or right-wing writer who left in 1944–45 was invited (or wanted) to publish in the IÚ. From the later 1970s onward, the journal published contributions from authors living in Hungary (for instance György Konrád), first anonymously, later under their own name. A good many authors were émigrés rather than exiles in the strict sense, though until the 1980s they too had difficulty reentering Hungary as contributor to the IÚ. The refugees of 1956, by far the largest group of contributors, included a number of the poets. Géza Thinsz lived in Sweden, and published, next to poems, translations and anthologies; László Kemenes-Géfin taught English and American literature in Canada, and served 1981–88 as co-editor of the Hungarian literary magazine Arkánum. Vince Sulyok worked at the Oslo University library in various capacities. Ágota Kristof published a number of poems in the IÚ, but stopped contributing as of 1965 because she turned to fiction writing in French. András Sándor taught at various US universities and retired as Professor of German from Howard University in Washington D.C. György Gömöri also taught at various universities before he settled at Cambridge University as a teacher of Polish language and literature. He contributed to the IÚ not only his own poems, but also articles on and translations from Polish texts. Lóránt Czigány, a literary historian who taught Hungarian, among others, at Berkeley, worked more extensively for ÚL, but also published articles in the IÚ. Gyo˝zo˝ Határ, who settled in London, contributed some poems to the journal, but most of his prodigious output consisted of fiction, reviews, and essay. He had demonstrated his talent as translator already back in Hungary with a Hungarian version of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Tibor Méray, IÚ’s editor, had started his career with reports on the Korean war from a North-Korean perspective. Both he and Tamás Aczél had received Stalin prizes, but after Stalin’s death they came to support Imre Nagy and served as his associates in the 1956 revolution. Together they wrote The Revolt of the Mind (1959), an excellent account of the intellectual ferment that led to it.

Irodalmi Újság in Exile: 1957–1989 (John Neubauer)

211

Another reform-communist, Gyula Háy (see the introductory essay of this volume), was also deeply engaged in the revolution and jailed until 1960 after its suppression. The IÚ campained for his release, and he joined as a contributor after he left the country in 1964. Among the refugees of 1956, Pál Ignotus, György Pálóczi-Horváth, and György Faludy had already lived in the West during the war, returned to Hungary in 1947–48, and were arrested there. Endre Karátson settled in Paris, taught at the University of Lille, and wrote for several of the leading Hungarian publications. The Magyar Mu˝hely published his first collection of novellas. The frequent contributors of the 1956 group included Gyula Sipos, who settled in Paris and published some of IÚ’s most sophisticated cultural and literary criticism under the name Pál Albert; Péter Halász, who settled in New York, the scene of many of his IÚ contributions as well as of his novel Második Avenue (Second Avenue); and Tamás Tu˝z, a priest who settled in Canada, and regularly contributed poems, and sometimes short stories, to the IÚ. György Ferdinandy, Tamás Kabdebó, and Mátyás Sárközi were important contributors to both the ÚL and the IÚ. Ferdinandy received his doctorate in 1969 at the University of Strassbourg, and wrote until 1962 only in French. From 1964 until his retirement, he taught at the University of Puerto Rico. Tamás Kabdebó, like several other contributors, earned his living as a librarian, while writing for several exile publications, including the ÚL, the IÚ. He translated and wrote also for English language publications. Sárközi, who also wrote under the pseudonym Márton Fekete, has been an extremely prolific writer, journalist, and graphic artist, who ran in the years 1971–94 a gallery called “Fehér Holló” in London. For the IÚ (as well as for the ÚL) he wrote articles, reports, and stories. Among the authors who left Hungary earlier, we find the poet and scholar Sándor [Áron] Kibédi-Varga, who lived in the Netherlands and was a founder of the Mikes Kelemen Kör (see his article below). Like László Cs. Szabó and Zoltán Szabó (both of whom broke with the communist regime in the years 1947–49), he was closer to the ÚL. In contrast, the great satirist György Mikes published only in the IÚ. He had left Hungary before the war, settled in London, and achieved enormous popularity with his satires, especially with How to be an Alien (1946). He also worked for the BBC and, later for Radio Free Europe, frequently contributing also for such prestigious English-language publications as the Observer, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Encounter. The IÚ had a number of regular contributors on non-literary subjects. On political matters, the two most distinguished contributors were Ferenc Fejto˝ and Anna Kéthly, both of whom stopped writing for the ÚL after 1958–59. Fejto˝ (see our introductory essay) had been living in France since 1939 and

212

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

became an internationally respected journalist and political analyst working for the AFP and writing for various foreign journals. Kéthly, a leader of the social-democratic party, had been in jail for opposing the disastrous merger of the Socialist and Communist parties. After 1956, she settled in Brussels and became Editor-in-Chief of the London Hungarian paper Népszava. Tibor Hanák, the key philosophic voice of both the IÚ and the ÚL, was primarily a scholar of Marxism and György Lukács. János Gergely, a linguist as well as musicologist, who had been living in France since 1938, contributed several articles on music. Magda Czigány and others reported on exhibitions and the art scene, while Péter Gosztonyi regularly reported (also in the ÚL) about his archival research on Hungary’s twentieth-century history. Our list of contributors ought to be complemented with one that enumerates those who did not publish in the IÚ. We shall name here only a few. The journal would not accept, of course, contributions from former Nazis and extreme right-wing writers; neither did the ÚL, though Borbándi thought in retrospect that his journal should have made greater efforts to win József Nyíro˝ and Albert Wass as contributors (Éltünk 76). Both journals excluded also left-wing writers that continued to support Stalinism, though IÚ had some interest in engaging Western communists in a dialogue. Conspicuously absent from IÚ’s list of authors until 1978 was Sándor Márai, perhaps the most distinguished Hungarian exile writer. Though he needed income, he jealously guarded his independence and kept out of the exile squabbles by writing books instead. Radio Free Europe engaged him to write a column for several years, but only as an external contributor. His only contribution to Látóhatár was his important “Halotti Beszéd” (Funeral Sermon; 1951), which the journal reprinted in 1954, together with a critical Hungarian radio broadcast on it by Áron Tamási. Out of respect, Márai acknowledged in his reply that his poem reflected the excessive pessimism of the years around 1950 (Borbándi, Éltünk 81–83). The IÚ made some initial efforts to gain Márai as a contributor, but, Ignotus claims in a letter to Fenyo˝ in 1958, the writer conceitedly rejected every effort at cooperation, even the publication of his books (Nagy 31). For two decades, the IÚ could only bring reviews of Márai’s works, but, in 1978, the ice broke: the journal’s May/June issue printed poems from a volume that he was about to publish, and the following two issues brought Márai’s longer essay on the great Hungarian modernist Gyula Krúdy. Finally, we should mention some authors that contributed to the IÚ but not to the ÚL. In the case of Ágota Kristof this may have been accidental. In the case of Tamás Aczél, Ferenc Fejto˝ (after 1959), Arthur Koestler (after 1959), György Mikes, Anna Kéthly (after 1958), László Gara (one article in UL), and

Irodalmi Újság in Exile: 1957–1989 (John Neubauer)

213

some others, political and personal differences may have played a role. For the similar reasons, the ÚL also had contributors that did not publish with the competitor. Gyula Gombos, who had his differences with the IÚ on account of his book on Dezso˝ Szabó (see below), did finally contribute to it a review in 1979; Miklós and András Domahidy stayed with the ÚL.

3. Orientation: Politics and Readership How resolutely the IÚ should combat Communism was and remained a contentious issue. Everybody rejected, of course, the Stalinist regimes as well as the one established by János Kádár after 1956. But what to do with writers like Tibor Déry and László Németh who gradually accepted a modus vivendi with the Kádár regime? As Ignotus wrote to Vámos (see above) the CCF envisioned a journal like the Polish Kultura, which did, indeed, become, a bridge between Polish culture abroad and at home. In the years immediately after the 1956 revolution, neither individual Hungarian exiles nor exile organizations would function as mediators: the political and cultural break was absolute. All that the IÚ could do (and did very effectively) was to mobilize world opinion in defense of the Hungarian writers in jail or facing execution. However, the writers around IÚ were by no means unanimous in their relation to Communism. Faludy, who barely survived long years in Hungarian jails and camps, took a strong anti-communist line, claiming that the reform communists had completely abandoned their former ideology. As Ferenc Fejto˝ complained to Ignotus on May 15, 1958, Faludy believed that Imre Nagy and his associates, as well as the communist writers of the (Hungarian) IÚ, considered themselves in the end as communists only for tactical reasons: by then they had already been converted to liberal capitalism, the “true redeemer” (Nagy 35). Fejto˝ and the reform communists involved with the old and the new Irodalmi Újság strongly disagreed with this approach, and feared that a doctrinaire anti-communist stance would bring the journal into the orbit of the Hungarian Nazis and the admireres of the Horthy regime. Ignotus shared Fejto˝’s view that some articles of the IÚ were leaning towards a dated, simplistic, and dangerous anti-Bolshevism (Nagy 19). According to the notes of the Association’s October 11, 1957 meeting in London, he remarked that ex-communists, and those who were theoretically still communist believers, played an important role in the 1956 revolution: “We can successfully fight against communism only if we are no ‘anti-communists’” (Nagy 22). András Sándor, together with Gömöri, Karátson, Krassó, László Márton, and others submitted a Memorandum to Ignotus, charging that the IÚ adopted a sim-

214

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

plistic anti-communist position that dealt only with the excesses of the former Stalinists. They wanted to see István Bibó’s papers printed, and this actually happened in a Supplement to the November 15, 1957 issue. (Anti-)Communism remained on the agenda of IÚ, but three other explosive issues were conspicuously absent from it: populist anti-Semitism and nationalism, the Holocaust, and Hungary’s relation to its neighbors. Of the three subjects, Populism was the most difficult to avoid, since the editors of IÚ’s counterpart, the ÚL, adhered to it, though not in a narrow and dogmatic way. The debate usually concerned issues of the past rather than the present. Take, for instance, the two-part critical article on Populism in the ÚL that Ignotus contributed in 1959. The journal followed this up in the summer of that year by interviewing Lajos Zilahy, a prominent older Hungarian writer living in New York, who was himself not a populist. Zilahi disagreed with Ignotus, who suggested that the movement had some fascist overtones. The meager reaction disappointed the editors, and Borbándi thought in retrospect that people had been reluctant to speak up on this touchy and divisive subject (Éltünk 169). Michael Polányi outlined his planned but never written response to Zilahy in a letter to Borbándi: Zilahy should have acknowledged that some populist writers made right-wing statements in the interwar years, but, Polányi thought, such remarks were common in those turbulent years of ideological confrontation (Éltünk 170). Nevertheless, the flammable issue of Populism ignited when Gyula Gombos, a key figure at ÚL, published at the journal’s press his extensive study of Dezso˝ Szabó, one of the most important but also most controversial populist figures of the interwar years. As it was evident already from excerpts that the ÚL had published earlier, Gombos admired Szabó, holding his rejection of both Nazism and Communism as a possible point of departure for a Hungarian “third road” beyond these oppressive ideologies – though he admitted that Szabó’s experiments did not find the “right” road. The editors sang high praise of the book but were for a long time unable to find a reviewer for it, and they could not get a subsidy for it from the Radio Free Europe Fund in New York, because the Fund received several protests against its support. Finally, Lóránt Czigány wrote in 1968 a highly critical review of the book in ÚL, titled “Szabó Dezso˝ is Dead,” which forced the embarrassed editors to come to Gombos’s rescue in the January 1969 issue, with a counter attack aimed at Ignotus and some members of the Parisian Magyar Mu˝hely (Borbándi, Éltünk 259–60, 280, 299–300, 304–306). Dezso˝ Szabó, and Gombos’s book on him, divided the contributors of ÚL: Cs. Szabó, Czigány, and others that also wrote for the IÚ sided with Szabó’s critics. Within the IÚ, the opinions diverged considerably less. The veteran

Irodalmi Újság in Exile: 1957–1989 (John Neubauer)

215

Miksa Fenyo˝ noted Szabó’s “relentless anti-Semitism”; reviewing his autobiographical Életeim (freshly published in Budapest) and Gombos’s study (which he greatly respected for its effort at objectivity), he worried about an imminent Szabó revival inside and outside Hungary (1966.19: 8–9). The linguist Ádám Makkai accepted Fenyo˝’s criticism, but only as an objection coming from the older generation (1967.2: 6). Ignotus got back into the argument two years later, when József Molnár attacked him and others in the ÚL. Ignotus wondered why Szabó and Gombos were now allowed in communist Hungary, and hoped that Szabó’s (and Gyula Szekfu˝’s) Hungary was not the only alternative to Communism (1969.11: 3). Most of IÚ’s contributors probably agreed with Ádám Kosztolányi, son of the famous Modernist writer Dezso˝ Kosztolányi, who summed up his view of Dezso˝ Szabó some ten years later: “One can learn from him, but not follow him” (1978.11–12: 10). The debate on Populism continued in the 1970s. Borbándi wrote a negative review in the ÚL ( June 1973) of Ignotus’s book Hungary (1972): he disagreed with Ignotus’s account of the interwar years, and claimed that Ignotus forgot that the Jewish middle- and upper-class were pillars of the Horthy’s regime. Ignotus responded in the August/December 1973 issue of the IÚ (5) that his view of Szabó, Németh, Féja, and other populists was not exclusively negative. His response, with the characteristic title “We have to Confess the Past,” took issue, furthermore, with Borbándi and all those who thought he should have devoted less time to the “Jewish Question.” This was, in his eyes, precisely the problem of Borbándi’s book on Hungarian Populism: the book filled a lacuna but was itself full of such lacunae by ignoring Zilahy’s call to support the fascist Prime Minister Gyula Gömbös and the problematic politics of László Németh (1976.11–12: 10). Next spring, György Schöpflin defended Borbándi in the IÚ (1977.3–4: 10) by arguing that Populism was the most important trend in the interwar period – but this was hardly a defense of its politics. The only important ÚL article that broached the history of Hungarian Jews was published by Vilmos Juhász in the 1965/2 issue. Juhász claimed that the Hungarian writers were silent when they should have combated the Nazi and quasi-Nazi ideologies, but, he went on, due to their older and more recent persecutions, many Jews had believed that they alone were victim, everybody else belonged to the persecutors. Hungary, their “host country,” had also suffered much throughout the centuries, and, so Juhász thought, the Hungarian peasants were more exploited by the leading classes than the Jews (Borbándi, Éltünk 241–42). Curiously, but characteristically, the only significant reaction to Juhász’s article – by Imre Kovács, key figure at the ÚL – contested merely the alleged guilt of the Hungarian writers, not Juhász’s remarks on the rela-

216

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

tivity of Jewish suffering (Borbándi, Éltünk 242). Within a broad and deep discussion of the Holocaust, such remarks and claims would have been surely appropriate, but in a general silence on the topic they sound inappropriate. It is as if the main issue of the Holocaust was the innocence of the Hungarian writers! In these and other debates, the immediate topic was always the position that populist writers assumed in the interwar years. How supportive were they of the right wing and the Nazis? How anti-Semitic were they? Did they support the anti-Jewish laws of 1939 and 1940? Those who answered these questions in the negative, those who denied the anti-Semitism of a Dezso˝ Szabó, a Géza Féja, or a László Németh held, one suspects, restricted notions of folk and nation. The populists in and around the ÚL were generally not anti-Semites (Borbándi visited Israel several times to foster the journal’s ties, and many contributors to the journal had a Jewish background), and the ÚL kept its distance from them – except for the great anti-Semite of the post-1989 decades at home, István Csurka, with whom the journal developed a close relationship in the last years of its existence. However, the ÚL was unwilling to or incapable of genuinely reworking the past: on the atrocities committed by Hungarian soldiers, on the Holocaust, and on Hungarian anti-Semitism it maintained a silence that curiously coincided with the position of the regime at home. Fenyo˝ did review in the IÚ Tibor Cseres’s novel Hideg napok on the infamous Novi Sad/Újvidék massacre of Serbs and Jews in 1942 (1965.8: 7), the ÚL ignored it, although it did review other works by Cseres. Imre Kertész’s name is not in the index, although his novel Sorstalanság (1975) was later good for a Novel-prize. Again, the silence accords with the book’s sad neglect in Hungary for quite a while. IÚ’s record in remembering the Holocaust and performing some kind of Trauerarbeit (work of mourning) is not much better. Péter Várdy’s article on Raoul Wallenberg and the tragedy of the Hungarian Jews, the most comprehensive and trenchant (non-literary) treatment of the problem in the IÚ, appeared rather late (1985.1: 11–15).

4. Contacts with Literary Life in Hungary Exile publications had three ways to build bridges towards literature in Hungary: 1) by reporting about, reviewing, or even publishing, literature written at home, 2) by publishing literary and cultural materials unavailable in Hungary, and, 3) by trying to get the publications themselves into the hands of readers in Hungary. From the late 1960s onward, occasional personal contacts also occurred, but these were monitored and often forbidden by the Hungarian

Irodalmi Újság in Exile: 1957–1989 (John Neubauer)

217

officials for many more years. In contrast to the major sister journals, the Polish Kultura and the Czech Sveˇdectví, the IÚ addressed itself to the exile community rather than to readers back home. The IÚ was severely criticized in its early years for not devoting sufficient attention to the writers and their publications at home. Comparing the Polish Kultura with the Hungarian exile journals, Gömöri noted, for instance, that the IÚ had failed to follow the literary scene at home, and, apart from a few issues, this was equally true of the ÚL (Nagy 72–74). Indeed, the IÚ noted with envy in its only extensive review of Kultura, that its readers were not restricted to those abroad, for the journal reached Poland and was able to influence domestic thinking and even shape public opinion there (1959.23: 4). Indeed, the IÚ was for a number of years more concerned with the political situation of writers in Hungary than with the actual literary production. In the immediate post-1956 years, the journal’s primary concern in this respect was to help writers at home. It frequently manifested its solidarity with writers who stayed in Hungary, but this extended, certainly in the first years, only to those that did not support the regime openly. László Németh’s reputation, for instance, suffered, when he journeyed in the Soviet Union in 1959 and gave high praise to what he saw. Of course, the IÚ rejected with sarcasm József Darvas’s Kormos Ég (Sooty Sky; 1959), a system-friendly portrayal of the “counter-revolution of 1956” (1959.10: 4). In contrast, Gyo˝zo˝ Határ’s review “An Ounce of a Masterwork” (1960.4: 8) enthusiastically greeted Iskola a határon (School on the Frontier; 1959), the magnum opus of the formerly silenced writer Géza Ottlik. By the early 1960s, it became evident that writers in Hungary would have to make some compromises in order to survive. The Hungarian Writers’ Association was reconstituted in 1959 after a two-year hiatus; the writers in exile understood that joining it may be a matter of survival, though they regarded active participation with great suspicion. In literary as well as other matters, the regime at home adopted János Kádár’s famous slogan, “whoever is not against us is with us.” Ironically, the slogan was coined by Tibor Méray in the IÚ to illustrate the difference between the Kádár and the Rákosi regimes (1961.20: 7) Of course, the IÚ itself remained on the regime’s “against us” list for a long time still. Since the Kádár regime regarded exile publications as “enemy material” almost to the very end of its existence, it was difficult to get exile journals to Hungary. As the number of travelers from and to Hungary increased, more issues could be smuggled in, but as late as 1979 the Hungarian Postal Service would intermittently return issues of the IÚ mailed to Hungarian addresses with the grotesque explanation that a Lausanne international postal

218

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

agreement forbade the posting of pornographic and explosive materials (Borbándi, Éltünk 288, 414, 434). Nevertheless, a number of issues did reach Hungary and were circulated there. Some information on the IÚ became common knowledge via attacks on it in the Hungarian media (1969.5–6: 15). As of 1982, Hungarians could subscribe to the Magyar Mu˝hely, the least political of the Hungarian exile journals. While Kultura could publish writers at home already in the 1960s (first under pseudonyms, later under the writer’s own name), the IÚ started doing this only in the late 1970s. The November/December 1977 issue brought both György Konrád’s “A függetlenség lassú munkája” (The Slow Work of Independence; 10–11) and Imre Jankovich’s “Meggyo˝zo˝ kisérlet és kétes kritika” (Convincing Experiment and Doubtful Criticism; 12–13). Both authors offered their articles to the IÚ knowing that they were unpublishable in Hungary and that publication abroad will get them into trouble at home. Konrád was, of course, not unknown to the journal’s readers: his first novel, A látogató (The Visitor; 1969), had been greeted in the July 15, 1969 issue by Albert Pál with the title “A Writer was Born.” In 1973, Konrád’s and Iván Szelényi’s manuscript “Az értelmiség útja az osztályhatalomhoz” (The Intellectuals’ Road to Class Power) was rejected by the Hungarian publishers and confiscated. Konrád lost his job and faced court proceedings, but the text did circulate in a samizdat edition. As the IÚ reported, Konrád and Szelényi were offered permissons to leave the country (1975.5–7: 16). Szelényi left; Konrád went abroad for visits but always returned, and now that he had little to lose, he ventured to publish in the IÚ. Others followed in the 1980s, but the numbers remained relatively small. Turning to the larger picture, authors in Hungary, especially the younger ones, received spotty attention in the IÚ. Gyula Illyés, the doyen, was, of course, frequently discussed and praised, but the other leading populist, László Németh, elicited critical reviews in 1962 and 1963, on account of his political stance, both in the prewar and the post-1956 period. Of the populists, the courageous dissident István Bibó had received most attention. The “classic” avant-guard writer, Lajos Kassák, and Hungary’s leading female novelist, Magda Szabó, were also featured frequently, though not without criticism. The IÚ was in the forefront in fighting for the release of Tibor Déry from jail, but he all but disappeared from its pages until his death in 1977, probably because he was no longer a dissident. The lacunae were most serious with respect to the younger and the youngest Hungarian writers. Among the former, Ferenc Karinthy and István Örkény were occasionally discussed, but Géza Ottlik, Miklós Mészöly, and other distinguished writers who were in disfavor at home should have received

Irodalmi Újság in Exile: 1957–1989 (John Neubauer)

219

more attention. IÚ’s record on the upcoming youngest generation of great writers was rather spotty: two of Péter Esterházy’s works were reviewed, and Albert Pál considered Péter Nádas’s Egy Családregénye vége “Fény a sötétségben” (Light in Darkness): “one of the most mature works of the new Hungarian literature; it is a ruthless and frank work, but one that plows deep and is tightly held together with a great literary logic, whose spirit borrows, as it were, something from the holy scriptures” (1981.5: 17). As we noted, Imre Kertész’s Sorstalanság was not reviewed.

5. Modern World Literature Exile literary journals have a double readership, and both are problematic, even if we disregard political differences. The home readership of the Irodalmi Újság was for a long time virtually unavailable, and as trans-border traffic of persons and publications became easier the journal had to face competition. As of 1961, Sándor András found it grotesque that Nagyvilág or Kortárs at home gave a better account of Western artistic and literary currents than the outdated one in the IÚ (Nagy 70). Even the home need for translations was partly satisfied by Nagyvilág and other Hungarian journals, though they had to neglect ideologically disfavored writers and currents. As to the readers abroad, they could get in principle all information they needed, but their interests were divergent; they were not just literati, but mostly professionals and intellectuals whose interest in literature was broadly humanistic and political rather than formal or theoretical. Even some of the contributors, good as they may have been, tended to dislike radical innovation and avant-garde experimentation. Witness, for instance, Gyo˝zo˝ Határ’s rather critical review of the London staging of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade (1964.20: 7), or Lóránt Czigány’s review of two works from the orbit of the more experimental Magyar Mu˝hely: a book by György Ferdinandy from 1970 (1970.9: 8) and Pál Nagy’s language experiments (1972.5–6: 14). As Borbándi reports, his ÚL regularly received complaints that the poems published in the journal were incomprehensible (Éltünk 488), though these were by no means avant-garde. My following critical remarks were written with the full realization that no editorial policy could have satisfied all conflicting needs and demands. The IÚ, like the ÚL, regularly reported on the Hungarian exiled writers, and they published and reviewed their work. Since most of the important writers abroad were already contributors to the journals, they expected to receive favorable reviews, and the editors often had to engage in delicate balancing acts. The animosities around Lóránt Czigány’s review of Gyula Gom-

220

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

bos’s Dezso˝ Szabó book show, how difficult it was to publish a genuinely critical review of a contributor. Another example was the publication of Sándor András’s “Hazatérés” (Homecoming) in the ÚL’s last issue of 1967. This story about a tragic suicide of a Hungarian émigré in California won a juried competition of the journal. Imre Kovács, however, found that it transgressed the limits of free speech and should not have been published, at least not in the ÚL, for it gave a false picture of the US, as well of the young Hungarians in exile. Most reactions sharply disagreed with Kovács (Borbándi, Éltünk 295–97), but the case showed that publishing such “decadent” Hungarian writings was a hazardous undertaking. Ironically, Kovács titled his protest “The New Sufferings of Werther,” unaware that this would become the very title of a short novel by the East-German Ulrich Plenzdorf (1973), and that Kovács’s criticism would be echoed by the communist officials of the GDR! For readers at home, the rhetorical attack on literary decadence must have been déjà vu. As to contemporary events and trends in world literature, Irodalmi Újság tried to cover them in four major ways, 1) by printing (short) translations of important works, 2) by reporting on the political positions of living foreign writers, especially inasmuch as they concerned Hungary, 3) via interviews, and 4) via short notices about new publications, performances, or other events. The IÚ printed during the first year of its existence translations of Albert Camus’s “L’Hôte” (from L’Exile et le royaume), Franz Kafka’s “Der Hungerkünstler,” James Joyce’s “Evelyne,” Wolfgang Borchert’s “Nachts schlafen die Ratten doch,” John Steinbeck’s “The Lopez Sisters,” and Ernest Hemingway’s “The Killers.” The IÚ also printed “Le Renégat” (1958.8: 9–10) yet another story from Camus’s L’Exile et le royaume, and an interview with the author (1957.13: 3), who was especially welcome on the pages of the journal on account of his sympathy with the Hungarian cause. When he died in a car accident, Ferenc Fejto˝ said farewell to him in a front page article titled “Our Friend, Albert Camus” (1960.2: 1). The Italian prose writers Ignacio Silone and Alberto Moravia (interview 1960.12: 4), the Swiss dramatist Friedrich Dürrenmatt (interview 1963.1: 1), and Salvatore Madariaga were also well-liked, for the prominent role they played in international protest actions against the suppression of the revolution and the jailing of writers. T.S. Eliot and the German Philosopher Karl Jaspers joined Camus and Silone to ask for the release of Tibor Déry (1958.3: 3). The IÚ reported with satisfaction that Howard Fast, a prominent American communist, left the Party because of the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolution (1957.5: 6), and it printed a lead article by him on February 15, 1958. However, it also had to report with biting irony that, according

Irodalmi Újság in Exile: 1957–1989 (John Neubauer)

221

to a report in the Budapest paper Népszava, the Brazilian writer Jorge Amado acknowledged the right of the Hungarian people to defend themselves against attempts by the US (sic!) to penetrate the country (1957.8: 2). Translations of two short pieces by Jorge Luis Borges appeared in the IÚ (1958.3: 9 and 1962.1–2: 11), but texts by the classic modernists became rare. What we do find are news items and reports on living authors such as T.S. Eliot (selections of his “Ash Wednesday” were published in the ÚL in 1965 in Határ’s translation), Aragon (report in 1966 that he protested against the Soviet condemnation of Sinavsky & Daniel), Simone de Beauvoir, and the German playwright Rolf Hochhuth, whose play Der Stellvertretende (1963) on the Pope’s failure to help saving Jews led to extensive discussions, although, regrettably, not on the pages of the IÚ. Other writers discussed in the IÚ included the Russian poet Ossip Mandelstam, the American dramatist Arthur Miller, and, last but not least, George Orwell, whose Animal Farm was translated and published in the book series of the IÚ. Of course, the IÚ gave ample space to the political and sensational affairs of the Russian writers Boris Pasternak, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Iosif Brodsky, Andrey Sinyavsky [Avram Terz], and Yuli Daniel. Rather than extending the list, we ask which broader trends and movements the journal neglected or ignored, for only this way can we get a better picture of its taste and orientation. Some omissions are striking. Of the Beat Generation in the US only Allen Ginsberg was mentioned (but not Lawrence Ferlinghetti or Jack Kerouac); the whole Latin-American “boom” after Borges was ignored, including two Nobel-prize winners, Miguel Ángel Asturias (1967) and Gabriel García Márquez (1982). Equally absent were the US post-modern writers starting with Thomas Pynchon. The French Noveau Roman was mentioned in a review of Michel Butor’s La modification (1958.2: 8) and a rather cautious essay by József Bakucz on Natalie Sarraute’s essays (1964.19: 14), but Alain Robbe-Grillé, for instance, is conspicuously absebt in IÚ’s index. Some writers we miss may have been named in passing (which would not lead to inclusion in the final index), but they did not receive the critical, historical, and analytic attention they deserved. Due to its limitations, IÚ offered its readers not just a limited but also a one-sided view of contemporary world literature. As we shall see in Section VII, this skewed presentation of living literature corresponded to a virtual silence about the revolutionary changes in literary theory and the humanities in general.

222

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

6. The East-Central European Literatures The inability (and often unwillingness) of the Hungarian exile community to seriously reassess the painful apects of Hungary’s literary, political, and intellectual past prevented it also from envisioning a genuine future for the country within a European community. To be sure, the IÚ had a decidedly international outlook, and it made some efforts to inform its readers about the latest literary, theatrical, and artistic trends in Europe and the US, even if, as we have just seen, its accounts were incomplete and usually written with a conservative artistic taste. The IÚ gave more space to the literature of Hungary’s neighbors than the ÚL, but this was still quite inadequate in view of the tasks ahead. In particular, the Central-Europe discussion that started in the 1970s, involving writers from both sides of the Iron Curtain, did not get adquate attention. To be sure, the IÚ did print Milan Kundera’s “Tragedy of Central Europe” (1984.3: 1–2, 23), but none of the responses to it. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that, as a rule, the IÚ (and the ÚL even more) became interested in the neighboring literatures only when politics flared up (e.g. Czechoslovakia in 1968, Poland in 1981) or when the suppression of the Hungarian minority became especially brutal, as was the case with Romania under Caus¸escu in the 1970s and 80s. The IÚ covered Polish literature far better than any of the other East-Central European ones: of the thirty-two East-Central European writers listed in the index, twenty-two, more than two-thirds are Polish. This was partly due to the traditional ties between the two countries, partly to the strength of Polish literature both at home and in exile, and, last but not least, to György Gömöri, a specialist of Polish literature and a frequent contributor to the IÚ. After printing Adam Waz˙yk’s poem of solidarity with the 1956 Revolution (see above), the IÚ introduced him to Hungarian readers (1958.1: 10). From the later Nobel-Prize winner Czesław Miłosz the IÚ printed a passage from Kultura, which was dedicated to the memory of Hungarian workers, students, and soldiers (1957.10: 7). The IÚ also published several years later a translation of his “Ode to October” (1964.19: 13), which does not explicitly mention Hungary but concludes with the words: “You offer a magic ring / if I turn it, the invisible precious stone of freedom shines in it. / Oh you, October.” The IÚ printed in its December 1, 1961 issue a translation of Jerzy Andrzejewski’s “The Great Lament of the Paper Head” (1953), one of the first daring attacks on the slavish servants of dictatorship. Readers of the journal could also follow Marek Hłasko, the Polish enfant terrible, as he wandered to Paris, Israel, and Germany. More important were two articles by Konstanty Jelen´sky, the distinguished essayist living in Paris: a lead article on the tradition-respect-

Irodalmi Újság in Exile: 1957–1989 (John Neubauer)

223

ing Polish revisionism of Adam Schaff and others (1962.5: 1), and the other on “Polish Writers and Censorship” (1964.20: 3). The IÚ frequently brought other Polish news as well: on Sławomir Mroz˙ek’s Strip Tease ( July 15, 1962), on Poland’s legendary theater director Jerzy Grotowski (1966.13: 4), and on Witold Gombrowicz’s Kosmos (1967.10: 3). It featured a work by Leszek Porok (1961.8: 11–12), poems by Zbigniew Herbert, and the poetry of Wisława Szymborska, the later Nobel-Prize winner. Late 1966 and early 1967 the IÚ reported extensively on the events in Poland. Leszek Kolakowski and Tadeusz Konwicki were excluded from the Party, Kazimierz Brandys returned his Party booklet, and Kolakowski’s colleagues were unwilling to strip him of his chair. At the end of the following year, Gömöri reported on some of the other key events in Poland: the scandal about Kazimierz Dejmek’s staging of Mickiewicz’s Forefathers; Mroz˙ek’s and Jerzy Andrejewski’s protest against the invasion of Czechoslovakia; and Henryk Grynberg’s exit from the country. A decade later, the IÚ published a long article by the dissident Adam Michnik on the new democratic opposition in Poland (1977.5–6: 4–5), just when the author was once more arrested. Note that all this concerns the politics of literature and cultural life rather than their actual content. The two are interrelated, but the perspectival differences are significant. Compared to this wealth of material on Polish literature, Czechoslovak literature selcom appeared on the pages of the IÚ. Of course, it printed as a lead article Pavel Tigrid’s travel report on his four-day visit to Hungary (1964.20: 4). At a time when Hungarian exiles could not or would not want to visit their home country, this editor of Sveˇdectví, the Czech sister exile journal, was allowed, surprisingly, to attend a conference of the international PEN Club as President of the Writers Abroad Section (the Hungarian authorities resisted the Czechoslovak request and refused to extradite him). By the mid-60s, news about Prague multiplied, although, in retrospect, not as dramatically as it should have. The IÚ did print in the November 15, 1965 issue a letter by the philosopher Ivan Sviták from Prague, but next year we find only one account of the events in Prague, in the February 15 issue. In 1967, the Slovak reformcommunist Ladislav Mnˇacˇko was particularly prominent in the IÚ: his new book Wie die Macht schmeckt (How Power Tastes; 1967) was reviewed in the May 1 issue, and the September 15 issue reported at length on his declarations abroad that he will return to Czechoslovakia only when his coutry resumes diplomatic relations with Israel. Of course, 1968 became IÚ’s Czech year. It reported on Novotny’s fall in January and on the first manifestations of a “Prague Spring” (1968.6–7: 1). In the remaining issues of the year, Fejto˝, Méray, and Enczi published reports, news analyses, and commentaries. Péter Kende [Endre Péntek] titled his con-

224

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

demnation of the Hungarian participation of the Czechoslovak invasion “We Became the Accomplices of Crooks” (1968.15: 3). The journal continued its reports on Prague in 1969, and, on a reduced level, in 1970; but attention revived actually only in 1977, related to the Charta 77 declaration, to which IÚ gave ample space, noting that thirty-four Hungarians signed it at home under the motto that this was “a joint affair” (1977.1–2: 1). The IÚ noted also that some Romanian writers, including Paul Goma, have joined. The next issue offered further space to him, and said farewell to one of the initiators of Charta 77, the Czech phenomenologist, Jan Pato˘cka (1977.3–4: 20). The IÚ slowly but perceptibly shifted its attention in the 1970s to Romania, but the perspective of that attention underwent radical changes. In 1968, a chorus of praise greeted Ceaus¸escu’s refusal to join Czechoslovakia’s invasion, often coupled with ironic comments on Kádár’s willing support of it. However, gradually it became evident that Ceaus¸escu’s nationalist defiance of the Soviet Union went hand in hand with an internal dictatorship, of which the minorities were the worst victims. Open protest against the Romanian policy was impossible in Hungary, and thus the émigré press had to speak up, often with chauvinist overtones. Albert Wass and others believed that returning Transylvania to Hungary was the only solution (See Borbándi Éltünk 272–273). Since Populism was particularly strong in Transylvania, the ÚL devoted in the 1970s and 80s much attention to the problems of Hungarian political, cultural, and literary life in Transylvania (Borbándi, Éltünk 332, 347, 411–12, 470, 498). The suppression of the Hungarian minority in Transylvania became gradually a central issue for the IÚ as well. It succeeded in taking a strong stand without falling prey to chauvinism, but, inevitably, exile contacts between Hungarians and Romanians suffered, even in Paris, where the two exile cultures lived, so to speak, around the corner from each other. The IÚ had devoted some attention to Romanian literature in the 1960s. It followed the scandal that developed around Vintila˘ Horia’s Prix-Goncourt-winning novel Dieu est né en exil (God was Born in Exile); it printed Petru Dumitriu’s essay “For what can I thank the Party?” soon as the exiled writer arrived in Paris (1961.16: 5); and it also reviewed his novel Incognito (1963.8: 9). Frigyes Naschitz published an article on Paris and the Romanian writers Panait Istrati, E.M. Cioran, Virgil Gheorghiu, and, of course, Eugène Ionesco (1996.12: 4). This promising beginning found no continuation, even though opportunities arose. In 1971, the dissident Romanian writer Dumitru T¸epeneag settled in Paris and started the Cahiers d’Est, the only exile journal that explicitly aimed at building transnational bridges. As the IÚ reported, he lost his Romanian citizenship (1975.11–12: 24). Cahiers d’Est appointed Fejto˝ and

Irodalmi Újság in Exile: 1957–1989 (John Neubauer)

225

György Aranyossi to its Board, and it devoted its eighth issue totally to Hungarian literature, featuring, among others, Konrád, László Nagy, Ferenc Juhász, Péter Hajnóczy, and such stalwarts of the IÚ as Fejto˝, Faludy, Határ, Tardos, Kende, Kibédi-Varga, Péter Halász, Magda Zalán, Ádám Bíró, and György Mikes. Unfortunately, T¸epeneag’s initiative found hardly any echo, and the contacts with the exiled Romanian writers withered. The publication of Paul Goma’s recollection of 1956 in the May/June 1977 issue of IÚ was an exception. In short: the exiled Romanian and Hungarian writers were just as unable to form a common front against Ceaus¸escu’s regime as their colleagues behind the Iron Curtain. The major Hungarian/Romanian event on the pages of IÚ was a “difficult” exchange between Elemér Illyés and Ion Rat¸iu, a leading Romanian exile living in London (1984.2: 7–8 and 1985.1: 6), in which both parties accused the other of cooperating with the communists at home. Considering that the East-Central European nations suffered a common fate, and considering that London and, especially, Paris, were centers of EastCentral European exile cultures, it is rather astonishing that so little attention was devoted to the literature of the neighbors. As a result, IÚ and the other exile journals could offer very little help after 1989, when cooperation between the countries in East-Central Europe became a problematic desideratum.

7. Cultural Trends in Western Societies Radically new Western approaches to literature, literary history, and the humanities emerged in the decades 1960–90 – theoretical approaches that relied in part on such earlier East-European initiatives as the Russian Formalism, the Prague Linguistic Circle, and the work of the Russian literary theoretician Mikhail Bakhtin. The breeding ground of many these new theories – in linguistics, literary theory, semiotics, structuralism, post-structuralism, postmodernism, and deconstruction – was Paris, though after an initial resistance American variants came to reshape the humanities of American academia as well. From Germany came the neo-Marxist theory of the “Frankfurter Schule” and reception aesthetics. The feminist movement in literature was especially strong in France and in the US. Last but not least, “linguistic turns” with different meanings took place in analytic philosophy and post-modern thought. This is not the place to survey all these complex theories and currents that often clashed with each other. Suffice to say for our purposes that in diverse way they have undermined authority and “democratized” reading. They did

226

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

so, by claiming that language, especially literary language, carried no clear messages but was multibly interpretable. The new approaches dislodged the authors from their position of authority, and encouraged readers to rely on their personal and historical experience. Admittedly, as we noted earlier, the possibilities of exile journals like the IÚ were severely limited, both on account of its readers’ interests and the orientation of its contributors. Still, in retrospect it remains puzzling that it could ignore theories (and practices) subversive of authoritarian ideologies in politics and aesthetics: the continental revolution in literature, literary theory, and linguistic philosophy hardly showed up on the radar of the IÚ (or on that of the ÚL). We shall look in vain in the index for the names of Ferdinand Saussure, Walter Benjamin, Noam Chomsky, Claude Lévy-Strauss, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gérard Genette, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Jürgen Habermas, Hans Robert Jauss, Wolfgang Iser, and the other creative and innovative literary-philosophical minds of the epoch. The only the name we find there is Roland Barthes, to whom Gyula Sipos [Albert Pál] devoted an article in the July 15, 1967 issue, summarizing the polemics that Barthes’s book on Racine generated with its assertion that literary works have multiple meanings. Friedrich Nietzsche, perhaps the most important inspiration of continental thinking in the second half of the century, shows up primarily because the Hanser Edition of his works debunked some of the myths around him (1958.2: 8); Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger appear once each in articles by Tibor Hanák (1962.17: 8 and 1971.3: 8). Though the IÚ and the ÚL boasted among their contributors such distinguished linguists as Ádám Makkai, György Kassai, János Gergely, and Tamás Bogyai, the “linguistic turns” were not discussed on their pages. Gergely Lehotzky devoted a supplement of IÚ to Bernard-Henri Lévy, André Glucksmann, Alain Finkielkraut, and the other “new French philosophers” that broke with Marxism (1977.7–8: 5–8), but the journal did not publish analyses of their works. Some other distinguished cultural figures were probably named in passing (Michel Foucault, for instance, is not in the index though Lehotzky mentions him), but such references are good only for chatting at cocktail-parties and receptions. Once more, the matter is puzzling, since many of these new notions of literature and literary criticism were developed and published under the very eyes of the Hungarian literati in Paris, often by émigrés and exiles from Eastern Europe, such as the Lithuanian Algirdas Julien Greimas, the Russian Roman Jakobson, and the Bulgarians Julia Kristeva and Tzvetan Todorov. None of these names occurs in the index of the IÚ; not even the name of the famous Hungarian semiotician Thomas Sebeok. We find only an obituary in

Irodalmi Újság in Exile: 1957–1989 (John Neubauer)

227

the IÚ of Peter Szondi, the brilliant literary theorist and critic of Hungarian origin, who tragically and prematurely died in Berlin. Taking the issue a step further, we may wonder why we find, apart from Peter Szondi (Sebeok’s semiotics was tangential to literature) so few Hungarians among the literary and cultural innovators during the second half of the twentieth century. The great figure of György Lukács did remain on IÚ’s agenda, mostly because his work was the main research subject of the journal’s chief philosophical contributor, Tibor Hanák. Occasional articles on him by Fejto˝ were highly critical. As Hanák wrote in his review of Lukács’s final opus magnum, “he became detached from our age” because he “followed in his literary judgments and his philosophy ideals of the nineteenthcentury” (1987.2.21). Indeed, interest in Lukács’s work on Marxist literary theory dwindled by the second half of the century. The exciting and relevant part of his legacy, which should have received more attention in the IÚ, was the pre-Marxist work of his youth, which was also a point of departure for the neo-Marxist work of the Romanian/French Lucien Goldmann (Le Dieu caché; 1956). Once more, Goldmann does not appear in IÚ’s index. Approaching the matter from yet another angle, this shortcoming appears less accidental, and hardly attributable to alleged limitations in IÚ’s (and ÚL’s) readership, its lacking literary sophistication and low interest in abstract philosophical arguments. The divergent new currents did not satisfy the historical, political, and psychological needs that most exile readers brought to the reading of literature: structuralism was abstract, often arid, and pretentiously “scientific,” while the often opaque poststructuralist and postmodern texts expressed grave doubts about the validity of that approach, but revealed a skepticism with respect to language and communication. As we mentioned, reviews and reports of exile literati concerning contemporary literature and performances indicate that they had difficulty with the message that all messages were fundamentally and linguistically ambiguous. That exiles were not per se hostile to the new currents is evident if we look at Kultura, which gave space to the great anti-traditionalist Witold Gombrowicz, or, closer to home, at the Magyar Mu˝hely, which was founded by the Hungarian anti-traditionalists in 1962. The literary conservatism of the IÚ, as well as that of all the other Hungarian publications in the West, may ultimately be traceable perhaps to the conservatism of Hungarian Modernism in general. What, then, was IÚ’s image of two cultural fields in which Hungarians were, indeed, in the forefront during the twentieth century: music and science? IÚ gave ample space to the music of Bartók and Kodály, primarily but not only, in articles by János Gergely. It followed also the national and international activities of the Hungarian conductors, orchestras, and soloists.

228

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

IÚ’s record in the natural sciences and mathematics is more uneven. It did print Michael Polányi’s lead article on “Science and Tyranny” (1958.17: 1), and his reflections on the resurrection of humanism (1961.4: 1). However, the next generation of brilliant Hungarian scientists, which included the biologist Albert Szentgyörgyi, the mathematician János ( John) Neumann, and the triumvirate of physicists, Leo Szilárd, Ede (Eduard) Teller, and Jeno˝ (Eugene) Wigner remained marginal, which is especially surprising if we consider that the readership included many engineers and scientists. One more omission should finally be mentioned: Imre Lakatos, who became a leading philosopher of science in the generation following Karl Popper. After leaving Hungary in 1956, Lakatos lived in England, where he not only developed his theory of “research programmes” but also became an active public opponent of the 1968 student demands at the London School of Economics (Congdon 128–43). Though some lugubre details of his Hungarian past became known only in 1997, after his death and after the folding of the IÚ, he was sufficiently in the limelight in the 1960s and early 70s to merit attention. Such lacunae in coverage are regretful but understandable. The IÚ admirably fulfilled a task under highly difficult political and financial conditions. Tibor Méray was justified in concluding the last issue with the words: we too “have fought our battle” (1989.4: 3).

Works Cited Aczél, Tamás, and Tibor Méray. The Revolt of the Mind. A Case History of Intellectual Resistance Behind the Iron Curtain. New York: Praeger, 1959. Borbándi, Gyula. A magyar emigráció életrajza (Biography of the Hungarian Emigration). 2 vols. Budapest: Európa, 1989. Borbándi, Gyula A magyar népi mozgalom (The Hungarian Populist Movement). New York: Püski, 1983. Trans. Of the German Der ungarische Populismus. Mainz: v. Haase & Köhler, 1976. Borbándi, Gyula. Nem éltünk hiába. Az Új Látóhatár négy évtizede (We did not Live in Vain. The Four Decennia of ‘Új Látóhatár’). Budapest: Európa, 2000. Borbándi, Gyula. Nyugati Magyar irodalmi lexicon és bibliográfia (Lexicon and Bibliography of Western Hungarian Literature). Budapest: Hitel, 1992. Congdon, Lee. Seeing Red. Hungarian Intellectuals in Exile and the Challenge of Communism. De Kalb: Northern Illinois UP, 2001. Cseres, Tibor. Hideg napok (Cold Days). Budapest: Magveto˝, 1964. Faludy, György. Pokolbéli napjaim után (After my Days in Hell). Budapest: Magyar Világ Kiadó, 2000. Darvas, József. Kormos Ég (Sooty Sky). Budapest; Szépirodalmi, 1959. Földes, Anna. Az Irodalmi Újság könyve (Book of the Literary Gazette). Budapest: Széphalom Könyvmu˝hely, 2001.

Irodalmi Újság in Exile: 1957–1989 (John Neubauer)

229

Gara, Ladislas, ed. La Gazette Littéraire organe des écrivains hongrois 2. novembre 1956 [trad. compleÌte] numéro unique paru pendant l’insurrection hongroise (Literary Gazette, Organ of the Hungarian Writers, November 2, 1956 [complete translation] of the Unique Number that Appeared during the Hungarian Insurrection). Paris: Horay, 1956. Gombos, Gyula. Szabó Dezso˝. Munich: Molnár, 1966. Halász, Péter. Második Avenue (Second Avanue). Toronto: Pannonia, 1967. Ignotus, Paul. Börtönnaplóm: Próza dalban elbeszélve (My Prison Diary: Prose told in Song). Munich: Látóhatár, 1957. Ignotus, Paul. Hungary. London: Benn, 1972. Irodalmi Újság. Facs. Rpt. 8 vols. Budapest: Bethlen Gábor, 1991–93. Irodalmi Újság la gazzetta letteraria ungherese del due novembre [trad. E. N. Adattamento, Vittorio Pagano]. Bari: Laterza, 1957. Márai, Sándor. “Halotti Beszéd” (Funeral Sermon). Látóhatár (Munich) 1951. Méray, Tibor. A párizsi vártán. Írások a Szajna mellöl (On Guard in Paris. Writing from the Banks of the Seine). 2 vols. Marosvásárhely: Mentor, 2000. Mikes, György. How to be an Alien. A Handbook for Beginners and more advanced Pupils. London: Deutsch, 1946. Mnˇacˇko, Ladislav. Wie die Macht schmeckt (How Power Tastes). Stuttgart, Deutscher Bücherbund, 1967. Nagy, Csaba, ed. Irodalmi Újság 1957–1989. Dokumentumok a lap történetébo˝l (Literary Gazette 1957–1989. Documents from the History of the Journal). Budapest: Argumentum, 1993. Saunders, Frances Stonor. Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War. London: Granta, 2000. Szabó, Dezso˝. Életeim (My Lives). Budapest: Szépirodalmi, 1965.

230

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

The Hungarian Mikes Kör and Magyar Mu˝hely : Personal Recollections Áron Kibédi Varga

1. Refugee Groups and their Cultural Life, 1945–1956 In 1945 politically different groups of refugees arrived in Austria and Germany, mostly conservative followers of Horthy and the Nazis. Some went to Argentina, where they established their cultural associations, journals, and publishing houses that printed mostly well-known conservative Hungarian novelists before 1945, for instance Dezso˝ Szabó and Miklós Surányi. There was even a Hungarian Theater Company (Magyar Színjátszó Társulat) in Buenos Aires, directed between 1948 and 1954 by the famous Hungarian actor Antal Páger, which had much success even with the Spanish-speaking Argentinean public (on Buenos Aires as an exile center, see the introductory essay in this volume). Some other 1945 right-wing writers, like József Nyíro˝ from Transylvania, settled in Spain. Albert Wass (see John Neubauer’s article on him below), a less gifted and more openly anti-Semitic Transylvanian novelist, spent several years in Germany and was subsequently admitted to the US. He settled in Florida and worked at the University of Florida in Gainesville, all the while writing essays, novels, and stories for children, as well as engaging in various publishing activities. In Europe, each group had its own cultural life, which often involved publishing a newspaper that tended to be ephemeral. I just mention a few. The Arrow-Cross movement published in Bavaria the Hídvero˝k (Bridge Builders; 1948–62), a paper that was very hostile to the refugees of 1947–49, who were mostly anti-Nazi democrats forced out of the country after the communists assumed power, and the postwar initiatives towards democracy were annulled. The latter group included the writers Sándor Márai, Zoltán Szabó, László Cs. Szabó, Lajos Zilahy, as well as a number of politicians from the Peasant and the Smallholders’ Parties. The conservative exile newspapers included the more moderate Hungária (1948–56) and the Új Hungária (New Hungary;

The Hungarian Mikes Kör and Magyar Mu˝hely (Áron Kibédi Varga)

231

1953–71), which were linked to the Hungarian National Committee (Magyar Nemzeti Bizottmány) in New York, a kind of US-supported government in exile. The Hídvero˝k attacked the members of this Committee, alleging that they sold Hungary to the Americans. Finally, we should mention the Katolikus Szemle (Catholic Review; 1949–95) in Rome, a religious and, especially, literary review, directed for very long time by the theologian and poet Gellért Békés. There were also Hungarian bookshops. Sándor Püski opened his New York bookstore in 1970; the Société Balaton (where one could also buy Hungarian salami!), functioned in Paris, whereas Andreas Jaritz had a store in Munich, which sold also recent editions of classical Hungarian authors like Peto˝fi or Jókai, printed in communist Hungary. To warn his readers and to excuse himself, he commented in his catalogue that the introductions in the books “poured a communist sauce” over the classical novels and poems. The Katolikus Szemle and some other reviews and cultural organizations occasionally published books as well. Of the genuine publishing houses I want to mention two. In Cologne, the Dominican priest Jeromos Fenyvessy founded in 1948 the Amerikai Magyar Kiadó (American-Hungarian Publisher), which could boast more than 2000 titles with more than one million copies by 1966. They included two new plays by Nyíro˝, several essays by the Catholic philosopher Béla Brandenstein, and poetry volumes by Alajos Kannás and Tamás Tu˝z. In Washington, the former politician István Csicsery-Rónay founded in 1954 the Occidental Press, which preferred quality to quantity and published much fewer titles. They included the Hungarian translation of Gaëtan Picon’s famous Panorama des idées contemporaines (1960), books by the political essayist Gyula Gombos and the philosopher László Vatai, Sándor Márai’s diaries, and, later, anthologies of poetry written about 1956. It also published two volumes of my own poetry. Csicsery-Rónay repatriated his Press in 1989. Searching for what was lasting and worthwhile in Hungarian exile literature, one has to admit that it did not match the literary production of the period in Hungary, or even the Hungarian literature written in Transylvania. We can survey it as easily as, say, the Hungarian literature written in Slovakia: writers of the exile/émigré group formed a relatively small group, usually knew each other, and read each others’ works. The bibliography of Hungarian cultural life abroad (including its neighbors with large Hungarian minorities) is large but of uneven quality. So are the bibliographies themselves. The most important ones were compiled by Gyula Borbándi, who worked for Radio Free Europe in Munich and was co-editor of the journal Új Látóhatár (New Horizon). Next to A Magyar emigráció életrajza, 1945–1985 (Biography of the Hungarian Emigration; 1989), Nyugati Magyar irodalmi lexikon és bibliográfia (Western Hungarian Literary Lexicon and Bibliography; 1992), and Emigráció és Magyarország (Emigration

232

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

and Hungary; 1996), he also published a book on the populist movement: A magyar népi mozgalom (The Hungarian Populist Movement; 1983). Ferenc Méro˝’s encyclopedia, Az Emigrációs Magyar Irodalom Lexikona (Lexicon of the Hungarian Émigré Literature; 1966), gives a broad view of various cultural activities all over the world, especially in Europe, the US, and Latin America. But it also shows one of the main problems of emigration, the lack of Nachbarschaftskontrolle, evaluation by the neighbors: in the absence of a well-organized literary life there is no selectivity. Méro˝ includes, and even praises, a multitude of very mediocre writers, unevenly and often inaccurately. The only Mikes Kelemen Kör he mentions is a Munich-based Hungarian right-wing organization founded in 1959 that published books by Nazis like Ferenc Fiala. He does not list our earlier-founded Mikes Kelemen Kör (Kelemen Mikes Circle), which was forced to change its name to Hollandiai Mikes Kelemen Kör in order to avoid confusion with the Munich one. Méro˝ mentions István Csicsery-Rónay, but not his Occidental Press; and he omits Ferenc Fejto˝ and Baron Bertalan Hatvany, although they played a key role among emigrant writers and supported the younger ones, especially in Paris. Both were close friends of the poet Attila József, and founded with him in 1935 in Budapest the literary review Szép Szó (Beautiful Word). In 1938 Fejto˝ went into exile in order to escape a jail sentence, and came to work for the Agence France Press (AFP). He became famous with his book Histoire des démocraties populaires (History of the Popular Democracies; 1962), while Hatvany, who had supported József financially and also left Hungary in 1938, became fascinated by Chinese culture and published in 1957 a Hungarian translation of the Taoist Chinese classic Tao Te Ching. The 1950 launching of the journal Látóhatár in Switzerland and its subsequent move to Munich substantially raised the quality of the Hungarian literary journals abroad. The editors, who came to work for Radio Free Europe, succeeded in attracting as contributors László Cs. Szabó, Zoltán Szabó, Imre Kovács, and other important Hungarian exiled writers living in Western Europe, with the exception of Lajos Zilahy and Sándor Márai, both of whom preferred to work on their own larger projects, and eventually moved to America. Látóhatár published articles on political, literary, and other topics, ranging from Hungarian agriculture to Proust and Thackeray, The main criterion of literary criticism was that it had to concern writers deemed to be good. After the 1956 Revolution, new journals were founded; the most important of these were the conservative Nemzeto˝r (National Guard; 1956–90), published in Germany, and the Irodalmi Újság (1957–90), published first in London and from 1962 onward in Paris (see John Neubauer’s article above). At a London meeting in March 1957, the Association of Hungarian Writers Abroad (Magyar Irók Szövetsége Külföldön) was founded, and the Irodalmi

The Hungarian Mikes Kör and Magyar Mu˝hely (Áron Kibédi Varga)

233

Újság of Budapest was re-launched, both with funding from the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a CIA front organization. At a large Congress in Paris next year, long discussions were held between the népi (inadequately translated as “populist”) and the urbánus writers. The népi movement was composed of writers – some tending to the right-wing others to Marxism – whose literary-sociological studies and novels directed attention to the misery of the Hungarian peasants, who still constituted the majority of the Hungarian population in the 1930s. The urbánus writers were often Jews, mostly living in Budapest. They were more open to influences from the West and they had less interest for rural Hungarian themes. As a contributor of Látóhatár, I attended a whole-night népi meeting, at which Imre Kovács ordered and paid for the wine. In the end, Pál Ignotus, considered an urbánus, became President, and the népi Zoltán Szabó secretary; the Association rarely met, and ceased to exist in 1961. In spite of differences, the exiled writers did not revive the famous népi/urbánus conflict of the 1930s, though Látóhatár and its successor, Új Látóhatár, had a népi orientation and Irodalmi Újság an urbánus one.

2. The Hollandiai Mikes Kelemen Kör (1951) and the Magyar Mu˝hely (1962) By the 1970s, the Hungarian Kádár-regime was considered as the most liberal among the communist regimes. Cultural policy was managed by Kádár’s close friend, György Aczél, who was very interested in literature and read not only writers living and publishing in Hungary but also many Hungarian reviews and writers living in the West. This cultural liberalism meant that writers like Sándor Weöres and the Catholic János Pilinszky were allowed to publish; even some works of the esoteric Béla Hamvas could appear. However, this liberalism had a price: writers were expected to exercise auto-censorship – a topic to which the Mikes Kör dedicated a special conference in 1980. Certain subjects were taboo: the revolution of 1956 could only be named and treated as a counter-revolution, as in József Darvas’s play Kormos ég (Sooty Sky; 1959), and mentioning the execution of Imre Nagy was strictly forbidden. Erzsébet Galgóczy’s novel Közös bu˝n, which takes place in 1956, could be published only with great delay, in 1976. In Vidravas (Otter Iron), published in 1984 and soon translated into several languages, Galgóczy tested the limits, by portraying the terrible anxiety of innocent people during the Rákosi-regime: a couple seeing each morning a police car before their house from which policemen observed them, or an old woman committing suicide.

234

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

On the whole, most authors living in Hungary accepted the task of selfcensorship; as to the Hungarian writers and organizations abroad, the authorities at home fostered a division among them. This was the background of most tensions within and between Hungarian groups and organizations, which I shall now exemplify with the Magyar Mu˝hely (Atelier Hongrois/Hungarian Workshop) in France and the Hollandiai Mikes Kelemen Kör (to be abbreviated henceforth as Mikes). The name Magyar Mu˝hely reminds most of us immediately and curiously of the well-known novelist and populist ideologue László Németh, though Tibor Papp, its co-founder, recently protested against this link and prefers to regard István Bibó, member of the Imre Nagy 1956 revolutionary government, as the organization’s inspiring figure. The link is curious, because Németh was a populist rather than avant-garde writer, but Németh’s concept of a Hungarian Workshop fits because it suggested that one should create works in a both Hungarian and international spirit. The founders of the Magyar Mu˝hely were perhaps not consciously avant-garde at the outset; the first stories written by Pál Nagy and László Márton testify to this. Tongue in cheek, I would add that the activities of the Magyar Mu˝hely remind one of Németh in another sense as well. He did not support the Communist regime, but he was not insensible to the homage it paid him, and he even accepted an invitation to visit the Soviet Union in 1959, about which he wrote a report that many in the West found disturbing. I heard him myself remark in the seventies, surrounded by a few younger Hungarian writers in his garden at Sajkód, near lake Balaton: “believe me, János Kádár is the least evil (“a legkisebb rossz”) we can have.” (To which I heard István Eörsi respond: I would like to live in a country where one would not be obliged to accept “the least evil” regime.) Like László Németh, the Magyar Mu˝hely accepted certain limitations. In order to reach Hungary they never published anything political, and, indeed, in the seventies and eighties it was much easier to find copies of it in Hungary than of the Irodalmi Újság or of Új Látóhatár, (you could not find them in every bookshop, though). However, one should add that the Magyar Mu˝hely used this relative freedom in order to introduce avant-garde writings in Hungary. It supported the Hungarian installation artists Miklós Erdély and István Haraszty, and they published studies on, or works by, writers whom the regime disliked, such as Sándor Weöres, one of the greatest Hungarian poets of the twentieth century, and Miklós Szentkuthy, author of many bizarre historical novels, especially of Prae (1934), a huge avant-garde novel about what one should do before starting to write a novel. Weöres had, however, an unpleasant experience during the sixties with “Tu˝zkút” (Fire Well), a manuscript of

The Hungarian Mikes Kör and Magyar Mu˝hely (Áron Kibédi Varga)

235

poetry. Hungarian publishers refused to accept it, but Magyar Mu˝hely and Mikes raised funds to publish it in the West at a Romanian printer (the editors of Magyar Mu˝hely worked there to earn a living, and they could use the machines in the evening for their own purposes). Weöres delivered the manuscript and it was published, but the poet got into trouble when he returned to Hungary: he adopted a clever strategy by stating in an open letter to a newspaper that he had nothing to do with the publication. By drawing attention to important artists and writers that the communist regime neglected, Magyar Mu˝hely did what the eminent but silenced literary critic Balázs Lengyel told us during a meeting (in Brussels or in Marly-le-Roi): “Your task is to establish a Hamburg standard. There is much fraud and corruption at the international boxing championships because millions of dollars are at stake. This is why specialists gather once a year in Hamburg to establish a reliable ranking and decide who the best one really is. Your task here in the West is to establish the Hamburg standard for Hungarian literature.” The choice of the name Kelemen Mikes is also interesting: we, all of us 20–25 year-old students, chose him in 1951 for romantic reasons. Kelemen Mikes was the page of Prince Ferenc Rákóczy II, who led an insurrection against the Habsburg rulers but lost and was forced into exile, first to France and then to the small village of Tekirdag (Rodostó in Hungarian) on the Bosporus in Turkey. Mikes, the youngest of the small exile community and its last survivor, spent his exile years by translating French novels and, most importantly, writing letters to a fictive aunt in “Constantinople.” The posthumous discovery of these letters made Mikes famous, and they are now considered as one of the highlights of eighteenth-century Hungarian literature. We were young and knew little about Mikes; for us, he embodied literature in political solitude, far from home, as in József Lévay’s famous poem “Mikes,” written in 1848: Mikes yearns for his home in Transylvania but his country is held in slavery and he prefers freedom, even if it means that he must be supported by the Sultan. This impressed us. Years later I discovered reading Mikes seriously that he was much more interesting. In spite of his sad daily routine, Mikes had an extraordinary sense of humor, a “Székely” humor that makes one think of Áron Tamási, the most famous twentieth-century Hungarian-Székely writer. And I am sure, Borges would have been delighted to read Mikes’s seventy-fifth letter, in which he tells his fictive aunt to throw away his letters because they are not worth much, but he will keep hers for they are much better: the non-existing should survive, not the real ones! When we started Mikes in 1951, we knew what was going on in Hungary: it was one of the worst years of the Rákosi regime. It was the time when my father told me that my grandmother had asked not to write even Christmas

236

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

greetings on an open post card because it was too dangerous for her. At a meeting in Utrecht, members of the Mikes discussed that if we gather to speak Hungarian we must risk of having an informant among us who would report to the Hungarian Embassy. Later I concluded that there must have been an informant: in 1965 I went to The Hague to get my first visa for Hungary, by accident a day after the Mikes General Assembly had elected the new Board. The press attaché handed me my visa remarking: “You had your Assembly yesterday, didn’t you? And X. and Y. have been elected as new Board members!” He revealed with visible pleasure that he was well informed. We were eager to protect our intellectual freedom in other respects too, for instance by avoiding reliance on external funding. I know of one such support only, a grant from the Societé Européenne de Culture. The Magyar Mu˝hely was founded by writers who had published in Új Látóhatár, but decided in 1962 to establish their own review. I remember their discussion about this with Gyula Borbándi in Munich: they found that the Munich journal devoted too much attention to politics. The founders of Magyar Mu˝hely included Pál Nagy, Tibor Papp, László Márton, and the internationally acclaimed sculptor Ervin Pátkai (to whom Karátson devotes an affectionate chapter in Otthonok). They were joined later by Alpár Bujdosó from Vienna. One could consider the Magyar Mu˝hely as a literary movement with its own review, like fifty years earlier, when the surrealists of André Breton had their reviews Littérature and La Révolution surréaliste. They published also novels, and poetry volumes by the editors and other contributors to the review. The Magyar Mu˝hely did not publish only. It resembled Mikes in that it also organized activities. In 1967 it started to organize conferences, first in Marly-leRoi near Paris, and later in Hadersdorf near Vienna. These were also attended by official Hungarian delegates, notably by the critic Miklós Béládi, who was charged by the regime to establish contact with Hungarian writers in the West – reason enough for Mikes never to invite him, though he was a very likeable person. When he attended the Magyar Mu˝hely conferences, he stuffed his car with books and reviews, for he, officially sent to the meeting, was allowed to bring them back Hungary. The Hungarian border guard once confiscated all the books in Béládi’s car, in spite of his protest. He could get them back only much later, in Budapest. There was much contact between the Magyar Mu˝hely and Mikes. Members of each often attended the conferences of the other organization. A third group, Hungarian doctors, engineers and other professionals from Germany and Belgium, visited both conferences. There were, of course, also some incidents, most famous them being the flag affair at a Mikes conference in the early seventies. Traditionally, the Saturday evenings were reserved for the reci-

The Hungarian Mikes Kör and Magyar Mu˝hely (Áron Kibédi Varga)

237

tation of work by the writers and poets, followed by music and dance. Miklós Erdély, a leading avant-guard artist from Budapest who worked together with the Magyar Mu˝hely, once came with his Parisian friends to the Mikes conference and persuaded them to put the Hungarian flag on the ground to dance on it. This made some other participants furious: they put issues of the Magyar Mu˝hely on the ground and began to dance on these. The affair ended in a bout of wrestling, especially between Tibor Papp and the novelist Endre Karátson. In spite of the numerous and usually very friendly contacts, the two institutions were structurally different. Mikes was not founded by creative writers and artists, and it had no review – though an online review, the Mikes International, has meanwhile been established in the 1990s. The members of Mikes were students, as well as lawyers, doctors, university teachers, and other professionals, who got together on Sunday afternoons, first in Utrecht later in Vianen, in order to talk about Hungarian politics, culture, folklore, and other matters they could not discuss with their Dutch colleagues and friends. It was an association with yearly membership dues, and a Board that was elected each year. If the funds allowed it, we invited, even before 1956, famous Hungarian speakers from abroad, among them the Jungian scholar of comparative religion Karl Kerényi from Switzerland, and László Cs. Szabó, Zoltán Szabó, and Gyo˝zo˝ Határ from London. The tenth anniversary of Mikes was commemorated in 1961 by Cs. Szabó’s lecture, delivered in Utrecht University’s ceremonial hall. Upon the initiative of Dezso˝ Prágay (a participant of the 1956 revolution who was sentenced to death by the Kádár-regime) the Mikes launched in 1959 in Doorn the so-called “Study Days” (Tanulmányi Napok), a week-long conference to which we invited Hungarian writers and scholars from other European countries. Over the years, these conferences had a stimulating, even inspiring, effect on the regularly participating writers, as several of them told us and stated in writing. These conferences started on Monday morning, with a break on Thursday that was used for bus-excursions. The first excursion took us to Aachen, Cologne, and to Amsterdam – where we nearly missed the reception the Lord Mayor offered us. In the later format, still used today, the conference takes only three days. In contrast to the Magyar Mu˝hely, Mikes did not publish books, except for the conference proceedings, of which eleven volumes appeared in irregular intervals. While the Magyar Mu˝hely held a fairly consistent attitude towards the regime at home, Mikes conducted intense and long discussions to determine our attitude towards the Kádár-regime. The two major problems were, whether individual members should travel to Hungary and Romania, and whether we should invite speakers from these countries to our conferences. The decision

238

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

to see parents and friends in communist countries was left to the individual. Some did not go, others went in order to see parents or to attend class reunions (érettségi találkozó); I myself went to see an uncle and an aunt, and was one of the first to visit, perhaps because I had left Hungary already as a child in 1944, not in 1956. When I went for the first time, in 1965, I met Márta Sárközi, the daughter of Ferenc Molnár and the mother of Mátyás Sárközi. The latter worked for Radio Free Europe and the Hungarian section of BBC, which made it impossible for him (from both sides) to go to Hungary. She put me into contact with three Hungarian poets, András Fodor, Ferenc Juhász, and László Nagy. In the seventies and eighties, when I went to Hungary primarily to meet writers, I befriended János Pilinszky, Sándor Weöres, and Miklós Mészöly. I saw them in their home in Budapest, and I especially remember Pilinszky’s terrifying stories (he had an incredible way of telling them): during the Rákosi-regime he had to earn his living as a corrector at the Party’s daily newspaper. All correctors were anxiety ridden about printing errors, for this would be considered a political sabotage and lead to their immediate arrest. While many Mikes members returned regularly to Hungary, others refused to go as long as the communist regime lasted. When Zoltán Szabó was invited by the village of Tard, about which he published his famous sociological study A tardi helyzet (The Tard Situation; 1935), he refused, and suggested that the people of the village should come instead to London, he would pay their travel expenses. He died in 1984, without ever having returned. This was initially also the position of Határ and Cs. Szabó, both of whom refused to apply for a visa to a communist government – but they changed their mind later. The second question, whether to invite speakers from communist countries, was a much more complicated one, because this had to be decided collectively rather than individually. We had no problem with inviting speakers from Tito’s Yugoslavia and we did, indeed, invite already in 1966 two Hungarian literary historians from Novi Sad (Újvidék), Imre Bori and István Szeli. The Novi Sad review Új Symposion, led by Ottó Tolnai, Beáta Thomka, and Magdolna Danyi, was, together with the Magyar Mu˝hely, the most modern literary journal in the Hungarian language, one that was the most open to the West. These two were read in Hungary secretly and most eagerly. In those years, Mikes did not have much contact with the Hungarian minorities in Slovakia and Ukraine; Hungary and Romania were the problems that Mikes started to discuss as early as 1966. We finally decided to invite a group of writers and literary critics from Hungary, not for 1966, the tenth anniversary of 1956 (which would certainly have been unproductive), but for 1967. We were not free to choose, for we had to accept the counterproposition of the Hungarian Embassy. As its press attaché put it: a captain does not ask the

The Hungarian Mikes Kör and Magyar Mu˝hely (Áron Kibédi Varga)

239

opinion of his adversary in a soccer game, he considers the game as a confrontation. Finally we agreed that a delegation of seven would come, with two officials and Party members, one of them being Miklós Szabolcsi, a wellknown academician and author of several books on Hungarian and European literature. Some older and very influential writers of Mikes firmly opposed this agreement. Cs. Szabó, whom we called our form-master (osztályfo˝nök), refused to come to a conference where he would be obliged to meet Szabolcsi. He had been coming every year to the Mikes conferences, but he did not return until 1975. One of the founders, Gyula Bóné, shared his opinion and gave up his membership. There were, however, some who regretted this attitude, for they believed that Mikes was the only place where non-communists from Hungary and abroad could freely meet and speak. At any rate, Mikes acquired with that decision a leftist reputation. When my father, a philosopher in Munich and commander of the Hungarian branch of St. John’s Knights, accepted my request to give a lecture at Mikes, Miklós Kenessey, a relative of Queen Beatrix by marriage, asked him after the lecture why he had accepted an invitation from such a left-wing association as Mikes. A much deeper crisis occurred in 1971, involving not only friends from outside but also many Mikes members, leading to a temporary break. The question that divided us was how far we should cooperate with the Hungarian authorities. Sándor Németh, one of the most active conference organizers, and Erika Dedinszky, then President, wanted to organize in 1971 a Hungarian cinema week and – as the famous Hungarian movie director Miklós Jancsó told us – this could not be done without a close cooperation with the Embassy. A majority refused to go along with this and called for an extraordinary Assembly in November, at which the President was forced to resign. Németh and Dedinszky decided to leave the Association, which led two years later to the more radical split of two parallel conferences. The second one was supported by the Magyar Mu˝hely and a few others like Endre Karátson, a good friend of Németh, while the majority organized, in a rather provocative way, a conference also dedicated to the avant-garde, to which we invited the art critic Géza Perneczky from Germany, the daughter of Gyula Krúdy from Budapest, and the editors of Új Látóhatár in Munich, who then published the lectures. Since the Hungarian authorities sent every time an official delegation to the conference, the Embassy also wanted to be present, but Mikes refused to admit its representatives. Finally, we came to an agreement: a member of the Embassy could attend the conference when, and only when, a speaker from Hungary gave a lecture – an opportunity of which the Embassy seldom availed itself. The pre-conference discussions improved the contact between

240

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

Mikes and the Embassy, and in the eighties the Ambassador, Tivadar Kiss, invited the Mikes Board every year for dinner; Mikes accepted, on the condition of exchange: the ambassador and his staff became dinner guests of Mikes in a very elegant restaurant in The Hague. Mikes had fewer non-Hungarian international contacts than the Magyar Mu˝hely. It remained essentially Hungarian, and had nearly no contact with other countries or cultures, not even with its host country. In fifty years, we had only two or three lectures in Dutch, and after 1989 we invited the Romanian poet Mircea Dinescu who had played a part in the anti-Ceaus¸escu revolt and had much sympathy for Hungarians – but that was all. We had Hungarian-speaking writers from abroad, but no writers who spoke and wrote in Slovak or Szerb only. The Magyar Mu˝hely was completely different in this respect, partly because they also published visual and computerized-interactive poetry, two new genres that interested very much the Parisian artists and opened contacts with them. Members of the Magyar Mu˝hely came to be invited thus to international festivals in France, Belgium, Italy, and the US, and they befriended Jacques Roubaud, Jean-Pierre Faye, Francis Edeline, and others. The Magyar Mu˝hely also published books and a review in French (d’atelier) – a cosmopolitanism that Tibor Papp’s and Tamás Prágay’s recent volume of interviews A pálya mentén (2007) displays very well. Contrary to others, Mikes never organized anything in Hungary after the regime change. Otto Tánczos, a former President, remembers that more than hundred-fifty members came to the meeting on February 25, 1990 to discuss what our organization should now do. We finally decided to stay in Holland, to continue our meetings and conferences there, and to observe from there events in Hungary, conditioned, as we were, by the famous Dutch common sense. I need to mention this, because all other Hungarian cultural organizations, including the Magyar Mu˝hely, the Roman Catholic Pax Romana (KMÉM=Katolikus Magyar Értelmiségi Mozgalom), and the Protestant Free University (Protestáns Szabadegyetem), decided to organize their conferences in Hungary, and to include thus Hungarians, intellectuals, artists, and theologians in their activities. Mikes preferred to invite people to Holland. Between 1956 and 1989, officials thought that our activities and publications reflected a kind of nostalgia and homesickness. We protested violently against this, for we believed that living in the West gave us the opportunity to become acquainted with different ways of living and thinking, and this, in turn, allowed us also to see Hungarian life and culture in a different way. This was the meaning of our independent cultural platform. Artists, writers, and scholars used to be very much interested in our organization, and were very happy to come – if we paid their travel expenses. The

The Hungarian Mikes Kör and Magyar Mu˝hely (Áron Kibédi Varga)

241

situation has changed since 1989. On the one hand, we have been pressured to participate in domestic political quarrels, to choose for the right or the left; on the other hand, enthusiasm to attend our conferences has diminished. Hungarians could now travel and/or be invited by other, non-Hungarian organizations; Mikes had become less interesting to them – and we have become slightly disappointed.

Works Cited Babus, Antal. “Németh László szovjetunióbeli utazása” (László Németh’s Travel in the Soviet Union). Kortárs 46.5 (2001): 115–128. Borbándi, Gyula. A Magyar emigráció életrajza, 1945–1985 (Biography of the Hungarian Emigration). 2 vols. Budapest: Európa Kiadó, 1989. Borbándi, Gyula .A magyar népi mozgalom (The Hungarian Populist Movement). New York: Püski, 1983. Der ungarische Populismus. Mainz: Haase & Koehler, 1976. Borbándi, Gyula. Emigráció és Magyarország (Emigration and Hungary). Budapest: Európai Protestáns Magyar Szabadegyetem, 1996. Borbándi, Gyula. Nyugati Magyar irodalmi lexikon és bibliográfia (Lexicon and Bibliography of Hungarian Literature in the West). Budapest: Hitel, 1992. Fejto˝, Ferenc. Histoire des démocraties populaires (History of the Popular Democracies). Paris: Seuil, 1962. Gaál, Eniko˝ “A hollandiai Mikes Kelemen Kör mint a nyugat-europai magyar emigráció kulturális fellegvára” (The Mikes Kelemen Society of Holland as the Cultural Citadel of the Hungarian Emigrants in Western Europe). Kónya et al. 186–274. Galgóczy, Erzsébet. Vidravas (Otter Iron). Budapest: Szépirodalmi, 1984. Karátson, Endre. Otthonok (Homes). 2 vols. Pécs: Jelenkor, 2007. Kónya, Melinda, Áron Kibédi Varga, and Zoltán Piri, ed. Számadás. Hollandiai Mikes Kelemen Kör (1951–2001) (An Account. The Kelemen Mikes Society of Holland, 1951–2001). Ed. Melinda Kónya, Áron Kibédi Varga, and Zoltán Piri. Bratislava: Kalligram, 2001. Lao-tse. Tao Te Ching. Hung. trans. Bertalan Hatvany. Az Út és az Ige könyve (Book of the Road and the Verb). Munich: Látóhatár, 1957. Lévay, József. “Mikes” (1848). http://csicsada.freeblog.hu/archives/2007/11/23/Levay_ Jozsef_Mikes/ Méro˝, Ferenc. Emigrációs Magyar Irodalom Lexikona (Lexicon of the Hungarian Émigré Literature). Cologne, Detroit, Vienna: Amerikai Magyar Kiadó, 1966. Papp, Tibor, and Tamás Prágay. A pálya mentén (By the Side of the Field/Career/Tracks). Budapest: Napkút, 2007. Picon, Gaëtan, ed. Korunk szellemi körképe (Intellectual Panorama of our Times). 2nd ed. Washington, DC: Occidental P, 1963. Trans. of Panorama des idées contemporaines. 1960. Szabó, Zoltán. A tardi helyzet (The Tard Situation). Budapest: Cserépfalvi, 1935. Szentkuthy, Miklós. Prae Budapest: Egyetemi Nyomda, 1934. Weöres, Sándor. Tu˝zkút (Fire Well). Paris: Magyar Mu˝hely, 1964. Budapest: Magveto˝: 1964.

242

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

“We did not want an émigré journal”: Pavel Tigrid and Sveˇdectví Neil Stewart

Within the vast theoretical field of cultural criticism, the study of literary institutions remains a surprisingly little-charted territory. Most scholars would readily agree that it is an important and somewhat neglected topic, but few have ventured to give general guidelines on how to go about exploring it. How, then, does one approach, analyze, or interpret a journal? One basic assumption that has to be made at the outset is obvious: it must be seen as more than the sum total of the individual contributions. For if the periodical under consideration were no more than a vessel holding a mixed variety of texts, the only meaningful analysis of it would be to draw up an alphabetical or chronological index of contents (and leave it at that). Meanwhile, a researcher who focused his entire attention on the biographies of the contributors to the periodical or the historical events that were reflected in its pages would not really be studying his purported object but the factors surrounding it. In other words: the periodical as such must be conceivable as a symbolic structure, i.e., a text, in its own right. Such a text is complex and heterogeneous, not least because various discourses (political, historical, and literary) and media (words, graphic art, and photography) coexist in it. It is multi-authored, dialogical and potentially open-ended, not structured by a predetermined dénouement. It has a specific poetics expressed in the choice, presentation, and composition of its materials. As with any other text, no single element can be removed and placed in a different environment without changing its meaning at least slightly. A poem by the writer Frantisˇek Halas in the pages of a Czech exile journal like Sveˇdectví (1: 41) “means” something different from its identical pendant in a present-day edition of Halas’ collected works, not only because it is surrounded by different texts as well as picked, presented and thus tacitly appropriated by different people for different reasons, but also because the form of a periodical, the date printed on page one, will automatically suggest topical parallels to the political issues of the day. The study of a cultural journal must always take political, historical, or social contexts into account, and also bear in mind that the journal is part of a net-

“We did not want an émigré journal” (Neil Stewart)

243

work that may include a large number of other persons, texts, intentions, and institutions. A close-reading focusing only on the manifest textual material would therefore be even more inappropriate in the case of this text than in that of others. That said, there really is no need for the literary critic to bring a completely different set of analytical tools to bear on the text of a journal. He does, in fact, often end up asking the same questions as he would in his interpretation of a work of literature, be it fictional or non-fictional, artistic or functional (notoriously blurred distinctions anyway). It is true that journals are not, as a rule, organized by the intention of a single author, but authors and their authority are generally problematic categories. Moreover: are there not writers of fiction who seem to exercise only minimal control over their characters – writers who will deliberately disappear behind the events related, not so much telling a story as arranging heterogeneous materials for the reader to make sense of ? And at the same time, do not some editors exercise such control over their contributors that every single word printed in their journals could well be taken to be their own? All this is not to say that the text of a novel and the text of a journal are the same thing, but that they can be tackled in similar ways, namely by identifying recurrent themes, analyzing the principles of composition, identifying intertextual references and real-life contexts, and ideally by reconstructing an underlying ideological scheme. What does take on special relevance in the literary study of a periodical, however, is the much discussed interrelation of ‘inner’ ideological content and ‘external’ form. The poetics of composition, the rhetoric of form, and the material aspects of communication are rather more palpable here than a literary criticism that deals predominantly in ideas would acknowledge. The literary historian discussing the moral philosophy behind Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment usually has little attention to spare for the original layout of the text or the way it was first serialized in Mikhail Katkov’s bimonthly Russkii vestnik (Russian Messenger). Conversely, if a scholarly study of that journal dwelt in great detail on the psychology of Raskolnikov, its author would certainly seem to have missed his point. Ideally, the analysis of a periodical should try to establish its most important socio-historical contexts as well as its basic ideological program, and then examine how these determine its semiotics and various concrete publishing practices. I shall attempt to examine in this way the Czech cultural quarterly Sveˇdectví (Testimony), which was published between 1956 and 1992 in (successively) New York, Paris, and Prague. The decisive socio-historical context for Sveˇdectví was beyond doubt the situation of exile, while its ideological program was exemplified by the life and work of its chief editor Pavel Tigrid, and more specifically by his theory of “gradualism.”

244

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

1. Biography Pavel Tigrid was born in 1917 as Pavel Schönfeld, the son of a chemical engineer from northern Bohemia. His parents, who were non-believing Jews fully assimilated into Czech society, had him christened a Roman Catholic. Tigrid studied law in Prague, but when the German forces occupied the country he and a friend decided to flee abroad: I was standing on Wenceslas Square with Pepík Schwarz-Cˇervinka on March 15, 1939, a terribly bleak, rainy day, and the Wehrmacht boys in black were driving all around us on their motorbikes. It was then that I spoke – and I must commend myself here – the allbut-legendary sentence: ‘Well, Pepík, this is not for us’. We obtained exit visas under a false pretense […], got on a train and went to Germany. It was all extremely hazardous and boyishly naïve, but we did get to Belgium. We could have gone to France but wanted to move on to England, because we considered it a solid country and because we spoke reasonably good English. (Pecˇinka/Tigrid 14–5)

Schönfeld spent the war years in London, working first as a waiter, then as an announcer for the Czech-language service of the BBC, and finally as editor of the Czechoslovak exile government’s regular radio program. It was for this job that Pavel adopted his pseudonym, explaining later that in school he always used to name the River “Tigris” incorrectly as “Tigrid.” He also revealed that his boss, Minister Hubert Ripka, had advised him to choose a radio name that would not betray his Jewish origins (Tigrid, Kapesní pru˚vodce 191). In June 1945, Tigrid returned to Bohemia on a British military plane, to discover that almost all his family had been murdered by the Nazis. Only one stepsister survived, who had fled to the United States (Posˇtová 8). Tigrid was offered a job with the Czech national broadcasting corporation by the Minister of Information, the hard-line communist Václav Kopecky´, who had himself just come back from exile in Moscow. When Tigrid showed up, however, he was told that the invitation had been a mistake and was meant for someone else (Pecˇinka/Tigrid 10). He found employment at the English department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and later became chief editor, first of the weekly Obzory (Horizons), the organ of the conservative Christian Democrats, and later of Vy´voj (Development), a journal belonging to the same party. When the communists seized power in February 1948, Tigrid had just departed for a journalistic tour of the British-controlled sector of Germany – and not a minute too soon: “The state security issued an arrest warrant for me, but they got to the border only about half an hour after I had crossed it” (Pecˇinka/Tigrid 14). In all accounts of how his second exile came about, Tigrid takes care to point out that in spite of certain forebodings the coup d’état

“We did not want an émigré journal” (Neil Stewart)

245

took him by surprise and that his political friends had actively encouraged him to travel abroad and to disregard his scruples about leaving home in such difficult times. Later, the Czech exile community would repeatedly accuse him of having known all along that a putsch was imminent and of having been coward enough to leave the sinking ship without warning anyone (Tigrid, Kapesní pru˚vodce 247). He did leave his wife behind, whom he had married in 1947 and who was held in custody by the regime. In September 1948 she was somehow “smuggled out” with “the help of some good people” (Tigrid 2000, 246–7), “the Brits” (Pecˇinka/Tigrid 14). His first book Ozbrojení mír (Peace in Arms), however, could not be saved: the authorities had the ready printed and bound copies confiscated and destroyed before publication (Kovtun 22). Asked to compare his two exiles, he later explained: In 1939 there was no doubt, the enemy was clear to everyone, and during all that time in London no-one ever questioned who that enemy was. After 1948 there was always some ‘but’ in the air. The enemy was not unanimously defined and it took a long time for the Czech people and us expatriates to begin to see matters as they really were. The persecutions, after all, went relatively slowly at first. Then came the fifties and everything became clear, at least to us anticommunists. (Pecˇinka/Tigrid 14–5)

During the four years following 1948, Tigrid lived and worked in Germany and was instrumental in setting up the Czechoslovak section of Radio Free Europe in Munich, ostensibly unaware of the fact that it was financed by the CIA (Pecˇinka/Tigrid 16). He was director of the program until 1952, when he resigned from his post in circumstances which are not quite clear: it seems he had fallen out with an eminent fellow exile, the journalist and writer Ferdinand Peroutka. Tigrid himself tends to be evasive about this episode of his biography, speaking on one occasion of “purely technical reasons” for his demission (Lederer/Tigrid 13), and on another giving the following saucy if not totally convincing “historical anecdote”: I employed a secretary at Radio Free Europe. On my wife’s advice, I had taken on a somewhat older Sudeten-German rather than a beautiful young woman. Now, this lady got picked up by an employee who was a Slovak separatist. At this time we were expecting a delegation of Slovak politicians from Canada, who were to come and look at how their countrymen were getting on with that old Czech (Cˇechún) Tigrid at Radio Free Europe. Shortly before, I had composed a letter to my boss, something to this effect: ‘Dear Bill, the Slovaks are coming. I think I can manage them, but I have only ninety dollars per month for representation. If you would double that I could feed them properly and everything would be alright’. I dictated that letter to her, she gave it to her Slovak, and he immediately sent it on to the Canadian newspapers. That proved fatal. (Pecˇinka/Tigrid 17)

Tigrid moved to New York, “thinking somehow that America was waiting for me” but soon discovering that “it was not” (Lederer/Tigrid 13). He enrolled

246

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

at Columbia University as a student of Political Science and occasionally wrote commentaries for The Voice of America (Posˇtová 10), but media institutions in the US would not employ him permanently, because he was now said to “get on badly with minorities. And in the States that formulation was as good as a death sentence” (Pecˇinka/Tigrid 17). In July 1955, a secret service informer using the code name “Marie” reported to Prague: “Tigrid is desperate; he cannot find a job, and his wife is expecting their second child in January. At present he is working as a waiter, but only on the weeckends [sic!]” (qtd. in Zídek “Tajemné sveˇdectví” and Posˇtová 19). Tigrid claims to have had the idea for Sveˇdectví while on night shift at an Irish pub in Brooklyn (Lederer/Tigrid 11). He founded the quarterly in 1956 together with ten other exiles: Vilém Brzorád, Jan Cˇep, Jirˇí Horák, Josef Jonásˇ, Jirˇí Kárnet, Jan Kolár, Emil Kovtun, Radomír Luzˇa, Mojmír Povolny´, and Emil Ransdorf. When he moved to Paris four years later as the European representative of a New York publishing house, Sveˇdectví settled with him in the French capital for the next three decades. As his journal grew into a central institution of Czech, Slovak, and European émigré culture, so did the indefatigable Pavel Tigrid become a major figure on the international stage, not only as an editor and prolific political journalist (who has been translated into English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Russian) but also as longtime president of the PEN Club of Writers in Exile. Meanwhile, his popularity with the regime in the CˇSSR was of a rather different nature: Tigrid was stripped of his Czechoslovak citizenship in 1959 and after the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968 at times enjoyed notoriety as public enemy number one. After the Velvet Revolution, Tigrid became an advisor to the new president Václav Havel, another former dissident writer now making a career in politics. From 1994 to 1996, he was Czech Minister of Culture, albeit a fairly controversial one (see Cˇulik) on account of his drastic cuts of state subsidies. At the end of his term in office – by then he was nearly eighty – Tigrid even regretted that he had not been able to abolish his own post, and the entire ministry with it. During his last years, he lived alternately in Prague and Paris, devoting himself to fostering Czech-German dialogue and to bringing about a reconciliation of the two countries. He also starred in a 2003 TV documentary called Pavel Tigrid – Evropan (Pavel Tigrid, the European) by Helena Tresˇtíková. In this film, Tigrid’s bad health is clearly evident. He died in Paris later in the same year. Some sources suggest that he killed himself: “Having achieved all he could in a lifetime, he quietly closed the book, and went” (Halada).

“We did not want an émigré journal” (Neil Stewart)

247

2. Pavel Tigrid: the Writer Over the years, apart from his contributions to Sveˇdectví, Tigrid produced several monographs. These writings must be seen as closely connected with his journal, not only because some were serialized in it before coming out in book form, but also because they are written in a similar style and concerned with similar topics as Tigrid’s periodical work. According to his colleague and lifelong friend Jirˇí Kovtun, the publication of each monograph was also indicative of a new stage in the development of Sveˇdectví (19). Thematically, these books deal mostly with the political history of the Czechoslovak state since the mid nineteen thirties. Kovtun finds it impossible to assign Tigrid’s writings to any traditional genre (22), although they may quite fittingly be described as lengthy essays. The author’s main interest is always predominantly political-historical (as opposed to literary-artistic), but from time to time he also includes anecdotes, wayward associations, and elements of fiction. Tigrid’s book Marx na Hradcˇanech (Marx on the Hradcˇin), published in 1960, has been called “two books in one” (Kovtun 22), combining as it does an analysis of the first twelve years of communist rule in the CˇSSR with autobiographical reminiscences about life in exile. Twenty-eight years later, he chose to present his favorite subject in yet another unusual format: Kapesní pru˚vodce inteligentní zˇeny po vlastním osudu (The Intelligent Woman’s Pocket Guide to Her Own Fate), the title of which echoes G.B. Shaw’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928). This text has a narrative frame in which “Mr. Tigrid,” an elderly émigré journalist and historian, meets Lucie, a young woman from Prague, at a seaside resort and lectures her on Czechoslovak history in the course of thirteen successive evenings. At the end of each chapter, Lucie, who is considering emigration and wants to know how the current malaise of her home country came about, is provided with a list of recommendations for further reading. Kapesní pru˚vodce cannot be called a masterpiece of narrative fiction, although it has an ironic twist or two (Lucie falls asleep several times and on one occasion insists that the meeting be transferred to the local discotheque). It does, however, provide a good example of Tigrid’s acute awareness of the target group, his efforts to address himself to a certain, clearly defined audience – in this case the young generation that had grown up in the CˇSSR without any personal memories of the Prague Spring – and to adapt his discourse accordingly. Such a rhetorical mode was also highly characteristic of Sveˇdectví. “A typically conservative Czech emigrant,” wrote Jan Cˇulík after the author’s death, “would have dismissed this ‘Lucie’ as ‘a degenerated product of the communist system’ and refused even to talk to her. But Tigrid was always ready for dialogue.”

248

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

Given the fact that his subject matter is a historical récit structured by three catastrophic events – the German invasion (1938), the communist takeover (1948), and the Soviet intervention (1968) –, Tigrid is on the whole a remarkably optimistic writer. Although he tends to be skeptical about romantic idealism in politics, no good cause ever seems quite lost to him and no negative state of affairs totally irreversible. Steeped in the tradition of democratic humanism represented by the First Czechoslovak Republic and its president T.G. Masaryk, as well as impressed by his wartime experience of the English parliamentary system (Kapesní pru˚vodce 191), he continuously refers his readers to the ideals of individual freedom, freedom of opinion, and democratic pluralism. Dialogue – a dialogue from which no-one may be excluded –, is almost a panacea for Tigrid. The three traumata of Czechoslovak history mentioned above, for example, he conceives of as a threefold repetition of the same archetypal situation, in which the side under attack has certain moral advantages that are practically useless, whereas the attacker has a very practical advantage in military strength. Such a situation, Tigrid argues, can only be mastered by constant attempts on the part of the weaker to make their moral capital count with others, including the oppressors, and thus gradually tip the power balance in its favor (Kovtun 23). Applied to the situation of Czechoslovakia under communist rule, this meant keeping in contact and working together not only with anti-communist forces in- and outside the country, but also with representatives of the Party, especially with the various reformist currents inside it.

3. Exile and “Gradualism” In his seminal study, Politická emigrace v atomovém veˇku (Political Emigration in the Atomic Age), published in book form in 1968 but containing material that had been serialized in Sveˇdectví since 1963, Tigrid writes about the second wave of Czechoslovak emigration (i.e., those who left the country after the communist coup d’état in 1948), analyzing that generation’s specific intellectual characteristics, political situation, and possible plans of action. He begins by disagreeing with recent Marxist attempts to differentiate between the post48ers and the time-honored socialist myth of the revolutionary in exile by theorizing the former as “the fundamentally new historical phenomenon” of a “reactionary” or “bourgeois emigration,” “aggressive in character” and intent on “turning back the wheel of historical progress” (Krˇen 16–7). Tigrid prefers to label his exiled compatriots “democratic” émigrés, insisting at the same time that their intention was by no means to reestablish the political system of

“We did not want an émigré journal” (Neil Stewart)

249

the First Republic and restore their home country to the status quo ante 1937 (Politická emigrace 53). On the contrary, he says, many democrats who went abroad in 1948 had undertaken far-reaching social changes immediately after the war, but been thwarted by the non-cooperating communists. Tigrid also maintains (Politická emigrace 79) that the reform process that began inside the Communist Party in the late nineteen fifties and finally led to the Prague Spring had really been sparked more than a decade earlier by the ideas of politicians and intellectuals who then became émigrés in the wake of February 1948 – although his fellow exiles were often unaware of this contingency, or unwilling to take the credit for it. Tigrid roundly dismisses the widespread laments inside the émigré community about a lack of unity and authoritative organization. What others bemoaned as ideological fragmentation that would weaken Czech exile as a whole Tigrid celebrated as modern pluralism that attested to its democratic culture. Unity as a virtue in itself was an outdated legend, very popular with the dogmatists on either side of the Iron Curtain: “Sociologists and historians will one day be struck by the aggressive and systematic way in which the myth of unity was drummed into the heads of the people back home by the representatives of the Communist Party, and at the same time preached by their bitterest adversaries to their own followers in exile” (Politická emigrace 84–85). In an age in which the existence of atomic weapons in the East as well as in the West had rendered a complete military victory of one side over the other impossible, the uncompromising ideological attitudes of old had become obsolete. Tigrid cites the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, according to which “the atomic bomb is ‘classless’ – it destroys everyone.” The present-day exile could no longer hope to ride back into his hometown victorious on “a white horse or a flower-strewn tank,” but had to temper his ethical idealism with the sobering demands of real politics (Politická emigrace 74). In other words, he was called upon to do what Sveˇdectví did: keep the dialogue with the other side going, try to improve relations with the people back home, and encourage a gradual liberalization of the political system. In the long run, one could rely on the fact that “the fiercest opponent of communism is communism in practice” (Politická emigrace 86). Although the modern exile thus cut a somewhat less heroic figure than his romantic predecessors, he did not have to suffer their tragic isolation and sheer impotence, because his situation provided many opportunities for meaningful action. Modern means of communication and travel, a host of international meetings, congresses, festivals, and stipends facilitated his activity (Politická emigrace 90–91). What is more, many representatives of the post-1948 Czechoslovak emigration were particularly well qualified for their

250

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

role in political exile. They had occupied important posts in the Czech Republic, were well educated, often relatively young, and it had not taken them long to attain respectable positions as journalists, scientists, professors, businessmen, etc., in the countries they now lived in. While such blending into foreign societies was decried and lamented as cultural estrangement by many conservatively-minded émigré representatives, Tigrid (Politická emigrace 91–92) characteristically stresses the positives of having such a well-to-do network in place – and since his own journal depended in no small measure on private donations from his compatriots we may assume that he knew what he was talking about. When Politická emigrace was published – Tigrid’s preface is dated “February 1968” – things were indeed looking bright for him. The Party had just replaced the hard-line communist Antonín Novotny´ with Alexander Dubcˇek as Secretary General, and it seemed that the faith Tigrid had placed in the reform communists had been justified. In the first half of the same year he wrote a study entitled Le Printemps de Prague (The Prague Spring) for the Paris publishing house Seuil, explaining the developments in the CˇSSR to a French audience. This book – a tremendous commercial success (Pecˇinka/Tigrid 22) – is basically a collage of original documents with short comments by the author. As such, it is fairly typical of Tigrid’s writing (Politická emigrace opens in similar fashion with a thirty-page anthology of topical quotations), and it also resembles the style of Sveˇdectví, where the presentation of sources is often given priority over explicit interpretation. Reality, however, got ahead of Le Printemps. The book relates the unfolding of events up to August 3, praising in the closing remarks the Czech reformers for their “remarkable performance” and “fine tactical abilities” in bringing about “a historic and irreversible decolonization of the Stalinist empire” (275). Tigrid little thought at this point that just over two weeks later the Soviets would crush the Prague Spring under the accumulated weight of six thousand tanks. Tigrid’s disappointment and the way it influenced his views are borne out by the title of his next book, published in 1969: La Chute irrésistible d’Alexander Dubcˇek (literally: The Unavoidable Fall of Alexander Dubcˇek, but translated into English as: Why Dubcˇek Fell). This study is remarkable above all for the highly confidential background materials presented by Tigrid, including detailed minutes of secret meetings of the Party’s Central Committee. President Novotny´ reportedly had hysterical fits whenever the exile’s name was mentioned, supposing himself “surrounded by Tigrid’s agents” ( Jezdinsky´ 106). Actually, there seems to have been only one regular informer, whose identity remains unknown to this day. Three years before his death, Tigrid said this much: “This man worked for [the Prague studio] ‘Krátky´ film.’ He was a Party

“We did not want an émigré journal” (Neil Stewart)

251

member but did not like the regime for various reasons. In the sixties, he attended Central Committee sessions with Oldrˇich Sˇvestka, who was in charge of media and communication. He also traveled to Paris relatively regularly and brought me certain manuscripts. He was the source – the only one of its kind. Our meetings carried on into the seventies but then petered out. He was a close-lipped man whom I never suspected of playing a double game. He was always discreet, loved France and Paris, and also liked Sveˇdectví – a truly remarkable figure” (Pecˇinka/Tigrid 15). Tigrid’s wife Ivana has also credited Heda Kovályová, the widow of a prominent Party official executed after a show trial in 1952, with having procured explosive political documents for her husband’s publications (Bendová/Tigridová). Before closing our present overview, we should add that La Chute d’Alexander Dubcˇek merits a mention for another reason. In this book the author – apparently to the slight irritation of two of his colleagues from Sveˇdectví (cf. Kovtun 27 and Jezdinsky´ 111) – makes one major if implicit correction to the “gradualist” theory elaborated in Politická emigrace: communism and democratization are now seen as ultimately incompatible. Even if the Soviets had not intervened, he argues, the experiment of Dubcˇek, that “sentimental Marxist” (cf. Sveˇdectví 10: 109), would have failed. He would either have had to allow free elections and renounce the single party system for good, or stop the liberalization process and embark on a rigid course of “normalization” similar to that of the hardliners who succeeded him (194–209). When the Czech and Slovak intellectual supporters of the Prague Spring were forced into emigration, they were as communists not welcomed by large parts of the conservative exile establishment. Tigrid’s reaction was also somewhat ambivalent: he greeted the newcomers with an article called “Salva do prˇátel” (A Salute Fired at Friends) in Sveˇdectví (12: 188–191), reminding them that as Party members they had “brought harm to more than one generation” in the CˇSSR since 1948 (188) and that at the time he and his contemporaries were threatened none of them “had budged an inch […]. Now they are calling persecution what they called class struggle then” (190). However, to the final question “How to go on?” he replied “As before” and called in good gradualist tradition for pragmatic, long-term cooperation, regardless of ideological differences (191). Unlike most exile institutions that had existed before 1968, Sveˇdectví proceeded to work productively together with the August emigrants and their most important periodical, the Rome-based bimonthly Listy (Pages). Tigrid and its editor Jirˇí Pelikán sometimes even arranged joint transport for their journals to Czechoslovakia (Pecˇinka/Tigrid 21–2).

252

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

4. Sveˇdectví : Poetics, Composition, and Historical Development The founding issue of Sveˇdectví was published in New York, during the height of the Hungarian uprising, just days before the Soviet intervention put an end to the hopes and expectations raised by the revolt. Sveˇdectví no. 1, dated October 28, 1956, opened with the following programmatic announcement: Appeal: This journal comes out at the time of a revolution in Central Europe. It is a revolution that is singular in its way: directed not against socialism, but against the Soviet Union, the country that has corrupted true socialism. This revolution does not aim for a return of capitalism, but for a return of liberty, justice, and human dignity. It is a fight of the people against those who for years have humiliated, constricted, tormented, and fooled it at the behest of a foreign dictator, who has recently been proclaimed a criminal even in Moscow. The people demand that these men be removed. This Czechoslovak journal, published abroad, declares its solidarity with the fighting people. What its contributors have been saying for eight long years has now come true: today, together with all staunch Czechoslovaks at home, we must create the main precondition for a life in freedom: full independence from Soviet Russia. A number of leading communist representatives in Central and South-Eastern Europe have already voiced this claim, and the Soviet government will sooner or later have to give in to it. All communists who still want to call themselves Czechoslovaks in the future must support this claim and insist on its complete fulfillment. In doing so, they can count on the support of the entire people. After this has happened, we shall open the discussion on what comes next. This journal wants to serve the discussion in full awareness of the moral, intellectual, and political concord that exists between the young generation back home and those who, as democrats, had to leave their country in 1948. Near the end of the fateful year 1956 they thus testify (podávají sveˇdectví) to the fact that with their feelings and their thoughts they are standing more passionately than ever on the side of the people and its yearnings. With this journal, which they are sending home, they appeal to all true Czechoslovaks to join in the quest for a future in peace, liberty, and justice. (Sveˇdectví 1: 1)

The optimism underlying this declaration was considerably subdued in later numbers, following the Budapest events of November 1956. All the same, several traits that would characterize the text of Sveˇdectví as it evolved over three decades are already observable in its first lines. The final sentence refers to a basic principle that set this medium quite apart from other exile periodicals. It was not aimed at the Czech community abroad to preserve and strengthen its cultural identity – “We did not want an émigré journal,” said the chief editor later (Pecˇinka/Tigrid 18) –, but addressed itself mainly to readers back home. Sveˇdectví was intended to be circulated in the CˇSSR and became an influential factor in the country’s interior politics, especially during the build-up to the Prague Spring. Domestic contributions (mostly letters and samizdat texts, but also articles from official sources) always constituted a sub-

“We did not want an émigré journal” (Neil Stewart)

253

stantial share of its content, and even staunch adherents of the Party made occasional tactical use of this illegal platform, where otherwise unprintable opinions could be communicated. Sveˇdectví adapted its activity with sometimes ruthless flexibility to the political needs of the day, most noticeably so in 1968, when the editors skipped three issues (34–36) in order to deprive Party hardliners in Prague of a propaganda target during a critical phase of the reform process (cf. Sveˇdectví 12: 188). The pragmatism of Sveˇdectví is well illustrated by the calculated rhetoric of the text quoted above. At first glance, one would hardly suspect that anyone of Tigrid’s center-right political persuasion could be behind the apostrophe to “true socialism” or the explicit approval of Central and South-East European (i.e., Polish, Hungarian, and Yugoslav) reform communism. The authors of the “Appeal” have no qualms about referring simultaneously to socialist concepts (with their internationalist implications) and to their readers’ patriotic feelings, in an apparent effort to draw in as many people as possible, rather than worrying about abstract logic or ideological consistency. Attracting attention and making contact is their first priority. Unsurprisingly, this eclectic stance came under severe criticism from different sides. Radomír Luzˇa (359) recalls how he, Horák, and Jonásˇ, all three of them Social Democrats, were ostracized by their party, while the communist regime at home strongly objected to Sveˇdectví’s usurpation of Marxist terminology for the purpose of “ideological diversion” (cf. Sveˇdectví 8: 433). The strictly anti-communist exile establishment also accused the journal and those associated with it of a dangerous lack of principles. This conflict was widely interpreted at the time (among others, by the Secret Service in Prague, cf. Posˇtová 21) as one between two Czechoslovak émigré generations: the older expatriates around Ferdinand Peroutka opposed Tigrid and his followers, most of whom were then in their early thirties. However, the ideological rift also divided the Sveˇdectví group itself. The journal’s early numbers contain not only several contributions harshly criticizing the concept of gradualism (1: 118, 140, 5: 70–71), as well as a note of protest from the Council of Free Czechoslovakia in New York (5: 69), but also an open letter from Jan Kolár, a founding member of Sveˇdectví, explaining that he considered its agenda “immoral” and “opportunistic” and therefore felt obliged to resign from his position as coeditor (Sveˇdectví 1: 112–15). Emil Ransdorf left for similar reasons and was temporarily followed in 1961 by Jirˇí Horák. According to Kovtun (qtd. in Zídek “Tajemné sveˇdectví”), not everybody realized in the mid nineteen fifties that gradualism “was the first step to victory” over communist totalitarianism, and that Sveˇdectví actually had a theoretically coherent ideology of its own. If we keep in mind the importance of the

254

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

First Czechoslovak Republic as a historical model in Tigrid’s political thought, the quoted references to “all true” or “all staunch Czechoslovaks” acquire a specific semantic value: Sveˇdectví is casting itself here not in the role of an anti-communist, anti-Russian or exile institution, but of a Czechoslovak one. This is used here as a signifier denoting, as it were, “democratic humanism in the tradition of Masaryk” rather than as a conventionally nationalist distinction. Dating the first issue October 28 – the anniversary of the founding of Czechoslovakia in 1918 – was a consciously symbolic act, and the second moment defining the lifespan of Sveˇdectví is similarly significant: the journal closed down not with the end of communism in 1989, but in 1992, when the federal state of Czechs and Slovaks broke up. Tigrid explicitly devoted the last number to “nationalism, the modern drug,” declaring that the political split marked the beginning of a new era, in which his review had finally lost its raison d’être (25: 161). During the entire course of its existence, Sveˇdectví demonstratively adhered to Masaryk’s democratic ideals, above all the principle of freedom of opinion. The editors regularly included texts out of line with their own views, such as regime communiqués, letters from indignant readers cancelling their subscriptions (e.g. Sveˇdectví 4: 215) or a communist ideological analysis of their journal (8: 419–33). In many of these cases they refrained from adding an explicit commentary, limiting themselves to the detached, matter-of-fact presentation of materials implied by the very name “Sveˇdectví,” which “expressed the basic intention of our periodical: to testify to what was going on in the heart of Europe rather than moralizing (something exiles are particularly prone to), propagating, prognosticating, and politicizing” (Lederer/Tigrid 12). It is paradoxical, by the way, that this liberal and pluralistic agenda should have been implemented by a chief editor who managed his business in austerely autocratic fashion, allegedly reducing the editorial board of Sveˇdectví to an institution of “purely symbolic” significance. “Tigrid overwhelmed us,” the writer Lubomír Martínek recalls: “On first acquaintance he was extremely pleasant, but when you began working with him you soon realized that this was no charming bon vivant but an authoritarian character who had his editorial conception and would not let anyone interfere with it” (qtd. in Zídek, “Tajemné sveˇdectví”). Likewise, the pleasant outward appearance of the journal was strictly and purposefully aligned with Tigrid’s ideological agenda: Ladislav Sutnar, a Czech exile and pioneer of twentieth-century information design, created an elegant, functional layout to suggest democratic transparency and rational evenhandedness. But Sveˇdectví was by no means a passively tolerant or indifferent medium that would publish any content or accept everyone’s views. There are many

“We did not want an émigré journal” (Neil Stewart)

255

ways of influencing a reader’s perception of a text without contradicting it directly, and devices to such effect played an important role in the semiotics of Tigrid’s periodical. His choice of quotations and, especially, his habit of citing sources out of context to make them support his own standpoint, were openly criticized even by close allies (cf. Sveˇdectví 3: 135–37), while others had reason to complain about the tendentious paraphrasing of their work. For example, an article taken from the official Czech review Plamen (Flame) appears in the exile journal (3: 367–38) with the added introduction: “The Marxist critic Milan Jungmann, incurably infected with Zhdanovism, has recently checked the pulse of Czechoslovak prose.” The text that follows contains long extracts from the original essay but also nondiegetic parentheses like “and because as a Marxist [Jungmann] is incapable of speaking independently of Party dogmas, he laments as follows” etc. Finally, at the bottom of the page, the whole contribution is attributed to “Milan Jungmann (Prague)”! The resources afforded by the graphical layout are sometimes used to a similar effect, e.g., when short quotations from political speeches, regime statements, or official radio broadcasts appear in black-framed boxes (reminiscent of obituary notices) and placed suggestively inside a text with a totally different ethos. Sveˇdectví grew considerably in size over the years (in the sixties, an annual volume had three to four hundred pages, in the eighties the average was almost one thousand) but the basic structure of the individual numbers remained unchanged. Each issue opened with a section that contained short comments by the editors on recent political and cultural events, followed by the more substantial studies and essays. The final part, entitled “Tribuna Sveˇdectví,” was reserved for letters from the readers and provided an arena for discussions and polemics. Regularly updated lists of samizdat publications and an extensive running bibliography of books on Czechoslovakia maintained by Ludmila Sˇeflová were important features of the journal. Sveˇdectví published in Czech and (albeit to a much lesser extent) in Slovak. Apart from the original contributions, it included extracts or complete texts taken from official as well as unofficial sources in the CˇSSR, alongside translated works by foreigners, mostly American, German, and Polish authors. Its focus was on political, sociological, and historical subjects, especially problems relating directly to East Central Europe. The wider context of world politics also received attention, whereas goings-on inside the Czechoslovak exile community were of relatively marginal importance compared to the space other émigré periodicals devoted to them. The arts, literature, and literary criticism were represented in Sveˇdectví from the very beginning, and gained in prominence as time went by. In keeping

256

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

with its general philosophy, the journal concentrated on works of evident political or social significance. René Wellek’s study Literature and Society was programmatically serialized over the first four issues (1: 43–52, 130–5, and 240–6), and in the summer of 1964 Sveˇdectví reprinted Karel Teige’s anti-Stalinist manifesto “Surrealismus proti proudu” (Surrealism against the Current) from 1938 (6: 383–386). The journal published and discussed domestic as well as world literature, often taking its cues from current events. The famous conference on Franz Kafka held in Liblice in May 1963 prompted a series of articles and notes (cf. Sveˇdectví 5: 78–9, 6: 113–4, 289–296, 296–371), as well as a retrospective twenty years later (18: 97–103, 127–136, 137–142) that included two chapters of the novel Der Prozess (The Trial) in Czech translation (69–95). Naturally, there was extensive coverage of the historic 4th Congress of the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union in 1967 (cf. 8: 451–548), where authors like Milan Kundera, Ludvík Vaculík and others had spoken out courageously against the regime. Special features were motivated by international awards like the 1984 Nobel Prize for Jaroslav Seifert or the 1986 Erasmus Prize for Václav Havel, by round birthdays (of Roman Jakobson, Bohumil Hrabal, Jan Kolárˇ, Václav Cˇerny´), or by prominent deaths (Víteˇzslav Nezval, Jan Cˇep, Ernest Hemingway, Egon Hostovsky´, Heinrich Böll). After Jan Werich and Jirˇí Voskovec had died in the space of nine months (October 1980 and July 1981), Sveˇdectví dedicated a whole number to the duo and its Dadaist art, the so-called “Liberated Theater,” from the interwar period (15: 1–208). On many occasions, the journal called attention to Eastern European writers who were being prosecuted as dissidents. When the Soviet regime forced Boris Pasternak to decline the Nobel Prize in 1958, Sveˇdectví devoted several commentaries and studies to him (2: 55–61, 62, 271–82, 3: 148–63, 357–65) as well as publishing extracts from Dr. Zhivago (2: 62–80) and samples of Pasternak’s poetry (2: 269–70, 3: 43–44). The Moscow trial against Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuly Daniel for “anti-Soviet activity” was covered (Sveˇdectví 7: 42–51, 8: 132–41), as were the trial of Joseph Brodsky and the case of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose Nobel Prize speech appeared in the journal (11: 609–21). Kovtun translated Evgeny Evtushenko’s poem “Babi Yar” for Sveˇdectví (4: 314). During the 1950s and 60s, the works of critical Russian writers, even those who were not dissidents, functioned as liberating models for Czechoslovak, as well as for Polish, Romanian, and Hungarian literature, because these authors (e.g., Vladimir Dudintsev or Valentin Ovechkin) offered the kind of unadorned depictions of life under socialism that their colleagues in smaller member states of the Warsaw Treaty were not permitted to give. The satellite regimes sometimes prohibited the publication of certain realist texts

“We did not want an émigré journal” (Neil Stewart)

257

from their brother country, arguing that their audiences, unlike readers in the USSR, were not yet sufficiently mature to be exposed to them (Vladislav 58, 77). Here Sveˇdectví obligingly stood in. Otherwise, the journal dealt predominantly with the repression of artists in Czechoslovakia and East Central Europe, reporting on Party campaigns against unruly culture periodicals like Tvárˇ (Face) in 1966 and Literární noviny (Literary Newspaper) in 1968, as well as on the 1967 trial of Jan Benesˇ and Karel Zámecˇník (Sveˇdectví 8: 134–37, 549–82). Ten years later, Sveˇdectví began to publish regularly the declarations of Charta 77 – and also to give accounts of rock concerts by the band “Plastic People of the Universe,” whose harassment by the regime had first brought the Charta into being as a solidarity movement. Jan Vladislav (53) has rightly given Tigrid’s journal credit for helping to maintain the continuity of Czech culture by preserving the memory of officially “forgotten” artists, by publishing materials that could not be printed in the CˇSSR, and by keeping readers at home informed about international developments that they would not otherwise have heard of. He also complained, however, that the journal tended to neglect poetry in favor of narrative prose, that many reviews were overly concerned with politics rather than artistic values, and that Sveˇdectví had failed to produce from its ranks an authoritative literary critic, who would endow the journal with a distinct critical profile (71). While we may grant the first two points, it is important to remember when considering the third that Vladislav’s analysis refers only to the first eight volumes of Sveˇdectví (1956–67) and that it was only after 1968 that Helena Kosková and the prolific Kovtun took charge of the literary criticism section, which they continued to dominate for almost twenty-five years. The history of the journal may be divided into two phases, the watershed being the Prague Spring and its aftermath. On the one hand, the debates on “gradualism” had by then subsided and Sveˇdectví was firmly established. On the other, disappointment with the failure of Dubcˇek’s project lingered, and it became clear that the political state of affairs was not going to change in the foreseeable future. In the nineteen seventies and eighties, the review intensified its contacts with dissident circles in Czechoslovakia (until then it had concentrated more on dialogue with reform-oriented Party members): two entire numbers (15: 409–600 and 16: 209–408) were edited underground in Prague, using exclusively domestic contributions, the first (1979) under the direction of Ludvík Vaculík, Petr Pithart, and Václav Havel, the second (1980) by Egon Bondy, Ivan Jirous, and Jirˇí Neˇmec. Tigrid and his collaborators also began to explore the cultural constituents of their situation in a theoretically systematic way, and on a larger scale than before. Individual articles analyzed the rela-

258

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

tionship between Czech émigré culture and German literature (18: 482–95), tried to define the status of Czech culture in the global context (18: 496–502), or attempted a general overview of Czech literature in exile (23: 234–52), while thematic issues were devoted to problems like “Electronics and Totalitarianism” (19: 1–240) or “Europe, Russia, and Us” (19: 241–528). In 1973, Tigrid sparked off a broad and heated discussion on national character with his essay “Jací jsme, kdyzˇ je zle” (What we’re like when Things are Bad). In this text (Sveˇdectví 12: 303–20), he compared catastrophic events from different phases of his country’s history, arguing – admittedly in somewhat sweeping fashion – that the Czechoslovak people and its representatives had displayed specific negative tendencies over and over again: they were small-minded, undignified, opportunistic, subservient to the point of absurdity, and exuberant in success but lethargic in the face of adversity. They totally lacked perseverance and their proverbial pacifism resulted all too often from indecision and an unwillingness to fight for their ideals. Tigrid added that his compatriots could be vindictive and cruel, mentioning the violent excesses against the German minority after 1945 (310–11), but only briefly, stopping short, that is, from touching on the arguably greatest taboo of postwar Czechoslovak historiography: the expulsion of the Sudeten-Germans. This taboo was broken five years later, when Jan Mlynárik, a Slovak historian then living in Prague, published under the pseudonym “Danubius” his “Tézy o vysídlení cˇeskoslovensky´ch nemcov” (Theses on the Eviction of the Czechoslovak Germans) in Sveˇdectví (15: 105–22). Mlynárik likened the forced transfer of two and a half million “Czechoslovak citizens of German ethnicity” (108) and the atrocities committed against them to similar actions in the USSR under Stalin and to the Nazi persecution of the Jews, speaking of “the final solution of the German question in Czechoslovakia” (120). Not only did he condemn the mass deportation for obvious humanitarian and legal reasons, he also pointed out that it had severely harmed the state culturally, politically, and economically. Particularly devastating was the damage done to its democratic culture: the people had endorsed the principle of collective guilt, lost respect for others’ property, and taken “irrational revenge” with “oriental-Asian brutality” (106). Just reestablished, the republic had sullied its moral integrity and betrayed the humanist ideals of Masaryk, thus squandering what had traditionally been Czechoslovakia’s only capital in the relations with its powerful eastern and western neighbors. “The expulsion of the Czechoslovak Germans is not only their tragedy, it is also ours,” concluded Danubius: “Its German aspects we can leave to the Germans. But we need to accept responsibility and come to terms with our guilt in our own interest rather than wait for the acts of that tragedy to repeat themselves” (122).

“We did not want an émigré journal” (Neil Stewart)

259

This article triggered a fierce discussion that went on in the pages of Sveˇdectví for several years (cf. 15: 383–406, 565–98, 785–95, 16: 175–86, 607–22, 838–40, 18: 219). As Milan Schulz writes: This long and extensive exchange of opinions showed that the matter was not, and still is not, one of purely historical interest. The debaters expressed a variety of significant and specific attitudes, reflecting the whole spectrum of political reality: there were the dogmatists on the extreme ends of that spectrum, radicals of similar ilk but occupying diametrically opposite positions, and of course those in the center, who as in every democratic culture inclined sometimes in this and sometimes in that direction […]. It was interesting to see how Danubius made patriots at home as well as in exile livid with rage. There was also a conflict of generations to be heard in the discussion, which sounded in bitter tones sometimes. (121–22)

Mlynárik himself has given an account (Sveˇdectví 19: 685–711) of the personal consequences of his “Theses” in the CˇSSR. He was hunted down and identified as “Danubius” by the police, imprisoned without trial and released after one year for health reasons. In 1982 he emigrated to Germany with his family. A few years later, Sveˇdectví was the arena for a debate concerning the work of Milan Kundera, who had left his country for France in 1975 and by the mid-1980s was the most successful contemporary Czech author, thanks predominantly to his bestselling novel Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí (The Unbearable Lightness of Being), first published in 1984 in French as L’insoutenable légèreté de l’être. Kundera became the subject of controversy on two occasions and in two respects: as an essayist propagating a specific conception of Central Europe (19: 333–72, 759, and 763) and as a writer of fictional literature (20: 135–62, 614–33, 965, and 21: 721–33). The first of these discussions was sparked by his polemical article “The Tragedy of Central Europe” in the New York Review of Books in April 1984, but really went back to a dispute that had taken place between Kundera and Václav Havel in the Czech press fifteen years earlier, after the Soviet intervention. Acknowledging this contingency, Sveˇdectví no. 74 began its feature “Údeˇl, únos, únik …?” (Lot, Kidnap, Escape …?) by reprinting the older materials: in “Cˇesky´ údeˇl” (The Czech Lot), Kundera had argued in December 1968 that it was the historical fate of the Czechs as a small people to be sandwiched between and bullied by the German and the Russian empires, but that their highly developed culture, skeptical intellect, and faculty for critical reflection more than compensated for their military inferiority. In the course of the Prague Spring they had risen above their traditional timidity, shaken off the “legacy of the small mentality” (334) and stepped into the spotlight of world history. The August invasion had not broken their spirit: “the Czechoslovak Autumn” was “even more momentous than the Czechoslovak Spring” and in the long run there was every

260

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

reason to be optimistic now that the people had finally realized “the Czech potential” (337). A month later, Havel had published a scathing critique of this optimistic analysis. According to him, “the Czech lot” was nothing but a self-adulating, pseudo-historical myth, conjured up to evade the real problems of the day. The political realities must not be sugarcoated; they demanded responsible action and the moral courage to stand up for universal human values rather than nationalist clichés about “tiny, unfortunately located, good, and intelligent Czechoslovakia suffering at the hands of its wicked neighbors” (342–43). Sveˇdectví included Kundera’s indignant reply to this from 1969 (344–49), and then proceeded to give a boxed abstract of his current essay (350–51). “The Tragedy of Central Europe” developed further the author’s notion of the quintessentially Western identity of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, and Hungary. Although these countries were politically part of the Soviet Bloc, historically they belonged as “Central Europe” to the Latin and Roman Catholic cultural sphere, which Kundera set off sharply against the Byzantine and Orthodox civilization of “Eastern Europe,” i.e., Russia. Central European culture valued the “skeptical individual” and traditionally stressed democratic diversity, whereas despotic Russian culture tended towards centralism, standardization, and imperial expansion, “the least possible variety in the largest possible space.” Soviet communism was in certain respects the fulfillment of Russian history. The East had “kidnapped” Central Europe after 1945, thus making it disappear in the eyes of a lamentably ignorant Western world, which saw it as nothing but a province of the Soviet empire and was unaware of its true cultural profile. In the discussion that followed in Sveˇdectví (350–62) there were original contributions by Milan Sˇimecˇka, Milan Hauner, and the Hungarian philosopher János Kis; François Bondy and Georges Nivat were quoted from the French journal Le Débat. In accordance with the vast majority of intellectuals who commented on the essay at the time, these authors were very critical of the sweeping distinctions it contained. While the nostalgia of Czesław Miłosz about Central Europe was “just about bearable,” Kundera had gone too far. His depiction of Russia was particularly one-sided and had “racist overtones” (Hauner in Sveˇdectví 356–57); it also concealed the fact that there always had been a strong European current in “the Russia of Pasternak, Mandelshtam, and Akhmatova” (Nivat in Sveˇdectví 361). Kundera’s Central Europe was idealized to the point of falsification, and, apart from this, its tragedy had not begun with the advent of the Soviets but with the invasion of the Nazis (Sˇimecˇka in Sveˇdectví 353, Bondy in Sveˇdectví 361). As Hauner pointed out, Hitler, not Stalin, was the product of Central European civilization (357). “The spiritual Biafra after 1968,” added Milan Sˇimecˇka, “was decidedly a homemade af-

“We did not want an émigré journal” (Neil Stewart)

261

fair […]. And the people who have made life so difficult for my friends and me over the last fifteen years […] all spoke Czech or Slovak” (354). He concluded in the pragmatic vein typical of Sveˇdectví: “Anyway, I would not try to convince the Americans that the East is the radical negation of the West. Many of them think so anyway […]. There is certainly more sense in stressing Russia’s European tradition” (356). The feature in Sveˇdectví closes with a samizdat translation of a conversation between Philip Roth and Milan Kundera (363–68) that had originally appeared in The Sunday Times Magazine in May 1984. The novelists are not allowed the last word, however: this goes to the Czech translator of the interview, the dissident writer Zdeneˇk Urbánek: “Now that my work is completed, I am not sure whether to offer it for reading. This is total rubbish. Roth should have silenced his partner after the second sentence […]. We need not grieve about some of those who have left” (368). All in all, Kundera does not fare well in this number, perhaps because Tigrid’s journal was, so to speak, “Havel-territory.” The future president was a regular collaborator and a personal friend of the chief editor (cf. Pecˇinka/ Tigrid 22–24), while Kundera, although he lived in Paris, never wrote anything directly for Sveˇdectví. A year later, the second controversy began with a samizdat review called “Kunderovské paradoxy” (Kundera’s Paradoxes) by Milan Jungmann (Sveˇdectví 20: 135–62), the former chief editor of Literární noviny who had been removed from his post and banned from publishing after the Prague Spring. He addressed the paradox that Kundera, one of the most popular novelists abroad, “a guru of Western society” (135), was so relatively unpopular not only with the communist regime, but also with the representatives of unofficial culture in the CˇSSR. Jungmann granted that his author was an exceptionally talented narrator and elegant philosophical causeur, but contended that he catered too much to the taste of a Western audience. “It is precisely this ‘unbearable lightness of writing’ that attracts the so-called mass reader to Kundera’s novels – he sees in them an ideal kind of ‘philosophical’ prose that is accessible to him [with his superficial knowledge] and pleasant reading at the same time. No obstacles lie in his path […] and his vanity is flattered” (161). A similar calculation was behind the image Kundera presented of himself to the public. “In one article, he describes his past literary activity thus: ‘I was a totally unknown author [when I wrote my first novel]. There were terrible persecutions of Czech intellectuals and Czech culture. Official documents listed me as one of the leaders of the counterrevolution, my books were prohibited and my name even eliminated from the phone registry. And all this because of Zˇert (The Joke)’” (143). Quite untrue, according to Jungmann. His

262

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

contemporaries at home were well aware that Kundera was by no means an “unknown author” in the sixties; he had been one of the leading intellectuals in the country ever since he entered Czech literature as a poet “who believed in Marx’s vision of a new man and a new society” (142). “He has created from his biography a cliché for the ignorant foreign reader, and succumbed to the mentality of an exile who is unable to explain abroad the complexity of the Czechoslovak developments” (143–44). Jungmann’s literary analysis focuses on the novel Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí. He notes that Kundera’s are not novels in the style of the “old masters” (161) but “novel-variations,” “without a closely-knit plot, where the individual protagonists never meet each other but live through their own experiences unconnected to other persons, all oriented towards the same center: the philosophical idea that the novel presents to its reader.” Kundera’s characters were not “human beings of flesh and blood,” they were “functions of a developing theme” (136–37). This was not a problem in itself but sometimes the reader received “the unpleasant impression of a dazzling performance maliciously designed to muck around with him. In his last novel, for instance, Kundera with pseudo-philosophical profundity even ascribes a metaphysical meaning – to shit.” Too often his writings resembled “a witty charade more than the accomplishment of a keen intellect” (137–38). The reviewer was also irritated by the prominence of sexual motifs in Kundera, by his extremely drastic descriptions verging on pornography, and by his obsessive linking of eroticism with violence (139). “I find this, shall we say, unprejudiced attitude completely incomprehensible and can only explain it as a concession to a fashionable trend in Western literature […] a submission to the terror of fashion” (140). Finally Jungmann, who was himself a declassed academic forced by the regime to make his living as a cleaner, objected to the manner in which Kundera had his protagonist enjoy a similar situation in Nesnesitelná lehkost, where the doctor and womanizer Tomásˇ has to work as a window cleaner after publishing a critical article; the general support and comfort he receives from his clients turn his life into one big party, with many erotic conquests along the way. “How happy, how careless, and how euphoric the life of a persecuted intellectual in Bohemia is!” fumed the critic: “Does he even have the right to complain about anything, to talk about spiritual or existential pressure” (155)? Jungmann was at least in a position to correct Kundera on one specific fact: “During the normalization years, people of very different professions, journalists, lawyers, vicars, historians, diplomats, technicians, and others became window cleaners, but not a single doctor. This was no coincidence: an administrative order specifically barred all doctors in our country from leaving their job” (154). The authenticity that Nesnesitelná lehkost assumed by including real-

“We did not want an émigré journal” (Neil Stewart)

263

istic elements from Czechoslovak political life for the entertainment of the foreign reader was a “false authenticity” (155). On this occasion, the Sveˇdectví community came out in support of their fellow exile. The following issue contained responses to Jungmann by Kveˇtoslav Chvatík, Ivo Bock, Petr Král, and Josef Sˇkvorecky´ (20: 614–33), correcting him with regard to his basic literary outlook: it was unacceptable to identify an author’s position with the views of his characters (Bock, in Sveˇdectví 632) and to ignore Kundera’s trademark irony (Král in Sveˇdectví 630). Modern literary criticism should neither moralize (Sˇkvorecky´ in Sveˇdectví 621; Bock in Sveˇdectví 631) nor base its argument on normative claims (Chvatík in Sveˇdectví 616, Bock in Sveˇdectví 631). A single plot and characters “of flesh and blood” were typical only of a certain type of novel, whereas Kundera belonged to a fundamentally different tradition (Chvatík in Sveˇdectví 616–17; Sˇkvorecky´ in Sveˇdectví 620; Bock in Sveˇdectví 631). Chvatík (616–18) even suggested that Jungmann’s insistence on such old-fashioned values indicated that he was still rooted in the aesthetics of Socialist Realism, while only Sˇkvorecky´ (620) mentioned in passing that the critic’s remarks in this respect had been rather more descriptive than reproachful (cf. also Jungmann’s reaction in Sveˇdectví 21: 722–25). As to the sexual explicitness of Kundera, it was by no means a concession to “Western literature.” “Why, did all sensual people leave Czechoslovakia after 1968?” asked Petr Král (628) and Sˇkvorecky´ pointed out that eroticism had always been typical of Kundera’s work. The fact that it was endowed with metaphysical connotations favorably distinguished his writings from the mainstream of contemporary American literature, where sexual intercourse was described with inflationary frequency but only for its own sake. The last author in the USA who could compete with Kundera in this field was Arthur Miller. As Sˇkvorecky´ saw it, Jungmann, actually quite a perceptive critic, had inadvertently lowered himself to the level of many moralizing Czech émigré journalists by flatly dismissing such motifs. “If he lived in exile, he would run a mile away from the company of these people” (622). Apart from the literary aspects of the debate, the opposition between the exiled intellectuals in Paris, Bremen, and Toronto on one side and the Prague dissident on the other is very interesting to observe. The former tend to cast themselves in the role of cosmopolitan men of the world, remarking that Jungmann “had no idea at all about the book market” (Chvatík in Sveˇdectví 616) or “had apparently misunderstood” several press articles because they were written for Western readers (Sˇkvorecky´ in Sveˇdectví 619–20). Nor, allegedly, was he aware that Kundera, far from being a “guru of Western society,” had actually been received rather critically at first in Germany (Chvatík in Sveˇdectví 615) and the United States (Sˇkvorecky´ in Sveˇdectví 619). At present, however, it

264

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

was almost exclusively thanks to him that the world took any notice at all of Czechoslovakia (Chvatík in Sveˇdectví 618), something the likes of Jungmann failed to realize. “Is it not typical of us that once we have a world-famous author we immediately go about telling everyone that he does not deserve his fame?” wrote Petr Král, arguing that traditional small-minded Czech provincialism was still alive behind the Iron Curtain: “Kundera’s main problem is that he is not […] a martyr, a new Hus or at least a new Havlícˇek […], but plays the role of a nonchalant hedonist” (626–27). While Chvatík (614) and Sˇkvorecky´ (624) referred in general terms to the adage that “the prophet has no honor in his own country,” Král was more specific in his criticism and protested sharply against the way in which “the dissidents monopolized the claim to authenticity” at home as well as abroad: “Jungmann speaks not only as an independent critic, but also as an avenger, a representative of that parallel power that the Charta has become in contemporary Czech culture” (627). Sˇkvorecky´ (commenting on Kundera’s “false authenticity”) struck a more placatory note: “Do we not hear two truly Czech voices, one sounding from our homeland and one from all corners of the world […], voices that in spite of their different timbres sound in harmony? The voice of the Czech samizdat, saturated with the immediacy of experience, and the voice of Czech exile, in which the realities of home, removed in time and space, are naturally transformed into metaphors and likenesses” (625)? This was a valiant attempt to relate exile and domestic opposition to each other and to reconcile a partnership of such vital importance for Sveˇdectví.

5. Sveˇdectví : Finances and Logistics It is difficult to say anything concrete about the finances of the journal because the chief editor, who was in sole charge of all monetary matters, remained extremely reluctant all his life to talk about the subject. Communist propaganda always insisted, of course, that Sveˇdectví was sponsored by the CIA (e.g., Bednárˇ, Posledni role 68), a claim that should perhaps not be dismissed out of hand, given the generally close contacts many of its protagonists maintained with CIA-financed Radio Free Europe. The journalist Martin Danesˇ recollects that while he was writing his French diploma thesis on Sveˇdectví in the nineteen eighties, Tigrid at first encouraged and supported him, and even offered to publish parts of the study. “But then my supervisor insisted that I include a chapter on the economic background of the periodical and when I came with that to Mr. Tigrid, he threw me out and there was no longer any talk of publishing my work” (qtd. in Zídek “Ta-

“We did not want an émigré journal” (Neil Stewart)

265

jemné sveˇdectví”). It is very likely that Tigrid, who had been observed by the Czechoslovak Secret Service for most of his life, took this Czech student in Paris for a communist informer. Danesˇ would not have been the first such person to try and get financial information out of him. Just one month before the first number of Sveˇdectví came out, somebody using the code name “Bartosˇ,” who had apparently talked to Tigrid about his plans, reported to Prague: “Of the first issue, there are to be around two thousand copies printed and distributed in the CˇSSR and eight hundred copies for the Western world. Printing one issue will cost five hundred dollars, and since it is meant to be a quarterly, we are talking about two thousand dollars a year, and that sum he has been guaranteed. The journal will be financed by some rich people in the USA, whom he does not want to name, but he says it is not at all difficult to obtain two thousand a year” (qtd. in Posˇtová 17–18). In view of the vast difference between the figures passed on by “Bartosˇ” to his Secret Service superiors and the actual, much more moderate print run of Sveˇdectví no. 1, one gets the impression that in this case the informer may have been deliberately misinformed. Tigrid has mentioned that the Slovak Sokol organization in New Jersey and later L’udovít Sˇturc, the administrator of the long-established Czech expatriate journal New Yorské listy (New York Pages; 1874–1966), helped with the publication of the first issues by printing them at a very moderate price and sometimes discreetly “forgetting” about overdue bills (Lederer/Tigrid 14). Tigrid credited Ján Papánek, a former Slovak delegate to the United Nations and “not only a generous man, but also one who understood our cause” with having contributed the first donation to Sveˇdectví: on one occasion he said Papánek gave him five hundred dollars (Lederer/Tigrid 14), later he claimed to have received a thousand dollars from him (Pecˇinka/Tigrid 18). Much more substantial sums, and on a regular basis, were apparently supplied in later years by the Czech-Canadian industrialist Thomas J. Bata, who ran the Bata shoe company from the nineteen forties to the nineteen eighties. Tigrid has hinted at Bata’s commitment (Kaiser/Tigrid), and Ilja Kunesˇ, who was member of the Editorial Board between 1985 and 1991, recalls that the shoe tycoon bought the first computers for Sveˇdectví “at fifty thousand francs a piece and under the condition that no-one should ever talk about it” (qtd. in Zídek “Tajemné sveˇdectví”). Tigrid says he envied his Polish counterpart Jerzy Giedroyc, editor of the monthly Kultura, for the villa and the “loads of money” at his disposal in Paris (Pecˇinka/Tigrid 19). During the twenty-nine years of Sveˇdectví ’s Parisian operation Tigrid was able to have it printed at a favorable price in the Belgian city of Bruges, but the journal’s financial situation was certainly never one of great

266

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

affluence. The periodical was aimed chiefly at readers in the CˇSSR, i.e., at people who could not pay for, let alone subscribe to it. Of the thousand copies of the first issue a hundred-and-fifty were sent home. The last number edited in exile in 1989 had a print run of twenty-one thousand, of which fifteen thousand went to Czechoslovakia (Exilová periodika 73). Thus between ten and seventy percent of the production did not only bring no returns at all, but even cost money to deliver to their destination – a considerable handicap for any commercial enterprise. Over the years, several editorial notices appeared in Sveˇdectví, asking the readers in France, Germany, and the USA to pay their subscription fees in time and reminding them also that the samizdat practice of passing a single copy on from one reader to the next was an excellent idea under a communist regime, but economically harmful for a journal when adopted by its clientele in the West (3: 180). The methods by which Sveˇdectví was smuggled through the Iron Curtain were rather crude to begin with, and must certainly have entailed the loss of a considerable number of copies: the journal was simply sent by post to various addresses, including some that had been picked at random from the telephone registry. Later, Tigrid and his collaborators used more sophisticated strategies, dispatching their mail from constantly changing places or sending only separate articles as off-prints. Sometimes envelopes containing copies of Sveˇdectví would be posted in Vienna, giving as addressee a fictitious person in Hungary and as sender a real person in Czechoslovakia, to whom the Czech post would then duly “return” the parcel. The external appearance of Sveˇdectví was systematically varied, e.g., some issues have no title on the cover, and several copies were printed in pocket-size (15 × 10 cm) as well as in the regular format (23 × 15 cm). Smaller brochures were not only more difficult to detect in the mail, but also more easily concealed, carried around, and distributed underhand. Sveˇdectví’s pronounced tendency towards “self-anthologization” can be explained in similar terms. The editors were in the habit of extensively quoting and reprinting texts that had already been published years before (e.g., Sveˇdectví 50: 273–94 and 89/90) and of regularly bringing out separate anthologies of its previous contents (for the bibliographical details see Exilová periodika 75, 77). In addition, texts that had originally been serialized in the journal were often re-used for the eponymous book series (Zach 43). Such publication practices were neither economically motivated attempts to sell old wine in new bottles, nor a sign that Sveˇdectví was short of fresh contributions. Rather, since one could never be sure which materials had reached a given reader, reprinting important texts several times was a way of maximizing their chances of making it through.

“We did not want an émigré journal” (Neil Stewart)

267

In the seventies and eighties, specially prepared vans were used to transport Sveˇdectví into the CˇSSR (see Bednárˇ, Poslední role 76 for a photograph of such a van confiscated by the police), and Western officials sometimes helped to smuggle it in: Ivana Tigridová mentions “several German diplomats” and “the wife of a Danish envoy to Prague.” She also explicitly names the sociologist Jirˇina Sˇiklová, the philosopher and future prime minister Petr Pithart, and the poet Jan Vladislav as collaborators helping to circulate Sveˇdectví in Bohemia (see Bendová/Tigridová). Jan Cˇulík points out the logistic contribution of Jan Kavan, founder of the London-based Palach Press agency, and later Czech foreign secretary and deputy prime minister. Some people became an active part of the network even against their wishes, as the journalist Sláva Volny´ remembers: I had a colleague whose husband was a high-ranking Party official. We were to go and do some reportage together and I came for her to their flat. While she was getting ready, I walked about the living room and found some kind of brochure lying there. I picked it up and began reading it. It contained background information about the last plenary meeting of the Party. It was extremely interesting and I said to myself: “These Party pobaahs (ty stranicky´ zvírˇata) always have better information than we do. I wonder who writes it for them.” My colleague entered the room, saw the brochure in my hands, turned pale and tried to snatch it from me. I held on to it and then saw that it was Sveˇdectví, published in Paris. I am afraid I allowed myself a little blackmail at this point, because I said to her: “You know what? You are going to leave this Sveˇdectví to me and pass it on to me in future, otherwise I will report you.” She accepted the compromise, and from then on I regularly received Sveˇdectví. (qtd. in Lederer 150–51)

Czechoslovak writers, diplomats, or journalists traveling to Western Europe, Scandinavia, or the United States were often approached and given the journal to read. Josef Sˇkvorecky´ recalls how he met Tigrid at a conference of the PEN Club in Oslo in 1962 and received from him a broad selection of copies from various years. These were eagerly studied on the car journey back (a friend did the driving), but Sˇkvorecky´ dared not take them along on the ferryboat ride to East Germany, and so he had to leave them with a bleeding heart “behind some shed” at the landing dock in Denmark (Sˇkvorecky´ 169). Ivo Fleischman, who was cultural attaché in Paris at the time, reported to Prague on March 25, 1966: “Tigrid is feigning friendliness, but he certainly has ulterior motives. He knows exactly when any of our cultural workers is coming to France. And no sooner has he arrived than he finds a number of Sveˇdectví in his hotel room” (qtd. in Zídek “Tajemné sveˇdectví”). Just three years later, Fleischman himself had emigrated and was writing for Sveˇdectví (45: 49–60).

268

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

6. The Empire Writes Back Sveˇdectví and the communist regime in Czechoslovakia may have been opposed to one another, but as systems and networks they were closely interlinked: both sides were well informed about their antagonist, very much affected by its presence and heavily influenced by its development. Each understood the other’s aims and strategies remarkably well. The journalist Karel Jezdinsky´ has pointed out the “schizophrenia” underlying Prague’s attempts to deal with Sveˇdectví (101–102): on the one hand, the authorities would play down its importance, insisting that the impact such a journal could have in the CˇSSR was “minimal” at best (qtd. in Sveˇdectví 8: 432), that its attacks were completely off-target and its ideology had long been consigned to “the scrap heap of history.” On the other, the figure of Tigrid was blown up to demonic proportions whenever it seemed expedient to present to the public the image of a sly and dangerous enemy, and “panicky administrative and police measures” were taken to counteract his influence. Three separate if overlapping areas of regime activity against Sveˇdectví can be distinguished: intelligence operations, scientific analysis, and popular propaganda. As an influential political journalist of conservative repute, Tigrid had been under close observation by the Czech communists long before the coup d’état of February 1948 (Posˇtová 19), and their attention did not lessen when he went into exile. The Czechoslovak Ministry of the Interior kept a voluminous file on Tigrid that contained the reports of pseudonymous informers in Germany, the USA, and France under such aliases as “Leon,” “Dárek,” “Stry´cˇek By´cˇek” (Uncle Bull) or “40.” To this day, these materials from more than four decades represent the most extensive source of information on Sveˇdectví (all the more so because the journal’s own archives are almost entirely lost). According to his wife, Tigrid generally treated the perpetual surveillance of himself and his personal environment with proud disdain (Bendová/Tigridová), but one suspects that it could not always be ignored, not, for instance, when the Paris premises were vandalized and a stink bomb was planted at the editorial office (Zídek “Tajemné sveˇdectví”). On one occasion, an observer of the journal’s headquarters apparently thought he had been detected and hastily drove off, nearly running over Tigrid’s fourteen-year-old son. In 1981, the telephone in his study was tapped and some private conversations recorded, a collage of which was then broadcast by Radio Prague. This caused a minor diplomatic scandal, in the course of which President Mitterrand called in the Czechoslovak ambassador to protest against bugging operations in his country. Shortly afterwards, Sveˇdectví had to move house in Paris, because its landlord had read about the affair in the French press and gained the impres-

“We did not want an émigré journal” (Neil Stewart)

269

sion that his tenants were terrorists of some sort. It was at the new headquarters at Rue Croix des Petits Champs in the 1st arrondissement that a commemorative plaque to the journal was unveiled in April 2007. Tigrid (“Na prazˇské jaro”) has hinted that if he should one day reveal the names of everyone who secretly cooperated with Sveˇdectví (which he never did) the result would be “a pretty unbelievable list.” Immediately after 1989, however, he and his wife were shocked to discover how many people whom they had “trusted one hundred per cent” had for many years been reporting about them to Prague “in an assiduous and stupid fashion” (Bendová/Tigridová). The file at the Ministry of the Interior contains their family photographs, a detailed description of Sveˇdectví’s editorial office, and a floor plan of the premises (reproduced in Posˇtová 34–43). We have seen how acutely aware Tigrid and his collaborators were of their target group, how they addressed themselves specifically to certain types of readers. Conversely, the Czechoslovak Secret Service knew quite well how to approach him. Agents were usually told to play the role of open-minded communists, seeking an informal exchange of ideas. The following instructions were sent in June 1956 to “Bartosˇ” in New York: You will arrange to meet him and open the conversation by saying that his political thoughts are very interesting and very different indeed from the uninspiring attitudes hitherto taken by the official emigration. You will flatter his person and his qualities. Make it clear […] that you have entertained similar thoughts yourself […], that this could be the beginning of a new era of émigré activity, the beginning of further and far-reaching action. You would be very glad if he, a man standing at the fore of this new movement, would inform you about what he intended to do next. Make it clear that you are talking to him on a purely private basis.

When the news got around that the publication of a new journal was imminent, the orders for “Bartosˇ” became more specific: What are his aims? How does he want to achieve them? Who is behind all this, how numerous is his group, and who is in it? Is he at all the representative of a group or does he speak only for himself ? On what issues does he disagree with Peroutka? […] Who does he want to send his journal to (names!) and by what means? What will the content of this journal be and how will it attempt to cooperate with intellectuals back home? How does he conceive of that? (qtd. in Posˇtová 20, 22).

It is interesting that during the early days, i.e., before Sveˇdectví came out for the first time, there were apparently plans to recruit Tigrid as an agent for the Czech Secret Service and thus make active use of his periodical rather than obstruct it. After all, he openly propagated coexistence and courageously opposed the strictly anti-communist course of other Czech emigrants as well as of the US government. “Bartosˇ” wrote in his communication of October 3,

270

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

1956: “I recommend that we continue negotiating with Leon about support for his journal and actually pass on a few numbers to members of our Party, who will certainly welcome such materials for study” (qtd. in Zídek “Tajemné sveˇdectví”). However, he seems to have failed to convince his superiors: a copy of his letter in Prague is covered with handwritten notes like “Nonsense!” or “I disagree” and “Bartosˇ is not acting in accordance with his orders!” One marginal comment reads “It is obvious at first glance that this is a politically dangerous journal, the impact of which could well be much greater than the flyers and broadcasts of Radio Free Europe.” The last conversation between Tigrid and “Bartosˇ” took place on November 5, 1956, just after the Soviet army had invaded Hungary. Two days later, “Bartosˇ” wired home: “My final meeting with Leon has shown him to be a sworn enemy of communism. This, roughly, is what he said: ‘The events in Hungary prove that the people in the People’s Republic hate the communists and the USSR, and that there can be no negotiating with communists. The people praise those who murder communists and Secret Service agents because they are occupation forces just as the Germans were’” (qtd. in Posˇtová 23–24). The idea to rope in Tigrid as an informant was duly dropped. During the years that followed, the extensive Secret Service correspondence concerning him generally dwelt more on how his activities could be countered and how he might be “brought back to the CˇSSR and held accountable for his deeds” (qtd. in Posˇtová 26). When Tigrid, now officially charged with treason, traveled to a meeting of the PEN Club in Budapest in 1964 (cf. his account in Sveˇdectví 7: 69–75), the Czechoslovak government applied in vain to its Hungarian allies for his extradition (Zídek “Hon”). In July 1967, he was sentenced in absentia to fourteen years in prison in a trial that attracted considerable international attention. A co-defendant, the young writer Jan Benesˇ (who, unlike Tigrid, had the misfortune to be present in person), was convicted of collaboration with Sveˇdectví and given five years. Benesˇ later blamed Tigrid for his arrest, suspecting him of a deliberate indiscretion in order to publicize a forthcoming book! By the early 1960s it had become abundantly clear to the authorities in Prague that Sveˇdectví must be taken seriously: neither had it gone out of business after the first few numbers (like so many other exile periodicals), nor could its distribution in the CˇSSR be effectively prevented. The journal’s ideology, aims, and strategies were now objects of serious analysis at the ideological department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, a treatment of Sveˇdectví that differed in nature from the ongoing intelligence operations, as well as from the more direct propaganda of the post-1968 phase (see below). The results of such examinations were, of course, not intended for the general reader, but distributed among a few political cadres. Never-

“We did not want an émigré journal” (Neil Stewart)

271

theless, the September 1965 number of the Party brochure series “Studijní prameny” (Study Sources) with a confidential analysis of Sveˇdectví somehow fell into the hands of Tigrid, who published the whole text in the pages of his own periodical, gleefully including the title page, which bore the words “For internal use only. Do not replicate!” (8: 419). “Over the past few years,” the readers of Sveˇdectví learnt from this text, “the journal has attempted to intensify the effect of its ideological diversion by adapting itself to certain moods and tendencies in our country. […] It is remarkably well informed and adopts a concrete and matter-of fact approach, thus subtly concealing its attacks on communism” (419–20). Unlike the cruder propagandistic campaigns of the nineteen seventies, which tended to associate Sveˇdectví with Sudeten-German nationalism, the ‘Studijní prameny’ analysis correctly pointed out that Tigrid’s journal “distances itself from revanchist tendencies,” propagating instead “Central European reconciliation by means of a normalization of relations” between East and West (427). For Czechoslovakia, we are told, Sveˇdectví demanded greater independence from the Soviet Union, artfully employing references to national traditions and devoting special attention to the Slovak question. Sveˇdectví attempts to maximize the effect of its propaganda by studying in great detail the inner conditions of various countries and by a differentiated approach to individual countries as well as to separate social classes within these countries. […] This propaganda does not hesitate to include Marxist terminology in its arsenal. […] It has an especially strong orientation towards our youth and various strata of the intelligentsia […], attempting to bring the intelligentsia and the cultural front into opposition to the Party. (432–33)

Ignoring for a moment the ideological bias of the text (which is omnipresent but does not actually get in the way of the factual analysis), it must be admitted that the unknown Party strategist writing for “Studijní prameny” actually offered a fairly perceptive study of Sveˇdectví. The fact that such analysis was not meant to be published even made it possible, in some instances, to acknowledge the opponent’s strengths. Oldrˇich Pilát’s Formy ideologické diverze, ˇcinnost emigrace a rozveˇdek (Forms of Ideological Diversion, Émigré and Intelligence Activity), a booklet intended for instructional purposes at the Party’s Academy of Political Science, explicitly separated the realism of Tigrid’s journal from other, more conservative exile institutions: “Sveˇdectví contends that in spite of all the utter nonsense programmatically proclaimed by the Council of Free Czechoslovakia […] revisionism inside the Communist Party is a political reality that can be built upon.” And the author goes on to admit: “It reckons with such revisionist phenomena as really do exist [in our country], in various public spheres: the economy, science, culture, among the university professors and students” (Pilát 108–109).

272

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

A third form of regime activity against Sveˇdectví differed from these writings in that it addressed the general public in the CˇSSR and was not meant to offer a sober analysis of the enemy’s doings, but rather to discredit him in the eyes of a larger, less informed audience, often by means of downright slander. This strategy became especially common during “normalization” in the nineteen seventies, when Tigrid was widely presented as one of the intellectual incendiaries behind the Prague Spring. A TV program called Pod maskou soukromníka (Under the Mask of a Private Citizen) was aired by the Czech Broadcasting Company in March 1979, dedicated to Sveˇdectví and its chief editor. Tigrid is introduced as “a propagator of war, who has for many years regarded terror as the only means of political struggle, [but] now on orders from Washington inclines towards a so-called politics of building bridges and dialogue.” Karel Jezdinsky´ (109) calls the show “feeble-minded” and it certainly is made in a somewhat awkwardly sensationalist fashion. Dramatic music will sound in the background, as mysterious pairs of feet hurry along dark corridors. The writer Ota Ornest appears and confesses how he betrayed his people as a collaborator of Sveˇdectví (Ornest had been sentenced to three and a half years in prison in 1977 and was granted a pardon in return for his public kowtow). Footage shot with a secret camera at Prague Central Station documents the arrest of two German students who had attempted to smuggle a vanload of Sveˇdectví into the country. Good patriotic workers recount how they were approached and baited by the evil one: “Not long ago, I received a package with a postage mark from Stockholm and ˇ d’ár our precise address on it,” the principal of the People’s Art School in Z nad Sázavou recollects with a shudder: “Having read a few lines, I realized that it was subversive, seditious, and slanderous material, so I immediately notified the State Security and handed it over to them.” The commentator triumphs: “Let Tigrid do what he does, but he will see that no-one here is interested in his output. The Sveˇdectví copies he sends are being turned in by their intended addressees.” During the roundtable discussion at the end of the program, one participant sums up the situation as follows: “The socialist countries, including Czechoslovakia, are examples to the capitalist world – and dangerous examples, too. Our reality and the truth about our country are very dangerous for our opponents. To obscure this truth and to keep the public away from it, is, therefore, the aim of all this ideological diversion and the mission of all the Mr. Tigrids out there” (qtd. in Jezdinsky´ 109–110). Two pamphlets published by a certain Petr Bednárˇ in 1978, Poslední role pana ‘T’ (The Last Role of Mr. ‘T’) and Cesta bez návratu (Path of No Return), must also count as examples of popular propaganda. These texts are hybrid in terms of genre: each contains a fictitious narrative in the style of a cheap crime

“We did not want an émigré journal” (Neil Stewart)

273

novel, in which an unnamed first-person narrator, apparently a Czech secret agent, moves around in Western émigré circles, meeting their most prominent representatives. These are variously depicted as thieves, drunkards, traitors, womanizers, and former Nazi collaborators. Tigrid – or “Mr. T” – is the worst of them all, a war deserter who spends most of his time in bed with an English nymphomaniac and has an innocent rural activist in the CˇSSR murdered by his henchmen. In addition to the narratives, both texts assume the authenticity of non-fiction by including photographs of real objects and persons. Like the TV program, however, the documentary element of Bednárˇ’s books is adversely affected by the official taboos surrounding their subject matter: it suffers from a distinct lack of really spectacular things to show. The author is often reduced to presenting slightly nondescript exhibits like snapshots of the Sveˇdectví headquarters from the outside or press portraits of Tigrid. A pile of confiscated copies and a letter written by the chief editor “to the CIA,” apparently had to be photographed from a safe distance, so as to make sure the writing was illegible. Popular propaganda against Sveˇdectví in Czechoslovakia made frequent use of an alarmingly familiar image: the character of Tigrid is drawn as scheming, shady, sly, and sneaky, and a suitcase full of CIA dollars is invariably part of his iconography. The anti-Semitic clichés employed here are fairly obvious. Sometimes, the regime could be even more direct. The way in which the jury and the official press emphasized the defendant’s Jewish origins when “Tigrid-Schönfeld” was convicted of treason in 1967, was one of the motives prompting his colleague Ladislav Mnˇacˇko to emigrate to Israel (cf. Sveˇdectví 8: 585, Jezdinsky´ 106). And after Tigrid had published his above-mentioned article on the Czechoslovak national character, the Party organ Rudé pravo (Red Law) explicitly commented that in view of the author’s ancestry “our national character is not his business in the first place.” Paradoxically, when it came to attacking Tigrid and Sveˇdectví, conservative exiles and communist propagandists were often in a position to borrow each other’s imagery and arguments.

Works Cited Bednárˇ, Petr. Poslední role pana ‘T’ (The Last Role of Mr. ‘T’). Prague: Magnet, 1978. Bednárˇ, Petr. Cesta bez návratu (Path of No Return). Prague: Magnet, 1978. Bendová, Jana, and Ivana Tigridová. “Sveˇdectví Ivany Tigridové” (The Testimony of Ivana Tigrid). Mladá Fronta Dnes (October 27, 2006). http://www.margolius.co.uk/MFrontaDnes.htm. Cˇulik, Jan. “Zemrˇel Pavel Tigrid” (Pavel Tigrid Has Died). Britské listy (September 1, 2003). http://www.blisty.cz/art/15222.html.

274

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

Exilová periodika. Katalog periodik ˇceského a slovenského exilu a krajansky´ch tisku˚ vydávany´ch po roce 1945 (Exile Periodicals. A Catalogue of Czech and Slovak Periodicals in Exile and Local Printed Materials Published after 1945). Ed. Lucie Formanová, Jirˇí Gruntorád, and Michal Prˇibánˇ. Prague: Libri prohibiti, 1999. Halada, Andrej. “Pavel Tigrid spáchal sebevrazˇdu” (Pavel Tigrid Committed Suicide). Reflex online (September 12, 2003). http://www.reflex.cz/Clanek14033.html. Jezdinsky´, Karel. “Sveˇdectví a prazˇsky´ rezˇim” (Sveˇdectví and the Prague Regime). Lederer 99–112. Kaiser, Daniel and Pavel Tigrid. “Poprvé i naposledy jsem veˇrˇil Grebenícˇkovi (rozhovor s Pavlem Tigridem)” (I Have Trusted Grebenícˇek for the First and Last Time [A Conversation with Pavel Tigrid]). Lidové noviny (November 25, 2000). Kovtun, Jirˇí. “Politicky´ spisovatel Pavel Tigrid” (Pavel Tigrid, the Political Writer). Lederer 17–28. Krˇen, Jan. Do emigrace (Into Emigration). Prague: Nasˇe vojsko, 1963. Kundera, Milan. Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí (The Unbearable Lightness of Being). Toronto: Sixty-Eight Publishers, 1984. First published in French as L’insoutenable légèreté de l’être. Kundera, Milan. “The Tragedy of Central Europe.” The New York Review of Books (April 26, 1984). 33–38. Lederer, Jirˇí, and Pavel Tigrid. “Rozhovor s Pavlem Tigridem” (A Conversation with Pavel Tigrid). Lederer 9–16. Lederer, Jirˇí. Sveˇdectví Pavla Tigrida (Pavel Tigrid’s Sveˇdectví). Frankfurt/Main: Opus bonum, 1982. Luzˇa, Radomír. V Hitleroveˇ objetí (In Hitler’s Embrace). Prague: Torst, 2006. ˇ ivotní kliky Pavla Tigrida” (The Fortunes of Pavel Pecˇinka, Bohumil, and Pavel Tigrid. “Z Tigrid). Pavel Tigrid. Marx na Hradcˇanech (Marx on the Hradcˇin). Prague: Barrister & Principal, 2001. 7–24. Pilát. Oldrˇich. Formy ideologické diverze, ˇcinnost emigrace a rozveˇdek (Forms of Ideological Diversion, Émigré and Intelligence Activity). Prague: Vysoká sˇkola politická ÚV KSCˇ, 1971. Posˇtová, Martina. “Pocˇátky Sveˇdectví, cˇtvrtletníku Pavla Tigrida, a reakce komunistického rezˇimu v CˇSR na jeho existence” (The Beginnings of Pavel Tigrid’s Quarterly Sveˇdectví and the Reaction of the Communist Regime in the CˇSR to its Existence), B.A. Thesis. University of Brno, 2007. http://is.muni.cz/th/163110/ff_b. Schulz, Milan. “My tady a oni tam” (We here and they there). Lederer 113–22. Sveˇdectví. Cˇtvrtletník pro politiku a kulturu (Testimony. Quarterly for Politics and Culture). Ed. Pavel Tigrid, et al. 25 vols. New York: Jirˇí Horák, 1956–1960, Paris: Jirˇí Horák, Radomír Luzˇa, and Sveˇdectví, 1960–90, Prague: Melantrich, 1990–92. Sˇkvorecky´, Josef. “Sveˇdectví v mém zˇivote” (Sveˇdectví in My Life). Lederer 167–71. Tigrid, Pavel. Politická emigrace v atomovém veˇku (Political Emigration in the Atomic Age). Paris: Sveˇdectví, 1968. Tigrid, Pavel. Le Printemps de Prague (The Prague Spring). Paris: Seuil, 1968. Tigrid, Pavel. Why Dubcˇek Fell. Trans. Lucy Lawrence from the French La Chute irrésistible d’Alexander Dubcˇek. London: Macdonald, 1971. Tigrid, Pavel. “Na prazˇské jaro jsem nikdy neveˇrˇil” (I Never Believed in the Prague Spring). Lidové noviny ( January 13, 1990). Tigrid, Pavel. Kapesní pru˚vodce inteligentní zˇeny po vlastním osudu (The Intelligent Woman’s Pocket Guide to Her Own Fate). 1988. Prague: Academia, 2000. Tigrid, Pavel. Marx na Hradcˇanech (Marx on the Hradcˇin). 1960. Brno: Barrister & Principal, 2001.

“We did not want an émigré journal” (Neil Stewart)

275

Vladislav, Jan. “Sveˇdectví a literatura” (Sveˇdectví and Literature). Lederer 51–78. Zach, Alesˇ. Kniha a ˇcesky´ exil 1949–1990 (The Book and Czech Exile 1949–1990). Prague: Torst 1995. Zídek, Petr. “Tajemné sveˇdectví Pavla Tigrida” (The Secret Testimony of Pavel Tigrid). Lidové noviny (October 21, 2006). Zídek, Petr. “Hon na stry´cˇka by´cˇka” (The Hunt for Uncle Bull). Lidové noviny (September 1, 2007).

276

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

Monica Lovinescu at Radio Free Europe Camelia Cra˘ciun

In retrospect, my generation seems to be divided between exilés and convicts. There were, of course, in the same generation communist winners (meaning they became communists when the self-imposed Red Army entered the country). But these people I knew very little or not at all. Before I even understood what History was about, I was already among its losers. (Lovinescu, La apa Vavilonului 1: 26) [May 10, 1946] I write in my Diary: “What can I have in common with politics?” A question I will contest my whole life. If destiny has corners, a devil must be watching me from there, smiling sardonically and repeating my stupid question from that moment on. He does not stop asking me this question. And smiling. (La apa Vavilonului, 1: 41)

On the evening of November 18, 1977, Radio-Free-Europe journalist Monica Lovinescu was physically attacked in her own courtyard in Paris, while returning home. Two men speaking French with a strange accent approached her for delivering a message, but she refused to let them come into the house, as she found something unusual about them. They started beating her cruelly and ran away only when a passerby entered the courtyard, alerted by the cries of Lovinescu, who became unconscious. The head of the Securitate (Romanian Secret Police), General Ion Mihai Pacepa, defected later to the United States and revealed conversations with his direct boss, President Nicolae Ceaus¸escu. From these, Lovinescu learned that the Party and its Leader were extremely concerned that the international image of the country suffered from the criticism that she and her husband Virgil Ierunca broadcasted in their weekly program at Radio Free Europe. RFE’s activity had in general been of a great concern to Ceaus¸escu because it heavily criticized the frequent human rights violations in Romania, and the personality cult around the leader and his wife. As Lovinescu often confessed in her journal and memoirs, she was amazed to find out how influential and powerful the Romanian officials believed she was; they apparently overestimated her influence at Radio Free Europe, and her capacity to rally the French and international press and public opinion against the regime. Nevertheless, her voice was indeed in-

Monica Lovinescu at Radio Free Europe (Camelia Craciun)

277

fluential and her broadcasts reached many intellectual and political circles abroad, and, more importantly, in Romania. Mostly she succeeded in connecting people and organizing actions to rehabilitate the moral and intellectual reputation of Romanian writers blacklisted by a regime that also launched defamation campaigns after their defection to the West, to save individuals whose lives were threatened in Romania by building up dossiers of humanrights infringements, and to re-establish the literary reputation of those who became marginalized when they refused to support the regime. In this article I analyze the mechanisms Monica Lovinescu used in building her influential position among French journalists and intellectuals as well as among the Romanian exile community abroad. I am also interested in her reputation and popularity with the Romanian audience at home, which found in her discourse a political and cultural criticism that could not be voiced inside the country. Lovinescu was a credible reference source for the Western press and intellectuals in matters of Romanian culture and politics. I analyze her popularity and credibility in terms of her personal background (family, connections at home, intellectual milieu, and education), her privileged position at the Romanian unit of RFE, her cultural and political criticism, and, finally, her essential role in a series of communication networks within the Romanian exile community, French journalists and intellectuals, and Romanian intellectuals at home. I perceive her as a strong media force, and I attempt to understand her position as a radio journalist who broadcasts mainly for a Romanian public deprived of media choices and personal liberties. Listeners at home found that her programs represented their own criticism and revolt. She offered them a critique and a counter voice to the communist political and cultural ideology. Eventually I focus on her strategy to create a reputation, on her function, and on her impact. The research I undertook for this article relied mainly on primary sources, since there are no studies dedicated to the Romanian unit of RFE or to Monica Lovinescu’s activity, apart from the abundant post-1989 Romanian reviews of her massive radio scripts, her incomplete journals (both Lovinescu’s and Ierunca’s journals from the 1950–70 period were destroyed and only partially reconstructed), her memoirs, interview volumes and a novel. In the few studies that have been dedicated to the Romanian intellectual exiles and to the literary life of the communist period, she is perceived as a major figure of the exile community and as an opinion leader of the Romanian public during the communist regime, but no studies exist that would specifically analyze her position or would take a distance from her encomiastic receptions. Since no work has been done on the Romanian unit of RFE (and very few other published primary sources are available, apart from Lovinescu’s writings, mainly

278

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

including a couple of personal accounts of former RFE journalists), all approaches to Monica Lovinescu’s activity and impact have until now been relying on her personal perspective, – which makes for an inherent imbalance. Testimonies, memoirs, and other ego documents by other figures at the RFE and in the Diaspora are rare and offer little information that could be used to create a broader, less personal picture of her and her environment. The broadcasting archive of RFE stored at Hoover Institution at Stanford University, California offered me a larger perspective on the activity of the Romanian unit. I also had access to a number of unpublished script pieces of great relevance that Lovinescu did not include in her publications (at least concerning the period of the mid-late 1970s and early 1980s, the focus of my research). Finally, I was able to look at the documents of her Sunday round tables of the French Scene broadcast, which are less known to the Romanian public. Still in the process of classifying the materials, the RFE archive is a vast resource, containing most of the daily broadcast scripts (alas with gaps, due to the unfinished classification and the extremely scanty documentation of the first decades) as well as the tapes of the programs (not yet digitized, which makes comparisons with the printed material difficult). The corporate archive, containing materials ranging from broadcasting policy to personnel files and minutes from meetings complements the broadcast material. Further research should focus on oral history through interviews with RFE contributors, exiles, and Romanian intellectuals from the network I shall identify in my article.

1. Personal Background Coming from intellectual and social elite, Monica Lovinescu had a strong public legitimacy at home and credibility in the exile community, with which she was in close contact even before her departure for France. As she often noted in her memoir, the burden of such a resounding name forced her to perceive culture as a vocation, but also as a challenge to prove her own ideas and statements. In exile, the young Monica did not struggle with problems of isolation, but could immediately connect to known networks. The massive migration of the intelligentsia from communist Romania was reflected also inside the network constructed around the literary circle of her father, Sbura˘torul (Winged Spirit/Incubus; 1919–27; 1946–47), which practically moved from Bucharest to Paris. Finally, the tragic death of her mother and grandmother, victims of the purges imposed by the Communist regime on the interwar elite, further precipitated her strong criticism on the Romanian political system.

Monica Lovinescu at Radio Free Europe (Camelia Craciun)

279

Born in 1923 as daughter of Eugen Lovinescu, the famous literary and cultural critic of the interwar period, and of Ecaterina Ba˘la˘cioiu, who descended from an old Wallachian landowner family with connections to the royal court, Monica grew up in the milieu of the Sbura˘torul literary circle and its eponymous journal. Her father gathered a large part of the Romanian intelligentsia of the time in his open house for meetings, lunches, dinners, public readings, and debates. She enjoyed the acquaintance and the friendship of many Romanian intellectuals from an early age on, became familiar with the intellectual environment of the time, and profited much from her father’s great intellectual reputation and authority. Eugen Lovinescu came from a middle-class Moldavian intellectual family; his ancestors were schoolmasters and teachers, while his nephews became important writers and critics in the postwar period. Horia Lovinescu, for instance, was a well-known playwright during the communist regime, whose plays were often staged and acclaimed for their ideological support of Communism; Vasile Lovinescu became an essayist. Horia’s and Vasile’s prominence on the communist literary and cultural scene represented a discontinuity with the family’s prewar intellectual reputation, but also with Monica, their French-naturalized relative at Radio Free Europe. Another famous Lovinescu family member, Anton Holban, was one of the most innovative prose writers among the young generation coming at age after World War I. Eugen Lovinescu was one of the most authoritative literary critics and historians of the interwar literary period. A main promoter of modernism, he engaged in major debates with the Sa˘ma˘na˘torul group, and such traditionalist and populist intellectuals as Nicolae Iorga and Garabet Ibra˘ileanu, in which he introduced his theory of synchronism as the main form of modernizing national literatures. His liberal, cosmopolitan, and modernist views were laid down in his canonic Istoria civilizat¸iei române moderne (History of Modern Romanian Civilization), published in 1924–25, and in his Istoria literaturii române contemporane (History of Contemporary Romanian Literature) from 1926–29; his journal Sbura˘torul was open to many literary trends, especially to symbolism and avant-guardism. Since Lovinescu published also works by several Jewish authors, the extreme right-wing labeled the journal and its director as “Judaized,” blacklisted him in late 1930s, led a press campaign against his “antinational views,” and even accused him of encouraging political conspiracy during his literary circle meetings in his house shortly before his death in 1943. Yet Lovinescu was by no means unbiased. Notwithstanding his openness to all talents, his prejudice appeared in his literary notes as well as in his histories, which contain a whole separate section on writers of Jewish decent. After his death, the end of World War II, and the coming to power of the communist regime, Eugen Lovinescu was excluded from the Romanian cul-

280

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

tural canon for almost two decades. The communist regime confiscated the library Lovinescu left to his daughter and former wife. His books were burnt by the Securitate, while the home of the famous literary club became a private residence of a Secret Police officer: the communists erased Lovinescus physical, as well as intellectual legacy. During the liberalization of the 1960s, his cultural influence was reconsidered and he was republished and included in the intellectual debates again. Thus Monica inherited a famous name and the pressure that goes with it: “every gesture, look or silence of his [Eugen’s] seems to express ‘I write, therefore I exist’ (I dare paraphrasing Descartes – my father would never make such jokes). Was it not because of this that I started scribbling on a paper in order to ‘exist’ in front of him?” (Vavilonului 1: 15)? Although she did not cultivate the memory of her father and his literary work in her radio programs, her memoirs testified to a cult of her father, especially due to his early death and his marginalization in the postwar period. After getting a degree in French literature and starting a career in academia, Monica received a French Government scholarship and left Romania in 1947, at age twenty-three. The following year, when communists consolidated their power, and all Romanian students were ordered to return home, Monica applied for political asylum and started an exile life that terminated only in 1989: “Leaving for Paris meant getting out of this prison, even if I thought I would depart only for one-two years, until the Occident will free the East. I would have never left my mother otherwise. I have not imagined, not even for a second, that it will be for a lifetime” (Vavilonului 1: 43). The Romanian exile community gradually grew and she slowly rebuilt her home network in France and abroad, strengthening her personal bonds under the new circumstances. The wish to build a strong opposition to the communist regime at home diminished the political differences among the exiles. In the beginning, Lovinescu worked with Eugène Ionesco and met early Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran, and S¸tefan Lupas¸cu. She worked as an assistant theatre director, founding an avant-garde company with a few friends in Paris. Subsequently she became a translator, a literary agent for memoirs written by former inmates of communist prisons, and an announcer for the Romanian unit of Radio Paris. She married Virgil Ierunca, editor of Ethos, Limite, and other Romanian cultural publications in exile; her cultural and political radio criticism complemented his printed publications and later radio work. They often treated the same issues through different channels of communication to increase their effectiveness. The fate of Monica’s maternal family strongly motivated her political engagement and anti-Communist stance. On her mother side, she came from a rich and well positioned aristocratic family: the Ba˘la˘cioius were an old landed

Monica Lovinescu at Radio Free Europe (Camelia Craciun)

281

boyar clan, while the Ples¸oianus were connected to the Bra˘tianu and Ta˘ta˘rescu families – members of the Romanians aristocracy connected to the Royal Court. Gheorghe Ta˘ta˘rescu, cousin of Monica Lovinescu’s mother, belonged to the National Liberal Party and was twice prime-minister of Romania (in 1934–1937 and 1939–1940), representing the emerging ambitious Romanian bourgeoisie. The Ba˘la˘cioiu family was, of course, subjected to persecution under the communist regime. Monica was already an exile in France when her grandmother and mother, to whom she was very close, died in Romania. Her grandmother, already in her eighties and deprived of her property, was forced to walk in chains behind a horse cart for several kilometers on a freezing winter day; she died soon afterwards, due to exhaustion and cold (Vavilonului 1: 39). Monica’s mother, Ecaterina Ba˘la˘cioiu, was arrested in 1958 and pressured to convince her daughter to curb her attacks on communist Romania: “in prison she refused the Securitate ‘offer’ to release her in exchange for a letter from her asking me to collaborate with ‘them.’ She preferred dying in order to give birth to me for the second time, into the freedom of being myself ” (Vavilonului 1: 14). As a punishment for resisting blackmail, in prison Ecaterina Ba˘la˘cioiu was deprived of medical care for her several chronic illnesses, and died within two years. Deeply affected by this tragedy, Monica later provided material, information, and support for a book she was unable to write herself because of the long-range effects of her trauma. In Aceasta˘ dragoste care ne leaga˘ (This Love that Binds Us; 1998), Doina Jela historically and socially reconstructed the life and tragic death of Ecaterina Ba˘la˘ciou in communist prisons, presenting her as representative of many women who were persecuted because they came from the old elite. The book has received several awards. In her memoirs and diaries, Monica Lovinescu saw her mother’s death as an indubitable crime of the communist regime and a human sacrifice for her intellectual and political independence. Her relation to Romania and to her own past changed dramatically: “the unidentifiable common grave into which my mother’s corpse was thrown, turned for me all of Romania’s soil into a possible tomb” (Vavilonului 1: 19–20).

2. Media Position and Political Discourse In the course of more than thirty years of broadcasting at Radio Free Europe, Lovinescu established herself as a critical authority not only of the communist regime in Romania, but also of the conditions throughout all totalitarian Eastern Europe. Working for Radio Free Europe was her great chance to establish her stature and acquire an impact both at home and in exile circles. This popu-

282

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

larity and remarkable authority came from several sources: her microphone, the political suppression of the Romanian public she was addressing, and her topics and general tone of broadcasting. The radio persona she built for herself embodied the opposition of Radio Free Europe to Romanian communist political and cultural propaganda. In her weekly pieces featuring specific political and cultural events in Romania, she perceived, contextualized, and criticized the inner mechanism that governed local practices behind the Iron Curtain. Lovinescu offered a glimpse of what went on behind the curtain, for the Romanian public that censorship deprived of insights, but also for the exile community, which was not fully aware of what was happening at home. Radio Free Europe unequivocally opposed the Romanian communist regime. Created in 1949 in New York by the National Committee for a Free Europe, and funded by the U. S. Congress through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), RFE was supposed to broadcast news and programs for five countries behind the Iron Curtain: Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria. Its headquarters in Munich were complemented by correspondence offices in Paris, Vienna, and Rome, other Western cities with significant exile communities, to make recruiting easier (Puddington 39). Monica Lovinescu and Ierunca, together with other Romanian collaborators were based in Paris, a major center of Romanian exiles. RFE started broadcasting with the Czechoslovak program ( July 4, 1950); the Romanian transmission followed as second on July 14. RFE had an attached research institute concerned with regional information and surveys, which published the Eastern European Research Bulletin (weekly) and the Daily Report. They provided the Western academic and general public with background information about the state of affairs in the region. The radio broadcast was very efficient and managed to inform the listeners faster than the media in the countries of report (for example, the 1977 Bucharest earthquake was reported on three hours earlier in the RFE news than in the Romanian media, and it also offered faster basic information for the rescuers and survivors). The broadcasts were mainly on domestic and international politics, as well as cultural affairs; there was a permanent staff for each language unit, but external/temporary collaborators were also used. The RFE Paris office was suspended in 1992; the Munich headquarters moved to Prague and the Czech, Hungarian, and Polish units were dissolved. Concerning the political orientation of the RFE, Virgil Ta˘nase – dissident at home, later in Parisian exile, participant of Monica Lovinescu’s human rights network, and contributor to RFE – commented in his volume Ma Roumanie (1990):

Monica Lovinescu at Radio Free Europe (Camelia Craciun)

283

The literary broadcasts of Radio Free Europe contained […] reversed Stalinism: the good became the bad and vice versa, but the basic principle was the same: the political took precedence over the literary. It had a deliberate and shocking determination for anti-communist pro-Western propaganda. The rule was: culturally, […] we don’t speak of what we don’t like; Radio Free Europe was influenced by its origins: it was created by the Americans for anti-communist propaganda reasons. Literary, for example, it performed what I would call reversed Socialist Realism. Unconsciously, the directors and journalists of Radio Free Europe were, actually, anti-communists in a basic rudimentary form in their heart and mind, unable to perform a rationally detached analysis. (Manolescu 306)

Due to its clear anti-communist position in terms of broadcasting among other foreign broadcasting companies transmitting for Eastern Europe, RFE enjoyed probably one of the highest listener ratings in Romania, which led to a rapid increase in the number of broadcasting hours and collaborators, as well as a diversification of its program. In the early 1950s, when Romania counted about twenty radio receivers/1000 inhabitants (compared to hundred fifty in Czechoslovakia), the Romanian RFE unit had only a brief daily news program, because broadcasting time was allotted according to the estimated audience. According to Florin Manolescu’s encyclopedia of Romanian literary exile, the daily Romanian language program expanded to six hours in the 1960s and finally reached twelve hours in late 1980s, when a Gallup survey disclosed that the Romanian RFE had 64 % of all listeners. The Romanian media were highly censored, and manipulated; hence people had little interest in them. The programs consisted of distorted versions of the political national and international events, of news on the activities of the Party and its national leaders, and of cultural programs to glorify the greatness and the success of the Romanian nation. Deprived of reliable domestic reports on current affairs, the Romanian public was eager to listen to the forbidden RFE and other foreign radio programs (Voice of America, BBC, Deutsche Welle; for the Hungarian community Kossuth and Peto˝fi Rádió and probably some others for other minorities), which enjoyed high popularity and increased audience. The Romanian Secret Police prosecuted individual listening and it was especially against group listening, since this could generate collective dissent. Nevertheless, despite control and fear, these regulations could not prevent population to continue listening to alternative news programs. The Securitate Services targeted the foreign radio stations and their journalists. In addition to the mentioned attack on Monica Lovinescu, packages with explosives were sent to Paul Goma, Nicolae Penescu, S¸erban Ora˘scu and other key journalists and intellectuals connected to RFE, and a bomb attack in 1981 against RFE’s Munich headquarters partly destroyed the building caus-

284

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

ing great damages and severely injuring several employees. Such orchestrated actions of the Secret Services and Police aimed at the infiltration and destruction of communication between the exiles in the West and the Romanians at home. In spite of these efforts, RFE remained one of the few alternatives to the national media in reporting and commenting on the news. It also strengthened the voice of the opposition by broadcasting the texts of Romanian dissidents such as Dorin Tudoran, Paul Goma, Doina Cornea confronting the Romanian regime, as well as the discourse of Romanian exiles criticizing the regime. As the quoted passage by Ta˘nase shows, the RFE’s programs were not detached, but under the influence of a strong anti-Communist ideology. By revealing the genuine Romanian political, economic, and social situation, as well as the broader international context (supported by personal testimonies), RFE managed to counteract domestic propaganda. However, during its first years, RFE often countered Communist propaganda with anti-Communist actions that exceeded the function of the radio station: it distributed, for instance, manifestoes by means of balloons and adopted a violent language, especially in the 1950s. Placed under the direct control of the US government after the 1967 CIA funding scandal, the RFE had to adopt the official international media policies of the US, and a new internal censorship tempered the tone and the criticism of the broadcasts. In crucial cases, the permission of the CIA and the Department of State was necessary in order to take a more cautious approach to the Eastern European matters. RFE gradually changed its self-image: it no longer regarded itself as “liberator,” but as a “liberalization inducer”; this shift was entered into the policy manuals for the RFE personnel that circumscribed their approach, topics, and tone. Lovinescu had already acquired significant experience in French and Romanian media and publishing prior to working at RFE. In Romania, she had worked shortly as a journalist, writing mostly theater reviews for Democrat¸ia and literature for Revista Fundat¸iilor Regale; she had also worked as an assistant for Camil Petrescu, one of the most important Romanian playwrights and drama theorists. In France, she first directed plays, translated Ion Luca Caragiale, and founded a small company where she worked with Eugène Ionesco and Nicolas Bataille. She worked for Radio Paris (1952–74) as an anchor; she also contributed to its Romanian-language broadcasts and joined as a staff member its East-European office, contributing mostly with musical and literary reviews and reports under a pseudonym. For a short time, she became more politically engaged in anti-communist intellectual circles, by creating a literary agency to publish works and testimonies of East-European refugees in France; but she failed, for instance, in her attempts to publish in the

Monica Lovinescu at Radio Free Europe (Camelia Craciun)

285

strongly leftist Paris of the 1950s Victor Nekrassov’s novel on Stalingrad, which came out only in 1963. She translated, under the pseudonym Claude Pascal, Adriana Georgescu’s Au commencement était la fin (At the Beginning was the End), and Virgil Constantin Gheorghiu’s La Vingt cinquième heure (The Twenty-fifth Hour) under the pseudonym Monique Saint-Côme. Apart from radio and translating activity, she also published articles in the French journals Kontinent, Les Cahiers de l’Est, Preuves, L’Alternative and in such Romanian exile publications as Caiete de dor, Ethos, and Dialog. Fearing retaliations against her mother, who was still a prisoner in Romania, Monica wrote under pseudonyms until the early 1960s; after her mother’s death she wrote under her own name and became more critical of the Romanian regime. Monica Lovinescu became a well-known public figure among Romanian audiences only when she began broadcasting at RFE. As she reports in her Short Waves volumes, she started working there in 1961, and stopped only when RFE decided in 1992 to close down all offices in Western Europe. As time went on, her activity diversified. In 1967 she launched three weekly programs: “Teze si antiteze la Paris” (Thesis and Antithesis in Paris, broadcast on Sundays and renamed “The French Scene” by RFE) gave Sunday updates on the French cultural scene for the Romanian public; “Puncte de vedere” (Points of view), included in the general news bulletin “Actualitatea româneasca˘” (Romanian Current Events, broadcast on Thursdays/Tuesdays and renamed “Domestic bloc” by RFE) presented a critical view of Romanian intellectual and political life; a third one, focusing on the Romanian exile culture, was later taken over by Theodor Cazaban. The expansion of the Romanian cultural broadcasts was especially remarkable after 1975. Ierunca, Monica’s husband, created the “Cronica pesimistului” (Chronic of the Pessimist) review column on Thursdays, and the Saturday program “Povestea vorbei. Pagini uitate, pagini cenzurate, pagini exilate” (The Story of Words. Forgotten, Censored and Exiled Pages) on Anatol Baconsky’s Biserica neagra˘ (The Black Church), Paul Goma’s novels and other censured Romanian literary texts. In the 1970s, Jacob Popper’s Sunday feature program introduced texts by East-European exiles, interviewed international experts on Eastern Europe, and reviewed or read in translation articles of the international press. The rich weekly schedule also included the religious broadcast “World of Religion,” a “Listeners’ Mail,” and the music programs “Metronom,” and “Top 20.” Lovinescu’s programs were soon noted by Romania’s political leaders, who feared negative publicity abroad and critical opposition at home. The attack against Monica Lovinescu was planned by the Securitate at the specific request of Ceaus¸escu, as General Pacepa recounts in his memoir.

286

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

Lovinescu vividly described in La apa Vavilonului her professional dedication as well as the technical aspects of her work: First, I was working for around an hour and twenty minutes of weekly broadcasts meaning at least 2–3 books to read per week (about French and Romanian cultural life), lots of newspapers from both areas too, performances, concerts, and movies. At home, many more hours were dedicated to the typing of the broadcast texts, to taping and mixing the round tables as well as the musical and sound effects (we had to build up a whole professional laboratory at home in Buttes Chaumont). Working home was a necessity, not luxury. Since Radio Free Europe had here the status of a correspondence office, broadcasting through telephone or a special line (for which reportages or chronicles were not allowed to exceed a time limit), we could not occupy the studio with long programs more than once a week. We became the only “cultural” exception of such length in this office, where not only the East-European nations were crowded together, but, after a while, when Radio Free Europe joined Radio Liberty on avenue Rapp, we also shared the space with Russians, Lithuanians, Uzbeks, Ossetians and other nations of the Soviet Empire. […] Every week, we “mixed” methodically the texts read by the speaker […] with music copied at home from the vinyl and the tapes already recorded with dialogues and round tables. Within maximum three hours of work in the studio, we accomplished the impossible: almost three hours of broadcasting. […] From there we moved on with our bags filled with tapes, to which we added manuscripts or books brought by the collaborators, visitors from home, or exiles. (2: 206–207)

“Teze si antiteze la Paris” and “Puncte de vedere” had specific cultural and political agendas. The latter analyzed the Romanian cultural and political situation, while the former presented French cultural news for the Romanian audience. Although each broadcast had its own cultural topic, they were embedded in a coherent political discourse, so that the material at hand served to illustrate Lovinescu’s political opinion. The topics came mostly from a broadly conceived literary field, but she was also interested in political events and social actions, especially when they affected literature: trials of writers and intellectuals in Eastern Europe, infringements on human rights, political congresses, cases of censorship, propaganda, and enforcements of the Socialist Realism aesthetic doctrine. Rather than merely updating the Romanian public on the Western cultural and political situation, or just summarizing the current situation in Romania through a critical lens, Lovinescu always had a political agenda. Whether speaking about the latest book on history or political theory, about a novel, about the latest exhibition, music recital, or theater performance in Paris, organizing a round table discussion on the profile of certain intellectuals, or Romanian press releases, commemorations, a new legislation, or a recent political congress with its internal fights and dissensions – Lovinescu used all these cases to articulate her antiCommunism.

Monica Lovinescu at Radio Free Europe (Camelia Craciun)

287

Indeed, Lovinescu’s broadcasts followed the RFE line: revealing the ideological bias of the Romanian media, RFE adopted a political perspective that was itself engaged rather than detached. Taking an anti-communist stance, Lovinescu and Ierunca came to associate also with some right-wing exiles with dubious pasts. Thus they frequented the exile literary circle of L. M. Arcade (Ma˘ma˘liga˘), writer and lawyer established in Paris; Ierunca maintained close connections with Paul Miron, professor at Freiburg University and Ioan Cus¸a, poet and editor in Paris. Ierunca’s broadcasts promoted Constantin Dumitrescu-Za˘pada˘’s right-wing analysis of the Communist regime, Cetatea totala˘. Monica Lovinescu’s weekly column on Romania gave much attention to the propaganda in Party’s cultural and press policy. She reacted to the Tenth Party Congress (especially to writers that towed the line), commented on the regime’s propaganda campaign planning to reshape Romania’s political image with a massive program of literary translations, and revealed that the clandestine publication Tribuna României was edited by Bucharest officials to infiltrate the Romanian exile community. Lovinescu attacked the corruption of the Romanian intellectual and political elite, especially of the group around Eugen Barbu that published Sa˘pta˘mâna (The Week) and frequently attacked her. She exposed the political compromises of important writers complying with the regime as Dinu Sa˘raru, D. R. Popescu, or Tudor Arghezi. Lovinescu followed a similar agenda with her French cultural news in Teze si antiteze la Paris. She reviewed books on political theory, histories of the other communist regimes, sociological analyses of the totalitarian movements, as well as testimonies, biographies and memoirs that exposed the Gulag experience. She placed the Romanian system in a comparative context. When discussing the international impact of 1956 or 1968, or the concerted actions of East-European dissidents, her main concern was always the situation in Romania. Conversely, she always contextualized her Romanian reports with comparisons to the situation in the Soviet Union, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia. In 1968, for instance, she extensively and warmly greeted the reform movement in Prague: she reported on the creation of Klub 231, uniting the former political prisoners of the Stalinist period to rehabilitate them, and the Critical Thinking Club (on April 6); she reviewed Morvan Lebesque’s notes on his trip to Prague (on April 20); reported on intellectuals traveling to and writing about Prague (on April 27); and discussed (on May 4) the case of the philosophy professor Ivan Sviták, who defected to the US. Her aim was to provide Romanian listeners with reliable information, but also to give examples that could be followed in Romania. Lovinescu wanted to engender in the public at home a feeling of solidarity with those suffering under similar regimes. She informed her audience of

288

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

books written by Polish writers, or of actions taken by Hungarian intellectuals, to show that a community of oppositional thinkers existed: on April 17, 1965 she presented Tibor Déry’s book Mr. G. A. in X; on June 12, 1965 she presented the case of Mihailo Mihailov, who was put in jail in Yugoslavia because of his article “Ljeto moskovsko 1964” (Moscow Summer 1964); on January 3, 1981 she discussed Andrzej Wajda’s film The Marble Man; on February 16, 1984 she reviewed Milan Kundera’s L’Insoutenable légèreté de l’être (The Unbearable Lightness of Being). With keen interest in theoretical analyses of the communist political regimes in East-Central Europe, she reviewed relevant publications in France, for instance works by Raymond Aron, Jules Monnerot, André Glucksmann, and Aleksandr Zinoviev. Her views often conflicted with leftist and pro-communist positions in France, which supported the Soviet line and denied until very late the atrocities committed behind the Iron Curtain. She presented such criticisms in her radio broadcasts; what could not be said openly, for instance her criticism of the French intellectuals leading the 1968 events in Paris, found its way into her personal papers. Lovinescu often clashed with leftist French fellow-travelers, who closed their eyes for a long time to the realities behind the Iron Curtain; she even considered leaving France. As she recalls, “the harmony between me and Paris became flawless (or almost) only after mid-1970s, when I reckoned that the ideological nightmare was over, at least for Paris” (Vavilonului 2: 218). Working for RFE, her political opinions became more and more articulate and critical. In the 1970s and 80s, when the situation in Romania worsened, she expanded the original cultural focus of her broadcasts to include social and political analyses of Romanian life. Thus, in 1985 and 1986 she discussed Bucharest’s demolition program, which formed part of Ceaus¸escu’s “systematization project” to reorganize and homogenize rural and urban space, implicitly aiming at the destruction of many historical areas reminding of the past and rebuilding the space according to communist principles. She also attacked the grandiose absurdity of the “House of the People” project; she discussed the 1987 workers’ revolt in Brasov, the food shortages, the Militia’s repression of all protests, as well as the 1977 earthquake. Monica Lovinescu was a relentless and hard-hitting critic of intellectual parvenus and their abuses at home. In one famous case (broadcasted on March 16, 1979), she revealed that Eugen Barbu’s novel Incognito plagiarized a novel by Konstantin Paustovski; in another case ( January 13, 1978), she contrasted Alexandru Philippide’s praise of the communist regime with his anticommunist interwar past. Her weekly columns also constructed a new cultural and moral canon by reconsidering forgotten, forbidden, or marginalized

Monica Lovinescu at Radio Free Europe (Camelia Craciun)

289

texts, intellectuals, groups, and journals, as well as by publicizing dissident political protest. Repeatedly comparing domestic positions with intellectual criticism and dissent in Poland and Czechoslovakia, she made the apathy and dividedness of the Romanian intelligentsia evident. Asking for the de-politicization of Romania’s captive literature, she tried to establish continuity with the pre-communist liberal and (quasi)conservative culture, and pleaded for the relevance of “non-communist experiences.” In this sense, Lovinescu proposed political alternatives and an alternative cultural canon. Politically, her criticism often went from theoretical considerations over into political activism (manifestations, boycotts, protests, collecting signatures, and spreading memoranda) coordinated through the RFE network: when we succeeded to save a person from persecution, we were happy, not because of vanity, but because we had the impression, incredibly magnified, that our work is not futile […]; by means of our regular broadcasts, we could prevent the disappearance of people, help avoid imprisonments, or we could help release ‘suspects’ interned by the regime in psychiatric hospitals.” (Vavilonului 2: 51)

Ierunca’s series of debates on the Fenomenul Pites¸ti (The Pites¸ti Phenomenon: a political prison especially dreaded for its inhuman treatment of inmates) became one of the first investigations of the Romanian version of Gulag and attracted massive interest from the Romanian as well as from an international audience. Lovinescu tackled the plight of Paul Goma, Dorin Tudoran, Virgil Ta˘nase, Dan Petrescu, Bujor Nedelcovici, and other persecuted Romanian dissidents. Addressing sometimes directly the officials via RFE, she tried by revealing their plight to force the government to ease the situation of the dissidents and terminate actions against them. Lovinescu repeatedly drew public attention to Marin Sorescu, Dimitrie Stelaru, and others, whose works were ignored in Romania because they did not adhere to Socialist Realism and did not praise the system. She tried to recuperate formerly acknowledged works that were excluded from the communist canon, and she took a strong position on cultural policy, by closely following meetings, and exclusions from the Writers’ Union. Reacting against the planned destruction of Mircea Zaciu’s literary dictionary, or calling public attention to politically marginalized intellectuals as Constantin Noica, was part of Monica Lovinescu’s strategy of revealing the Party’s abusive and secret measures. Disclosing a striking case of censorship, Monica Lovinescu compared the original text of Alexandru Papilian’s novel Micelii (Mycelia) with its published form. She reviewed Ion Caraion’s Insectele tovara˘s¸ului Hitler (The Insects of Comerade Hitler), the writings of Paul Goma, Bujor Nedelcovici, Vintila˘ Horia, and other exiled writers, making thus exile life and debates ac-

290

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

cessible for the public at home. When the regime planned to co-opt wellknown émigrés, Lovinescu’s radio program functioned as the author’s channel to express publicly her discontent and refusal. Thus she compared the censored and uncensored versions of Mircea Eliade’s interview with Ceaus¸escu’s “court poet” Adrian Pa˘unescu, and exposed a non-authorized Romanian publication of the writings of S¸tefan Lupascu, internationally renowned Romanian philosopher of science living in Paris. She also revealed the opportunism of writers acclaimed in Romania, for instance by pointing out on February 21, 1961 the hypocrisy and literary failure of George Ca˘linescu’s Bietul Ioanide (Wretched Ioanide), and by exposing Tudor Arghezi’s political co-optation by the Party. One could define Monica Lovinescu’s aim as the construction of an alternative canon by mobilizing moral and aesthetic values that had a complicated interrelation. Lovinescu insisted that the aesthetic criteria must supersede “Socialist Realism,” but she acknowledged literature’s political dimension. According to her, politics should enter into literature, but only as a personal commitment, without pressure from outside. Reviewing Romanian literature of the 1980s that adopted Western postmodernism, Lovinescu criticized its avoidance of social and political reflection, especially in comparison with the dissidents. She condemned Romanian literary escapism for lacking a check on the political reality. Individual compromises were perceived as a new form of “trahison des clercs”; yet such a moral judgment disregarded the real pressuring conditions of life and creation at home. She wrote bluntly: I have always found only one “sin” intolerable: the one committed through Word. I don’t believe that a writer disposes of two types of words, those used to lie with and those used to express his/her very own self; some for the newspaper, for praise and for official bows, some others for his/her “work.” […] The fact that one writer or another was immoral from the perspective of current moral codes – this never interested me. But the fact of burying his/her own talent – in this specific case, the Word – under the dirt of abiding to politics, yes. In my view, “the morality” of this kind belongs to aesthetics. It is the only one, in any case, that I practiced. (qtd. in Manolescu 454)

Within the male-dominated East-Central European exile, Lovinescu was one of the few active women (together with Natalya Gorbanevskaya, former Russian political prisoner and poet, and Maria Bra˘tianu, a Romanian exile activist), the only Romanian feminine voice and one of the most popular figures of the Romanian unit at RFE. Although she advocated the cases of women political prisoners and exiles – she translated the prison memoirs of Adriana Georgescu, a Romanian lawyer and former political prisoner with whom she forged a solid bond; she was in contact with Maria Bra˘tianu and Natalya

Monica Lovinescu at Radio Free Europe (Camelia Craciun)

291

Gorbanevskaya; and she knew through her mother’s and grandmother’s experience how women suffered in the communist regime – she gave surprisingly little attention to the gender specifics of politics. In any case, Lovinescu’s conservative disposition was presumably not sympathetic to French Feminism of the leftist kind. The Romanian communist regime reacted instantaneously to Lovinescu’s support of dissidence: “this everyday guerilla war, undertaken at Radio Free Europe […] seemed to force the regime at home to confront difficult problems; it usually reacted in panic and clumsily” (Vavilonului 2: 246). The regime first tried to persuade her to temper her criticism by offering the copyrights of the republished works of her father. It sent the old-style literary critics S¸erban Cioculescu and Vladimir Streinu, who were close to her father and her family, to negotiate with her. As an émigré, she held no legal right over these editions; thus the regime hoped to bribe her in an elegant way, but she refused in the end. Subsequently, debates were set up to discredit her father’s legacy and her mother’s memory, suggesting all the while a rehabilitation of that moral and cultural heritage if she was willing to collaborate. The mentioned physical attack on her backfired and kicked up an international storm against the Romanian communist regime and its secret police. A similar attack was planned on Ierunca, but failed to take place. Lovinescu’s memoirs and diaries frequently report on intimidating messages and on attempts at a compromise that would temper her criticism and hostility. Furthermore, she was attacked not only in Barbu’s Sa˘pta˘mâna, but also in Luceafa˘rul, the journal of Ceaus¸escu’s other demagogue, Corneliu Vadim Tudor. They tried to undermine her credibility in the exile community as well, but she gave rebuttals in her broadcasts.

3. Networking Lovinescu’s image and reputation depended also on her network within the exile community, which she used for communicating with the intellectuals at home, for disseminating information, and for mobilizing the international press to protect dissident writers in Romania. I chose a case study to illustrate how this network functioned when rescuing writers jailed in Romania, how information about underground actions, abuses, censored publications, and manuscripts circulated between Romania and France, and how Lovinescu reacted to emergency cases in Romania by disseminating information, establishing a strategy of action, and contacting the right people. My analysis also follows the way in which these actions generated public discussions in the foreign media, and at RFE.

292

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

The poet Dorin Tudoran, a dissident in the 1980s, was released after a wellorganized campaign abroad. My primary materials for discussing the case are mainly Lovinescu’s documents (her diaries, her memoirs, and her scripts for RFE), which may present a one-sided picture, but I am interested here in her personal account and in the way she herself perceived her position within the campaign that mobilized her exile network. Reading her Jurnal, one is astonished by the busy daily rhythm of her work at RFE, which included the reading of the latest books, attending theatre performances, cinema evenings, art festivals, museum visits, writing reviews for the weekly broadcasts and organizing round tables with Romanian and French guests. These activities were punctuated by frequent phone calls, messages, visits, meetings, evenings out with people to exchange information and to double check news items so that they can be transmitted to the press or to the radio, organizing effective political reactions, and thinking on strategies for media attacks. Daily contacts with the network took up a significant part of her time. Romanian intellectuals visiting Paris, possibly looking for political asylum, and French editors and journalists working on Romanian affairs were on her daily agenda, and demanded her attention in cases of emergency. She updated her information on Romanian life with subscriptions to the press and receiving by mail books, coded postcards, letters, and tapes. She often got her information through telephone, or through visitors who transmitted messages that needed to be checked against a second source. Lovinescu soon acquired in Paris a reputation that no longer depended on her father’s fame. She had contacts with all the Romanian exile communities and all age groups, but she felt closest to the interwar generation, which continued to maintain the prestige it acquired before World War II. Most visible and influential in her network were the older exiles, individuals who left Romania before and during the war or right before the communist regime acquired power. In Paris she reconnected with Eugène Ionesco and his wife, who were her father’s neighbors in Bucharest; S¸tefan Lupascu, the philosopher, quickly became a close friend when she brought messages and recommendations from mutual Romanian friends, such as his cousin Lili Teodoreanu and the sisters Cella and Henrietta Delavrancea; Mircea Eliade and his wife Christinel became close friends, especially after she married Ierunca, who edited exile reviews supported by Eliade; she met Emil Cioran in France and maintained a close relationship with him until the end of his life; Ierunca’s Romanian French teacher, Luc Ba˘descu, was teaching French literature at the Sorbonne when she met and befriended him. Little by little, she also established connections with French intellectuals through Romanian mediators. As a translator of Romanian memoirs about escapes from

Monica Lovinescu at Radio Free Europe (Camelia Craciun)

293

camps and communist prisons, she came to know French publishers and started to work with the editor Christiane Fournié, who became a lifelong friend. Working at the Encyclopedia Quillet, Fournié knew Marthe Robert, Gaetan Picon, Clara Malraux, Manès Sperber, and others, to whom she introduced Lovinescu. Through her work in the theater, as a literary agent (with a well-connected friend, Rainer Biemel), and at Radio Paris, Lovinescu established contacts with a broad segment of the French cultural establishment. As more Romanian exiled writers and intellectuals arrived in Paris, Lovinescu enlarged her network. The new members included the Turcologist Mihnea Berindei (recently accused of collaborating with the Securitate in exile), the writer Paul Goma, whom she helped leave the country in 1977 after extended persecutions, as well as Dorin Tudoran and Bujor Nedelcovici. The newcomers had more contacts at home, and were able to help intervene in cases of humanitarian need. The heads of the Romanian unit at RFE, Noël Bernard, then Mihai Cisma˘rescu, and finally Vlad Georgescu, were also involved in network activities. Marie-France, daughter of Eugène Ionescu, Rodica Iulian, Oana Orlea and others were also connected on a near daily basis, exchanging news, information, and documents, procuring books and articles, and shipping materials to and from Romania. Lovinescu’s life was a permanent interplay between remembrances of the country she left without suspecting that her move was irreversible, and her life in France, which she perceived as temporary. Daily connections with Romania allowed Lovinescu to recreate her country and breathing space within her Parisian setting: “Updated with everything that takes place, reading everything, meeting everybody, we are actually living in Bucharest […] and return to France where I hardly exist” ( Jurnal 1: 114). When she felt she must take a break and leave the city, the reason was the obsessive image of Bucharest, rather than her Parisian environment: “actually I don’t want to leave Paris so much, but the Bucharest nightmare with direct echo in Buttes-Chaumont” ( Jurnal 1: 198). However, her meetings with friends could also revive shared memories in the “relaxed atmosphere of a real Bucharest coffee shop in the middle of Parisian hot weather” ( Jurnal 1: 239). In such moments, Parisian exile felt like being in Romania. Lovinescu minutely described in her memoir and journals the network’s structure and function. The most difficult task was to overcome Romanian censorship on information, to get it updated, and to maintain reliable sources at home. Since the regular channels of communication (post, phone calls, telegrams) were usually under surveillance and censorship, new strategies of communication had to be introduced, first of all via encoding: certain ex-

294

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

pressions or words signaled potential threats (arrest or trial) or a crisis that asked for mobilization and help from the network abroad. One dissident, for instance, wrote a postcard that he cannot drink coffee and has to visit a doctor. This was decoded in Paris as a request that foreign journalists should no longer be sent to him since the Securitate started to interrogate him. Information was usually brought by those who were allowed to travel abroad, a few highly selected and surveilled individuals. Most of the time they traveled in pairs to keep an eye on each other, and they had to give accounts back home on every meeting during their trip. Usually these were internationally recognized artists and intellectuals attending international meetings as Romania’s representatives; their return was safeguarded by keeping their family at home. This was the case of Dan Ha˘ulica˘, President of the International Association of Art Critics, film director Lucian Pintilie, and other artists invited to perform and work abroad. During their frequent travels they invariably called or met Lovinescu to update her on the cultural inside stories of Romania. Some writers and intellectuals came, for a single conference or on a one-time scholarship, without knowing whether they could ever leave Romania again. Those who decided to use this one-time opportunity to ask for a political asylum received support from the network, which provided Western authorities with information on the persecution of Romanian writers and intellectuals. The writers Maria Mailat and Bujor Nedelcovici, the critic Lucian Raicu and his wife, Sonia Larian were invited to participate in RFE round tables and interviews. Those wanting to return to Romania usually avoided meetings or discussions with the exile network, but there were also exceptions, such as Mihai Botez, who later suffered retaliations. A second category of informants consisted of foreigners traveling to Romania, and foreign university lecturers or researchers who became friends with Romanian dissidents and shipped materials and information in their personal luggage. This was risky, as the border police and the Securitate often discovered them and, apart from confiscating the materials, interrogated and even tortured them. When the French lecturer Romain Réchon was caught with documents of Luca Pit¸u’s and Dan Petrescu’s from the Ias¸i Dialog group, both he and members of the group were beaten. Another French lecturer, Thomas Bazin, befriended with members of the same Dialog group, especially with Luca Pit¸u and Alexandru Ca˘linescu, and was constantly under the supervision of the Securitate. Italian lecturer Anna Alassio transmitted the special code to be used to decode intercepted phone calls; the code was later used to determine when RFE should start broadcasting a letter of protest meant to determine the approval of departure of Liviu Cangeopol, a Romanian writer and dissident. She also transported a set of tapes on which Dan Pet-

Monica Lovinescu at Radio Free Europe (Camelia Craciun)

295

rescu recorded his manuscripts for publication abroad. The most secure method was to use Western diplomatic personnel who could ship materials through special channels of the foreign mission. When information about a case reached Lovinescu, she first had to double check it according to the strict rules at RFE. The US State Department often overruled internal decisions due to certain diplomatic agreements between Romania and US. If the information was considered reliable, but could not be confirmed by an official source, the network leaked the information to the international media, so that RFE could indirectly refer to the media reports. The strategy of communication varied from case to case. The list of contacts included foreign journalists, scholars, diplomats, French officials and organizations. The main organizers were Berindei, who had extended contacts in the French media, and Sanda Stolojan, the former official Romanian translator working for French presidents from De Gaulle to Mitterand, who had connections in political and diplomatic circles, Marie France Ionesco, who was connected with the world of publishing, and Paul Goma, exile writer (see Marcel Cornis-Pope’s article on him in this volume), to name a few. The network helped publish manuscripts of writers persecuted in Romania, and of political refugees looking for public attention. The network also had connections at the important publishers Gallimard, Flammarion, Payot, and Albin Michel: Alain Paruit, son of a Transylvanianborn doctor and a French mother, worked for Gallimard as a Romanian translator; Goma coordinated the series Est / Ouest at Albin Michel, Virgil Ta˘nase worked as a lector at Flammarion, and Bujor Nedelcovici, who had published Le Second messager (1985) at Albin Michel before leaving Romania, became an editor at Esprit. Apart from arranging book translations and publications with reputable publishers, Lovinescu publicized recently published Romanian works via RFE, usually as a follow-up to her reports on the persecution of the writer in Romania. By publicizing new writers, Lovinescu came to be known as “creator of reputations.” If a writer was presented and discussed at RFE, and possibly in the foreign media as well, this could give him or her a new lease on life: if still in Romania, the publicity could force the authorities to let the dissident leave the country, if already in France, it could secure a place for the writer in the French media. If a case was severe, foreign journalists were sent to contact and check, as well as interview the writer. Some of them requested such help from abroad when all internal possibilities were exhausted and their situation became dangerous. French, Belgian, Swiss, or U.S. journalists already familiar with Romania and the communist regime, often through information from Lovinescu and Berindei, usually responded to such requests. As long as Romania granted visas for

296

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

foreign journalists, interviewing individuals was possible, although the Securitate usually monitored the foreigners to identify their contacts and itinerary. Once such visas were abolished, journalists had to travel as tourists, trying to hide their true purpose and activity. They risked not only the confiscation of their materials but also beatings and imprisonment, as it happened to Bernard Poulet, whose mission was to check the situation of Vasile Paraschiv, a former political convict persecuted by the Securitate. When journalists returned from Romania with the needed information, they widely publicized it in the Western, especially the French, media, alerting the major TV and radio stations (e.g., BBC and Radio Paris) as well as the press (e.g. Liberation and Figaro). In important cases, the action moved from publicity to signature collecting, street demonstrations, public protests (especially in front of the Romanian institutions in Paris), and the mobilization of international human rights organizations as well as of Romanian exile groups such as the Liga pentru Drepturile Omului (The League for the Defense of Human Rights), the Casa Româna˘ (The Romanian House), and the Centrul de Cerceta˘ri Române (Romanian Studies Center). The Romanian authorities usually reacted predictably, proving the effectiveness of the network: the persons in question were released from prison, freed of Securitate surveillance, permitted to publish again, and readmitted into their professional organizations. They were allowed to travel or even to leave the country. When a radio broadcast reported that the Romanian authorities stopped distributing one of Pintilie’s films and forbade showing those of Mircea Daneliuc’s, the works were released. As a result of campaigns, the persecuted political dissidents Father Gheorghe Calciu, Dan Petrescu, and Dorin Tudoran, were released. The effectiveness and rapidity of such protests increased the reputation of the organizers, especially of Lovinescu and Ierunca’s, who were prominent through their activity at RFE. The following longer account of the campaign to help Dorin Tudoran leave the country should illuminate how such campaigns functioned.

4. Lovinescu and the Network in Action: the Tudoran Case In Romania, dissidence was individual and rare, in contrast to groups or movements in Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Translator and dissident Doina Cornea, or the writers Dorin Tudoran and Paul Goma had only a small following; the anti-communist reaction was naturally much stronger in the exile community. The Romanian regime, with its Secret Police and legal system, was well equipped to repress or even annihilate revolt and dissent, so

Monica Lovinescu at Radio Free Europe (Camelia Craciun)

297

that the chances of group resistance supported by internal forces alone were close to nil. Hence institutions such as the RFE were crucial in creating a critical mass for collective actions. Dorin Tudoran, a well-known poet, started his dissidence by resigning in 1981 from the Party and from the leadership of the Romanian Writers’ Union. He was immediately forbidden to publish and to leave the country. He started sending texts to RFE for broadcasting and publishing abroad, and demanded that he be allowed to leave the country. The literary network used here several strategies. French PEN Club admitted Tudoran (possibly with Goma’s help) and invited him for a visit. He was also invited to Heidelberg through a Romanian connection in Germany. Furthermore, Lovinescu discussed his case in her chronicle at RFE. When Tudoran’s PEN Club membership became known in Romania, he was allowed to publish, but remained jobless and still forbidden to travel. The case received much attention in the West. Upon Lovinescu’s urgings, an article on Tudoran appeared in Le Monde, while Bernard Poulet and Bernard Guetta included the case in their articles about Romania in Le Matin and Le Monde. By becoming a public figure abroad, Tudoran managed to improve his situation at home, but the aggravated authorities threatened him with a trial and possible jail sentence. In response, Tudoran requested more international publicity on his case, and Lovinescu and Ierunca convinced the RFE headquarters in Munich to allow for more broadcasting time on it. The Agence France Press sent out telegrams with materials about him, and it also distributed Tudoran’s statements on Ceaus¸escu’s dictatorship, which were immediately broadcast by RFE. Tudoran continued to send materials to L’Alternative and Ethos, while Le Monde continued to report on his case. Similarly, Lovinescu continued broadcasting chronicles on Tudoran, and criticizing the lack of solidarity and growing isolation to which he was condemned by the Romanian writers home. When the PEN-Club invitation was delayed, Tudoran applied for immigration to the US, and he took his protest to the next level by giving a telephone interview to Radio Suisse Romande on Romania’s controversial Danube-Black Sea Channel project, and he lambasted the entire system. Lovinescu and Berindei distributed this to the French press through Libération. Tudoran finally received his US visa. When he received subsequently death threats by phone, he immediately communicated these through Bujor Nedelcovici and other friends to the network, in order to publicize them at RFE. Berindei sent the Tudoran files with an introduction to France Presse and Le Monde, while Lovinescu distributed them to RFE in order to devote more attention to this case. Lovinescu’s broadcast chronicles on Tudoran’s

298

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

case were published in L’Alternative, and this kept the topic current for the wider public in the international press. On April 15, 1985, Tudoran started a hunger strike to obtain the passport he had applied for a year earlier. Reacting to this piece of news, RFE director Vlad Georgescu decided to broadcast daily on the Tudoran case, while Berindei, who handled the communication with the press, contacted journalists from Le Monde, Libération, and other papers. Lovinescu got in touch with the newspaper Libre Belgique and with William Heinzer, a journalist at Radio Suisse Romande who had previously interviewed Tudoran and now rebroadcasted sections of the interview with older relevant materials. Communication with Tudoran was by that time difficult because phone calls with him were interrupted. Goma contacted Le Quotidien and involved the French PEN Club; Marie France Ionesco and Sanda Stolojan drafted the protest of the League for the Defense of Human Rights in Romania and collected signatures of famous writers and intellectuals abroad, such as Eugène Ionesco, André Glucksmann, Antonín Liehm, Cornelius Castoriadis, Pierre Hassner, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Michał Heller, Konstanty Jelenski, and Aleksandar Smolar. From his position as the president of the League, Berindei sent the signatures with a telegram of protest to Ceaus¸escu. When the US headquarters of RFE temporarily prohibited broadcasts on the topic because the State Department did not want to endanger the ongoing negotiations with Romania, the League’s appeal and the protest letter were publicized through Lovinescu’s contacts in Radio France International and through the Agence France Presse, via Berindei. The main targets were foreign radios broadcasting in Romanian: the RFE broadcasting ban went on, but articles on the case continued to appear in the Liberation, Le Point, Le Quotidien, and Figaro, as well as in the Washington Times. The Nouvel Observateur fired one of its journalists because of official Romanian protests, but he moved to L’Evénement and continued to write in the same vein. As the situation worsened during the hunger strike, Tudoran sent requests to foreign journalists to visit and interview him, but since Romania no longer issued journalist visas, this had become extremely dangerous. Arielle Thedrel, a French journalist from Le Figaro, convinced a Belgrade correspondent of Reuters to see Tudoran, while a Nouvel Observateur journalist familiar with the case also prepared to go. Tudoran communicated his request through the coded message “la mer reste tantôt verte, tantôt bleue” ( Jurnal 2: 127), meaning that he wanted to be contacted by foreign journalists; he knew about their coming via coded phone calls from friends. The League organized a manifestation at the Romanian embassy in Paris when the new ambassador organized a reception for diplomats. Berindei,

Monica Lovinescu at Radio Free Europe (Camelia Craciun)

299

Marie France Ionesco and others distributed the League’s “Appeal for Tudoran” to the arriving guests. In order to get around the ban on reporting on the Tudoran case at RFE, a second protest was organized in front of the Romanian embassy to generate new media reports on the topic. According to her Jurnal, only twenty-five people showed up, but Lovinescu directed the slogan shouting, and she recorded it on tape so that she could amplify the sound in broadcasting, as if it came from a bigger group. The material was later used at RFE, and led there to a decision to rescind the ban. Using any opportunity, the network tried to revitalize the Tudoran case: journalists at Libération, Le Figaro, and Le Quotidien tied the Tudoran file to reports on Romanian news, and the case found thus again its way to the International Herald Tribune and Le Monde. RFE transmitted clippings from the Western press, and thus Tudoran remained daily present in the news. The final stage went beyond the network, when French MP Jacques Mallet presented the case in the European Parliament, and the International Delegation of Human Rights in Frankfurt submitted to the Ottawa Conference a list of human rights violations that included the Tudoran case. As a result, the writer was promised a passport and he requested the network to suspend actions. After a forty-day hunger strike, during which his health was not monitored by a doctor, Tudoran was finally allowed to leave the country, in a bad psychological condition. During the campaign, Lovinescu had prepared his coming by looking for a job for him at RFE or BBC, by trying to secure a fellowship for him, and by getting him paid for the dissident texts he sent and which were broadcasted, so that funds would wait for him in the US, his chosen country of migration. Tudoran settled in 1985 in Philadelphia, started to edit Agora, a Romanian exile cultural review, and became member of the network to help in similar cases.

5. Concluding Remarks Philosopher and editor Gabriel Liiceanu reportedly said in a conversation that Bucharest should have a crossroad where Avenue Monica Lovinescu meets Boulevard Virgil Ierunca. Their political and cultural criticism had an enormous impact upon the Romanian public before 1989. After 1989, Lovinescu rapidly became part of the newly reshaped and mainly conservative cultural canon, and in 2006 she was awarded the Dimitrie Cantemir award for Romanian intellectuals in the Diaspora. As a gesture of reconciliation with her country, in March 2008 she donated her house in Paris to the Romanian state for the creation of a cultural center and she also established the Ierunca-Lovi-

300

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

nescu Memorial. On April 20, 2008, just one month later, she died in Paris. Her remains and those of her husband were repatriated to Bucharest. Monica Lovinescu’s writings have been published in Romania by Humanitas, probably the best-known publishing house immediately after 1989, the first one to respond to the new situation, especially by introducing to the Romanian public previously censored literature and exile personalities. Humanitas published the six-volume Unde scurte (Shortwaves), which includes a selection of rewritten texts, broadcast at RFE between 1961 and 1992 (there are also gaps and missing texts in the material that is currently stored, but not entirely catalogued, at the Hoover Institution), and a selection of rewritten texts broadcast at RFE between 1961 and 1992. Her Jurnal, also published selectively in six volumes, was complemented by her two-volume memoir La apa Vavilonului, which covers the first period of her life, namely her Romanian youth and the first decades of her French exile, not covered by her journal. A book of dialogues, some of them transcriptions of round table discussions from the weekly French Scene broadcast, appeared as Întrevederi cu Mircea Eliade, Eugen Ionescu, S¸tefan Lupas¸cu and Grigore Cugler (Encounters with …). Finally, the only novel written in her youth, which was rejected by several French publishing houses in the 1950s and thus remained a manuscript, appeared in a Romanian translation in 2007 as Cuvîntul din cuvinte. As remarked at the outset, the scarce research on Monica Lovinescu has not yet gone beyond encomiastic appreciations, although there are plenty of primary sources to start serious scholarly research. The impact of her work was tremendous and many-sided, but scholars still seem to be under the influence of her authority and are reluctant to switch from hagiography to analysis. The relatively short period since 1989 has been one of triumphant homecoming. Dedicated to the reconstruction of the political profile and social impact of RFE, Alexandru Solomon’s 2007 documentary Cold Waves/Ra˘zboi pe calea undelor featured Monica Lovinescu as one of the main voices of the Romanian unit. Apart from Ioana Popa’s M.A. thesis at the EHESS/ENS in Paris on Radio Free Europe (1998), only a few chapters appeared on Lovinescu’s work, in books on the period, journal articles, reviews, and polemics; the public is familiar only with her towering reputation. Her connections with the Parisian exile circles and the political-intellectual context of her work have been largely ignored. A combination of factors contributed to Lovinescu’s influence in Romania, among the French intellectuals, and among the French-Romanian exiles. She started out with a significant social and intellectual capital that I tried to reconstruct in this article. As a central figure at RFE, she built up a reputation with thirty years of broadcasting. She represented a symbolic bridge to a cul-

Monica Lovinescu at Radio Free Europe (Camelia Craciun)

301

tural and social past represented by her father, and she personally participated in communist Romania’s affairs through her mother’s tragedy. She inherited ties with the pre-1945 intelligentsia and built new ones through broadcasts and her help for persecuted writers in Romania. There is one significant question about the RFE activity and Monica Lovinescu’s anti-communist discourse: partly based on her personal background and political opinions, her anti-communist position seems to result from a combination of personal conviction, the RFE ideological line, and the repressive communist regime in Romania. Still, further research based on the rich RFE broadcasting and corporate archival holdings at the Hoover Institution, as well as the oral history accounts of former exiles and radio journalists should complete the profile of the Romanian unit of RFE, which has until now been identified in the wider public mainly with one figure: Monica Lovinescu.

Works Cited Baconsky, Anatol E. Biserica neagra (The Black Church). Bucuresti: Eminescu, 1995. Barbu, Eugen. Incognito. 4 vols. Bucharest: Albatros; Eminescu, 1975–1980. Bernard, Noel. Aici e Europa Libera (This is Radio Free Europe Broadcasting). Bucharest: Tinerama, 1991. Calinescu, George. Bietul Ioanide (Wretched Ioanide). Bucharest: ESPLA, 1953. Caraion, Ion. Insectele tovara˘s¸ului Hitler (The Insects of Comrade Hitler). Munich: Ion Dumitru, 1982. Carp, Mircea. “Vocea Americii” in Romania (1969–78). (‘Voice of America’ in Romania: 1969–78). Ias¸i: Polirom, 1997. Déry, Tibor. Monsieur G. A. à X (Mr. G.A. in X). Paris: Seuil, 1965. Trans. Monique Fougerousse and Ladislas Gara of G. A. úr X-ben. Budapest: Szépirodalmi, 1964. Dumitrescu-Za˘pada˘, Constantin. Cetatea totala˘ (The Absolute City). Munich: Ion Dumitru, 1982. Flers, Reneé Al. de. Radio Europa Libera si exilul romanesc. O istorie inca nescrisa. (Radio Free Europe and the Romanian Exile. An unwritten History) Bucharest: Vestala, 2005. Georgescu, Adriana. Au commencement était la fin (At the Beginning was the End). Trans. Claude Pascal [Monica Lovinescu]. Paris: Hachette, 1951. Romanian original : La inceput a fost sfirsitul. Bucharest: Humanitas 1992. Gheorghiu, Virgil Constantin. La Vingt cinquième heure (The Twenty-fifth Hour). Paris: Plon, 1956. Trans. Monique Saint-Côme [Monica Lovinescu] from Romanian. Holt, Robert T. Radio Free Europe. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1958. Jela, Doina. Aceasta dragoste care ne leaga (This Love that Binds Us). Bucharest: Humanitas, 2005. Kundera, Milan. L’Insoutenable légèreté de l’être (The Unbearable Lightness of Being). Paris: France loisirs, 1984. Trans. François Kérel from Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí. Toronto: SixtyEight Publishers, 1981. Lovinescu, Eugen. Istoria civilizat¸iei române moderne (History of Modern Romanian Civilization). 3 vols. Bucharest: Ancora, 1924–25.

302

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

Lovinescu, Eugen. Istoria literaturii române contemporane (History of Contemporary Romanian Literature). 6 vols. Bucharest: Ancora, 1926–29. Lovinescu, Monica. Cuvîntul din cuvinte (The Word within Words). Bucharest: Humanitas, 2007. Lovinescu, Monica. Diagonale. (Diagonals) Bucharest: Humanitas, 2002. Lovinescu, Monica. Est-Etice. Unde scurte 4. (East-Ethics. Shortwaves 4) Bucharest: Humanitas, 1994. Lovinescu, Monica. Insula Serpilor. Unde scurte 6. (The Snakes’ Island. Shortwaves 6) Bucharest: Humanitas, 1996. Lovinescu, Monica. Întrevederi cu Mircea Eliade, Eugen Ionescu, S¸tefan Lupas¸cu s¸i Grigore Cugler (Encounters with …). Bucharest: Cartea romaneasca, 1992. Lovinescu, Monica. Jurnal 1981–1984. Bucharest: Humanitas 2003. Lovinescu, Monica. Jurnal 1985–1988. Bucharest: Humanitas 2003. Lovinescu, Monica. Jurnal 1990–1993. Bucharest: Humanitas, 2003. Lovinescu, Monica. Jurnal 1994–1995. Bucharest: Humanitas, 2004. Lovinescu, Monica. Jurnal 1996–1997. Bucharest: Humanitas, 2005. Lovinescu, Monica. Jurnal 1998–2000. Bucharest: Humanitas, 2006. Lovinescu, Monica. La apa Vavilonului (By the River of Babylon). 2 vols. Bucharest: Humanitas, 1999–2001. Lovinescu, Monica. Posteritatea contemporana. Unde scurte 3 (Contemporary Posterity. Shortwaves 3). Bucharest: Humanitas, 1994. Lovinescu, Monica. Pragul. Unde scurte 5 (The Threshold. Shortwaves 5). Bucharest: Humanitas, 1995. Lovinescu, Monica. Seismografe. Unde scurte 2. (Seismographs. Shortwaves 2). Bucharest: Humanitas, 1993. Lovinescu, Monica. Unde scurte (Shortwaves). Bucharest: Humanitas, 1990. Lovinescu, Monica. Unde scurte. Jurnal indirect (Shortwaves. Indirect Journal). Madrid: Limite, 1978. Manolescu, Florin. Enciclopedia exilului literar romanesc (Encyclopedia of the Romanian Literary Exile). Bucharest: Compania, 2003. Michie, Allan A. Voices through the Iron Curtain: the Radio Free Europe Story. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1963. Mickelson, Sig. America’s Other Voice. The Story of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. New York: Praeger, 1983. Mihailov, Mihailo. “Ljeto moskovsko 1964” (Moscow Summer, 1964). Delo (Belgrade), ( January-February 1965). Nedelcovici, Bujor. Le Second messager (The Second Messenger). Paris: Albin Michel, 1985. Nekrassov, Victor. Dans les tranchées de Stalingrad (In the Trenches of Stalingrad). Trans. René L’Hermitte. Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1963. Nelson, Michael. War of the Black Heavens. The Battles of Western Broadcasting in the Cold War. London, Washington: Brassey’s, 1997. Papilian, Alexandru. Micelii (Mycelia). Bucharest: Cartea Româneasca˘, 1980. Pelin, Mihai. Operatiunile “Melita” si “Eterul.” Istoria Europei Libere prin documente de Securitate (The ‘Melita’ and ‘Eterul’ Operations. A History of Radio Free Europe through Securitate Documents). Bucharest: Albatros, 1999. Popa, Ioana. “L’intelligence de l’anticommunisme entre litérature et politique: une instance de consécration. Le cas d’une émission de critique littéraire, la radio Free Europe” (The Secret Services of Anti-communism between Literature and Politics: A Form of Public

Monica Lovinescu at Radio Free Europe (Camelia Craciun)

303

Acknowledgment. The Case of a Literary Criticism Broadcast at Radio Free Europe). Unpublished MA thesis, Paris: EHESS/ENS, 1998. Puddington, Arch. Broadcasting Freedom. The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2000. Solomon, Alexandru, dir. Cold Waves (Razboi pe calea undelor). 2007. Ta˘nase, Virgil. Ma Roumanie: Entretiens avec Blandine Teze-Delafon (My Romania). Paris: Ramsay/De Cortanze, Medias, 1990. Urban, George R. Radio Free Europe and the Pursuit of Democracy. My War within the Cold War. New Haven: Yale UP, 1997. Wajda, Andrzej, dir. Człowiek z marmuru (Marble Man). 1976.

304

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad

Chapter III Individual Trajectories

Introduction

307

Introduction We follow in this chapter the traces of five writers in exile. Each case is unique yet also representative of a type, determined by nationality and tradition, by exilic trajectory, and by a mental map that each of them formed of the world. Other choices could have been made, and from certain angles, the group is less than fully balanced. No separate article is devoted to a Slovak or a Croatian writer, and, even worse, to a female writer. The latter is somewhat mitigated by the fact that we do have in other chapters two essays on women: on Monica Lovinescu in Chapter II, and on Herta Müller in Chapter V. Nevertheless, the imbalance reflects a general gender inequality in our overall pool of exile writers. We were aware of this imbalance, but were unable to rectify it because it reflects the present state of knowledge about literary history, which only future research may readjust. A brief look at the Timeline in Chapter VI reveals how serious the imbalance is. Prior to 1956, we found only a handful of women writers who went into exile: Anna Lesznai, Sarolta Lányi, Erzsébet Újvári, Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna, Maria Kuncewiczowa, and Wanda Wasilewska before the war; Danuta Mostwin, Milada Soucˇková, Kriszta Arnóthy, and Monica Lovinescu after the war – a meager result that compares unfavorably even with the pool of female writers in our region during the first half of the twentieth century. No doubt, both married and unmarried women had greater difficulties going into exile than men. Among the 1956 Hungarian exiles, two women stand out: Anna Kéthly, a veteran political leader, who continued to play important roles in the international social-democratic movement, and Agota Kristof, who came to be known decades later as a writer in French. Starting with the 1960s, the number of women writers in exile increased dramatically, especially by those who quit Czechoslovakia (e.g., Jirˇina Fuchsová, Veˇra Linhartová, Zdena Salivarová, and Libusˇe Moníková). Future research may change this picture. Only one of our chosen writers, Milan Kundera, broke decively through to write in a second language, though Witold Gombrowicz also made some attempts during his long stay in Argentina. They continued to write in their native language but this did not mean that they continued to adhere to their native identity. A caustic irony towards the national tradition is at the very heart of Gombrowicz’s writing, and a fundamental ambivalence with respect

308

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

to Hungarian society and culture characterizes Imre Kertész, the only writer in this group that did not leave his country permanently (though he stated several times that he feels comfortable in present-day German culture; he lives part of the year in Berlin). While Paul Goma remained in the native orbit in terms of his preoccupations and his language of writing, he takes an unwaveringly critical stance with respect to Romanian culture and society. Milosˇ Crnjanski is the only writer in the group who returned home to enjoy his celebration as a national writer (a turn towards nationalism that is evident already in some of his earlier fiction). Finally, we note that none of these writers was swept into exile as part of a mass movement. Though their departure from home was conditioned by great historical events, they pursued a personal trajectory rather than joining a mass exodus. Ironically and tragically, the only one to stay at home was earlier part of a mass exit, the deportation to Auschwitz. Kertész may not be formally an exile, but he has learned more bitterly than most exiles what it means to be ejected.

Milosˇ Crnjanski in Exile (Guido Snel)

309

Milosˇ Crnjanski in Exile Guido Snel

When Italy and Germany declared war on Yugoslavia on April 6, 1941, Milosˇ Crnjanski, then press attaché at the Yugoslav embassy in Rome, left for Lissabon. A few months later, he reached London and joined the Yugoslav government in exile there. After Tito’s communist party took over in 1945, Crnjanski did not return to Yugoslavia but remained in London until 1965. When he finally returned to Belgrade, he was hailed as a great and important writer and poet. He lived in the city until his death in 1977. Was he an exile? The reason why he did not or could not return was, he claimed, because he was told that he “would have to spend a few months in jail,” because of his right wing publications from the 1930s. “‘Thank you very much,’ I told them, and left the government” (Ispunio 184). The threat may have been real, and he might have ended up in prison would he have returned in 1945. In London, Crnjanski joined the life of the Serbian exiles (many of them royalists and Cˇetnik allies), but soon shifted to the margins of a community that was itself already marginal. He may have expected more (financial) support, as he was convinced that every community should take care of its gifted individuals. When he later realized that even T.S. Eliot’s poetry didn’t provide the renowned poet with an income, he expressed astonishment (or rather disgust) with the English society. Crnjanski, though careful to the point of paranoia, did not completely avoid, however, compatriots allied to the new regime. By the end of the 1950s, he occasionally met reporters and inquired about the possibility of publishing back home. In 1956, his novel of 1921, Dnevnik o Cˇarnojevic´u (A Diary about Cˇarnojevic´), was reissued in Subotica. The only censored passage was an erotic one. Furthermore, when his long time friend, the former Vreme journalist but now a fellow émigré Dragan Ac´imovic´ visited him in London in 1961, Crnjanski told him about one of his visits to the Foreign Press Association, in the capacity of economic reporter of the Buenos Aires weekly El Economista. There, he meet Mosˇa Pijade, a prominent person in Tito’s party. In the version of Ac´imovic´:

310

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

Once he [Crnjanski] got a seat at the end of the table, among unknown Asian correspondents, the next time among world famous journalists. On one occasion, right after the war, he got a seat opposite Mosˇa Pijade. When he recognized Crnjanski, he was highly surprised. With his eyes, he [Pijade] gave him a sign that he wanted to talk. Later, when they got together, Pijade asked him: “What are you doing here?” “Making a living as a journalist.” […] “Why don’t you come home?” Pijade continued. “Enough about that, Mosˇa.” […] And they each went their own way (41).

Another version of the same anecdote took place at the Yugoslav embassy in London, where Pijade apparently told Crnjanski: “Why don’t you come home, you old fool!” (Dnevnik 68). These are written versions of a story Crnjanski was obviously fond of telling; the very difference between the question mark and the exclamation mark opens up two versions of the event, whether budalo matori (you old fool) was actually added or not. It was Srd-an Prica, Yugoslav ambassador in London, who finally succeeded in convincing Crnjanski to return. In 1965, Prica accompagnied Crnjanski to Triest, and from there to Rijeka, where Crnjanski had spent his high-school years. So was it Crnjanski’s own choice not to return to Tito’s Yugoslavia? Couldn’t he return, or did he think that he couldn’t return? The famous or infamous mild censorship of Tito’s Yugoslavia allowed for a grey zone, which often left it open whether a writer would be persecuted or not. One should also keep in mind that by 1945 Crnjanski was more or less on the margins of Yugoslav literary life. He had been abroad in the diplomatic service since the early 1930s and hadn’t published poetry or fiction for a long time. He may have overstated his own stature and significance, and would have perhaps simply been ignored had he returned in 1945. Or he would have gotten the benign treatment other writers received, for instance Ivo Andric´, the former ambassador of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia to the Nazi regime in Berlin, who miraculously re-emerged in 1945 both on the literary and the political scene of what was now communist Yugoslavia. In the case of Crnjanski, biographers must rely on information that the writer himself provided, most of it in interviews after his return in 1965. Even worse, they would have to pore over Belgrade dailies and weeklies, which every now and then wrote about Crnjanski but hardly ever provided more than anecdotic information. A biographer who digs into the Yugoslavian past like a literary archeologist can only dream of a firm biographical tradition as it exists in English literature, where several biographies of one author add up to a complex image of a writer’s life. Think of the now countless studies on the life of the quintessential modernists Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, which take contrasting views on the entanglement of life and literature, and of the factual events in the author’s life and the fictional ones that make up his or her

Milosˇ Crnjanski in Exile (Guido Snel)

311

literary texts. When dealing with an exiled or émigré writer, the lack of a biography is even more frustrating. As Leszek Kołakowski writes: More often than not, modern exiles have been expatriates, rather than exiles in the strict sense; usually they were not physically deported from their countries or banished by law; they escaped from political persecution, prison, death, or simply censorship. The distinction is important insofar as it has had a psychological effect. Many voluntary exiles from tyrannical regimes cannot rid themselves of a feeling of discomfort. […] A certain ambiguity is therefore unavoidable, and it is impossible to draw up any hard-and-fast rules to distinguish justifiable from unjustifiable self-exile (188).

Whether Crnjanski’s decision to go into exile was deliberate, a justifiable selfdefense, the result of a miscalculation or paranoia, cannot be answered here, not even hypothetically. What I can give here are some questionable and subjectively interpreted facts about Crnjanski’s London life, which, at least in the version he gave in interviews after his return to Belgrade, bore the hallmark of exilic hardship. After Crnjanski resigned from the exile Yugoslav government in London, he first toiled and moiled for some time in a bookstore, where he had to carry heavy packages of books. He then worked as a clerk in the shoe store Hellstern and Sons, where he sat in the basement and watched the feet of Londoners passing by. He attempted to write a novel in English, “The Shoemakers of London.” In an interview after his return to Belgrade, he claimed he gave the novel to Rebecca West, author of the acclaimed Balkan travelogue Black Lamb, Grey Falcon, who approved of it and recommended him to an English publisher. But he then withdrew the book because he had apparently realized that “it is harder to write English than to speak it. I can now see that it would take me at least twenty years to become English” (Ispunio 36). Crnjanski lost his job in the shoe store, in one version because of a conflict with the manager (Ac´imovic´ 50), in another version because his Achilles tendon tore during a holiday at the coast (Ispunio 211). The tendon rupture also befalls the fictional character Rjepnin in Crnjanski’s Roman o Londonu (A Novel about London; 1971). Crnjanski and his wife Vida lived for some time with Lady Paget, wife of the former Viceroy of India and benefactress of the Serbian exile community. Vida served tea; Crnjanski sat in the garden and wrote. Throughout his London years he tried to get an academic position, with or without the help of the Serbian exile community. He became a student at the University of London and got a degree in international affairs; According to one source he also obtained a degree in dramaturgy and film direction (Bunjac 70). Still, he failed to obtain a steady job. As of 1952, he wrote on economy for the Buenos Aires based El Economista, run by another Serbian émigré. The wages must have

312

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

been insufficient: he applied as a porter with a number of hotels, but was not accepted. They lived from the money Vida earned by sewing doll clothes for department stores. When they returned to Yugoslavia in 1965, the Yugoslav government covered Crnjanski’s debts in England (about 500 pound sterling) and sent him, at his request, three meters of wool for a new suit. Though Crnjanski may not have been objectively an exile, he did live as one and acted out the role of a poet banished from his home country. In the many interviews he gave after his return, he never missed an opportunity to tell about the hardships he and his wife had to endure. Although the actual reasons for his staying abroad may have been obscure, the fiction and poetry he wrote in London, Kod Hiperborejaca (Among the Hyperboreans; 1966), A Novel about London (1971), and the long poem “Lament o Beogradu” (Lament for Belgrade; 1956), are monumental texts about the complexities of exile. Hence, the remainder of this essay will not deal with Crnjanski’s actual London years, but with their transposition into an exilic experience in his fiction.

1. Exercises in Homelessness Although exile often presents a sudden and dramatic rupture, causing a writer to “undergo a total transformation” (Miłosz 36), there is remarkable consistency in Crnjanski’s poetics throughout his oeuvre, at least concerning the subject matter. His obsessive theme remains homelessness, no doubt informed by his experiences at the Isonzo and Galician fronts in World War I. Far from an abstract sense of being existentially out of place, homelessness is for Crnjanski the state of mind of a soldier who returns home after the war, finding himself fundamentally misunderstood and forever cast into the world. This is already at the center of his first novel Dnevnik o Cˇarnojevic´u, which introduced the dreamlike character of the “Sumatraist,” a wandering sailor who can be simultaneously at several places, like a psychedelic avant la lettre. The poem “Sumatra” and the subsequent prose piece “An explanation of Sumatra” turned this individual obsession into Sumatraizam (Sumatraism), a programmatic, one-man avant-garde movement. The poem describes a state of detachment: “Now we are light, tender and careless”; the prose text portrays a painful road to it. The narrator returns home from the Great War by train and travels through the region of Srem in Vojvodina. He undergoes now a sense of loss, now of an all-embracing interconnectedness with people, memories, and places in the world. “Sumatra,” he utters several times, the first time seriously, the second one “mockingly.” We don’t know whether his sentiment is sincere, ironic, or sarcastic. The explanation in prose is preceded by a mani-

Milosˇ Crnjanski in Exile (Guido Snel)

313

festo that declares, much like similar avant-garde manifestos, all tradition to be obsolete and hypocritical. These problematic veze (“ties” or “connections”; the best translation would perhaps be Baudelaird’s correspondances) between people, places, and events in the world remain at the heart of Crnjanski’s later poetics, also during his London years. In the first volume of the novel Seobe (Migrations; 1928), Sumatraism is extended from the individual level to a diasporic, national one. In A Novel about London, the main character Rjepnin is driven crazy by the veze in the world, the seemingly coincidental and senseless correspondences between separate places and faces. Among the Hyperboreans, a hybrid text (essay, autobiography, as well as travelogue), is wholly based on correspondences between Northern and Southern Europe, between the Arctic and the Mediterreanean. And Sumatraism is the guiding principle of the poem “Lament for Belgrade.” Crnjanski takes this homelessness quite literally, and often visualizes it in images of wandering between two or more places in reality, history, or memory. And there are countless passages in which individual sorrow and grief overlap with national pathos. It is important to note that this is already the case in A Dnevnik o Cˇarnojevic´u, where Crnjanski places his heroes and protagonists into an essentially national context. His personal nationalism is, unlike its nineteenth-century version, not triumphant, but bitter and disappointed. It does not imply homecoming or a return to an (imaginary) golden age, but a state of eternal wandering. And it is certainly different from the cosmopolitan variant of homelessness that is, at least in the pre-World-War-II era, absent from Yugoslav letters as an active, speaking voice, though it did exist on Yugoslav soil. Ödön von Horváth, for instance, was born in Fiume/Rijeka, wrote in German, lived mostly in Austria, fled after the Anschluss to Hungary, and died, finally in Paris. He was never counted as a Yugoslav, but he entered its literature in the 1980s: Danilo Kisˇ, who lived by then in an “Joycean exile” in Paris, based the story “The Man without Fatherland” (Apatrid) on Horváth’s life and tragic death; this then became a model for Dubravka Ugresˇic´, David Albahari, and other post-Yugoslav exiles in the 1990s – a tradition with which Crnjanski’s homelessness has nothing in common. In contrast to Horváth, writers like Crnjanski, Ivo Andric´, and, to a lesser extent, Miroslav Krlezˇa still had a firm notion of a national home, whether it be South-Slav, Yugoslav, Serbian or Croatian. Some, though not all of them, would become renegades, but they did have a home they could embrace or reject. The difference between these national and cosmopolitan forms of homelessness, can be illustrated by the stance Yugoslav writers took toward their Jewish fellow citizens, at least toward those who were not assimilated. These were kuferasˇi, “suitcase people,” as the narrator says in Andric´’s “The

314

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

Letter from 1920.” The term and the image of people living from suitcases reemerges among post-Yugoslav exiles and émigrés, but in the 1920s, in the years following the collapse of the Habsburg empire, it suggested a lack of loyalty to the new South-Slav state that was multi-national insofar as Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes were concerned, but provided no home shelter for Jews, Hungarians and ethnic Germans. Occasional hints of philo-Semitism in Crnjanski’s work merely confirm his essentially national understanding of the dramatic events during the two world wars. A description of the introduction of racial law under Mussolini, from Embajade, diplomatic memoirs he wrote toward the end of his life (that were first published in 1984, frames even the Holocaust in terms of national rather than individual fate: Personally, these were hard days for me. Already in my youth in Austria I felt connected to Jews and Jewesses, who were very dear to me. Apart from a number of Jews in Vienna who were more Austrian than the Austrians themselves, I am attached, through memories, to those whom I loved, and to those Jews who were my friends in Austria, and good friends at that. During World War I, we Serbs were the pariahs, what the Jews are becoming these days. (390)

The first of Crnjanski’s three major exile texts, Among the Hyperboreans, is a partly fictionalized memory of the days in Rome, written during his London exile. The concept of veze is at the very heart of the narrative: the narrator, who has traveled extensively in Scandinavia and the arctic zone in the 1930s, discovers in Rome countless correspondences between Rome in Italy and the Arctic zone. Bearing in mind that Crnjanski wrote this book during his London years, we note that it offers a peculiar perspective, that of an exile who looks back at his last years as an expat, his social heydays. As the narrator repeatedly says, he was not aware back then of the hardships the future would bring. In Among the Hyperboreans, Rome of the early 1940s is dramatic, not just because it is a town on the edge of war but also because it turns out to be the last place before the protagonist’s social decline. Here he still enjoyed all the privileges of an expat. The story about Rome opens with a diagnosis that he is gravely ill, and though this turns out to be a kind of sham, it allows him to have a dialogue about death and immortality with such European predecessors as Carducci, Kierkegaard, Tasso, Michelangelo, Stendhal, and Goethe. He can pick quarrels with his direct neighbor Marinetti; as a protagonist, he can even afford, existentially, to remain all but silent in conversations within his company. Our poet from a small Balkan country does not seem to suffer from an inferiority complex. He is authentic and sovereign.

Milosˇ Crnjanski in Exile (Guido Snel)

315

Whenever the protagonists is provoked by an Italian officer, suggesting that the Slavs are inferior to the Italians, he answers not in the mode of a modern nationalist but in the older discourse of a proud and arrogant Slav who observes the heart of Europe from the privileged position on the edge of the continent. This is much like the ‘spirito nazionale’ that urged the Dalmatian Ivan Lovric´ in 1776 to respond to the exotic image of the South Slavs in Alberto Fortis’ Un Viaggio in Dalmazia (A Journey to Dalmatia). The pre-modern figure of a banished man of letters like Dante, Tasso, or Casanova is both a literary and a political example in Among the Hyperboreans. The poet banished from his polis: this is the status the exiled author, behind the expat narrator of Among the Hyperboreans, would claim for himself. Casanova is also present as an erotic example: the narrator’s manhood seems the unshakable fundament here of an authentic, absolute masculinity. In A Novel about London, sex becomes for the exile Rjepnin the main field of cultural degradation. Just how Among the Hyperboreans constructs this pre-modern identity becomes clear in a long passage in which the protagonist and his company take a bicycle tour through Rome and visit the grave of Torquato Tasso. Pondering the tragic fate and wanderings of the Italian poet, the protagonist suggests: It seems to me that wherever Tasso went, his memory of Sorrento haunted him, whether he would be writing poetry in Ferrara, Florence, or wherever else in Italy. I have been in Sorrento. I know its intoxicating, enchanting, seductive surroundings, and I believe that Tasso describes this in all his nature scenes. Just as Camões created a Mediterranean of his own, and oceans that did not exist, Tasso imagined and relocated all his crusaders, his princesses, and his loves to a Sorrento that was his own creation. That is why he is unhappy wherever he goes. That’s why he cannot find inner peace anywhere. And that is why he wanders through Italy, like a fish cast on the shore in a storm, sprawling in shallow water, in the sand, on the rocks (153).

Crnjanski’s protagonist describes Tasso’s complex of estrangement and homelessness in the terms of Sumatraism. Tasso’s wandering, his search for the imaginary landscape of his youth, is much like the experience in Crnjanski’s poem “Sumatra,” where red cherries from the poet’s zavicˇaj, region (rather than state!) of birth, are reflected in the red choral at the bottom of a sea near Sumatra: the correspondence is there, but the original is lost, only its images remain. Tasso’s wandering is symptom of a being out of place, not bound to any context. It is the homelessness of the protagonist in Among the Hyperboreans, one that he attempts to cure by looking for veze, correspondences between seemingly unconnected phenomena, for instance between Tasso, the famous Italian poet, and himself, also a famous poet but from a minor tradition that is obscure in the eyes of the Italians, who have always had a keen, avid political eye for his Slavic oltremare. The protagonist’s and Tasso’s disease

316

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

is both ancient and modern, and therefore neither of these exactly but rather universal. The suggestion is that the exile of the author/protagonist in Among the Hyperboreans is akin to that of Tasso. Although I am not aware of critical discussions that read Among the Hyperboreans in the light of Crnjanski’s exile, most major studies of Crnjanski’s Sumatraism tend to respect its universalist claims. Like Petar Dzˇadzˇic´, critics discuss Sumatraism, at any stage in Crnjanski’s oeuvre, as a philosophy, as an abstraction from the text. However, as Crnjanski became an exile (or thought he became one), his poetics of homelessness became embedded in a context of acute estrangement. However real or fictitious his actual exile may have been, his poetics, the core of his work and poetical thinking, came under the threat of losing its universality and becoming the lament of a single man caught in the golden cage of his language. And in the England of the 1950s, Serbian must have rung only a distant bell, that of folk poetry, not of a supreme modernist poet. Hence Crnjanski’s wish to write in English, and his choice for a Russian and rather than a Serbian protagonist in A Novel about London when his attempt at changing language failed. This leads us to what is probably the central question concerning Crnjanski’s A Novel about London and the poem “Lament for Belgrade.” How do they respond to the threat of estrangement? In Among the Hyperboreans, Crnjanski opted for escapism and flirted with the figure of an older, pre-modern man banished from his polis, trying to pose as a Dante or a Tasso. I want to suggest that Crnjanski did actually “undergo a total transformation,” especially in his London novel, by facing up to the modern age, not just to the mid-twentiethcentury time of his exile but also to the place, England. Doing so, he transgressed the constraints of the national Serbian context in which he had up to then been living, writing, and thinking.

2. A Novel about London Edward Said shows in his classic essay “Reflections on exile” just how entangled the twentieth-century phenomena of exile and nationalism are. According to Said, nationalism “affirms the home created by a community of language, culture and customs; and, by so doing, it fends off exile, fights to prevent its ravages. […] All nationalisms in their early stage develop from a condition of estrangement” (176). For Said, nationalism is not a premodern phenomenon but one that is directly related to the existential discontent of the modern age. Exile, the most extreme manifestation of this discontent, is therefore “irremediably secular and unbearably historical.”

Milosˇ Crnjanski in Exile (Guido Snel)

317

Although exile is “terrible to experience” (173), Said does see possibilities for its productive use. The exile’s position on the margins of the (most often Western) host societies, may offer a unique vantage point that may become fertile. In most cases, the position of intellectuals or writers on the border is hazardous, for they are socially isolated and cut off from their native tongue. Crnjanski’s A Novel about London is about the double hell that the city represents for a Russian exile, the aristocrat Rjepnin: his hell is not only the English metropolis, but also the exile community. Still worse, hell is not just the others but also Rjepnin himself, personified by the devil. The novel is a brilliantly written, huge prose text of almost 800 pages, which resembles the traditional realist novel only superficially; it thus confirms Czesław Miłosz’s adage that “realism cannot by definition be practiced in exile” (37). Crnjanski’s modernity lies here in the narrative technique. Although the main character’s consciousness is opened up through a third-person narrator, it is far from clear who this narrator is: he may be merely an abstract narrating instance, or a voice that lurks behind the figure of the author, or a sane/insane schizophrenic second voice in the head of Rjepnin. It may be even the voice of the devil. Rjepnin’s growing belief that his exile has brought him into a Gnostic universe where evil rules, will trigger his final decision to commit suicide. He not only fails to build up a new life in London, he fails to come to terms with the chaos of the modern world as such. His exile is, indeed, as Said says, an acute and extreme manifestation of the existential discontent of the modern age. The main question to be answered about the novel as a whole (although its size makes this a difficult enterprise) is how Rjepnin’s failure to deal with modernity, first and foremost with London’s sexual morality and its Babelic multilingualism, relates to the novel’s polyphony. Crnjanski presented his London years, especially after his return to Belgrade, as a bitter exile, a dramatic version of his biography that some critics have silently or openly accepted as the novel’s direct context; some critics discern the figure of the author in the novel’s narrator, others have gone as far as to interpret Rjepnin as his alter ego. The point is, however, that although A Novel about London offers a tragedy of Rjepnin’s life, it also is a truly modern novel for it creates utter confusion about the “orchestration of voices” in the text, to use Mikhail Bakhtin’s phrase. Traditional Serbian nationalist interpretations of A Novel about London find an authorial intention behind the polyphony, and thus offer a monologic reading, in which Rjepnin’s fate is absolute, in which there is no place for irony, and which, silently or openly, confirm the predominant role of the stradalnik, the martyr, in Crnjanski’s biography. This, for instance, is the interpretive strategy of Jelena S. Bankovic´’s 1996 study.

318

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

Though tempting, this is misleading, not in the least because the narrator’s voice in the novel is far from univocal. I shall discuss a number of chapters that describe Rjepnin’s holiday in Cornwall roughly in the middle of the novel, but I wish to focus on the novel’s opening, where Rjepnin is in the London subway. The narrator complains that the world can only be observed nowadays “as a whole in some kind of old fashioned planetarium” (33). Then, discussing the shape of various European countries on the map, the narrator comes to a terribly distorted picture of Spain: “As if God did not create the world. But the Devil. “…‘rФ. …‘rФ,” someone shouted in my ear” (34). “The devil. The devil,” someone shouts in Russian, but who does the shouting? Rjepnin? The narrator? The devil himself ? Is Rjepnin involved in soliloquy, is he speaking in various alien tongues and hence mentally ill? Is he mocking himself, the narrator, or human fate as such? Two hundred pages later, Rjepnin is a clerk in “Lahure & Son,” a luxury shoe store in London’s center, sitting in the basement and working overtime. In the afternoon, he had a curious meeting in the park with an English nurse, who happily declared to him that “sex is at the root of everything” and indirectly offered herself to him – which filled him with horror. Leafing through women’s magazines, the narrator remarks now: “As if some kind of Devil is playing with him, he finds in the magazines he is reading by the light of the small desk lamp, proof of his thoughts about the changes in London, English women, love, and sex” (229). Then, probably to unburden himself of these thoughts, Rjepnin cannot resist picking up an illustrated magazine of a more recent date. Meanwhile, the Devil still stands in the dark corner of Lahure and Son, and “picks photographs that confuse Rjepnin and, in the end, make him laugh with horror” (230). A bit later, the narrator becomes uncertain and says: “As if some kind of Devil, Mephisto personally” (233). Either Rjepnin believes that an evil force manipulates him, or the Devil may actually be on the scene and we are to believe that the he himself plays a role in the world of the novel. Such is Rjepnin’s confused mental state when he goes on holiday to Cornwall. He now gradually conceives of the events that befall him as consequences of a diabolic intervention, as if not only he alone but all of Western civilization is put to the test. What exactly exerts so much pressure on him, and humiliates him? To the reader, it is obvious that most of his suffering is caused by social and cultural humiliation. His company in Cornwall is AngloRussian. Although most people come in couples (only Rjepnin’s wife Nadja stays back in London), adultery seems a favorite pastime in “The Crimea,” a little hotel at the coast, named, Rjepnin believes, to remind Russian émigrés

Milosˇ Crnjanski in Exile (Guido Snel)

319

that “Sebastopol had fallen in the end” (289). The central issue in these chapters is the question whether Rjepnin will kill himself or not. On the day of his arrival, when he sees the sea for the first time, he already thinks of suicide: “This was not a pathetic thought, no self-pity, no fear of life, but a strange, foolish desire to sacrifice himself for his wife whom he loved and who loved him” (293). “I am going away,” the first-person narrator hears him saying in Russian to himself. The company includes the émigré Krilov, a doctor, with his adulterous English wife. Krilov sees everywhere what Rjepnin at this point only suspects: sin, adultery, people obsessed with coitus. Another émigré, Sorokin, has taken his wife’s surname, Fowey. Their attitude toward assimilation is indicated by the way they use or avoid their native Russian in conversations. Krilov is passive, Sorokin defiant and arrogant. Also part of the company is Lady Park, daughter of a Russian émigré, who is married to the aged Sir Malcolm, who despises all Russians save his wife. One morning, when they all go swimming together, Lady Park, hardly an adult, challenges Rjepnin to swim to a rock further out; he agrees and she tries to seduce him there. Rjepnin struggles to come back, gets exhausted, and feels aged for the first time in his life. He makes it back whereas the Russian émigré Pokrovski, who was earlier said to have a face like Christ on Russian icons, almost drowns. Sir Malcolm carries him in his arms as if “he had just taken him from the cross” (354). While reanimating him, they beat his body “as if not only water had to get out, but some kind of devil as well” (355). All this takes place close to the ruins of a castle that is said to have belonged to Tristan, the legendary knight. Once Isolde’s purity had been at stake, now England itself is threatened: In those days the papers were full of scandals that involved Italians who had come to England looking for a job. The miners didn’t want to hire them. Those dark-eyed, handsome young men seduced their women and daughters, poor creatures who were already obsessed by those other new men, Indians and also blacks, who were coming from Europe, Asia, and Africa, looking for a job, something to earn, and were only successful with women. It was all over the papers. Sex was at the root of everything that made it to the papers. (368)

In passages like these, the novel’s polyphony becomes obvious. Rjepnin reads a newspaper article that expresses outrage at the scandals caused by foreigners; Rjepnin’s mention of “poor creatures,” for instance, can be either emphatic or sarcastic, just as his comment on “those handsome, dark-eyed young men,” although the sarcasm may express English views of foreigners. In the last line Rjepnin focalizes again, signaling his own growing belief that he lives in an evil universe. But there is an additional voice here. We are not

320

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

only looking through Rjepnin, we are also looking at him, and listening to another voice from a considerable distance. At other times, this voice is often ironical; here, it doesn’t judge Rjepnin but it observes him from the outside. The vantage point of this voice is well outside Rjepnin and his fellow émigrés, as it is outside the exiles’ host community, England. So where does it speak from? And where is the devil? Rjepnin considers the possibility that the devil is a reality in his world, but we, the readers, don’t get a clear idea of his thoughts. If he really believed in the devil this would suggest an escape from modernity and a return to a pre-modern world, where good and evil (Christ and Satan) could be easily identified and distinguished. Following this train of thought, the novel would qualify as modernist, since Rjepnin’s perspective is one among a number of voices that display incompatible views of the world. The alternative approach would be to interpret Rjepnin’s perception as trustworthy and to accept the presence of evil in the universe, the actuality of gnosis. But in my view, the presence of the devil is too complex and obscure to identify in this text an independent fantastic layer of the kind we find in Bulgakov’s Master and Margerita. Still in Cornwall, Rjepnin hears one day in the adjacent room Konstantin Sorokin. His fellow émigré turns out to be the gigolo of Mrs. Peters, a female pilot and war hero with a distorted face. As Rjepnin gathers, she smokes during the act, and she exclaims in her ecstasy the name of her lover, “Constantine! Constantine!” But when he asks, even begs for money, she bluntly turns him down. His compatriot’s humiliation brings Rjepnin to a conclusion: So this was why there were wars in the world? This was why children were born? The Almighty had decided that it would come to coitus between that Russian from Tver and that woman from Cornwall. And also between Sorokin and Mrs. Peters. Free will was just a cigarette, even during the coitus. Dear God, so much work for the Almighty (384).

At this point, when Rjepnin’s fate has almost become a philosophical matter, history and the historical moment return. Narrated time accelerates towards the end of the Cornwall episode; right after having witnessed his compatriot’s humiliation, Rjepnin, becomes “a wholly different person” (385) and finally returns home. Several weeks pass while he is recovering from a torn Achilles tendon. The accident happened when he jumped into the sea, which must have happened after the scene, but before the last day of vacation and his return home. He returns a month too late and loses his job as a clerk in the shoe store. What has he become? A prince or not, what is Rjepnin? No one. A displaced Russian. A displaced person, in Cornwall. “PereФeНennaѕ persona” I can hear him mumble in Russian. (387)

Milosˇ Crnjanski in Exile (Guido Snel)

321

He now remembers all the wrong pronunciations of his name, “Mister Richpain,” “Mister Pin” or “Mister Richpin,” and recalls that “the Russian word for dust meant also dust in the old language of Cornwall. (Everything in the world was crazy)” (388). Here we have another veza, evidence of chaos in the modern world. That we are in the modern world is underlined by repeated references to London as a metropolis where races, colors, and languages intermingle. While Rjepnin’s understanding of his world becomes increasingly premodern, the fictional world of Crnjanski’s novel grows gradually more complex and layered: it comprehends not just the Gnostic vision of the exile Rjepnin, but also the ironical possibility that his vision is completely wrong and anachronistic, that chance and chaos, not evil intention, rule his fate.

3. Once more on Cooden Beach Still in hotel “The Crimea” in Cornwall, the company plays a game, which Rjepnin, who is reluctant to partake, easily wins: he fluently translates broadcasts from almost any Western language on the radio. No wonder, for he is a Russian aristocrat raised by English and French nannies, who used to prefer holidays at the Mediterranean. English society, though at this point still the cradle of a global empire, is portrayed in the novel as philistine: it refuses to open up to the otherness of foreign languages. As we saw, Rjepnin’s surname gets so corrupted that he can no longer be identified. Cornwall, more precisely Cooden Beach, was also where Crnjanski wrote his “Lament for Belgrade” in 1956, which was published in 1957 by Dragan Ac´imovic´’s Garamond in Johannesburg. The reception of this poem, like that of A Novel about London, was rather one-sided, for it read the text as an expression of nostalgia and longing for the homeland. “The Lament, that’s me,” Crnjanski once said in an interview (Ispunio 246), in which he also stressed that A Novel about London was a work of fiction rather autobiography. Though this seems to indicate that the poem had a supremely authentic voice, the statement becomes ambiguous once we realize the extraordinary shape of the poem, which could be called dialogic or schizophrenic: counting twelve pages but no more than 120 lines, each right page addresses Belgrade with “Ti” (You), while the lines on the left pages address places and cities the poet has visited, where he had lost or deceased friends. The left pages are bitter, elegiac, sarcastic, and carnivalesque images of transitoriness; the right pages are exalted, almost hymnical. Crnjanski, who introduced free verse into Serbian literature after World War I, is back to rhyme here, though on the left pages these are certainly far from traditional:

322

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

Jedan se ‘Leiche! Leiche!’ dere. Drugi mi sˇapc´e: ‘Cadavere!’ Trec´i: ‘Lesˇ, lesˇ, lesˇ. [106, Italics GS] A man shouts ‘Leiche! Leiche!’. Another one whispers: ‘Cadavere!’ A third one: a corpse, a corpse, a corpse.

The poem’s right pages, devoted to Belgrade, are solely in Serbian and express a craving for a “clean,” deliberately idealized Belgrade. The poem’s multilingualism is restricted to verses on the left pages, which are associated with chaos, disorder, war, and transitoriness. The two do not get reconciled for right/left page division continues until the end. The two sides are, however, part of the same poem and of the same lyrical consciousness. Here, as in A Novel about London, more than one voice speaks in many languages, all calling from the past to the lyrical I. The tension here is not between irony and sincerity, but between elegy and hymn. The elegy speaks of the world at large and the lyrical I’s past in it; the hymn concerns a not yet existent magical place, a locus of the imagination. As Rjepnin says in the novel: “The worst thing was that the question was not just whether [Rjepnin] should return, but where he should return to” (361). It is unclear then, both in the novel and the poem, who or what the organizing force behind the voices is, and where it should be located. This is precisely wherein the modernity of Crnjanski’s exilic texts resides: in the absence of a stable, neutral perspective from which human experience can be observed and understood. What Joseph Brodsky once wrote about the life of exiled writers, may hold true for the life of Crnjanski, though it certainly falls short of the complexities of Crnjanski’s texts about exile: “if one would assign to it a genre, it would have to be tragicomedy” (4).

4. Post Scriptum A few years ago, the Embassy of what by then represented the Republic of Serbia and Montenegro, unveiled a memorial plate on the house where Crnjanski had lived in London. The article reporting (http://www.setimes.com; July14, 2004) said that a similar event was planned for Borisav Pekic´, another Serbian author who had lived in London. A genuine national statement: we shall mark the traces the exile had left abroad before he returned to the homeland. Crnjanski’s place of birth, Csongrád, Hungary, already had such a memorial tablet in both Serbian and Hungarian. But will the

Milosˇ Crnjanski in Exile (Guido Snel)

323

Embassy’s gesture save Crnjanski from the fear of oblivion that is so obvious in the elegiac part of his Lament for Belgrade? Although canonized as a national, perhaps the national Serbian writer of the twentieth century, Crnjanski far transcended the real and symbolic boundaries of the Serbian nation, both in his life and his work. In the recent history of the former Yugoslavia, forced migration has played a major part in rewriting the literary canon. Self-declared Yugoslavs lost a canon they had themselves created and supported. The new national canons often do not welcome these post-Yugoslavs, while older exiles, like Crnjanski, are put at the heart of the updated national canons. Apart from a handful of writers, like Dubravka Ugresˇic´ or David Albahari, who have made a name for themselves, cosmopolitanism holds more misery than splendor, and the fate of most of these writers is or will be anonymity. Yet, inasmuch as the literatures from the former Yugoslavia receive any international attention at all, this goes to the cosmopolitans; those that are being read explicitly place themselves outside the national context. At home, in their countries of origin, their significance is contested; other exiles, other kinds of exile, are dug up from the past and placed in the beating heart of the national canon. The irony is that the national and the international literary cultures both cultivate simplifying readings. From a literary point of view, the position of national writers is as hazardous as that of writers who are out there in the market of a globalized world.

Works Cited Ac´imovic´, Dragan R. Sa Crnjanskim u Londonu (With Crnjanski in London). Introd. Milovan Danojlic´. Belgrade: Visˇnjic´, 2005. Andric´, Ivo. “Pismo iz 1920. godine” (The Letter from 1920). Jevrejske Pricˇe ( Jewish Stories). Belgrade: Narodna Knjiga, 1991. 57–73 Bankovic´, Jelena S. Metamorfoze pada u delu Milosˇa Crnjanskog (Metamorphoses of the Fall in the Work of Milosˇ Crnjanski). Belgrade: Nova, 1996. Brodsky, Joseph. “The Condition we Call Exile.” Robinson 3–12. Bunjac, Vladimir. Dnevnik o Crnjanskom. Belgrade: BIGZ 1982. Crnjanski, Milosˇ. Dnevnik o Cˇarnojevic´u (A Diary about Cˇarnojevic´).1921. Belgrade: Zaduzˇbina Milosˇa Crnjanskog, 1993. Crnjanski, Milosˇ. Embajade (Embassy). Belgrade: Nolit, 1984. Crnjanski, Milosˇ. Ispunio sam svoju sudbinu (I have Fulfilled my Destiny). Ed. Zoran Avramovic´. Belgrade: BIGZ, 1992. Crnjanski, Milosˇ. Kod Hiperborejaca (Among the Hyperboreans). 1966. Belgrade: Zaduzˇbina Milosˇa Crnjanskog, 1993. Crnjanski, Milosˇ. “Lament o Beogradu” (Lament for Belgrade). 1957. Lirika 100–115. Crnjanski, Milosˇ. Lirika (Poetry). Belgrade: Zaduzˇbina Milosˇa Crnjanskog, 1993.

324

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

Crnjanski, Milosˇ. Roman o Londonu (A Novel about London). 1971. Belgrade: Nolit, 1987. Crnjanski, Milosˇ. Seobe (Migrations). Vol. 1. 1928. Belgrade: Zaduzˇbina Milosˇa Crnjanskog, 1993. Crnjanski, Milosˇ. “Sumatra” and “Objasˇnjenje Sumatre” (An Explanation of Sumatra). Lirika 287–93. Dzˇadzˇic´, Petar. Povlasˇ´ceni prostori Milosˇa Crnjanskog (The Priviledged Spaces of Milosˇ Crnjanski). Belgrade: Prosveta, 1993. Fortis, Alberto. Un Viaggio in Dalmazia (A Journey to Dalmatia). 1774. Munich: Sagner, 1974. Kolakowski, Leszek. “In Praise of Exile.” Robinson 188–92. Miłosz, Czesław. “Notes on Exile.” Robinson 36–41. Robinson, Marc, ed. Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile. Winchester, MA: Faber and Faber, 1994. Said, Edward. “Reflections on Exile.” Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge MA, Harvard UP, 2000. 173–87. West, Rebecca. Black Lamb, Grey Falcon. 1941. London: MacMillan, 1955.

Gombrowicz, the Émigré (Jerzy Jarze˛bski)

325

Gombrowicz, the Émigré Jerzy Jarze˛bski

Witold Gombrowicz emigrated from Poland in a somewhat different way than the others who fled the country, although – like all Polish emigrants of the two last centuries – he emigrated, to some extent, in the context of the emigration of his great predecessors: Mickiewicz, Słowacki, Krasin´ski, and Norwid. Many Polish writers shared the feeling that emigrating on the brink of World War II they were following in the footsteps of the émigrés of the nineteenth century, who’s fate cast them beyond the Polish borders, and this state of mind was best expressed by Ksawery Pruszyn´ski in his article “Literatura emigracji walcza˛cej,” (Literature of the Fighting Emigration), which opened the first Paris issue of the emigrant journal Wiadomos´ci Polskie. Nevertheless, the way in which Gombrowicz found himself in Argentina in August 1939 was of an ambiguous character: seemingly he got stuck in Buenos Aires accidentally – sent from Poland as a young, promising writer as part of a promotional effort for a new cruise line, during the maiden voyage of the new Polish transatlantic liner Chrobry. The writer’s memoirs indicate however, that he most certainly anticipated the war, and the fact that he decided to sail to Argentina and stay in Buenos Aires before the German army entered Poland, was in a way an act of “desertion.” The Polish model of emigrating in the nineteenth century would rather have the writer participating actively in the military effort, and absconding abroad only after the defeat in order to continue there the fight against the enemies of the motherland. Oddly, this model does not apply in the case of the greatest authors of émigré literature mentioned above (not a single one of them fought as a soldier in the national uprisings). Therefore, Gombrowicz could have perhaps ignored or hidden his betrayal of patriotic ideals, or stated from the start that he was repeating Mickiewicz’s or Słowacki’s decision. But quite to the contrary, he practically declared his desertion publicly in Trans-Atlantyk, the novel he wrote shortly after the war. The protagonist, who bears the author’s last name, sneaks off in the opening scene the Polish ship in the Buenos Aires harbor as it gets ready to return to Europe, berating the motherland for demanding sacrifices. The plot, as it un-

326

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

ravels, turns out to be just as scandalous: the protagonist defies patriotic models practically all the time: he tries to impress the Polish envoy in order to extract money from him; he enters into rather suspicious relations with Gonzalo, the Argentinean millionaire-homosexual whom he promises to assist in seducing Ignac, the young and innocent son of a Polish army major raised in patriotic traditions; then he accepts bribes from Polish emigrants in exchange for fictitious business assistance, organizes a false duel without bullets in the pistols between Gonzalo and the major –– in order to lure Ignac to the millionaire’s residence, and so on. All of the actions of the protagonist-Gombrowicz described in the novel are outrageously unworthy and dishonorable from the point of view of the patriotic tradition of emigration. The émigré was, after all, supposed to triumph over the evil prevailing in the homeland by practicing virtue and remaining true to ideals. To make matters worse, the novel’s Gonzalo advises Witold to revere, from now on, not the motherland, but the “son” land [synczyzna] – the erotic, alluring youth. Simultaneously with the publishing of the Trans-Atlantyk by the Literary Institute Press in Paris, Gombrowicz started to publish installments of his Diary in the Institute’s émigré periodical Kultura. Already the first of these ostentatiously attacked the model of Polish patriotism, which required a submissive adherence to the motherland instead of defending a sense of individuality and a critical approach to all national sanctities. This provocation drew criticism from traditionalist emigrant circles, and cost Kultura the loss of many subscribers. Gombrowicz entered the Polish émigré circles in the atmosphere of scandal. In addition, his address about Poland, delivered for an Argentinean public at the very beginning of his stay in Buenos Aires, was deemed an antiPolish provocation by the Poles in Argentina – and so he had no one to turn to, not even in his closest environment of compatriots. The story of Gombrowicz’s first years in Argentina is told most fully by Klementyna Suchanow (2005). Gombrowicz spent the war years in extreme poverty, but he was unwilling, or unable, to turn to the prominent figures of Argentinean culture for help; from the very beginning he quarreled with the literary patron and Argentinean millionaire Victoria Ocampo, he was ill-disposed towards Jorge Luis Borges, and sought recognition rather with the young generation, which opposed the literary establishment. Therefore, his strategy in Argentina initially consisted of attempts to make a name for himself among local writers and critics. Shortly after the war, he delivered a series of readings in the literary Café Mocho. The most notorious of these lectures, Contra los poetas (Against the Poets) was a critique of poetry as a form of art to which everyone was generally indifferent, and around which, according to Gombrowicz, an atmos-

Gombrowicz, the Émigré (Jerzy Jarze˛bski)

327

phere of mandatory veneration had been created. Next, the author undertook the attempt of translating into Spanish his most renowned prewar novel, Ferdydurke. He went about this attempt in an original manner, by inviting a group of his Cuban and Argentinean writer friends to join him in his efforts. This international group, which included some authors who were later to gain recognition and even fame (the most renowned of these was surely Ernesto Sábato, though Jorge Calvetti, Adolfo de Obieta and the Cuban Virgilio Piñera also came to enjoy success) followed a pattern of work in which Gombrowicz would first translate a given fragment himself into his best Spanish, and then his friends, according to his guidelines, would attempt to reproduce in their own idiom all of the stylistic complexities and word games of the Polish original. The translation of Ferdydurke was published in 1947 by the small Argos publishing house, and though it was reviewed in several magazines and journals, it did not raise a wide or long-lasting interest. Today, however, some critics and writers (Ricardo Piglia for instance) claim that the publishing of the translation marked an epoch in the formation of twentieth-century Argentinean literary language. Between September 1944 and February 1945, Gombrowicz published a series of eight articles in the magazine Viva cien años under the pen-name Jorge Alejandro, discussing the subject of the Latin-American erotica, favoring the freedom of physical eroticism over conventional traditions of “love-making.” In October 1947 he took on the challenge of writing for the vignette Aurora. Revista de la resistencia, which took a provocative approach to official Argentinean literature, and he also wrote and subsequently translated with his young Argentinean friend Alejandro Rússovich the play S´lub, which was published under the title El casamiento by the music publishing house EAM a year after the publication of Ferdydurke. This publication did not raise any interest whatsoever, because the play – artistically calling upon the style of Shakespearian theater, Polish romantic drama, and Calderón’s La vida es sueño – was too far from anything that could be seen in Argentinean theaters at that time. Gombrowicz published the largest number of his works in Spanish in the 1940s. He published books, articles (under his own name and several pennames), he made public appearances, but all this had little impact on his position in the literary circles of Argentina. It was then, that he realized that without a strong support of European, preferably French critics, he cannot hope to succeed with his works in Argentina. For some time, he harbored illusions of continuing his career as a writer in Communist Poland. These hopes were aroused when the Polish author Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz visited Buenos Aires from Poland in 1948. He praised the recently written S´lub, lured him with the

328

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

prospect of publishing his works in Poland, and offered such opportunities in his weekly Nowiny Literackie, – all as an attempt to convince the writer to return to Warsaw. Shortly after Iwaszkiewicz’s return to Poland, the authorities closed down his magazine, and, as literature had to conform increasingly to the Stalinist model, hopes to publish Gombrowicz’s work became completely unrealistic. All that was left were the Polish émigré circles, which ran numerous publishing houses and journals and formed an important literary movement in the postwar period. But entering émigré literary circles was also not easy: as mentioned before, the publication of Trans-Atlantyk and the first installments of the Diary caused a scandal. For this reason Gombrowicz could not count on the more conservative émigré circles, especially those which gathered around the London-based weekly Wiadomos´ci. From this moment on, Gombrowicz only criticized or ridiculed Wiadomos´ci and the literary and moral ambience it sought to create. In this situation, the writer established a permanent collaboration with the émigré monthly Kultura which had a much more modern program, and was edited and published by Jerzy Giedroyc and a group of his colleagues in the Maisons-Laffitte on the outskirts of Paris. It was Giedroyc who published Trans-Atlantyk and S´lub in the first volume of the series launched by Kultura, the Biblioteka Kultury and later suggested to Gombrowicz the idea of writing and publishing in Kultura the installments of his Diary. Therefore, Gombrowicz appeared on the literary émigré stage only in 1951, with the publication in Kultura of excerpts from Trans-Atlantyk and the publishing – a while later – of the Polish version of the lecture “Against the Poets” (Przeciw poetom). I do not include here the rather marginal text “Witold Gombrowicz o swoim odczycie w Teatro del Pueblo” in Kurier Polski, a Polish émigré magazine in Argentina, which summarizes the thesis of his provocative lecture about contemporary Poland. The scandal around the lecture contributed to the closing rather than to the opening of Gombrowicz’s way into the literary emigration circles of Argentina. He entered the literary émigré scene as a late outsider, as well as a rebel and a heretic, for his fellow authors had been publishing in Polish periodicals printed first in France and then in the United Kingdom, USA, Palestine and other countries all throughout the 1940s.. His first publications in Kultura were an apology of the “betrayal of the motherland” on the one hand, and, on the other, an attack on the most revered Polish sanctities, one of which was surely romantic, nineteenthcentury poetry. During the following years, Gombrowicz wrote practically only for the Kultura, unless we count the publication of the short story “The Banquette” in the London Wiadomos´ci. Most interesting for us is, however, the publication of

Gombrowicz, the Émigré (Jerzy Jarze˛bski)

329

a commentary on E.M. Cioran’s Comforts and Discomforts of Exile (1952), which Gombrowicz had translated. This text is essentially a presentation of Gombrowicz’s idea of exile, juxtaposed with Cioran’s ideas, the meaning of which the translator and commentator had, by the way, quite significantly distorted (see Jerzak). It is Gombrowicz’s wish to emigrate with dignity and without a sense of personal failure, to the contrary – with a belief that exile is essentially the fate of every writer who must face the feeling of his painful standing out of the crowd and his distinct otherness, constantly bordering on pathology: It is very painful not to have readers and very unpleasant not to be able to publish one’s works. It certainly is not sweet being unknown, highly unpleasant to see oneself deprived of the aid of that mechanism that pushes one to the top, that creates publicity and organizes fame; but art is loaded with elements of loneliness and self-sufficiency, it finds its satisfaction and sense of purpose in itself. The homeland? Why, every eminent person because of that very eminence was a foreigner even at home. Readers? Why, they never wrote “for” readers anyway, always “against” them. Honors, success, renown, and fame: why, they became famous exactly because they valued themselves more than their success. […] I would also like to remind Cioran that not only émigré but all art remains in the most intimate contact with decay; it is born of decadence, it is a transmutation of illness into health. All art, generally speaking, borders on silliness, defeat, degradation. (Diary 39)

And then, referring to Cioran’s words about writers who wither away from their motherland: Is it surprising than that these hothouse creations, nurtured in the womb of the nation, wilt when out of the womb? Cioran writes about how a writer torn away from his people is lost. If that is the case, this writer never existed in the first place: he was a writer in embryo. Instead, it seems to me that theoretically speaking and bypassing material hardship, the immersing of oneself in the world, that is emigration, should constitute an incredible stimulus for literature. For, lo and behold, the country’s elite is kicked out over the border. It can think, feel, and write from the outside. It gains distance. It gains an incredible spiritual freedom. All bonds burst. One can be more of oneself. In the general din all the forms that have existed until now loosen up and one can move toward the future in a more ruthless way. An exceptional opportunity! The moment everyone has dreamed of! It would seem, therefore, that the stronger individuals, the richer individuals would roar like lions? Then why don’t they? Why has the voice of these people faded abroad? They do not roar because, first of all, they are too free. Art demands style, order, discipline. Cioran correctly underscores the danger of too much isolation, of excessive freedom. Everything to which they were tied and everything that bound them – homeland, ideology, politics, group, program, faith, milieu – everything vanished in the whirlpool of history and only a bubble filled with nothingness remained on the surface. Those thrown out of their little world found themselves facing a world, a boundless world and, consequently, one that was impossible to master. Only a universal culture can come to terms with the world, never parochial cultures, never those who live only on fragments of existence. Only he who knows how to reach deeper, beyond the homeland, only he for whom

330

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

the homeland is but one of the revelations in an eternal and universal life, will not be incited to anarchy by the loss of his homeland. (Diary 40)

This makes Gombrowicz a believer in a truly heroic dimension of emigration, which means giving up all of the facilities to which writers, pampered by their own society, had been accustomed to. This meant a revision of the kind of Polish identity which most Polish émigrés maintained: a traditional one, accepted and affirmed without questioning it. Gombrowicz constantly put forward uncomfortable questions regarding this ideal of Polishness, or rather, he disputed the unconditional affirmation of the motherland and the wallowing in the warmth of national collectivity. The first installment of the Diary in Kultura revolved around these questions, and the statements made therein have entered the canon of Polish reflection on patriotism: I once happened to take part in a meeting devoted to yet another mutual Polish cheering up and support session, when, after having sung the Rota and having danced the Krakowiaczek, everyone settled down to listen to the speaker, who extolled the nation because “we produced Chopin,” “we have Curie-Skłodowska,” Wawel, Słowacki, Mickiewicz, and because we also figured as a bulwark of Christianity and our Third of May Constitution was really quite progressive […]. The man explained to himself and to his audience that we are a great nation, which perhaps no longer arouses the enthusiasm of the listeners […] but it was, nevertheless, received with something like satisfaction that one’s patriotic duty had been fulfilled. But I felt this ritual as if it were born of hell, this national Mass became something satanically sneering and maliciously grotesque. For they, in elevating Mickiewicz, were denigrating themselves, and with their praise of Chopin showed that they had not yet sufficiently matured to appreciate him and that by basking in their own culture, they were simply baring their primitiveness. Geniuses! The devil take those geniuses! I felt like saying to those gathered: Who cares about Mickiewicz? You are more important to me than Mickiewicz! And neither I nor anyone else will be judging the Polish nation according to Mickiewicz or Chopin, but according to that which goes on and which is said here in this hall. (Diary 5)

We should remember that the words “The devil take those geniuses” and “Who cares about Mickiewicz?,” taken out of context, were used by the Stalinist Prime Minister of the Peoples’ Republic of Poland, Józef Cyrankiewicz, to accuse émigrés of despising their own tradition. Did Gombrowicz really turn away from his nation? Not in the least. He mentioned the fact, that Mickiewicz and Pasek were among the authors who influenced him most, that he writes in Polish because it is his language – he cannot write in a different one. In a way, he cared about the strength and vitality of Polish identity more than those who praised it; if he subjected it to critical inquiries, it was with the intent to strengthen it. His literary stylizations draw as much on the great Polish romantics, the gentry storytellers of the early nineteenth century, and Sienkiewicz, as they do on Shakespeare, Calde-

Gombrowicz, the Émigré (Jerzy Jarze˛bski)

331

rón, Dostoyevsky, Mann, or Proust. But Gombrowicz decidedly renounced a model of emigration that was based on clinging to the memory of prewar Poland, and especially on protecting and conserving the prewar hierarchy of literary values. This distinctly set him apart from the circles of Polish émigrés gathered in London around the Polish government in exile, the Polish clubs, and the editorial office of Wiadomos´ci. Therefore, those who formed the large, organized emigrant communities in Great Britain, the United States, Argentina, or Brazil saw Gombrowicz as an eccentric and blasphemer, or, in certain special cases, as a renegade. Nevertheless, we must remember that from the very beginning of his stay in Argentina he also had a few favorably disposed readers. Among these, he owed the most to the poet and essayist Józef Wittlin, who was at that time a distinguished moral authority in the émigré circles. Wittlin agreed to write the foreword to Gombrowicz’s most blasphemous work, Trans-Atlantyk, a foreword entitled, not accidentally, Apology of Gombrowicz, which emphasizes the intellectual courage of the novel’s author. Nevertheless, the writer remained in conflict with the émigré circles until the end of his life, and in 1998 I still met some ladies in Buenos Aires calling him in this tradition a “snob” and a “poseur.” Gombrowicz was strongly affected by the conflicts with the Polish emigrants, but he also provoked them, or so it seems, on purpose, and staged them in a certain manner. This was the case with the acrimonious exchanges he had in Kultura with the writer Zbigniew Grabowski in Great Britain, which lasted for months, or the debates with Czesław Straszewicz, Jan Lechon´, Józef Mackiewicz and Janusz Kowalewski. Most ostentatious and artistically subtle was, however, his clash with Barbara Szubska in Wiadomos´ci – a confrontation in which many readers sided with one or the other (Gombrowicz, Publicystyka 206–60). Szubska, an unknown reader of Wiadomos´ci, attacked Gombrowicz during his polemic with Mackiewicz, accusing him of deliberately deceiving his readers with the alleged depth of his stories; Gombrowicz answered, using a vast array of styles and rhetorical tricks, posing now as a victim, now as the grand genius, and then as a buddy – an accomplice in the game. This last discussion started with yet another of Gombrowicz’s provocations. While publishing after his return to Europe installments of his Diary, he filled them for many months with his Interviews with the French critic and writer Dominique de Roux. Alongside the installments of these Interviews, he also published short texts, describing on the one hand the comforts of a villa he was supposed to have bought for himself on the French Riviera, and, on the other, confessing that a certain mulatto from Argentina was on her way to see him, with a child who was supposed to be his illegitimate son, and whose name he failed to remember. Both of these mystifications went against the traditional expec-

332

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

tations that Polish emigrants were supposed to adhere to: the ideals of modesty and purity, as well as the ideal of engaging in the Cause of fighting against Communism. This, above all, must have infuriated Mackiewicz, who took the Cause extremely seriously. That an author, already acclaimed by the international public, should be involved in a serious dialogue about his work with a foreign critic, and should, at the same time, incidentally and almost in passing, provoke and insult the feelings of his compatriots, must have driven most émigrés up the wall. And so, the practice of breaking the rules of “decency” and ostentatiously attacking the commonly accepted ideals, governed Gombrowicz’s relations with Polish émigrés from the very beginning of his time in Argentina up until his death in Vence in 1969. This does not mean, however, that he was in conflict with all exiled Poles. His discussions with Czesław Miłosz and Jozef Wittlin were extremely interesting and filled with mutual awe and respect; and he also received recognition from Maria Kuncewiczowa, Wit Tarnawski, and Paweł Chmielowiec, not to mention the editors of Kultura. In Argentina Gombrowicz also had a devoted group of Polish friends, the best known of whom were the writer and translator Zofia Cha˛dzyn´ska and the painters Zygmunt Grocholski and Janusz Eichler. But these contacts were of a rather private nature. The official relations between Gombrowicz and the émigré literary and cultural centers were tense for many years: he was seen as a freak, an attention seeking eccentric, and an incurable buffoon. Let us now examine the other side of the story, the relations that Gombrowicz built with foreigners, the ways in which he tried to gain acclamation and present himself to the Others. In the prewar period, in the years of his debut and first books, Gombrowicz did not yet have, it seems, a clear concept of who he wanted to be on the world stage – this is quite natural for a writer who is still struggling to gain recognition on the home literary market. He took inspiration from Russian (Dostoyevsky), French (sentimentalists, Proust) and English speaking (Poe) writers, and we will also find references to Nietzsche. Excellent company, but Gombrowicz just as keenly stylized his novels in the manner of popular literature: novels on growing up, Polish “gentry” prose, romances, mystery novels, contemporary gothic literature, etc. It was only in Argentina that Gombrowicz faced the essential problem of presenting himself to Others, of gaining acclaim in the context of another literature and a different hierarchy of literary values. He accused the Argentineans from the very start of trying to be “Parisian” at any price and thus condemning themselves to being second-best, though they could benefit from their cultural immaturity, criticizing from their point of view the degeneration of Paris’ maturity. But, as usual, Gombrowicz started this campaign with himself, emphasizing in the Diary his own immaturity and its expository function:

Gombrowicz, the Émigré (Jerzy Jarze˛bski)

333

If you hate acting so much, it is because it is a part of you. For me, acting becomes a key to life and reality. If you are repelled by immaturity, it is because you are immature. In me, Polish immaturity delineates my entire attitude to culture. Your youth speaks with my lips, your desire for mirth, your elusive flexibility and lack of delineation. You hate that which you try to eliminate in yourself. In me, the hidden Pole is liberated, your alter ego, the flip side of your coin, that part of your moon that has been unseen until now. Ah, but I would like you to be conscious actors in this game! (Diary 36–37)

Soon he will add: I “allowed myself to whisper to the Polish intelligentsia that its real assignment is not rivalry with the West in creating form, but the uncovering of the very relationship of man to form and, what goes with it, to culture” (Diary 94). These words became a program for hundreds of millions of citizens of countries situated far away from the Western cultural centers well after Gombrowicz made similar statements about Argentinean intellectuals: Even if from a personal vantage point some of them were mature, they still lived in a country where maturity was weaker than immaturity and here, in Argentina, art, religion, and philosophy were not the same as in Europe. Instead of transplanting them here live onto this soil and then moaning that the tree is rachitic – would it not have been better to raise something more in harmony with the nature of their land? […] Sometimes, I tried to tell this or that Argentinean the same thing that I often told the Poles: Interrupt your poem writing for a minute, your picture painting, your conversation about surrealism, consider first of all if this does not bore you, consider whether this is really so important to you, think about whether you would not be more authentic, free and creative, by ignoring the gods to whom you pray. Interrupt this for a minute in order to reflect on your place in the world and culture and the choice of your media and goals. (Diary 135)

And so, the first idea that Gombrowicz wanted to present to the world was that the cultural leaders of developing countries should accept immaturity and “inferiority”; this was an apology of “barbarism” as a culture-stimulating revolutionary force that undermines the foundations of the existing order. This revolution was to take place not only in the name of peripheral cultures, but also of groups of people who were excluded or pushed to the margins of society. Gombrowicz, with his homosexual tendencies, spoke also in the name of tolerance for “freaks,” even though he hated being identified with the gay subculture, and his admissions in this mater were partial, to say the least. Explicit homosexual themes are presented practically only in his Trans-Atlantyk – and even there in a grotesque guise. This, however, should not prevent today’s homosexual or queer literary criticism to see in him an apologist of liberation from the traditional, patriarchal rules of existence and social functioning (see Kuharski, Sołtysik, Płonowska Ziarek, and Kühl). Another important enterprise undertaken by Gombrowicz in the name of defining his own identity was an attempt to confront the great intellectual

334

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

movements of his time. And so, in the first volume of the Diary we find deliberations on Catholicism, Marxism and Existentialism. Gombrowicz, not a believer himself, was intrigued not by Catholicism’s doctrine, but rather by the human beings involved in faith. He reads Simone Weil’s La pésanteur et la grâce and asks himself: The issue is not in the least one of believing in God, but of falling in love with God. Weil is not a “believer,” she is in love. To me, in my life, God was never necessary, not for five minutes, from earliest childhood I was self-sufficient. Therefore, if I now “fell in love” (bypassing my general inability to love), it would be under the pressure of that heavy vault, which is lowering itself upon me. It would be a shout, torn out in torment, and so, invalid. Fall in love with someone because one can no longer stand oneself ? This is a forced love. (Diary 174)

Further on, Gombrowicz considers Weil’s inner greatness, but also discovers the flaws in this greatness, as well as an unintentional comical aspect, to reach in the end an essentially Feuerbachian concept of God as a “road-bridge leading to man” (Publicystyka 277). At this point, however, the metaphysics of religion become purposeless. We return to an “interpersonal reality,” in which there are no absolute values, and where a constant battle of everyone against everyone else is fought, together with an undermining and revising of all concepts. Answering the polemicists who criticized his essay “Against the Poets,” Gombrowicz states remarks?: My opponents, if they had actually wanted to understand my position, would have had to conceive of it against the background of the great revision of values that is taking place now in all fields. What is it based on? On the uncovering of the backstage of our theater. On the revelation that phenomena are not that which they would like to appear to be. We are reassessing morality, idealism, consciousness, psychologism, history … A hunger for reality has been born in us, the wind of doubt has blown, and it is this that has undone our masquerade (Diary 125)

Nevertheless, the “philosophy of suspicions” is also suspicious. Gombrowicz does indeed kill the “God in heavens,” but he also comments quite contemptuously on Nietzsche and his “superman,” confronting the philosophical concepts with the “low” reality of Retiro, the port district of Buenos Aires, full of transgressions but offering the delights of uninhibited youth: It was enough for me to bind myself emotionally to Retiro for one second for the language of culture to begin to sound false and empty. Truths. Slogans. Philosophies. Morals. Religions. Codes. All of this was as if it were in another key, imagined, said, written by people already partially eliminated from existence, who lacked a future … the heavy work of the burdened, the awkward work of the stiff […] while there, in Retiro, all of that culture dissolved in some sort of young insufficiency, young undevelopment, young immaturity, it become “worse,” because someone who can still develop is always “worse” than his ultimate realization. (Diary 144)

Gombrowicz, the Émigré (Jerzy Jarze˛bski)

335

Gombrowicz, always siding with existence against existential formulas, sees himself as a natural ally of existentialism. But to his mind, something is wrong in this philosophy as well, as soon as it is formulated. And these oppositions of his Diary between philosophical horrors and everyday reality – his “To fear nothingness, but to fear the dentist more” (Diary 184) – are long engraved in one’s memory, like an apt joke. Gombrowicz goes on: When you, existentialists, speak to me of consciousness, fear, and nothingness, I burst with laughter, not because I disagree with you but because I must agree with you. I agreed and, lo and behold, nothing happened. I agreed but nothing changed in me, even by an iota. The consciousness that you injected into my life entered my bloodstream and instantly became the life that now shakes me in spasms of giggles, the ancient triumph of the element. Why am I forced to laugh? Simply because I also revel in consciousness. I laugh because I delight in fear, play with nothingness, and toy with responsibility. Death does not exist. (Diary 185)

Among the great philosophies of suspicion and doubt Gombrowicz also takes on Marxism. But first, however, he identifies with its vivacious leftism, based on an assaulted sense of morality and an awareness of social injustice, its apotheosis of revolt, which any revolutionary artistic activity should sympathize with. However, Marxist magic ceases to work when revolutionary power and terror appear, and, above all, when the demands of doctrinal purity or adherence to the current party line kill the individual’s ability to think critically and destroy individuality and authenticity – the two most important pillars of Gombrowicz’s anthropology (Publicystyka 300–311). Among the “masters of suspicion and doubt,” Freud appears least frequently, rather occasionally. This maybe because it is the psychoanalysts who tamper with those elements of a writer’s psyche that are most intimate and are not to be shown off, even if they are the most important ones. It is significant that Gombrowicz is, as a matter of fact, most frequently read today via references to Freud and Lacan (see Beressem and Markowski). Nevertheless, it is among the “masters of doubt” that Gombrowicz tries to find a space for himself, even if he attempts to prove that he is actually (thanks to greater consistency) a better existentialist than Sartre, a better Marxist than Marx, and maybe even – given his tendency to unmask his own buffooneries and his persistence in exposing the unalienable urge of human beings towards greatness and importance – a better “superman” than the one conceived by Nietzsche. Such was Gombrowicz’s self created image in the early Fifties, an image created for the world, although condemned, paradoxically, to be completely disregarded by it. In those years, Gombrowicz remained a practically unknown writer. Of the eminent figures in the humanities of that time he only corresponded, briefly, with Martin Buber, whose philosophy of dialogue he

336

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

saw as very close to his ideas, but no enduring relationship came of it. Convinced of the timeless value of his work, Gombrowicz was unknown even in his country because his books were not allowed to enter from abroad or published, was forced to quibble with Polish émigrés over one blasphemy or another, and had few contacts on a higher intellectual level. This situation changed dramatically with the political events that took place in Poland in 1956. October 1956 meant in Poland a rapid opening to literature from the interwar period and the postwar emigration, which had until then been partially or entirely banned. Among the classic publications from the interwar period, Gombrowicz’s short stories were published in Poland, from the abridged collection Pamie˛tnik z okresu dojrzałos´ci (under a new title: Bakakaj), then Ferdydurke, Trans-Atlantyk and S´lub and finally the play Iwona, ksie˛z˙niczka Burgunda, published before the war in the periodical Skamander (1958). Fragments of the Diary were published in magazines, and there was an outpouring of reviews and commentaries about Gombrowicz’s works. Overnight, the author became one of the most important personages of Polish cultural life, and thanks to Artur Sandauer (see his two articles on Ferdydurke), the most active of his promoters, also something of a yardstick, a paradigm of literary and intellectual value against which the country’s literary output came to be measured). This success, which exceeded expectations, meant that from then on Gombrowicz, while remaining in exile, was more inclined to address the Polish rather than the foreign reader – which caused a temporary crisis in his relationship with Jerzy Giedroyc, editor of Kultura, who thought that Gombrowicz should make stricter political demands on his publishers in exchange for his consent to the printing of his works. However, the Thaw after 1956 lasted no more than two years: the first volume of the Diary could no longer be published in Poland, and the authorities began to criticize what they considered as “excessive attention” given to Gombrowicz. Several years later, when Gombrowicz went to West Berlin in 1963 on a Ford Foundation fellowship, the authorities organized a press campaign against him, depicting him as betraying Polish national interests. So aggressive was the campaign that Gombrowicz decided to forbid the publication of all of his works in Poland until the full text of the Diary, including his reaction to the false accusations, were printed there. As a result of this (actually oral) “last will of Gombrowicz,” to which his widow remained faithful, the next official publication of a work of his in Poland took place only in 1986. In the second half of the seventies however, a publishing underground had developed in the country, and one of the most important tasks it imposed upon itself was to offer banned literature to the reader, above all the publi-

Gombrowicz, the Émigré (Jerzy Jarze˛bski)

337

cations of the most acclaimed writers remaining in exile. Gombrowicz’s work continued to be the topic of many articles and books in literary criticism as well as academic works. After 1958, when his books would no longer be published officially, his popularity in the country –increased rather than fell. An important role in the popularization of his work was played by the theater, for his “will” did not include dramatizations. And so, most of the texts of Gombrowicz, who was highly theatrical even in his prose, found their way to the stage in dramatized versions. Thanks to this, the author of only three completed plays (and one that he abandoned half way through) became in the eighties one of the most often staged classics of Polish theater. In the meantime however, Gombrowicz’s position and importance in Western Europe changed dramatically. He owed this advancement, above all, to his loyal enthusiast, the prominent critic and essayist, Konstanty A. Jelen´ski, who resided in Paris and was possibly the most worldly of the Polish émigrés: fluent in four foreign languages, married to the famous painter Leonor Fini, and allegedly the illegitimate son of an Italian aristocrat, Jelen´ski was a member of high society with many connections. He used his influence to promote in France the work of his literary idol, which was not easy in reception?. He was aided by the well-known French-Swiss critic François Bondy, who began publishing and reviewing Gombrowicz in his monthly Preuves. In 1958, Julliard published the French translation of Ferdydurke, and two years later the novel was published in Germany. The sixties saw the publishing of Gombrowicz’s most important work in France and Germany, and editions in English, Swedish, Italian, Dutch and soon even in Japanese. There was an avalanche of critical interest and when, thanks to the efforts of the indefatigable Jelenski, Gombrowicz came to West Berlin, he was already welcomed as one of the “great unknown” ones, worthy of respect and more than the average interest. Hence the numerous interviews given to French and German journalists, and the author’s new strategy of action and of “building fame.” The arrival in Europe was an exciting though difficult trial for Gombrowicz. In love with Argentina’s irresponsible youthfulness, he had already grown accustomed to his life in the rented room on the Calle Venezuela, and, most of all, to his young entourage of writers and artists, who where only now entering adulthood. According to one of them, Miguel Grinberg, Gombrowicz could have become in the sixties an idol of the next generation of debutant writers who published in the periodical Eco Contemporáneo and formed the militant groups Mufados and Elefantes revolting against their seniors (48–49). This, however, would have meant going back to the stage of debut (as Janusz Margan´ski wrote, Gombrowicz was a permanent debutant), and beginning once more, at the age of nearly sixty, a struggle for popularity in Ar-

338

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

gentina, where he was still a nobody as an author, and where hardly anyone believed in his European successes. The advantage of staying in Argentina would have been to live through a second youth, while going to Europe meant not only reaping the benefits of his literary celebrity but also sliding towards old age and death. Gombrowicz chose the latter. Since Gombrowicz had arrived in Europe to build the edifice of his glory, he needed to choose and follow a strategy that could grant him immediate popularity. The chosen strategy was one of attack: in Berlin, Gombrowicz attacked the Germans for their Nazi past, masked by good manners and seeming good heartedness (“Berlin, like lady Macbeth, all the time washing its hands”); in France, he tried to put down the beloved Proust, while praising Sartre, who was for the moment out of fashion; he ridiculed the dullness of the Nouveau Roman, criticized the artificiality of the customs, and even – o horror! – of the French cuisine. At the same time, he tried to draw attention to his “permanent youthfulness” and his being in tune with the latest trends in thought. So, while he had previously – and with good reason – claimed to have been a forerunner of French Existentialism, he now published a short article, an interview with himself, outrageously entitled “J’étais structuraliste avant tout le monde” (1967), drawing on the similarities between his own concept of man as “created by form” and the concept of man put forth by the structuralists. On the other hand, Gombrowicz wanted to be seen as a nonconformist and he firmly cut himself off from the popular leftist ideas in the late sixties, choosing for his main promoter on the French market Dominique de Roux, a critic who defied the trends of the day and promoted in his Cahiers de l’Herne such writers as Louis Ferdinand Céline, Jorge Luis Borges, and Ezra Pound. Be it as it may, Gombrowicz became in the last years of his life that he spent in France a well-known, perhaps even famous figure. Magazine and television journalists sought interviews with him, while Dominique de Roux (1968) and Pierre Sanavio (1974) each published a book of interviews with him. In Gombrowicz’s lifetime many of his works were also staged, beginning with the famous Parisian staging of S´lub by the Argentinean Jorge Lavelli at the Théâtre Récamier in 1963. Gombrowicz was also played in Berlin, Mannheim, and Zurich, and most importantly in Stockholm, where the Alf Sjöberg’s production of S´lub (1966) was a landmark in the history of Swedish theater. Western critics also appreciated – probably earlier than the Polish ones – Gombrowicz’s later novels Pornography and Cosmos, which Sandauer was so opposed to. In May 1967 the author received the international publishers’ award Prix Formentor for Cosmos, and it was said that he stood a good chance as a candidate for the Nobel Prize.

Gombrowicz, the Émigré (Jerzy Jarze˛bski)

339

And so, Gombrowicz’s situation as émigré had changed as if in a kaleidoscope: in the years 1939–44 he was virtually unknown in Argentina; in the years 1944–48 he made desperate attempts to gain acclaim on its literary scene, but– with little success; in 1947 he finally began working for the Banco Polaco, which had ties to institutions in his home country, and he tried to reclaim his position in Poland – also unsuccessfully. In the years 1951–56 he functioned mainly with outrageous and blasphemous remarks in émigré circles; after 1956 his position and importance in Poland distinctly overshadowed those he had in exile; and after 1958, particularly after his 1963 return to Europe, regular publications and stagings of his works in the West led to a fame there that outstripped that in his home country, not to mention the dubious position he held among Polish émigrés. The seventies and eighties were again a period of gradual decline of his popularity in Western countries and an upswing of his significance in Poland. He became there a herald of freedom and a symbol of highest artistic and intellectual values, from which the communist authorities had cut off the public. Finally, the author found – many years after his death – normality. In Poland, France, or Germany he has become simply a classic, whose works are published in multi-volume collections, and in other countries they are gradually translated in full and staged afresh. The centenary of the writer’s birth in 2004 brought many academic sessions focusing on him, and new volumes of academic publications, which number by now in the hundreds. In 2007 the far-right Minister of Education tried to remove Gombrowicz’s works from the school curriculum and brought on himself such an avalanche of protests and jeers that it played a significant role in bringing about his political demise. Who then was Gombrowicz as émigré? We find out over and over again, in ever different categories. In 2000, Jean-Pierre Salgas published a book in France, which presented Gombrowicz’s work as, no more and no less, a certain nucleus of European thought in the second half of the twentieth century. Hence, as he himself had claimed, Gombrowicz would be a philosopher ranking with Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud among the “philosophers of doubt,” rather organically associated with the Left, with such intellectuals as Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault or Pierre Bourdieu. We have here a path leading from Existentialism, through Structuralism, all the way to post-structural thought. Nowadays, Gombrowicz is read also through the categories of Modernism as well as Postmodernism, and through the lenses of post-colonial, queer,and Lacanian psychoanalytic perspectives. All of these methodologies – and many others as well – are possible thanks to the personality of the author, which was in constant flux, and engaged in perpetual games. According to Salgas, another important factor comes into play

340

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

that adds to Gombrowicz’s importance: an increasing provincialism of the old global centers of culture. As a champion of the, variously interpreted, periphery Gombrowicz becomes a philosopher and artist who is capable of addressing the core problems of men and women at the turn of the twenty-first century. And the reverse of Alfred Jarry’s slogan (“Poland – or everywhere” instead of “Poland – or nowhere” –) can not only function as a chapter title in Salgas’ book, but soon enough become also a symbol of this omnipresent return to the periphery. Let us end this essay with this paradox: if Gombrowicz’s strategy at the beginning of his emigration was to free himself of Poland and Polish problems on a journey towards the world, then from Salgas’ perspective, the end of this journey is to expand Polish provinciality to the corners of the Earth. And thus, emigration as a “great escape” becomes, as in the case of Gombrowicz’s writing, a double “great return”: to the world and to his home country at once. Translated from the Polish by Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand

Works Cited Beressem, Hanjo. Lines of Desire: Reading Gombrowicz’s Fiction with Lacan. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1998. Cioran, E. M. Dogodnos´ci i niedogodnos´ci wygnania. Trans. from the French Witold Gombrowicz, Kultura (1952), 6: 3–6. Trans. Richard Howard as The Temptation to Exist. Chicago: Quadrangle, 1968. [Gombrowicz, Witold]. “Witold Gombrowicz o swoim odczycie w Teatro del Pueblo” (Witold Gombrowicz about his Lecture in the Teatro del Pueblo). Kurier Polski (Buenos Aires) nr. 2845 (August 23, 1940): 5. Gombrowicz, Witold. Trans-Atlantyk. Kultura (1951), 5: 19–41; 6: 47–61. Gombrowicz, Witold. “Przeciw poetom” (Against the Poets). Kultura (1951), 10: 4–11. Gombrowicz, Witold. “Bankiet.” Wiadomos´ci (1953), 16: 1. Gombrowicz, Witold. Bakakaj. Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1957. Gombrowicz, Witold. Ferdydurke. 1937. Spanish trans. Buenos Aires: Argo, 1947. Warsaw: PIW, 1957. French trans. Paris: Julliard, 1958. Gombrowicz, Witold. Trans-Atlantyk – S´lub, z komentarzem autora (‘Trans-Atlantyk’ and The Marriage,’ with the Author’s Comments). Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1957. Gombrowicz, Witold. Iwona, ksie˛z˙niczka Burgunda (Ivona, Princess of Burgundia), Warsaw: PIW, 1958. Gombrowicz, Witold. “J’étais structuraliste avant tout le monde.” La Quinzaine Littéraire 1 (May 1967): 5. Polish trans. in Gombrowicz, Publicystyka. 320–329. Gombrowicz, Witold. Diary. General ed. Jan Kott. Trans. Lillian Valee. Vol. 1. London, New York: Quartet Books, 1988. First Polish ed.: Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1957. Gombrowicz, Witold. Publicystyka, wywiady, teksty róz˙ne 1963–1969 (Articles, Interviews, Various Texts, 1963–1969). Trans. I. Kania et al. Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1997.

Gombrowicz, the Émigré (Jerzy Jarze˛bski)

341

Grinberg, Miguel. Wspominaja˛c Gombrowicza (Recalling Gombrowicz). Trans. Ewa Zaleska and Rajmund Kalickia; afterword Jerzy Jarze˛bski. Warsaw: PIW, 2005. Jerzak, Katarzyna. “Defamation in Exile: Witold Gombrowicz and E.M. Cioran.” Płonowska Ziarek, Gombrowicz’s Grimaces 177–209. Kuharski, Allen. “Witold, Witold, and Witold: Performing Gombrowicz. Płonowska Ziarek, Gombrowicz’s Grimaces 267–86. Kühl, Olaf. Ge˛ba Erosa: Tajemnice stylu Witolda Gombrowicza (The Mug of Eros. Mysteries of Witold Gombrowicz’s Style). Trans. Krzysztof Niewrze˛da and Maria Tarnogórska. Foreword Włodzimierz Bolecki. Cracow: Universitas, 2005. Margan´ski, Janusz. Gombrowicz wieczny debiutant (Gombrowicz: the Perpetual Beginner). Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2001. Markowski, Michał Paweł. Czarny nurt: Gombrowicz, ´swiat, literatura (Dark Current: Gombrowicz, World, Literature). Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2004. Płonowska Ziarek, Ewa, ed. Gombrowicz’s Grimaces: Modernism, Gender, Nationality, Albany: State University of New York P, 1998. Płonowska Ziarek, Ewa. “The Scar of the Foreigner and the Fold of the Baroque: National Affiliations and Homosexuality in Gombrowicz’s Trans-Atlantyk.” Płonowska Ziarek Gombrowicz’s Grimaces 213–44. Pruszyn´ski, Ksawery. “Literatura emigracji walcza˛cej” (Literature of the Fighting Emigration). Wiadomos´ci Polskie (1940), nr 1: 1. Roux, Dominique de. Entretiens avec Gombrowicz (Conversations with Gombrowicz). Paris: Belfond, 1968. (subsequent eds. as: W. Gombrowicz, Testament: Entretiens avec Dominique de Roux) Salgas, Jean-Pierre. Witold Gombrowicz ou l’athéisme generalizé (Witold Gombrowicz, or Generalized Atheism). Paris: Seuil, 2000. Sanavio, Piero. Gombrowicz: La Forma e Il Rito (Gombrowicz: the Form and the Ritual). Venice: Marsilio, 1974. Sandauer, Artur. “Szkoła nierzeczywistos´ci i jej uczen´ (Esej krytyczny osnuty na tle I cze˛s´ci ‘Ferdydurke’ Gombrowicza)” (The School of Unreality and its Disciple. Critical Essay Based on the First Part of Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke). Z˙ycie Literackie (1958), nr. 1. Rpt. Sandauer. Dla kaz˙dego cos´ przykrego. Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1966. 81–118. Sandauer, Artur. “Pocza˛tki, s´wietnos´c´ i upadek rodziny Młodziaków (Esej krytyczny, osnuty na tle II cze˛s´ci ‘Ferdydurke’ Gombrowicza” (The Rise, Splendor, and Fall of the Youngblood Family. Critical Essay Based on the Second Part of Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke). Polityka (1958), nr. 43. Rpt. Sandauer. Dla kaz˙dego cos´ przykrego. Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1966. 119–169. Sołtysik, Agnieszka M. “Witold Gombrowicz’s Struggle with Heterosexual Form: From a National to a Performative Self.” Płonowska Ziarek, Gombrowicz’s Grimaces 245–65. Suchanow, Klementyna. Argentyn´skie przygody Gombrowicza (Gombrowicz’s Argentinian Adventures). Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie: 2005.

342

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

Paul Goma: the Permanence of Dissidence and Exile Marcel-Cornis-Pope

Paul Goma is the Romanian writer most marked by the Gulag “model,” which he has converted into a veritable imago mundi. The obsessive insistence with which he treats this theme could result in a monotony of horror, exceeding a reader’s capacity to react to it. Yet we need to think of his contribution differently, as a pioneering impact of the Solzhenitsyn-type novel about the Gulag experience on Western mentalities. His novels, like his testimonial literature have a shock value. With the difference that here the author resorts to ample narrative constructions, in which fiction predominates, though it uses reality as its starting point. (Cesereanu, Gulagul în cons¸tiint¸a româneasca˘ 293) When I did what any other writer (except a Romanian one!) would have done, by sending my manuscripts refused in the East to publishers in the West, I found myself avoided, isolated, quarantined. (Goma, Jurnalul unui jurnal 269)

The case of oppositional writer Paul Goma represents both a recognizable type for East-Central European dissidence and exile, and a surprising exception within his own country. In the larger context of the East-Central European oppositional movement, Paul Goma joins other major figures like Jacek Kuron´, Adam Michnik, Vaclav Hável, György Konrád, and Jurek Becker, who spearheaded the drive towards the liberalization of socio-cultural life and contributed to the erosion of the ideological monopoly of Soviet-inspired communism. Already as a young man, Goma supported the Hungarian anti-communist movement (see below) and two decades later signed the Czech inspired Charter 77 together with 34 Hungarian intellectuals and a few Romanian writers primarily from the Diaspora (the only writer at home to join him was Ion Negoit¸escu). Concomitant with Goma’s resistance to Ceaus¸escu’s ideological oppression, came the strikes of the Jiu Valley miners and workers in Bras¸ov (1977, 1979), as well as the first attempt to form a Free Trade Union of the Working People of Romania (SLOMR, 1979), which Goma supported directly. The workers’ movements were crushed violently and some of the leaders disappeared without a trace. Goma himself was

Paul Goma (Marcel-Cornis-Pope)

343

brutally beaten and expelled from Romania in 1977, while his resistance movement subsequently dispersed. Still, his example encouraged a broader civil-rights movement in Romania, in which writers and scholars from several university centers participated: Bucharest (Dorin Tudoran, Ana Blandiana, and Mircea Dinescu), Cluj (Doina Cornea – in an interview, she recognized the impact that Goma’s example had for her own dissidence), Ias¸i (Dan Petrescu, Mihai Dinu Gheorghiu, Liviu Cangeopol, Alexandru Ca˘linescu, and Luca Pit¸u), and Timis¸oara (Petru Ilies¸u). Liviu Antonesei draws attention to some of the parallels between the short-lived Goma movement in 1977 and the actions of several groups of writers in 1987–88 that called into question the monopoly of communist power (66). Some of the methods were similar: open letters to the Romanian authorities and to the foreign press, collective appeals and signing of international documents guaranteeing civil rights. As Antonesei points out, the dissident movement of 1987 was somewhat better organized and better publicized than Goma’s movement a decade earlier: both moments had a significant contributions to “freeing people from fear, preparing a pre-revolutionary state” (140). Born in 1935 in Mana, a Bessarabian village at the time part of the Kingdom of Romania and now in the Republic of Moldova, Goma’s biography epitomizes the main phases of persecution, dissidence, and political exile that we have come to identify with the dramatic fate of writers during and after World War II. After the occupation of Bessarabia by the Soviet troupes, Goma’s father, Eufimie, was arrested by the NKVD and deported to Siberia. In 1943, he was discovered by his wife Maria in a camp for Soviet prisoners in Southern Romania, treated as a “prisoner of war.” In March 1944, the family managed to avoid a renewed threat of deportation and took refuge in Romania, settling in the Transylvanian city of Sibiu. In August the same year, while targeted with other Bessarabian Romanians for involuntary “repatriation” to the Soviet Union, the Goma family fled to the village of Buia, deeper in Transylvania. For several months, they hid in the forests around Buia but were turned over to the Romanian authorities by shepherds working in the area. While awaiting their fate in a “Repatriation Center,” Eufimie Goma forged documents for his family, escaping deportation back to Soviet Union. His brother, who refused to use the forged documents, was deported and died in one of the camps. These early events are reflected in a number of Goma’s works, from Arta refugii (The Art of Refuge/Taking Flight Again) and Soldatul câinelui (Dog’s Soldier) to Garda˘ inversa˘ (Reverse Guard). Paul Goma’s early biography thus began under the sign of peregrination and exile, with his family trying to negotiate a minimal home. As a Romanian from Bessarabia, Goma was from the beginning an exile, both in his native

344

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

village occupied by the Soviets in 1940, and in Romania, where he was sometimes viewed as a poor and illegitimate relative by the Romanians: “Goma is an older exile [than the twenty-five years he has spent away from Romania beginning in 1977]. He is the Exile with capital E, he embodies the prototype or the archetype of the exile. Even when he was in Romania, Paul Goma was an exile” (see Laszlo, http://ournet.md/~paulgoma). He continued to feel an exile also as a writer, finding it difficult to be at home in the convoluted metafictional style of the sixties and seventies, preferring a more direct, conversational style, peppered with imprecations and profanities. And, as we shall see below, he was a stranger also to the carefully monitored thematics of postStalinist fiction, preferring not to accept the pact with authorities that his generational colleagues had for the most part accepted; he broke taboos, not only during the Stalinist period but also during the post-Stalinist period instituted by Ceaus¸escu. And he has continued to be an archetypal stranger also in exile, refusing to join the well-established structures of the Romanian exile and to be guided by group interests. Already as a young man, Goma suffered political persecution at the hand of the communist authorities. In 1952, while attending tenth grade, he was expelled from the Gheorghe Laza˘r High School in Sibiu for praising in class the anti-communist partisans and keeping a coded personal journal. He managed to complete his high school education in another southern Transylvanian town and was admitted in 1953 to the Institute of Literature and Literary Criticism in 1953, a mostly Stalinist institution modeled after a similar school in Moscow. His defiant attitude in writing classes, and his support for the 1956 Hungarian uprising (he read publicly a fragment of a novel in which a Romanian student returns his Young Communist League card in solidarity with the Hungarians) led to his arrest on November 22 and imprisonment at Jilava (1957) and Gherla (1958). As a proof that the Romanian authorities were not yet ready to accept deviations from the dogma of Socialist Realism, Goma was assigned, immediately after being released from prison, forced domicile in La˘tes¸ti (a village in the Ba˘ra˘gan Plain abandoned by deported peasants) until 1963. In 1965, Goma reenrolled at the University of Bucharest, but was forced to abandon his degree in philology in 1967, under pressure from the Securitate. The persecutions Goma suffered under Ceaus¸escu’s neo-totalitarian regime in the 1970s are well-documented in his own work and in the testimonies of others. In 1972, Goma and a few other writers protested the hardening of party control over literary culture and the changes in the Statutes of the Writers’ Union that made it harder for rebellious writers to be delegated to the National Conference. Goma was punished at once by being prevented from

Paul Goma (Marcel-Cornis-Pope)

345

participating in the Writers’ Conference. The following few years, he was refused publication repeatedly, beaten in the street, and sent to the Rahova prison after he voiced publicly his support for the signatories of the Czechoslovak Charta 77 movement. By the time he sent, via a Belgian diplomat, a letter of support to Pavel Kohout ( January 1977), one of the initiators of Charta 77, Goma had become a one-man opposition in communist Romania. He wrote in this letter: I declare my solidarity with your action; the Czechoslovak situation is – with unessential differences – shared also by Romania. We leave and survive in the same Camp […] (its capital: Moscow). […] The same absence of elementary rights, the same contempt for man, the same shamelessness of lies – everywhere. Everywhere there is also poverty, economic chaos, demagoguery, uncertainty, terror. […] But it has been proven and it will be proven again that one can oppose the programmatic degradation to which we are submitted here, under Stalinist socialism. (Diac)

In February the same year, Goma addressed a message directly to President Ceaus¸escu, inviting him to co-sign a letter of support for the Czechoslovak human rights movement. A third letter, which he addressed to a Belgrade conference convened to analyze the application of the principles of the Helsinki accord, was co-signed initially by eight other Romanians. Two hundred more people signed later, including the writer Ion Negoit¸escu, students, and workers like Vasile Paraschiv who subsequently organized, with Goma’s encouragement, the first free trade union. This letter decried the violations of the civil rights written into the Romanian Constitution, such as the freedom of the press, the freedom of association, as well as the right to free circulation of people, ideas, and information. Many participants in the “Goma movement” were subsequently given a passport and “encouraged” to leave the country. This created the impression that solidarity with Goma could get you a passport to leave the country – a matter upon which Goma ironically reflected in several of his later works. For Goma himself, the movement brought further persecution and physical abuse at the hands of the Securitate general Nicolae Ples¸it¸a˘. Finally, Goma was forced at the end of 1977 to take refuge in France and file for political asylum, together with his wife Ana Maria, daughter of the pre-1944 communist activist Petre Na˘vodaru-Fischer, and his two-year old son. This was the second time he was given a passport to leave the country; the first time, in 1972, he was allowed to travel to his native Bessarabia, as well as to France and Italy, in response to invitations to read and lecture. Against the hope of the Romanian regime, Goma did return home and became the regime’s main political irritation until 1977, when he was permanently expelled. Lieutenant-General Ion Mihai Pacepa, former Director of the Romanian Intelligence Service and special advisor to Ceaus¸escu, who defected to the

346

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

West in 1978, documents in Red Horizons (1987) the persecution and intimidation to which Goma was submitted after he appealed to the signatories of the Helsinki accord to monitor the political repression in Romania. Beaten savagely in the street and in his cell by a hired professional boxer, Goma was freed temporarily on Ceaus¸escu’s order before the latter’s official visit to the US in 1977. Once in the West, Goma was targeted for assassination. In 1978, the Securitate tried to poison Goma’s son, Filip, in 1982 Goma himself received a letter bomb, which was defused by the French police. The same year, the Securitate sent officer Matei Pavel Hirsch (“Haiducu”) to Paris with the mission to eliminate Goma and another Romanian dissident “by any means,” but Haiducu turned himself in to the French counter-intelligence (see Pacepa 6, 154–5; Funderbank 66). Goma’s life as a refugee from Bessarabia after its Soviet invasion and as a victim of repeated incarceration and persecution is not that different from the life of other writers who survived the Communist gulags. Recent estimations put the number of victims who were arrested, interrogated, tortured, and “reeducated” in Romanian prisons and camps between 1948 and 1960 to more than a million (see Kanterian). The worst repression took place during the purges at the end of the 1940s and beginning of the fifties, led by Alexandru Dra˘ghici as interior minister and Alexandru Nicholski, as Securitate general. After a brief liberalization in the mid sixties, Ceaus¸escu reintroduced a neoStalinist form of repression against dissidents and working class activists. Like the Moldavians Nicolae Costenco and Alexei Marinat, the Ukrainian Vasyl’ Barka, or the Romanian Ion Caraion, Goma, continued to be persecuted and could publish about his gulag experiences only abroad, beginning in 1971 (see below). His case is different, however, because of the violence with which Goma’s work was repressed from the very beginning. Clearly, Goma fits neither of the two categories that Miklós Haraszti established for dissident writers in The Velvet Prison: he is neither a “Naïve Hero,” who refuses self-censorship and compromises and exiles himself from the world of aesthetics (151), nor a “Maverick Artist” who smuggles messages between the lines, disrupting state culture at its foundation with his alternative art (152). He did not simply reject the notion of “art as service” in the name of some ill-defined notion of spiritual independence, his imagination “flooded with romantic utopias” (154). On the contrary, as we shall see below, Goma mixed from the beginning a pragmatic focus on art in the service of truth and collective emancipation with a notion of artistic integrity that, at least in the earlier phase, included also stylistic experimentation. He not only tested the limits of “permissibility” (Haraszti 157), as some dissident writers were wont to do, but circumvented them altogether by smuggling his work abroad. In this

Paul Goma (Marcel-Cornis-Pope)

347

sense, he refused to play the role of a regulating pressure valve in the system of directed culture. For one thing, the cultural system introduced by Ceaus¸escu’s regime after 1971 was a return to Stalinist impositions and not the “sophisticated directed culture” that Haraszti saw in Kádár’s Hungary. As Haraszti put it, “The more talented and flexible the state, the more pleasurably it can suck the dissidents’ vital fluids into the organism of state culture” (159). In Ceaus¸escu’s Romania, a radical dissident like Goma was totally inassimilable, his work and career refusing to lubricate and ameliorate the system by its counterexample. According to a Hungarian saying, quoted by Haraszti, “if Solzhenitsyn had lived in Hungary, he would have been appointed president of the Writers’ Union […] given time” (156). In Romania, a Solzhenitsyn-figure like Goma, who obsessively focused on the prison system built by the communists (Cesereanu 118), could only be harassed, imprisoned, and banished. Ion Negoit¸escu, Ion Vianu, and the other few who signed Goma’s protest in 1977 were likewise ostracized, deprived of “respectability,” especially the kind offered by the “honorable world of communism” – as Vianu ironically remarked in an interview with Lidia Vianu (Censorship in Romania 73–74). After Goma received permission to publish again in 1966, his signature appeared first in the magazine Luceafa˘rul, the new outlet for promising young writers. The magazine gave him an award for fiction in 1966, a surprising decision given Goma’s history as a former political prisoner. Encouraged by the official Romanian condemnation of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia on August 21, 1968, Goma joined the Communist party the same day, together with a group of other young writers. His first and only book of short fiction to appear in Romania, Camera de ala˘turi (The Adjoining Room; 1968) was published the same year. However, his testimonial novel Ostinato, which challenged the period’s taboos by focusing on the experiences of the Romanian gulag, was refused by the State Publishing House for Literature and Art (ESPLA). Two sections of it had, nevertheless, been published in the premier literary publication, Gazeta literara˘, in March and April, and further sections were printed in Goma’s Camera de ala˘turi. Unwilling to make any further revisions to his manuscript, toning down his treatment of the repressive regime in Romania, Goma published in 1971 his novel abroad, in German under its original title, and in French with the new title, La cellule des libérables (The Cell of Those Who Can Be Freed). It was also translated into Dutch in 1974. The publication of this novel caused quite a scandal: the Romanian officials left the Frankfurt Book Fair when the publisher Suhrkamp refused to withdraw the book. Goma was excluded from the Romanian Communist Party for “putting in the hands of the enemy a weapon the latter could use against our mother country.” With typical party-inspired inconsistency, he was accused simultaneously of writing an un-

348

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

patriotic book, an anti-Soviet book, an aesthetically inferior work, as well as a novel that distorts socialist realities (see Gabanyi 203). Goma’s next novel, Us¸a (The Door), which contained portraits of recognizable communist figures, including the country’s president and his wife, was again rejected by Romania’s main literary publisher, Cartea Româneasca˘, in 1970, but was published abroad, first in Germany under the title Die Tür (1972) and in France Elles étaient quatre … (They Were Four; 1974). Gallimard in Paris published also Goma’s documentary Gherla (1976), Dans le cercle (Within the Circle; 1977), and Garde inverse (Reverse Guard; 1979). After he was forced into exile, Goma published in 1981 Les Chiens de mort (The Dogs of Death), focused on the Pites¸ti political prison, where the prisoners were coerced to practice “inter-torture,” as Goma calls it, tormenting each other as part of a ruthless program of “re-education” carried out between 1948 and 1953. Goma’s novel foregrounds the complex process of brainwashing and brain-changing that had as main objective the annihilation of the subject’s personality and the construction of a new self-deprecating identity in a terrible ritual of death and resurrection through public confession (Cesereanu 365). Le tremblement des hommes/Culoarea curcubeului’77 (on the 1977 movement for human rights) and Chassé-croisé (Soldatul câinelui; 1983) also exposed in brutally honest detail reminiscent of Solzhenitsyn the treatment of political prisoners in the Romanian system, and the fragile and continually threatened life of a political exile like the Bulgarian Georgi Markov or Goma himself. Bonifacia (1987) is a docufiction, a documentary novel that represents closely enough the author’s return to college after incarceration, witnessing the contradictory life of the Bucharest literary elite, traversed by fake dissident political figures and dubious supporters in the party nomenclature. Le calidor (1989) returns us to an exploration of mid-century historical traumas as experienced by a young child that is confronted with the collapse of his innocent world of imagination. All these works were written originally in Romanian but, with rare exceptions, they were first published in French, German, Dutch, and Swedish translations. Goma’s first book of short fiction, Camera de ala˘turi (The Adjoining Room; 1968) is focused primarily on the writer’s childhood and his youthful discoveries and disorientations. “O ce veste minunata˘” (Wonderful Tidings), concerned with the experiences of a recently freed prisoner who carries messages from inmates to their relatives in the disorienting world of “freedom,” anticipates some of the political themes of Goma’s later work. The protagonist, Gulima˘nescu, returns in the novel Ostinato under the name Guliman, as the Gypsy sage who moves from prison to prison, bringing solace to the other prisoners in the form imaginative storytelling.

Paul Goma (Marcel-Cornis-Pope)

349

A comparison with Augustin Buzura’s political fiction may explain why none of Goma’s subsequent work was allowed to appear in Romania. Goma shares with Buzura a single-minded concentration on the detail of life, but while Buzura’s novels were published in Romania after concessions made to the censorship, Goma’s novel-essays refused any such compromises. (Of course, the opposition between internally censored vs. published abroad should not automatically grant superior quality to the latter: aesthetic, structural, and other criteria will have to be taken into account, as Buzura was all too happy to point out in the recent interview “Acolo, la Louisville,” which tried to deny the literary value of Goma’s work). Denise Deletant has similarly compared Alexandru Ivasiuc’s Pa˘sa˘rile (Birds; 1970) and Paul Goma’s Ostinato, “both remarkable for the accurate reconstruction of that period’s atmosphere”: Both writers had been arrested in 1956–they were students at that time–for having participated in the actions inspired by the Hungarian anti-Communist revolt; they became friends in prison. Their heroes share the same fate: a political detention through the 1950s, then the struggle for reintegration after their release. In exposing the process of “collectivization” [the enforced association of farmers in “collective farms”– note MCP], the treatment of convicts in prisons and that of political suspects by the “Securitate,” Goma was more courageous in that he transgressed the limits allowed by the Censor’s office” (Deletant 180–1; for a comparison of Goma with Ivasiuc, see Gabanyi 73–74, 184)

Most commentators have divided Goma’s work into fiction (the novels Ostinato and Les Chiens de mort, ou, La passion selon Pites¸ti) and testimonial literature, what Cesereanu (293) calls his “trilogy of aggression” and which includes Gherla, Le tremblement des homes/Culoarea curcubeului ’77 and Soldatul câinelui. However, Goma continually transgresses and complicates the boundaries between fiction and testimony. Most of his work focuses, if only indirectly, on the world of concentration camps, foregrounding the basic themes of freedom and entrapment, fall and redemption. In a reversal of Dante’s metaphysical mapping of the universe, Goma’s work describes a multilayered and inescapable hell which allows at best only a provisional exit, with no real opportunity for redemption. Ostinato launched the theme of the Romanian Gulag, blending reportage and fiction, improvisational and explorative narrative. The novel starts in the “liberation room,” where the narrator Ilarie Langa and other “soon-to-befreed” prisoners await their liberation in 1967, in the aftermath of a party decree that frees most common law and political prisoners. Many of the detainees in this Dantesque “cosmology of the cell” (Siegfried Lenz in the afterword of Ostinato 457) are political, including some who had participated in the 1956 student unrest or were victims of persecution. By contrast, the tractor

350

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

driver Marinica˘ was sent to prison for killing a woman when drunk; Lemnaru was condemned to twenty-five years for a crime of passion, while the narrator was condemned to seven years, later extended to eleven, for having helped his cancer-suffering mother end her life with an overdose of morphine. One of the guardians is more willing to understand Langa’s mercy crime by contrast to the state crimes committed by the sympathizers of the Hungarian anticommunist revolution, but the novel levels out these differences, suggesting that all detainees are dehumanized and entrapped by the penal system. Once inside, there is no real escape: Langa himself becomes embroiled in a politically staged trial, in which he is accused of participating in a secret counterrevolutionary organization supported by the Vatican. The liberation chamber is a purgatory where “people are cured of waiting by waiting” (84); it is a “memory chamber,” where every character is caught in an uncertain world of memories and present anxieties. The character who attracts most attention is the Gypsy Guliman, who pendulates between “prison and non-prison” (117), connecting the world outside with the world inside. He struts into the novel like Ken Kesey’s Randle Patrick McMurphy to take over the imagination of the other prisoners with his picturesque stories. Most of his stories have a hopeful ending, or at least remain suspended in the realm of promise: the promise of freedom, or of reunion with the woman left behind. But he can also tell disturbing stories about his experience at the Gherla prison, ruled over by the sinister Doctor Sin (“Menghele”) who “cures” patients by hitting them in the area of pain. His own story belies his apparent optimism: imprisoned in the 1950s because of the political jokes and ironic slogans he spreads in the market place, he moves inside the different circles of the Romanian gulag, from Gherla to the work camps at the Danube-Black Sea Canal. He is illiterate yet deeply philosophic; he discourses on “Froaid” and “psicanalitica˘” (pussyanalytics), applying cat behavior to people. He mocks the notion that all villains under communism are “non-Romanian,” giving examples of native torturers like Petre Goiciu who practice extreme forms of the “reeducation/liquidation” of political prisoners. Stimulated by Guliman’s stories, Langa tries to rehearse in his memory his life before and during incarceration. His life appears to him as a sequence of renunciations and false escapes. His escape from prison through a pipeline can only fail because it is prompted by the illusion that there is a real difference between the outside and inside of the communist prison system. His mercy killing of his mother was also prompted by a false sense of liberation from an oppressive destiny and from his own incapacity to deal with her suffering. Half way through the novel Langa becomes cynical about the possibility of any true liberation, denying (to the chagrin of the other prisoners) that

Paul Goma (Marcel-Cornis-Pope)

351

the decree which is supposed to free them has any reality. As Monica Lovinescu comments, Langa sees the promised liberation from prison as only “a new and last stage of closure” (522). As he himself puts, with a dizzying sense of irony, “liberation proceeds from the outside of the inside towards the true outside, not from the cell, so I have to pass through the purgatory of the yard … that will be another liberation; the other, the real one, will proceed from here, directly (Ostinato 43). In a totalitarian state, the opposition freedom-incarceration is illusory, one being liberated from a communist prison into a political system that operated itself like a prison. In an imaginary encounter with a divine avatar (or Dostoevskian Grand Inquisitor), the narrator is further warned that his “freedom may feel more prison than prison” (45), contaminating him with the “worm of disbelief.” However, instead of accepting the divine (or malefic) advice to relinquish “burdensome” freedom, the narrator challenges God’s position in relation to the horrors of the communist Gulag. Through his passivity, God is just as guilty of collaborationism with the regime as its human victims. The latter are caught in a vicious circle, with the “guardians and the guarded […] guarding each other,” being as (un)free as the others (173). Yet in Langa’s (and in Goma’s) eyes, this vicious circle can be broken through a passionate refusal of cowardly compromises. The protagonist even calls for a new Nürnberg trial of communist terror, not simply in order to punish the perpetrators of crimes against humanity but to make sure that things are not forgotten, that “evil is not eternal, but a simple accident” (392–93, 403). The narrator’s chance to return to a more normal existence after liberation from prison depends on his capacity to preserve his basic humanity and connect to other human beings, especially to women like Catinca, a telephone assistant he met before his arrest. In the narrator’s imagination, enhanced by the stories told by Guliman, Catinca becomes a mythical figure of loyalty and support, a “Penelope” (see Cesereanu 303) who encourages all detainees awaiting their liberation. The narrator also resorts to dialogic writing as a mode that can make sense of his messy existence. The novel as whole emphasizes dialogue and alternative storytelling in a montage of voices that retain their accents, their quirkiness, and theatricality. Dialogue with minimal contextual or situational references often mixes with Langa’s fragmented interior monologue, first person collaborates with the third and the second, and past mixes with the present and a hypothetical future. Where the grand narrative (the plot of history) fails, smaller personal narratives, filtered through emotion rather than argument, seem to prevail. Against Guliman’s advice to the narrator to leave the past alone, Langa revisits it in half-fantastic dreamscapes, mixed with documentary prose, going

352

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

back to his childhood in a Bras¸ov German school and the political persecution suffered by his family. The narrator’s recuperative effort is emphasized also by the musical metaphor of the title which suggests the obstinate repetition of a motif or phrase until it builds a rhythmic theme, a pattern of repetition with variation and development. The last two parts of the novel correlate this metaphoric motif with a renewed focus on women figures, dream, and self-reflection, weaving various themes together. The first of these two parts (a narrative interlude) focuses on the story of the narrator’s mother, including her merciful death, but also on her metamorphosis into other women figures. In the third part, the narrator reconnects various characters and stories in a loosely interwoven structure that reflects the “ostinato” musical composition the narrator is working on. Retrieving a number of characters that become emblematic for certain attitudes in the novel, the narrator has difficulty sorting out his feelings towards Catinca, for her undeserved devotion to him; towards Marian Cusa, the liberated writer who betrays truth in order to court publishers, and towards himself as a “liberated” prisoner who at the end of the novel steps across the ambivalent space that divides the inner from the outer carcer space. Langa can only ask in the end, “Where is my liberation? Further back, deeper still” (Ostinato 451). Us¸a (The Door) also has a complex narrative structure, experimenting with ways of translating narratively contradictory states of consciousness and memory. One of the characters here, a female commissar responsible for terrorizing even her uncle during the collectivization of agriculture, regrets some of her acts of terror on a human level, but not on an ideological one. After his forced exile to France, Goma published Les Chiens de mort, ou, La passion selon Pites¸ti (The Dogs of Death, or The Passions in the Pites¸ti Version; 1981); the first Romanian edition, Patimile dupa˘ Pites¸ti, was published in 1990, but was withdrawn from the market two days later and the printing plates destroyed, to be republished only in 1999. The novel focuses on the historical figure of Eugen T¸urcanu, the chief torturer in the “reeducation” prison at Pites¸ti, who is given an infernal appearance upon his entry: he has a “rhinoceros horn instead of chin” (Patimile 11), eyes that shift colors from yellow to violet to grey, and dreams that are haunted by “angels with crocodile jaws and wolf hair” (110). Yet T¸urcanu is very much a product of his culture, an emanation of the reign of terror in the 1950s Romania, intent on purifying social “rot” through extreme methods that include torture and making everybody feel guilty. The “Great Re-educator,” as T¸urcanu is called in the novel, is directly related to the Grand Inquisitor in Brothers Karamazov and Piotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky in The Possessed. He sees himself as the evangelist of a new order, promoter of a dark scripture. In a key scene, T¸urcanu practices a parody

Paul Goma (Marcel-Cornis-Pope)

353

of baptism in the prison’s closet, complete with the crowning of the Christ figure with feces and a sexual orgy involving “Biblical” figures (170–73). Himself a “successful” example of a reeducated prisoner, T¸urcanu applies sophisticated forms of torture to his victims, treating them as remoldable “clay” (Patimile 104), taking them apart and reassembling them into unrecognizable “new men” (98, 136). According to Cesereanu (296), T¸urcanu’s shares with Dostoevsky’s Verkhovensky a sadistic urge to destroy an individual’s humanity as a tool of “purification” and to enhance collective terror through reciprocal denunciation. Vasile Pop plays an important role in T¸urcanu’s demonstration. As the recorder of the Great Re-educator’s works, he is treated differently from the other victims, at least at the beginning, as his eyes and ears are educated to absorb the enormity of T¸urcanu’s assault on human dignity. In a later stage of “reeducation,” he is forced to practice “intertorture” with his twin brother, Elislav, who becomes a punishing/redemptive Angel in Vasile’s imagination. After Vasile’s failed attempt to kill the Great Re-educator, he is submitted to further torment that includes the real or imaginary killing of his brother (the novel maintains some ambiguity about this). Thirty years after these events, Vasile tries to exorcise the ghost of the Great Re-educator by writing a “Gospel” of the victims of the communist regime. His text overlaps partly with Goma’s own novel which tries to wrest some understanding out of the dark history of Stalinism. Goma’s subsequent works became more impatient with narration, replacing fiction with testimony, and narrative construction with confession. Characteristic for this later approach are Gherla, Dans le cercle, Garde inverse, Le tremblement des hommes, Les Chiens de mort, and Chassé-croisé. All these works map closed spaces (prison cell, forced domicile), foregrounding the psychological tension between a prison space and a contestatory imagination. Gherla gives up narrative embellishments, resorting to direct testimony in a “sarcasticangry” style that Nicolae Balta˘ (“Rezumatul”) contrasts with the more detached or humanistic perspective of other detention memoirs. Goma’s irony is most ferocious when he describes the home-grown contributions to the history of incarceration and torture. As Cesereanu argues, Goma is one of the few memorialists interested in describing in detail the process of torturing from the point of view of both the victim and the interrogator, whose inventiveness in inflicting pain is boundless (182). The epigraph of Gherla (“Most of my books are posthumous”) describes accurately the difficulties of such documentary political works. Begun during Goma’s first trip abroad (1972), this book went through several different versions, shifting from a dialogue with a skeptical Western interlocutor (niece of

354

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

a former political prisoner in the Romanian gulag, now living in France) to an authorial voice in passionate dialogue with itself. Even in the earlier version, we can infer the interlocutor’s reactions only from the narrator’s responses. The narrative voice is often ironic, argumentative, emphasizing the diabolic nature of prison rules: the prison doctor is punished for administering cough syrup to the prisoners in bottles with stickers that can be reused for their own writing; prisoners denounce one another out of perpetual fear; in prison, nobody is allowed to use the plural “we,” speaking for others rather than just for oneself. The narrator defends the memorialistic nature of his work, its sacrifice of style for truth. He admits that in retelling a certain event in different versions over time he ends up rewriting it, but he still rebukes his former prison mates for refusing to write about their prison experience for fear of distorting it. Breaking the silence is more important than producing a well polished work (221). One of the central events the narrator retells after many preparations and detours is the atrocious beating he received two days before liberation, on November 19, 1958. The day starts with a fight between one of the prison’s informants, church painter Barbu, and a Swabian prisoner from the Banat area, Klapka, arrested for attempting illegal border crossing. The narrator takes Klapka’s side and is in turn accused by Barbu of sending secret messages to his “fascist friends” through the heating unit. Things escalate further when Goiciu, the supreme inquisitor famous for perfecting torturing procedures out of Dostoevsky, shows up to confront Klapka and the narrator. The two are tortured by the prison’s associate director, Istrate (an elementary school teacher and thus an “intellectual”), under the complicitous eyes of the prison’s doctor and with the “rueful” participation of Goiciu, who fakes the attitude of a disappointed parent, unwillingly chastising his children. Upon further instigation by the prison informers, Klapka and the narrator are submitted to a second, even more brutal beating in the old section of the prison, built in the time of Empress Maria Theresa. This phase, which begins with Istrate’s attempt to establish a complicitous relationship with the narrator, mocking the lack of intelligence and polish of the other torturers, gives way to a brutal assault on the narrator from all directions, with Istrate as master of ceremony and the other guardians as his dutiful tools. As the narrator reaches the end of his capacity to endure, he promises never to forget, never to keep silent about this torture (170). The documentary we read is his Solzhenitsyn-like “Day from My Life at Gherla.” These phases in the punishment of the narrator are retold with many interruptions and detours that set up the larger context for the events: the hardening of prison conditions after the Hungarian revolution, the importation

Paul Goma (Marcel-Cornis-Pope)

355

of the Soviet model of repressive political police (the Securitate), the brutal suppression of the rebellion of the frontier-crossers at Gherla, the increased terror instituted through torturers like Todea (nicknamed Stalin), Pop, Vasea, Sigi Beiner and “Gruia (Grünberg) who represent a veritable ethnic cross-section in the Stalinist prison world. There are also a number of detours through earlier periods in the narrator’s life, from the time he worked as a pioneer instructor, to his trial by a tribunal stacked with Securitate agents. Women (such as the girl from the neighborhood whose growing to adulthood the prisoners follow from the window of their security cell) also play a role in connecting the prisoners to a fragile outside world. Gherla thus develops through arborescent narration, each story forking out into other stories in a nonlinear, expanding structure. Many of the stories are told from partial perspectives, in unverifiable versions as witnessed (seen or only overheard). Whether a direct participant or only an observer, the narrator is emotionally involved in the tale. He is often passionate, accusing the Russians for bringing only calamities to the area or denouncing ironically the naiveté of the prisoners who expect the American Sixth Fleet to come to Gherla by way of the Mediterranean, Black Sea, and various internal Romanian rivers, to save them. He also advances historical opinions that are not always thought through properly: he compares the fascist occupation with the Soviet one, declaring the length of occupation to be more important than its intensity, and he describes fascism and communism as versions of the same totalitarian ideology. The narrator also points to the preponderance of nonRomanian guardians in the first phase of the Romanian gulag (Hungarian Jews educated in Transylvania, Russian-speaking Jews from Bessarabia and Bucovina), but admits that in a later phase guardians and torturers were recruited from among the Romanian country folk. Doctor Sin himself, also known as the Gherla Mengele, is either a Saxon or a Romanian from Transylvania. The narrator claims not to be afraid to speak the “truth,” which includes a focus on both the role of minorities in the repressive communist regime and the cowardice and collaborationism of Romanians. The online version of Gherla continues with an unfinished epistolary-documentary fragment titled La˘tes¸ti (1973), which covers the period from the narrator’s liberation from Gherla to his surprise trip to La˘tes¸ti, where he is given forced domicile. The fragment starts in the epistolary mode, addressing the narrator’s former lover now defected to France, but it gradually shifts to a straightforward diary. The story covers the narrator’s exit from prison on November 21, 1958, his marching painfully down the street on his mutilated feet (most of his nails plucked out during torture). He is taken to the local gendarmes who treat him more humanely than the Securitate officers, and send

356

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

him to town to get cigarettes and food. When he buys books and newspapers with the money received from home, he learns about some of the political changes in the world missed while he was in prison. On the way to the Baragan area, he meets his mother who is drugged, dreamy, unaware of what she is saying. At the destination he meets his father who tells him of his many futile efforts to see him in prison, which finally made him sick with tuberculosis. The fragment ends with the father bribing a functionary to get his son a good house in La˘tes¸ti; in a conversation with his son he compares the Soviet treatment of political prisoners with the Romanian one: the casual attitude of the latter appears to him crueler. With the same unsparing and honest approach, Goma focuses in Le tremblement des homes/Culoarea curcubeului ’77) on collaborationists and informants, assigning their betrayal an existential and moral dimension: they purchase their survival at the cost of victimizing others. Even those who do not protest or take the side of the victim turn into instruments of torture (150–51). As Goma points out, the final result of “reeducation” in the Romanian communist gulag is the abolition of the right to be a victim (352), to remember one’s ordeal. Therefore, writing remains for Goma the most important tool or remembering. In all of Goma’s detention memoirs, there is an urgency of confession that comes from a promise to not forget at the height of his suffering. There is also a certain gradation in Goma’s memorialistic work, from the violent repression in the 1958 Gherla, to the 1977 interrogation in the Rahova prison (Le tremblement des homes/Culoarea curcubeului ’77), and his Parisian exile in Chassé-croisé/Soldatul câinelui, still endangered by the long arm of the Romanian Securitate with bomb threats and plots to poison him. Much of Goma’s work in the 1980s and early 1990s can be defined as docufiction, for it draws on the writer’s biography, raising it to the level of an epic-allegorical battle with the forces of totalitarianism. Justa, the novel written in exile (1985) but published in its Romanian original only in 1995, focuses on an ironic counterpoint to the communist history of Romania and the personal history of the writer: the impact of the Hungarian 1956 rebellion on the Romanian student circles and the role that the official factory of writers (the Bucharest School of Literature) played in laying the foundations of Romanian Socialist Realism. The novel alludes to many historical figures (political activists and collaborationist writers) but conceals the names of the students participating in the 1956 events. Many events in the narrator’s biography (childhood in Bessarabia, escape with his parents to Transylvania as the Soviet troupes march in, attending school in Sibiu, short involvement with the School of Literature, arrest and deportation to the Ba˘ra˘gan Plain, and discovery of liberating literature) represent a fictional version of the author’s

Paul Goma (Marcel-Cornis-Pope)

357

life. The title character, Justa, is a seductive and contradictory figure who attends meetings in which class-alien “reactionary elements” are being purged. Her alternative name, Sandra, may also allude to a historical figure, the novelist Alexandra Indries¸ (Pit¸u 129). In Bonifacia (written in 1983, published 1987), historical figures like Al. Ivasiuc (“Alec”) and other members of the literary elite mix with fictional characters. This docu-novel, placed in 1965 during a period of quasi-liberalization, advances quickly through dialogue and narrative vignettes. The authorial narrator is thirty years old, at times self-ironic but more often distrustful of other people around him, including some of his former comrades in prison. Moving back into their prison years at the end of the fifties, the narrator tries to decide whether Alec was an informant or rather a courageous man. He interrogates his friend, asking him to explain the difference in treatment that the two had received from authorities: the narrator was refused any kind of rehabilitation, whereas Alec was encouraged to publish by the cultural commissars. In their dialogues, Alec remains totally self-absorbed, ready to exploit the narrrator’s acquaintance with Bonifacia, daughter of a party bureaucrat who controls the quota of paper for Alec’s novels. The authorial narrator is himself interested in Bonifacia Frânculescu, thinking she could help him obtain political rehabilitation through her uncle, an important figure in the party nomenclature. On their first encounter in a college class, the narrator is fascinated and repulsed by Bonifacia’s rotundity, continuous mastication, and aggressive attention to him. She helps him feel less awkward among his young classmates upon his return to college after more than a decade of interruption (during his arrest). The narrator is bemused by Bonifacia’s extravagant vulgarity but prefers her to the sophisticated Old Slavonic teacher, who keeps reminding him that he is a tolerated student, still on trial. In describing Bonifacia’s appearance and behavior, the narrator mixes naturalistic observation with comic hyperbole, and sarcasm with praise. Her intimate smells both entice and repel the narrator (they are also connected to other smells experienced in prison, including the smell of fear). In spite of all her failures, physical and social, Bonifacia seems to have a certain generosity (she is preoccupied with obtaining better living conditions for the narrator to write his “forbidden” novels), but the narrator’s skepticism towards women, especially women in privileged positions, prevents him from taking her seriously. In spite of his bias, the narrator acknowledges the redeeming role that women played in his life; he connects his story of Bonifacia to that of other women he shared his bed with in the La˘tes¸ti camp. One such story retells how a young Bessarabian girl, accused of having fled the Soviet paradise, is con-

358

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

demned to serve as a sexual slave of the Securitate people. Two other women hold a certain emotional and intellectual power over the narrator: Ela (a political victim of the regime) is a true muse, who encourages him to write his literature without thoughts of publication; the other, Lila Piper – Alec’s wife and poetry editor for Romania’s premier literary magazine – functions more like an ironic muse, giving the narrator cynical advice on the use of connections to get published. As in Goma’s earlier books, the narrator takes on the role of the historian, weaving together familial, personal, and collective narratives. The visit of his father helps him focus on the latter’s biography as concentration camp prisoner and political refugee, but also as a compromiser, forced to teach his students a communist philosophy and history he does not believe in (182). Retelling his father’s stories and other more recent episodes, the narrator “extends his life,” putting some order into it. He also learns to deal with his own fears, both present and past, by connecting them into a narrative of repeated confrontations with the communist authorities: No, I never knew a “first one,” perhaps that is why all beatings were simultaneously firstand-next: I received them, dizzied by their novelty, paralyzed by surprise, and at the same time prepared, initiated, experienced. This is how I grew up, this is how I lived, this is how I was (am)… (151)

The novel manuscript that the narrator has written is itself an exercise in “unforgetting,” focused not only on the Stalinist past but also on the post-Stalinist compromises of the mid-1960s. The latter part of Bonifacia offers a comicironic chronicle of the literary world as experienced at the Writers’ Restaurant in Bucharest, or through Lila’s copious parody of Romanian contemporary literature as a conspiracy of co-opted writers, most of them from Transylvania. The narrator navigates awkwardly around this world in search of somebody to bail him out (he has no money to pay for his dinner) but also in search of companionship. He is finally saved by Virgil Mazilescu, who includes him among the “oneirists” (Titel, Turcea, T¸epeneag, Dimov, etc.), a new trend of political surrealism soon to be dismantled by the Party authorities. The narrator’s presence at the oneiric table seems fortunate, for he is given the good news that the magazine Luceafa˘rul will publish his short fiction. The narrator’s reaction to this acceptance is one of disbelief and suspicion. He cannot understand why a magazine edited by three collaborationist writers wants to publish him, even if the type of shorter fiction he writes seems to have suddenly more appeal than the grandiloquent epic tradition of the Stalinist decade represented by writers like Petru Dumitriu, who in the meantime had defected to the West. Predictably, the narrator feels guilty for publishing a

Paul Goma (Marcel-Cornis-Pope)

359

story in one of the official literary magazines, especially after the newsvendor reminds him that no published literature is worth reading. At the end of the novel, he throws away the magazine copy with his published story; emancipated of any connections (both his novel manuscript and Bonifacia have mysteriously disappeared), he feels free to return to his writing. This paradoxical ending suspends the dilemma he had been pondering earlier when, as he condemned the compromises perpetrated by Alec and other former detainees, he realized that he was exposing himself to similar criticism by continuing his relationship with the niece of communist criminals and by hoping one day to officially publish his “honest” literature. With Le calidor (1989), subtitled in Romanian “a Bessarabian Childhood,” Goma returns to an exploration of his childhood and adolescence. In spite of its broad autobiographical stretch, covering the troubled period of the 1940s, this novel manages to develop a firmer narrative grip on history than some of Goma’s previous works, which tended towards amorphous documentary narration. The difference here is the consistency of the narrative point of view: from the privileged position offered by the “calidor” (house porch), the child is initiated into the life and history of Soviet-occupied Bessarabia, which corresponds to the destruction of the child’s edenic vision of the world. The historical material here presented is nevertheless comprehensive, starting with the history of the narrator’s parents, village teachers who experience the traumatic events of mid century, with the father arrested by the Soviets and sent to Siberia, his Romanian books burnt in the school yard. The family considers him dead and digs a grave for him, only to receive a postcard from Romania that informs them that Eufimie is now a Romanian prisoner-of-war in dire need of documents to certify that he is actually a Romanian ethnic. After he is finally freed, the whole family takes refuge in Transylvania, where they suffer through the vicissitudes of the war and the fear of being returned to the Soviet Union. Ironically, they are captured by their Romanian brethren while hiding in the woods, and delivered to the local authorities who are keen on sending back to the Soviet Union all Romanians from Bessarabia and Bucovina. The family escapes “repatriation” and a sure death in the camps of Siberia by presenting fake identity documents to the Romanian authorities. Arta refugii: o copila˘rie transilvana˘ (The Art of Refuge/Taking Flight Again: A Transylvanian Childhood; 1991) continues the exploration begun in Din calidor, adopting the semi-autobiographical perspective of the slightly older boy, who witnesses a new act in the drama of his family, now committed to Transylvanian prisons. The boy’s education in the terrors of history adds a new ironic twist, because those who are the agents of persecution are not the Soviets but the Romanian “brethren.”

360

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

After 1989, Goma abandoned fiction altogether, focusing on the “hyperincendiary personal diary” (Pit¸u 131). This diary, which presents many contemporary Romanian writers and former associates in most unflattering terms, exactly when they were getting ready to turn their self-proclaimed “dissidence” into post-communist cultural capital, ruined the honeymoon that Goma’s work seemed to enjoy immediately after the Fall of Ceaus¸escu regime (see Nimigean), when several of his works beginning with Gherla˘ were republished. The Romanian edition of Culoarea curcubeului ’77, printed by Humanitas in 1990, was withdrawn from the market two days later and the printing plates destroyed. The same fate attended the Romanian edition of Garda˘ inversa˘, scheduled to be published by the poet and editor Marin Sorescu at the Scrisul Românesc Publishing House; he felt that this uncomfortable publication could hurt his political career in Iliescu’s post-communist government. Goma’s former supporters disassociated themselves from him after the publication of the first three volumes of his Journal. He became a persona non grata in many literary circles, including those around the country’s foremost magazine, România literara˘: in 1998, Nicolae Manolescu wrote an essay, “Adio domnule Goma” (Farewell, Mr. Goma) that basically denied him the possibility to publish again in Manolescu’s representative journal of Romanian writers. Other exiles had somewhat similar fates after the collapse of the communist regimes, for they were discouraged from returning home or ignored after an initial flurry of articles about them that gave the impression that the post-communist societies were ready to integrate them in new canons. With these canons fiercely disputed by groups of indigenous writers, each with more or less founded claims to an anti-communist pedigree, there was little room left for uncomfortable figures like Goma, who was not interested in joining any group and called to question the political careers of others. His intransigent attitude cost him his position in the Romanian letters. To this very day he still has not been reinstated as a member of the Romanian Writers’ Union from which he was excluded in 1977, while imprisoned at Rahova; nor has he regained Romanian citizenship, continuing to reside in Paris as a stateless political refugee. In the 1990s, Goma turned down an offer of citizenship from France, extended simultaneously to him and to Milan Kundera; more recently, a 2006 petition in favor of restoring his Romanian citizenship (signed, among others, by the exiled scholars and writers Sorin Alexandrescu, Mircea Iorgulescu, Norman Manea, Bujor Nedelcovici, Dus¸an Petrovici, and Dieter Schlesak) was unsuccessful. In spite of his political capital as an opponent of the communist regime, or perhaps because of it, Goma has always been isolated, both before and after 1989, marginalized by the various political games played by his colleagues.

Paul Goma (Marcel-Cornis-Pope)

361

Some (like Augustin Buzura, but also the critics Nicolae Manolescu and Eugen Simion) have denied his literary talent, arguing that his literature is too steeped in autobiography, and possesses raw documentary value at best. Nevertheless, Goma received in 1992 the Fiction Award from the Writers’ Unions of both Romania and Moldova, and in 2007 he was named Honorable Citizen of the City of Timis¸oara, where the anti-Ceaus¸escu revolution started in 1989. Ethnicity has played an important role in Goma’s recent work, and in some critics’ reactions to it. As Goma reports in Le tremblement des homes, shortly before he was expelled from Romania he was stopped in the street by a “patriot” who accused him of not being Romanian (he did have a non-Romanian grandparent, a Russian patronymic, and married a Jewish woman) or acting as a nonRomanian (35). Many of Goma’s novels and memorialistic works have emphasized that the communist repression was not just a “foreign” phenomenon but to an equal degree a Romanian one, a form of political and social “self-mutilation” (see Cesereanu 116). It is true, however, that several of his more recent works that deal with the history of his native Bessarabia in the 1940s seem to put the blame for the collapse of Bessarabia on the pro-Soviet Jews. A number of commentators have found offensive Goma’s references to Jews and a Jewish conspiracy in Din calidor or in the fragments of his Journal published in the magazine Viat¸a Româneasca˘ (nr. 6, July 2005). As a result of this publication, the associate editor of the journal, Liviu Ioan Stoiciu, was fired “preventively” (see Diaconu), before any discussion of Goma’s writing could take place. Other literary magazines, both from Bucharest and from the provinces, considered the case a little more calmly, reflecting arguments on both sides of the issue. The exiled writer and critic Dan Culcer openly protested against what he saw as a return to censorship in post-communist Romania. Further controversy was generated by Goma’s Sa˘ptamâna ros¸ie 28 iunie – 3 iulie sau Basarabia s¸i Evreii (German edition, Die Rote Messe; 1984), which focused on the alleged acts of terrorism (assassinations, robbery, destruction of businesses and churches) committed by Jews, Ukrainians, and other ethnic groups against the withdrawing Romanian army and the Romanian population that stayed behind after the Soviet June 1940 occupation of Bessarabia and Bucovina. Based partly on the documentation offered in Dut¸u’s and Botoran’s volume Situat¸ia evreilor din România, 1931–1941, itself originally rejected by the Romanian press because of its controversial topic, Goma asks for a reexamination of the anti-Romanian violence committed by a “Fifth Column” composed of Russians, Ukrainians and Jews between June 28 and July 3, 1940, when over 300,000 Romanians were exterminated or deported to Siberia. According to Goma, these tragic events caused the harsh reprisals of the Ro-

362

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

manian army a year later. Starting with the June 29, 1941 pogrom in Ias¸i, the Romanian army targeted not only Jews, but also Russians, Ukrainians, Armenians, Gypsies, and Bulgarians, who were beaten, lynched, and burnt to death. Goma does not excuse the “bestial and criminal” behavior of Romanian troupes, pointing out that they targeted, especially in Transnistria, innocent people; still, he suggests that one needs to take into account also the “red genocide” in Bucovina and Bessarabia, which preceded the Nazi Holocaust. In a preface to the most recent edition of this work, posted on his website, Goma claims that all he wanted to do in this documentary was to present in parallel the “dreadful deeds of the Romanians against the Jews and of the Jews against the Romanians,” emphasizing the importance of focusing also on the communist genocide. However, while acknowledging the responsibility of the Romanian government and army for their “criminal and condemnable” actions, which included the abominable pogrom in Ias¸i and deportations of Jews to Transnistria, Goma still sees the former as reprisals for the events of 1940. The connection is at best tenuous: as Goma himself admits in note five, the pogrom in Ias¸i and the simultaneous deportations of thousands of Jews to Transnistria were meant not only to revenge the Jewish attacks against Romanians in Bessarabia and Bucovina, but also to “solve the Jewish question.” Much of Goma’s argument is impassioned, the argument of a pamphleteer rather than that of a historian, which condemns the Bolshevik (“foreign,” Jewish, Russian-Hungarian) colonizing invasion that brought Romania under control after 1946. He also criticizes the reticence of historians and memorialists to discuss other genocides – of the Armenians, of colonialism, of the communist Gulag – or to admit that a “Red Holocaust” was also carried out in the name of Bolshevik ideology against the populations in the region, including Jews. In the addenda to the essay, Goma accuses foreign historians of undermining the Romanian historical heritage, by imputing anti-Semitism and proto-fascist ideas to early figures like the historian Mihai Koga˘lniceanu. He tries to demonstrate, with quotes from Koga˘lniceanu’s 1869 discourses, that this historian and political leader emphasized the need for economic, religious, and political freedoms for the Jewish population moving to the Romanian territories from the East. Yet, as Minister of Domestic Affairs, Koga˘lniceanu also expressed anxieties over the growing economic and cultural power of the Jewish population, or the fact that as “consumers rather than producers” they put a strain on Moldova. Furthermore, in some of the documents that Goma reproduces, it becomes evident that the Jews did not have significant political rights, that their “emancipation” and recognition was still an open problem at the end of the nineteenth century. They begin to receive more rights and power in the northern territories (Galicia, Bukovina, and Bes-

Paul Goma (Marcel-Cornis-Pope)

363

sarabia), especially after the Bolshevik revolution, but their expectation that Stalin would allow the establishment of a Jewish Republic in those territories never came to pass. In an article published in the French newspaper Le Monde, Mihai Dinu Gheorghiu accused Goma of feeding the anti-Semitic propaganda in Romania. Other writers, both Jewish and non-Jewish, took Goma to task for his attempt to equate the communist persecutions (the “Red Holocaust”) with the Nazi Holocaust, and implying a Jewish culpability in the former. In a more balanced intervention, the exiled writer and critic Dan Culcer argues that Goma’s historical reconstruction of the period 1940–1941 in Sa˘ptamâna ros¸ie and in a section of his Journal must be regarded as the work of a writer rather than a historian, who starts from an extensive documentation to build a narrative that may be historically questionable. Culcer further argues that Goma hastily connects by way of a narrative of revenge, the anti-Jewish pogroms of 1941 to the anti-Romanian terrorism of 1940, but he finds this connection to be more an error of logic than a proof of his anti-Semitism. He praises Goma’s broader effort to bring into discussion the communist persecutions during the Stalinist period, which was supported by the Jewish Bolshevik elite but targeted all ethnic groups in Romania, including Jews. Beyond the controversy that Goma’s recent work has triggered, there is a certain irony in applying the label of anti-Semitism to him, since Ceaus¸escu’s regime, in its ferocious campaign to undermine his credibility as a dissident, accused him of being simultaneously a fascist, a homosexual, a philo-Semite (through his wife) and anti-Semite (Goma “Riposta˘”). It is true that Goma himself seems to seek rather than shun controversy on all levels, accusing in turn his accusers and imputing them ulterior motives. Today, Paul Goma’s fiction and documentary literature on the communist terror can be discussed as part of a larger post-1989 trend to memorialize the suffering in the communist prisons and concentration camps of Aiud, Gherla, Sighet, Jilava, and Pites¸ti. The trend includes the journals and documentary works published by Ion Ioanid, Nicolae Steinhardt, Corneliu Coposu, Belu Zilber, Lena Constante, and Nicolae Balota˘, as well as the television series “Memorialul durerii” (Memorial to Pain), shown on State Television beginning in 1991 by filmmaker Lucia Hossu-Longin. There is now even a journal dedicated to the victims of communism: Memoria, edited by poet Mircea Dinescu for the Association of the Former Political Detainees from Romania (AFDPR). The establishment of a National Council for the Investigation of the Securitate Archives (CNSAS) in 2000 has provided the formerly persecuted individuals with access to their Securitate files, while also revealing the names of those

364

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

who had collaborated with the communist institutions of repression. However, as Edward Kanterian has pointed out, the “systematic research on the totalitarian era” has been slowed down by the hesitant opening of the archives and the lack of a longer-term approach to this analysis. One exception is the book series “Procesul Comunismului” (Communism on Trial) edited by Doina Jela for the Humanitas Press since 1998. Jela’s own Lexiconul negru (Black Dictionary; 2001) provides documentation on 1,700 of Dej’s and Ceaus¸escu’s henchmen, from Securitate officers to prison guards, torturers, judges, doctors, and even cleaning women – all of whom made the Stalinist machinery of murder work. Also important for refocusing attention on the history of communist terror is the Memorial to the Victims of Communism and Its Resistance, established by poet-essayist Ana Blandiana and her husband Romulus Rusan in Sighetul Marmat¸iei (in northern Transylvania), where one of the earliest concentration camps was set up in 1948. Blandiana and Rusan also opened in Bucharest an International Center for the Study of Communism, which has initiated a taped collection of oral narratives and interviews with victims of communism. As part of this process of anamnesis, Goma’s work adds an important dimension to the memorialization of suffering under communism but also to the exploration of exilic experience. Goma continues to remain a controversial writer, denied by some, rediscovered by others – a paradigmatic case that tells us as much about the ambivalent politics of writing as about the value of his work. Though Elvira Iliescu and Mariana S¸ipos¸ have published in 2005 two different books about Goma, it is perhaps too early to offer an objective assessment of his literary and cultural contribution. As Ovidiu Nimigean argues: His contested, tortured and heroic existence remains one of the few reasons of optimism, proving that the country’s cultural organism can still secrete vigorous antibodies, that it has not yet been overwhelmed by cancerous growth. In time, things will clarify, and another generation that will owe nothing to the present literary barons will do justice to Paul Goma (and to itself), discovering in his books both the bestiary of several monstrous decades, but also an almost implausible model of upright humanity.

Radu Paraschivescu offers this Goma portrait, emphasizing its rough but consistent contours: Confrontational down to his finger nails, hard-headed with a fixed stare and clenched jaws, Goma is sometimes difficult to digest and easy to hate. He easily makes enemies and does not practice the art of compromise. He has an aggressiveness that invites you to keep your distance, and he is not euphoric. He often judges hastily and unfairly. […] But Paul Goma is one of the decisive moral gains of the last decades. […] The fact that he survived with dignity all [his persecutions] is a minimal sign of comfort for all those who still believe in our chance as a nation.

Paul Goma (Marcel-Cornis-Pope)

365

Works Cited Andreescu, Gabriel. “Goma s¸i tema antisemitismului” (Goma and the Theme of Anti-Semitism). Ziua 3249 (February 17, 2005). Accessed online on Sept. 28, 2007, at: http:// www.ziua.net/display.php?id=169748&data=2005-02-17&ziua=2bd5b7026bde1020c8 1c2fd5eb84e9c0. Antonesei, Liviu. Jurnal din anii ciumei: 1987–1989. Încercare de sociologie spontana˘ (Diary from the Years of the Plague: 1987–1989. Attempt at Spontaneous Sociology). Ias¸i: Polirom, 1995. Buzura, Augustin. “Acolo, la Louisville (Kentucky), a început seria marilor mele ‘chiolhanuri’: suc de mere si iaurt …” (There, in Louisville, My Series of Great Feasts Was Launched: Feasts with Apple Juice and Yoghurt …) Interview with C. Sta˘nescu in Adeva˘rul (2002). http://obrega.tripod.com/pgreferinte.html Balta˘, Nicolae. “Rezumatul unei detent¸ii” (The Summary of a Detention). Contrapunct 25 (1991). Cesereanu, Ruxandra. Gulagul în cons¸tiint¸a româneasca˘: Memorialistica s¸i literatura închisorilor s¸i laga˘relor comuniste (The Gulag in the Romanian Consciousness: Memoirs and the Literature of Communist Prisons and Camps). Bucharest: Polirom, 2005. Culcer, Dan. “Pledoarie pentru Goma” (Plea for Goma). Ziua 3870 (March 3, 2007). Deletant, Denis. Ceaus¸escu s¸i securitatea. Constrângere s¸i disident¸a˘ în România anilor 1965–1989 (Ceaus¸escu and the Political Police: Constraint and Dissidence in 1965–1989 Romania). Bucharest: Humanitas, 1998. Diac, Cristina. “Cazul Goma” (The Goma Case). Jurnalul nat¸ional (National Journal), March 13, 2007. Accessed pnline at http://www.jurnalul.ro/, Sept. 28, 2007. Diaconu, Virgil. “Curajul propriilor opinii” (The Courage of One’s Opinions: Interview with Liviu Ioan Stoiciu). Cafeneaua literara˘ (Literary Café) 3: 9–10/29–30 (Sept.Oct. 2005. Dut¸u, Alexandru, and Constantin Botoran. Situat¸ia evreilor din România (The Situation of Jews in Romania). Vol. 1, 1931–1941. Bucharest: T¸ara Noastra˘, 2003. Funderbank, David B. Pinstripes and Reds. Washington, DC: Selous Foundation Press, 1987. Gabanyi, Anneli Ute. Literatura s¸i politica în România dupa˘ 1945 (Literature and Politics in Romania after 1945). Bucharest: Editura Fundat¸iei culturale române, 2001. Trans. Irina Cristescu from Partei und Literatur in Rumäniein seit 1955. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1975. Gheorghiu, Mihai Dinu. “L’Honneur perdu d’un dissident Roumaine” (The Lost Honor of a Romanian Dissident). Le Monde (May 29, 2007). Goma, Paul. L’art de la fugue. Paris: Julliard, 1990. Arta refugii: o copila˘rie transilvana˘ (The Art of Refuge/Taking Flight Again: A Transylvanian Childhood). Cluj-Napoca: Dacia, 1991. Chis¸ina˘u: Basarabia, 1995; Bucharest: Anamarol, 2007. Goma, Paul. Bonifacia. Trans. from the Romanian manuscript A. Paruit. Paris: Albin Michel, 1987. Romanian edition, Bucharest: Omega, 1991; Bucharest: Anamarol, 2006. Goma, Paul. Le calidor. Trans. from the Romanian manuscript A. Paruit. Paris: Albin Michel, 1989. Din calidor: O copila˘rie basarabeana˘ (From the Porch: A Bessarabian Childhood). Dietzenback: 1989; Bucharest: Polirom, 2004. My Childhood at the Gate of Unrest: A Romanian Memoir. Trans. Angela Clark. New York: Readers International, 1990. Goma, Paul. Camera de ala˘turi (The Adjoining Room). Bucharest, 1968. Goma, Paul. Chassé-croisé. Trans. from the Romanian manuscript A. Paruit. Paris: Gallimard, 1983. Romanian edition, Soldatul câinelui (The Dog’s Soldier). Bucharest: Humanitas, 1991.

366

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

Goma, Paul. Les Chiens de mort, ou, La passion selon Pites¸ti (The Dogs of Death, or The Passions in the Pites¸ti Version). Paris: Hachette, 1981. German edition, Köln: Thule, 1984. Romanian ed. under the title Patimile dupa˘ Pites¸ti. Bucharest: Cartea Româneasca˘, 1990. 2nd edition, Cluj-Napoca: Dacia, 1999. Goma, Paul. Dans le cercle (Within the Circle). Trans. from the Romanian manuscript Yvonne Krall. Paris: Gallimard, 1977. Romanian edition, În cerc. Bucharest: 1995. Goma, Paul. Garda˘ inverse (Reverse Guard). Trans. from the Romanian manuscript S¸. Cristovici. Paris: 1979. Romanian edition, Garda inversa˘. Bucharest: Univers, 1997. Goma, Paul. Gherla. Afterword (“Le Phénomène concentrationnaire en Roumanie”) by Virgil Ierunca. Paris: Gallimard, 1976. Romanian ed.: Gherla. Bucharest: Humanitas, 1990. Online edition titled Gherla/La˘tes¸ti at “Gomasite.html.” Accessed on October 3, 2007. Goma, Paul. Justa. Bucharest: Nemira, 1995. Goma, Paul. Jurnal. 3 vols. Bucharest: Nemira, 1997. Vol. 4, Jurnal de apocrif (Apocryphal Journal). Bucharest: Nemira, 1997. Goma, Paul. Jurnalul unui jurnal (The Journal of a Journal). Cluj-Napoca: Dacia, 1998. Goma, Paul. Ostinato. Trans. Marie-Thérèse Kerschbaumer into German. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1971. Trans. A. Paruit into French as La cellule des libérables (The Cell of Those who can be Freed). Paris: 1971. Romanian edition: Ostinato. Bucharest: Univers, 1992. Goma, Paul. “Riposta˘ data˘ propostei lui M.D. Gheorghiu” (Response Given to M. D. Gheorghiu’s Preponse). June 26, 2007. Online at “Gomasite.html.” Accessed Oct. 5, 2007. Goma, Paul. Die Rote Messe. German trans. L. Grigorowitsch. Köln: Thule, 1984. Romanian ed.: Sa˘ptamâna ros¸ie 28 iunie – 3 iulie sau Basarabia s¸i Evreii (The Red Month: June 28-July 3rd or Bessarabia and the Jews). Chis¸ina˘u/Chishinev: Museum, 2003; Bucharest: Criterion, 2003. Rpt. Bucharest: Vremea, 2004. Online at “Gomasite.html.” Accessed Oct. 10, 2007. Goma, Paul. Scrisuri, 1972–1998 (Writings 1972–1998). Bucharest: Nemira, 1999. Goma, Paul. Le tremblement des hommes: peut-on vivre en Roumanie aujourd’hui? (Quaking Men: Can One Live Today in Romania?). Trans. A. Paruit from the Romanian manuscript. Paris: Seuil, 1979. Romanian ed., with additional documents from the Securitate files, 1957–1977: Culoarea curcubeului 77–Cod “Ba˘rbosul” (The Color of the Rainbow 77; Code Name “The Bearded One”). Ias¸i: Polirom, 2005. Goma, Paul. Us¸a noastra˘ cea de toate zilele (Our Daily Door). Trans. Marie-Thérèse Kerschbaumer into German as Die Tür. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1972. Trans. A. Paruit into French as Elles étaient quatre … (They Were Four …). Paris: Gallimard, 1974. First Romanian ed., Bucharest: Cartea Româneascaˇ, 1992. Haraszti, Miklós. The Velvet Prison: Artists under State Socialism. Trans. from the Hungarian Katalin and Stephen Landesmann. Foreword George Konrád. New York: Basic Books, 1987. Iliescu, Elvira. Paul Goma – 70 (Paul Goma at 70). Bucharest: Criterion, 2005. Jela, Diona. Lexiconul negru. Un elte ale represiunii communiste (Black Dictionary. Instruments of Communist Repression). Bucharest: Humanitas, 2001. Kanterian, Edward. “Knowing Where the Graves Are: How Romania Has Begun to Deal With Its Communist Past.” Neue Zürcher Zeitung ( June 24, 2002). Accessed on line at http://www.draculascastle.com/html/cgulag1.html. September 22, 2007. Laszlo, Alexandru. “Paul Goma–25 de ani de exil?” (Paul Goma: 25 Years of Exile?). http:/ /ournet.md/~paulgoma. Accessed Sept. 29, 2007. Lovinescu, Monica. Unde scurte I. Jurnal indirect (Short Waves, Vol. I: Indirect Journal). Bucharest: Humanitas, 1990.

Paul Goma (Marcel-Cornis-Pope)

367

Manolescu, Nicolae. “Adio domnule Goma” (Farewell, Mr. Goma). România literara˘ (December 2–8, 1998): 3. Nimigean, Ovidiu. “Paul Goma. Nici mai mult s¸i nici mai put¸in” (Paul Goma: No More, No Less). Timpul (Ias¸i) December 12, 2005. Online at http://www.timpul.ro/pdfs/ 12-05.pdf. Accessed September 22, 2007. Pacepa, Lieutenant-General Ion Mihai. Red Horizons. Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1987. Paraschivescu, Radu. “Obiectiv ‘Ba˘rbosul’” (Target: “the Bearded One”). Evenimentul Zilei (Event of the Day). November 21, 2005. http://www.evz.ro/mass-media/?news_ id=203921. Accessed Sept. 22, 2007. Pit¸u, Luca. Lettre a un ami occidental, suive de Texticules divers et … ondoyants (Letter to a Friend in the West. Followed by Diverse Short … and Ondulating Little Texts). Rev. ed. Ias¸i: Timpul, 2004. S¸ipos¸, Mariana. Destinul unui dizident: Paul Goma (Paul Goma: Destiny of a Dissident). Bucharest: Universal Dalsi, 2005. Vianu, Lidia. Censorship in Romania. Budapest: Central European UP, 1998.

368

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

Writing and Internal Exile in Eastern Europe: The Example of Imre Kertész Susan Rubin Suleiman

Exile can be defined as a condition where one is “not home,” or “far from home,” whether by choice or because one is condemned to it – and sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. The great classical example of exile, the poet Ovid, was banished from Rome by Emperor Augustus in A.D. 8. He was probably the first great writer to suffer the pangs of exile, or at least to write about it – and he died without ever seeing Rome again. In what I am calling internal exile, by contrast, one can be geographically at home and still feel like a stranger. A feeling of estrangement from home and society is one of the hallmarks (perhaps the hallmark) of modernist literary self-consciousness. From Baudelaire’s prose poem “L’étranger” (The Stranger; 1862) to Camus’ novel by the same title (1942) and beyond, one finds major expressions of this kind of internal exile in modernist writing. Indeed, the figure of the estranged individual, usually a man, has been an emblem for the modern intellectual and poet, as well as for the modern Everyman. The condition of estrangement can be lived negatively, as an existential burden, or else positively, as a liberating choice – or even neutrally, as the unquestioned condition one is born to. Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger, an intellectual, wishes he could be like the blond, blue-eyed people who seem so uncomplicatedly at home in the world, but he knows that he is condemned to be an outsider: he lives his estrangement negatively, albeit with a certain pride. Camus’s Meursault begins by being neutral, but in the end he positively welcomes his estrangement from every kind of societal and even interpersonal expectation. Philosophers too have analyzed, and often celebrated, what I am calling modernist or existential estrangement. Theodor Adorno wrote in one of his famous aphorisms that “it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home” (39). And the cultural critic Victor Burgin has noted that “Most of us know the melancholy tension of separation from our origins” (29). It will not be a surprise that often, in the discourse on existential estrangement, the figure of the “wandering Jew” appears. Whether a positive symbol

Writing and Internal Exile in Eastern Europe (Susan Rubin Suleiman)

369

or an anti-Semitic stereotype, the Jew who has no home – or who is at home everywhere, which is simply the flip side of homelessness – has been a longstanding figure embodying modern restlessness and uprootedness. Joyce intimated this idea in his choice of the urban walker Leopold Bloom as his everyman; the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot reiterated it in his notion of “être-Juif ” (being-Jewish), which he saw as a synonym for nomadic movement (183). The Polish-Jewish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman – who lives and writes in England – has called the Jew in Kafka’s works the “universal stranger,” at whose experience “strangers of all walks of life could look […] as a mirror and see the blurred and vaguely conveyed details of their own likeness” (27). All this is, of course, well known: modernist existential estrangement, whether embodied in Jewish figures or others, is practically a cliché – as well as, one should note, a continuing subject of reflection and fascination. In this essay, I want to explore a somewhat different kind of internal exile, one that is still tied to the condition of modernity but that is also specific to the postWorld War II situation of Eastern Europe – or, to be more exact, to the situation of Eastern Europe between the Iron Curtain’s descent in the late 1940s and its abrupt lifting in 1989. The phrase “internal exile” was used for the first time in relation to Nazi Germany, to designate non-Jewish intellectuals who did not emigrate as a sign of protest when Hitler came to power; in that context it had quite ambiguous resonances, since some who did not emigrate were not really anti-Nazi, while others were (see the introductory essay of this volume). A similar ambiguity can be said to exist in Eastern Europe under Communism as well. After the war, the East-European countries came under communist rule, and some writers left for the West, either in the late 1940s or thereafter, either by choice or by force; others, the great majority, chose to stay and accommodated themselves to a greater or lesser degree to the dominant regime. It is among some of these writers that one can speak of the phenomenon of internal exile. I will focus on the example of Imre Kertész, because he presents a particularly complex version of internal exile, both in his career and in his writings. The word “exile” (számu˝zetés) occurs often in Kertész’s essays and autobiographical writings, while ironic detachment (which can be considered a stylized version of existential estrangement) is both a recurrent theme and a characteristic mode of narration in his fiction. Another fact that makes Kertész’s example compelling is that he is a writer of the Holocaust, best known for his novel Sorstalanság (Fatelessness; 1975), based on his experience as an adolescent deported to Auschwitz; deportation was also a kind of exile, a brutal, forced exile from which nobody was expected to return. One question we can ask is: How does the experience of the Holocaust inflect Kertész’s

370

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

views and writings about the phenomenon of internal exile under Communism? Another question is: what happens to his views and writings about internal exile after the fall of Communism? His being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002, the first Hungarian writer to be awarded that prize, is obviously relevant to this discussion – and accounts for the fact that I can safely assume that most readers of this essay have at least some idea of who Imre Kertész is. I will begin by briefly comparing Kertész’s career to those of other Hungarian writers who are associated with some form of exile. After that, I will consider the question of internal exile as it is treated in some of Kertész’s autobiographical works and essays, which are less well-known – both in Hungary and abroad – than his novels.

1. Shapes of Exile By way of comparison, let us consider a few other Hungarian writers who, like Kertész, were born before the communist regime and who represent various types of exile, both external and internal. First, two “external” exiles who left the country after 1948: Sándor Márai is, along with Kertész, probably the most widely read and translated Hungarian writer in the West today – due, no doubt, to the enormous world-wide success of his short novel A Gyertyák csonkig égnek (Candles Burn to their Stump; 1942) after it appeared in English translation under the title Embers in 2001. Márai traveled widely in Europe as a correspondent for Hungarian newspapers in the 1920s, then returned to Hungary and started writing novels. He was a democratic anti-fascist, and left the country definitively after the communist takeover of 1948, eventually settling in the United States for more than three decades; between 1967 and 1980 he lived in Salerno, Italy. He is a classic example of the political exile who continued to write in his native language during all his years abroad and continued to be vitally interested in what was going on “back home,” even though he never set foot in Hungary again. He published many books (in particular, his journals) in Hungarian during his years of exile, mainly in the U.S. and Canada; in Hungary, his works started to be published only in 1990, but today he is one of the country’s most venerated writers. György Faludy is a variation on the political exile, similar to Márai in some respects as far as his career goes (see the introductory essay of this volume). He actually fought on the Allied side in World War II, but returned to Hungary in 1946. Unlike Márai, who left in 1948 after the communists came to power, Faludy had hopes in socialism after the war but was imprisoned from

Writing and Internal Exile in Eastern Europe (Susan Rubin Suleiman)

371

1949 to 1953 on trumped-up charges, during the harshest years of the regime. After his release, he could no longer publish his own works but earned his living as a translator. In 1956, he left the country like so many others, and after living in various European cities, in 1967 he settled in Toronto, where he published many volumes of poetry and essays in Hungarian; he also edited several exile journals in various countries during his decades abroad. He returned to live in Hungary in 1988, and saw his works published again and enjoyed wide recognition in literary circles, and beyond. Next, two “internal” exiles who present different profiles from Kertész: Béla Hamvas, an essayist and philosopher, was active in editorial and intellectual circles in Budapest between the two world wars, as well as during the three years of postwar democracy, 1945–48. His philosophical position was that of a Christian humanist. Forbidden to publish after 1948, he lost all of his intellectual positions and worked in a warehouse – his was a classic case of forced internal exile, similar to those in the Soviet Union and other Iron Curtain countries in that period. His writings circulated in samizdat, however, and he started to be published again posthumously, in the mid-1980s. György Konrád was trained as a sociologist, but became well-known as a writer after the publication of his first novel, A látogató (The Case-Worker) in 1969. Like Kertész, Konrád is a secular Jew; unlike Kertész, he has written often and with great affection about his religious grandparents and his childhood in the provinces; he survived the Holocaust in Budapest. After his first successes, he got into trouble with the regime because of a manuscript he wrote in 1974 with another sociologist, Iván Szelényi, on intellectuals and power; Szelényi left the country, but Konrád chose to stay. From then on, he was published in samizdat or in censored versions. He became widely published abroad, in German, French and English translations, and he gained world-wide recognition in the 1980s. He also became a well-known member of the democratic opposition, the “political dissidents,” along with other intellectuals like János Kis; and he has continued to be active as a public intellectual after 1989. Konrád is that interesting figure, an “internal exile” writer who is at the same time highly respected as a politically dissident intellectual; paradoxically, the dissident is part of the system, which after all tolerates dissidence up to a point (at least, that was the case in the last decade of the communist regime in Hungary); and he is also part of the “counter-system,” just as Hamvas was in an earlier and more difficult time. We could say that while these dissident writers are tolerated outsiders as far as the official regime is concerned, they are respected insiders as far as the intellectual culture of opposition is concerned. With these various contrasting possibilities in mind, we may consider in detail the shape of Kertész’s career and his itinerary as a writer. He was born in

372

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

1929 in Budapest, into a lower middle-class Jewish family that he describes at some length in his most recent and most explicitly autobiographical book, K. dosszié, published in 2006 (not yet published in English, but published in German in 2007). His family was in many ways typical of Budapest Jews, with the grandparents practicing orthodox Judaism while the parents’ generation was much more removed from Jewish practice. At the same time, it was Kertész’s orthodox grandfather who “Magyarized” the family name from Klein to Kertész before World War I, at a time when such change was not a sign of insecurity but rather a sign of optimism, or at least of hope in the possibility of Hungarian Jewish identity. By the time young Imre grew up, his immediate family was much more ambivalent about its Jewish identification, especially as his parents were divided in other ways as well; they separated when Imre was five years old, and he spent several years in a boys’ home while they fought over custody. Eventually his father won, and Imre went to live with him and his new wife, seeing his mother on set days. Despite the family’s ambivalent Jewishness, the boy had his bar mitzvah in 1943, and was tutored for it by a rabbi. He recalls, however, that he was dressed for the occasion in a Bocskai suit, a typical “Magyar” patriotic outfit for special occasions, named after a seventeenth-century Transylvanian aristocrat! That tells us something, Kertész writes, about the absurdity of the situation, which no one present seemed to notice at the time (K. dosszié 55). Kertész doesn’t elaborate, but assumes that his readers know the facts: by 1943, Jews had been legally excluded from much of public life in Hungary – and if his bar mitzvah ceremony had occurred a year later, he would no doubt have worn his Bocskai suit with a yellow star. In Sorstalanság, the Bocskai suit comes up in a similarly absurd way when the narrator recalls, after his arrival in Auschwitz in the summer of 1944, that he had worn such a suit to the opening day ceremonies of his grammar school four years earlier – and then adds, with characteristically deadpan irony, that the school never taught him anything about Auschwitz, though, under the circumstances, it would have been very useful for him (Sorstalanság 93; Fatelessness 113). In fact, Kertész’s circumstances were unusual. Unlike most Budapest Jews, who were spared from deportation, he was deported in July 1944, before his fifteenth birthday, to Auschwitz and other camps. This was a kind of exile from which very few returned. Kertész did return in 1945 – and this return was by choice, for he was offered the possibility of emigration, like others liberated from Buchenwald. Elie Wiesel, who was liberated from the same camp, chose not to return to his hometown Sighet in Transylvania. Returning to Budapest, Kertész learned that his father had died in forced labor; but his mother survived the war, and he lived with her for several years

Writing and Internal Exile in Eastern Europe (Susan Rubin Suleiman)

373

after his return. He joined the Communist Party around 1946, and stayed in it for a few years; after graduating from high school, he worked as a journalist until he was fired (presumably for political reasons, as the regime was then in its harshest Stalinist phase) in early 1951. In 1953 he met a “lonely, abandoned” person like himself (K. dosszié 179), a woman who had just been released from a Stalinist prison; they married the same year. From then on, he lived in what he himself has called “internal emigration” (A Számu˝zött nyelv 93). He was unemployed for several years (supported by his wife, who worked as a waitress), then chose again to stay in Hungary after the unsuccessful revolution of 1956 – largely because by then he had decided to become a writer and he felt attached to the language. In the early years of the Kádár regime that came to power in 1956 with Soviet help, Kertész wrote with a friend some popular light comedies to support himself, an activity he has jokingly referred to as his form of “collaboration” with the regime (K. dosszié 223). But his true writing was elsewhere: from 1960 to 1973, he worked on his first novel, Sorstalanság (1975); and he also started writing his intellectual and spiritual diary, Gályanapló (Galley Diary), which he continued through “the change” (as Hungarians call the fall of Communism) until 1991 and which was published in 1992. Meanwhile, from the 1980s on, he earned a living by doing translations from German. As is clear in Kertész’s autobiographical essays and in Gályanapló, which I will discuss shortly, Kertész considered himself to be a total outsider under the Kádár regime, not only politically but also in terms of the intellectual culture, whether it was the official culture or the culture of the “dissidents” like Konrád. Some scholars have disputed this claim, pointing out that Sorstalanság received a couple of very good reviews when it was published. Nevertheless, the book remained unknown for many years, both inside and outside Hungary; in 1983, the rising young writer György Spiró published a long article in the influential weekly Élet és Irodalom, in which he noted that this novel about fatelessness had itself had a negative fate by remaining so ignored (5). It is true that Kertész was partly responsible for his obscurity, since he published very little in the decade after Sorstalanság; but even in the early 1990s, after he had become much more prolific and better known, and his works had started to be translated, Erno˝ Kulcsár Szabó’s influential scholarly history of postwar Hungarian literature (published in 1993) never even mentioned his name. All this changed, of course, after the Nobel Prize; today Kertész’s work figures prominently in the canon of Hungarian literature, is taught in schools, and is the subject of a great deal of scholarly work by both Hungarian and non-Hungarian critics (see Tötösy de Zepetnek’s Bibliography from 2005 – much more has been published since then). Interestingly, however, after

374

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

choosing to remain in Hungary during the harshest periods, when both external and internal exile mattered a great deal, Kertész has chosen in recent years to live mainly outside Hungary; since 2000, he has spent most of his time in Berlin. But then, the concept of exile has also changed. In a way, there are no more exiles in what we call the West (which includes Eastern Europe); the true exiles are now from – or in – countries like Iran, Nigeria, or China. In Europe and the United States, there are only the usual nomadic intellectuals living their modernist estrangement, whether at home or abroad.

2. Auschwitz and the Kádár Regime: Kertész on Internal Exile I want now to look at the question of internal exile in greater depth, through some of Kertész’s own reflections on it. In 1996, he gave a speech in Munich titled “Homeland, Home, Country” (“Haza, Otthon, Ország”), later published in a volume titled A Számu˝zött Nyelv (The Exiled Tongue). It’s not clear what language the speech was delivered in, but very likely it was in German. Kertész writes: “There exists a country where I was born, whose citizen I am, and especially whose beautiful language I speak and read, and write my books in; this country, however, has never been mine, has never belonged to me – rather, I belonged to it, and for four decades it proved to be much more my prison than my homeland” (Számu˝zött Nyelv 103; my translation, here and elsewhere unless otherwise stated). This essay contains some of Kertész’s most pessimistic statements about his relation to Hungary, and I’ll come back to it later. First, I want to take a closer look at this idea of the native land as a prison, which he developed on a daily basis over a thirty-year period in Gályanapló. As the book’s title states, this is a “galley-diary,” a diary of imprisonment. And yet, the diary also offers a paradox: the condition of imprisonment leads, strangely, to a sense of personal freedom. The diary starts in 1961, a year after Kertész had “started writing a novel” (Gályanapló 9). And the striking thing is how firm his ideas were already at this date. In one sense, he was totally lost, that’s how he looks back on that period in K. dosszié. But reading the diary, one has the feeling that he had very clear ideas about literature, as well as about his own relation to “the system.” What is evident from the start is his scorn for conformism and what he calls “the functional man.” He knows that his own relation to the system is that of an outsider, and he also knows (here is the paradox) that this status of outsider is his by choice as much as by necessity. Or, if you will, it is his by an internal necessity: he can do no other. Furthermore, the choice to stay outside the sys-

Writing and Internal Exile in Eastern Europe (Susan Rubin Suleiman)

375

tem is intimately linked to considerations of writing and the practice of literature. One of the very first entries in the diary states: “Lives deprived of truth, functional lives, are not appropriate subjects of literature. In their fate nothingness shines through, since such fates lack the meaning that makes tragedy possible” (10–11). A fate worth living is one that admits the possibility of tragedy – which means, among other things, that it is an individual fate. Kertész’s deep suspicion and rejection of collective “solutions” – be they political, religious, or any other form of collective determination – is stated repeatedly, from the very start of the diary; and it refers to both life and literature. Thus he writes in 1963: If society solves all ethical dilemmas through the collective, then only the barest subsistence remains. The order is: you may worry about all of life’s problems, but the problem of life itself you may not worry about. […] However, under these circumstances, an art (literature) that wants to see only life’s problems instead of the problem of life becomes itself a functional, conformist, superficial art instead of a real one. What is talent worth, in that case? Nothing but a disadvantage, a burden. (11)

Two years later, in 1965, he formulates the problem in existential terms: individual fate is only possible through a refusal of designations imposed from the outside, by a collective. In a difficult entry dated (by an ironic coincidence) May 1, he writes: What do I call fate? In any case, the possibility of tragedy. But the external designation, the stigma which forces our life into absurdity in a particular situation of totalitarianism, interferes with this: therefore, if we live the designation that is pinned on us as truth, instead of living the necessity that follows from our own (relative) freedom, that is what I would call fatelessness. (19)

In other words, the problem is how to create your own fate instead of allowing a system to “pin” it on you – for a “pinned on” fate is in fact fatelessness. Freedom – which he recognizes as always relative, an ideal rather than a fact – consists in designating your own fate, independently of (or in opposition to) socially or collectively imposed designations. It is only by exiling himself from the designations imposed by the collective that Kertész can save himself, both as an individual and as a writer. Soon after the above remarks, he notes the following about writing: “It’s not some kind of talent that makes one a writer, but rather that one doesn’t accept the language and ready-made ideas” (20). Just like the man who wants to create his own fate instead of letting a fateless fate be imposed on him, the true writer is one who refuses the language of the collective – even when that language purports to express “noble” ideas such as humanism. This idea is formulated in a striking image a few years later, in 1973: “The executioners cannot stand the complaints of the beaten. Just as

376

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

they put on music in the torture chambers to cover the screams of the tortured, so they cover over truth’s muffled murmur by the cheap chatter of socalled humanist literature” (36–37). We could say, then, that Kertész’s project as a writer is to try and render “truth’s muffled murmur,” over and against the cheap chatter of received ideas, be they “humanist” or any other form of official art. This project is indissociable from the existential project of seeking to live your own fate, which under totalitarianism involves embracing estrangement as the only possible condition. One of the most striking entries in the diary is the emphatic, isolated sentence dated 1975, shortly after the publication of Sorstalanság: “Az én országom a számu˝zetés” (51) – “My country is exile.” What relation does Auschwitz have to these reflections? In fact, Kertész ascribes all of his preoccupations and all his thinking to an origin in Auschwitz. He writes in 1973: “Whatever I think about, I am still thinking about Auschwitz. Even if apparently I am speaking about something else, even then I am speaking about Auschwitz […] Everything else appears vacuous by comparison. And it’s certain, quite certain, that this is not only for personal reasons.” For Auschwitz, he continues, was “European man’s greatest trauma since the cross” (36). This juxtaposing of Auschwitz with the cross may seem shocking, but Kertész maintains it – he specifically comes back to it in K. doszszié. Whatever one thinks of this, it reflects Kertész’s deep conviction (stated in a number of essays in the 1990s) that the Holocaust was a universal European trauma, not just a Jewish one. This universalist view brings Kertész into conflict with certain theorists of the Holocaust who insist on its uniquely Jewish significance. Or we might say that it makes him appear as an outsider even in relation to Jewishness – at least as conceived by some Jews. Critics have noted that the way Kertész describes the reactions of his protagonist in Sorstalanság makes him appear, to some Jewish readers, like an anti-Semitic or “self-hating” Jew (Sanders 705–06). There is the famous passage, often quoted, where Gyuri recounts how he feels completely excluded by the Yiddish-speaking Jews in the Zeitz camp, who accuse him of not being a “real Jew” because he does not speak Yiddish. This makes him feel the way he used to feel back in Hungary, not quite like the people around him – in other words, like a Jew. This is an odd feeling to have, he says, in the midst of Jews, in a concentration camp! (Sorstalanság, 114; Fatelessness, 140) In a recent interview with Tibor Fischer, Kertész recalled that in 1975 “[t]here were two publishers in socialist Hungary. One rejected it [the novel] on the grounds that it was anti-Semitic. I still have the letter” (20). What is important to note here – other than the awful irony of this situation – is the way Kertész uses his experience as a “non-Jewish Jew” to arrive

Writing and Internal Exile in Eastern Europe (Susan Rubin Suleiman)

377

at what he calls the “universal human experience” under totalitarianism. In Gályanapló, after insisting that he has never felt Jewish, any more than Buddhist or Muslim, he writes (in an entry from 1975): But on account of my Jewishness I still lived through something, which is the universal experience of people under totalitarianism. If I am Jewish, then, I say that I am negation, the negation of all human pride, of certainty, of quiet nights and peaceful inner life, of conformism, of free elections, of national glory – in the book of victories I am the black page, where no writing appears; I am negation, not a Jewish but a universal human negation, the writing on the wall of total oppression. (61)

Ivan Sanders reads this passage as Kertész’s most radical disavowal of Jewishness, as well as the most shocking one to those, mostly American Jews, who accuse him of being a “self-hating Jew” (705). But it can also be read, paradoxically, as an affirmation, or at least as something positive: the negation of conformism, pride, and certainty turns into a “writing on the wall,” a warning – perhaps even a kind of resistance. Gyuri, the protagonist-narrator of Sorstalanság, refuses to join any discourse of certainty upon returning from Buchenwald. He is as ironically distant from the man we would now call a Holocaust denier, who asks him whether he personally saw any gas chambers (which is horrible and hilarious, if one thinks about it; Gyuri simply replies that No, he has no personal experience of the gas chamber) as he is from the left-wing journalist who wants him to recount his experiences so that “the guilty will be punished” (Sorstalanság 201; Fatelessness 251). The possibility that negation can be a writing on the wall of oppression raises the question of whether Kertész’s brand of internal exile can be regarded as political. He himself has explained, in K. dosszié, that he was outside every kind of official circle during the Kádár regime, including the circle of “tolerated” dissidents (242). But a number of notations in the diary suggest that his thinking is profoundly political. His reading of Kafka’s The Castle, for example, argues that Kafka’s K. does not wish to “settle” in the village and become integrated, as some critics claim. On the contrary, what K. seeks is to unsettle the system, according to which only some people can enter the castle, those who observe certain rules and conditions. “They accept a given order, a rule of the game, and base their lives on it, as if that order were the order of life or of nature. K.’s freedom resides in his decision to enter the castle” (Gályanapló, 65). As to why K. decides to enter the castle: “because of the paradigm, because he wants to break the order of the world” (67). The castle is the image of “collectively accepted slavery,” Kertész says, and that is precisely what K. wants to break. So there is political meaning (though not “official dissident” meaning) in Kertész’s brand of estrangement. In 1982, we find this notation in the diary:

378

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

“In this collective world […], to remain a private person and to keep on being a private person; at this point I could hardly think of a more heroic enterprise” (147). He comes back to this again in 1985, when he insists that the only true non-conformism consists in taking – or at least attempting to take – one’s life completely out of the “hands of the system (rendszer), of all systems.” Everything in the system acts against such an attempt, “but one must show the crack where the individual life shoots up, like a blade of grass among stones, because that crack exists” (225). In other words, the system is not totally foolproof – it is possible to find cracks in it. But who “must show” these cracks, and how? One answer may be found a few pages later: “From far away, far away, everything from very very far away. Cooling off what is boiling, abstracting what was alive. To look at the world that way: Auschwitz! Oh, there we have everything that’s needed for a good book!” (228) This is a wonderful comment on Kertész’s own style, his estrangement from received ideas and from everyday, smooth language. The only way to “understand” or describe Auschwitz – or any totalitarian system, but it was Auschwitz that taught him this – is by means of a detached irony, which allows one to see things from “very very far away.” Or we could say that it is only by means of a highly stylized literary language that one can approach the most traumatic reality. Later still, he writes: “The concentration camp can only be imagined as a literary text, not as reality. (Not even – and maybe especially not even – when we are living it)” (287). To come back to the question of politics, it would appear that Kertész both claims a resistance to totalitarian systems that can only be thought of as political, and refuses the “everyday politics” of dissidence. Hence his remark, in September 1989, differentiating himself from the dissidents: I must be crazy, to be thinking about art. On the other hand, there is no point in thinking about anything else. What’s the difference between them and me? They oppose the regime (or regimes), while what I oppose is, as I might put it, God. Someone who opposes a regime must believe in a different regime. Someone who opposes God doesn’t have to believe, but simply live before his eyes: that’s quite enough for belief. (299)

In sum, Kertész is interested not in “regimes” but in a much more fundamental human condition. But still, the preoccupation with man’s place in the universe – as one might rephrase his idea about “living before God’s eyes” – is in his case indissociable from his personal experience of the two dominant totalitarianisms of the twentieth century. As Kertész has repeatedly and provocatively stated, Nazism and Communism are in a curious way mirror images of each other. Sorstalanság should be read, he has stated with provocation, not as a Holocaust novel but as a novel about the Kádár regime (K. dosszié 84–86).

Writing and Internal Exile in Eastern Europe (Susan Rubin Suleiman)

379

3. After Communism Earlier, I asked: what happened to Kertész’s views and writings about internal exile after the fall of Communism? The answer is complicated, in part because the fall of Communism coincided with Kertész’s own increasing visibility on the international literary scene – so in one sense, he appeared as less and less of an outsider in the context of world literature. Indeed, he now appears as one of those rare and highly privileged writers from small countries who find a world-wide audience. It is therefore all the more striking to note how alienated Kertész feels in post-communist Hungary – at least, that is the way his feelings are expressed in his writings. In one sense, we could say that “after Communism,” he reconnects with the feeling of existential estrangement that has been his ever since he was a child. Thus in April 1990, he writes in his diary: “the recent political events freed me from politics, and gave me back to my familiar, everyday exile” (Gályanapló 313). But at the same time, it is in post-communist Hungary that he feels most specifically estranged as a Jew. In a striking passage of his book Valaki Más: A Változás Krónikája (Somebody Else: Chronicle of the Change), published in 1997, he relates how one day around the time of the patriotic national holiday (March 15), as he is riding the tramway that goes from Moszkva tér to the Margit Bridge, he sees a bunch of young men marching in black boots, carrying objects that look like guns under their arms. Everything about them – their movements, their faces, their voices – reminds him of the 1940s. He does not explain, but does not need to, since we know full well what the 1940s evoke for Kertész – not so much (or not only) deportation, but exclusion, separation into a special category: the Jewish class in school, the yellow star. It would seem that to him post-communist Hungary, rather than representing liberation, represents regression to a hateful past. In the essay I quoted earlier, “Haza, otthon, ország,” written around the same time as Valaki más, he again evokes memories of the 1940s. The word haza (homeland), scares him, he says, because he was taught quite early that “my best way of serving my homeland was to do forced labor, after which I would be exterminated” (Számu˝zött nyelv 97). A few pages later, he recalls how happy he was when he stood on the street in June 1944 wearing his yellow star, reading the newspaper about the Allied landing in Normandy. But suddenly he felt that people were looking at him, precisely because of his manifestation of joy: “It’s indescribable how I felt, when I suddenly realized my situation: it was like a sudden fall into the depths of defenselessness, fear, loathing, estrangement, disgust, and exclusion” (102). We can call this kind of déjà-vu (equating the 1990s with the 1940s) irrational on Kertész’s part, but it’s also true that one sign of democratization in post-

380

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

communist Hungary has been the possibility – and the reality – of open expressions of anti-Semitism, which had been squashed during the communist years. In an important essay published in 2001 in Élet és Irodalom, Kertész alludes to this with some irony. He remarks that his second wife, who spent many years in the United States (he married Magda in 1996, after the death of his wife Albina), has noticed that he behaves a lot more freely abroad than at home: “Abroad I move comfortably, like one who is at home, while at home I move like a foreigner. With foreigners I speak freely, with my own countrymen I’m tense. All this was a natural condition under the so-called socialist dictatorship, with which I coped fairly well; but democratic racism, I have to get used to” (“Önmeghatározás”). A sentence from Gályanapló, written in 1990, sums it all up: “Hungary has been freed from bolshevism, but not from itself ” (314). Kertész’s almost visceral feeling of estrangement from post-communist Hungary, and his pessimism about it, may be irrational (or perhaps merely impatient?), just as it is irrational when he claims, as he did in the title essay of A Számu˝zött nyelv, that Hungarian for him is a “borrowed” language and that he doesn’t belong to the national literature of Hungary: “In any case I write my books in a host-language which, by its very nature, expels them from itself or else tolerates them only in the margins of its consciousness” (291). The reason for this, he says, is that every language creates a collective Self, a kind of national consensus that writers participate in; but the experiences of a Holocaust survivor, which he writes about, can only be marginal in the Hungarian “consensus.” Kertész’s conception of the national literature thus echoes the pessimism one finds in his other writings of those years. It seems to him that, by its very nature as the language of a small country that has to seek a “national consensus,” the Hungarian literary language does not admit the possibility that a Holocaust writer can be part of the national mainstream. The only way out of this is via world literature, and specifically German. In the later, somewhat different English version of this essay, “The Language of Exile,” he writes: “In reality, I belong to that Jewish literature which came into being in Eastern and Central Europe. This literature was never written in the language of the immediate national environment and was never a part of a national literature” (“Language” 6). He mentions Kafka and Celan and their successors, but he forgets a detail: unlike Kafka and Celan, who wrote in German when the national language was Czech or Romanian, he himself has written and continues to write in the language of the “immediate national environment,” Hungarian, which is a minority language on a global scale but not one in Hungary. Kertész would like to treat Hungarian as if it were a “minority language,” as Deleuze and Guattari define that term in their book Kafka: pour une littérature

Writing and Internal Exile in Eastern Europe (Susan Rubin Suleiman)

381

mineure, even though he is not writing in a “minority” language in Hungary. Whatever his reasons for wanting to claim that he writes in Hungarian as a stranger, and despite the fact that many Hungarian nationalists would nastily want to agree with him about that, he is a master of the language, even when – or especially when – he “mistreats” it and writes it with stylized awkwardness. In that regard, his writing corresponds to Deleuze’s and Guattari’s notion that in modern times, great writers have sought to write even in their own language as if it were a foreign tongue: to become “the nomad and the immigrant of one’s own language,” that is the “revolutionary” ideal that Deleuze and Guattari derive from their reading of Kafka (Kafka 35). Kertész won the Nobel Prize as a Hungarian writer. The fact that he is also a “world-wide” writer does not diminish his Hungarianness, just as Márai’s Hungarianness is not diminished because he is world-renown. Kertész may feel like a stranger in Hungary, but today, his works are part of the Hungarian canon; long left out of histories of Hungarian literature, he figures prominently in the new threevolume literary history edited by Mihály Szegedy-Maszák, and I for one fervently hope that he will continue to be read and discussed in Hungarian as well as in other languages. I want to end this essay on a celebratory note, by evoking Kertész’s extraordinary reflection, toward the end of Gályanapló, on a passage from Márai’s diary, which had then just been published in Budapest. In an entry in June 1990, Kertész quotes Márai’s diary from July 1944, describing the air raid on Budapest on the night of July 2–3, which Márai saw from the suburban train as he was traveling toward the city. Kertész remembers that on that same night he was with the other boys who had been rounded up and taken to a suburban brick factory before being deported, and that they had climbed up on a hill near the fence to see what was happening when the air raid started. Márai, in the passage Kertész quotes, describes the dark sky, the planes and the burning city, and then notes that the train passed in front of the brickyard where “’7,000 Jews from the Pest area are awaiting deportation, guarded by armed guards.’” Kertész then comments: I don’t know why I suddenly feel a tremendous, grateful joy that Sándor Márai saw me. He was forty-four, I was fourteen. He saw the child wearing the yellow star among the racks of drying bricks; and he knew what the child did not yet know, that soon he would be taken to Auschwitz. All this – since what else could a writer do? – he wrote down in his Diary (and this Diary is, incidentally, the clearest, most compelling and most important description of that time). What does all this mean? It’s hard to decipher, like a singular constellation. Still, I sense in it a deep meaning, one that is independent of both of us and that spreads quietly in concentric circles, the way in the general uproar one can perceive, with difficulty but unmistakably and ineffaceably, a radio wave in the air. (319–20).

382

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

This evocation of the radio wave is a beautiful image for the effect that a writer’s work can have, across the years and across miles and oceans, on another writer. Márai published the first volume of his Napló in Budapest in 1945, after which it did not again see publication until 1990, when Kertész read it in post-communist Hungary. By that time Márai was dead, and was soon to become one of the most highly respected writers in Hungary even though he never set foot in the country again after 1948. Kertész, in his commentary, reminds us that he too was exiled once from his native land, not by choice but by brutal force, along with thousands of other Jews who never came back. And the beauty of it is that this reminder about Jewish persecution occurs not through Kertész’s own words or memories, but through the observations of another Hungarian writer, who chose exile from his native land – in other words, who could determine his own fate, no matter how tragic. But Kertész too, once his first forced exile was over, can be said to have chosen his fate: he decided actively to stay in Hungary, when it would have been easier to leave. Across the enormous distances in time and space that separate them, the external exile’s words – unmistakable and ineffaceable, as Kertész says – reach the writer who stayed home, but whose real country, as he tells us again and again, has always been exile.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. Trans. E.F.N. Jephcott. London: New Left Books, 1974. Baudelaire, Charles. “L’Etranger.” Oeuvres Complètes. Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1961. 231. Bauman, Zygmunt. “Strangers: The Social Construction of Universality and Particularity.” Telos (Winter 1988–89): 7–42. Blanchot, Maurice. L’Entretien infini (The Infinite Conversation). Paris: Gallimard, 1969. Burgin, Victor. “Paranoiac Space.” Visual Anthropology Review 7:2 (1991): 22–30. Camus, Albert. L’Etranger. Paris: Gallimard, 1942. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Kafka. Pour une littérature mineure (Kafka. For a Minor Literature). Paris: Eds. de Minuit, 1975. Kafka, Franz. The Castle. Trans. Edward and Willa Muir. New York: Knopf, 1941. Kertész, Imre. A Számu˝zött nyelv (The Exiled Language). Budapest: Magveto˝, 2001. Kertész, Imre. “Az önmeghatározás szabadsága” (The Freedom of Self-Determination). Élet és Irodalom November 30, 2001; consulted online: http://www.es.hu/old/0148/ feuilleton.htm#kertesz Kertész, Imre. Gályanapló (Galley Diary). Budapest: Magveto˝, 1992. Kertész, Imre. “Memoirs of a Survivor.” Interview with Tibor Fischer. The Independent ( January 11, 2008): 20–21. Kertész, Imre. K. dosszié (K. File). Budapest: Magveto˝, 2006.

Writing and Internal Exile in Eastern Europe (Susan Rubin Suleiman)

383

Kertész, Imre. “The Language of Exile.” Trans. Ivan Sanders. The Guardian (October 19, 2002): 4 and 6. Kertész, Imre. Sorstalanság. Budapest: Századvég, 1993. Trans. Tim Wilkinson as Fatelessness. New York: Vintage, 2004. Kertész, Imre. Valaki más. A Változás Krónikája (Somebody Else: Chronicle of the Change). Budapest: Magveto˝, 1997. Konrád, György. A Látogató. Budapest: Magveto˝, 1969. Trans. Paul Aston as The Case Worker. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974. Kulcsár Szabó, Erno˝. A Magyar irodalom története, 1945–1991 (The History of Hungarian Literature, 1945–1991). Budapest: Argumentum, 1993. Mann, Thomas. “Tonio Kröger.” 1903. Stories from Three Decades. Trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter. New York: Knopf, 1936. Márai, Sándor. A Gyertyák csonkig égnek (The Candles Burn to their Stump). Budapest: Révai, 1942. Trans. Carol Brown Janeway from the German as Embers. New York: Knopf, 2001. Sanders, Ivan. “The Question of Identity in the Novels and Essays of Imre Kertész.” In The Holocaust in Hungary: A European Perspective. Ed. Judit Molnár. Budapest: Balassi, 2005. Spiró, György. “Non habent sua fata.” Élet és Irodalom 27.30 (1983): 5. Szegedy-Maszák, Mihály, ed. A Magyar irodalom történetei (Histories of Hungarian Literature). 3 vols. Budapest: Gondolat, 2007. Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven. “A Bibliography of Imre Kertész’s Oeuvre and Publications about His Work.” In Imre Kertész and Holocaust Literature. Ed. Louise O. Vasvári and Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 2005.

384

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

Kundera’s Paradise Lost: Paradigm of the Circle Vladimír Papousˇek

Many current readings of Milan Kundera’s work are provoked by the author’s visible endeavor to explain his work, to control, interpret, and define its “orchestration” in every language into which it is translated. Interpreters usually try, therefore, to catch Kundera committing some kind of error, they try to prove that Kundera’s desire to control the text is extravagant and excessive, and they tend to deconstruct Kundera’s interpretation of his own work. Kundera emerges from such conflicts as an author who permanently pretends something, an author whose work everyone knows better than he himself. Most of these interpreters, especially the European ones, seem to be convinced essentialists, who regard a text as a mysterious code bearing some hidden message, and an author pleading for his own interpretation as one of those guardians whose task is to obscure the message even more. Let’s follow the path of a pragmatist who does not believe in a great hidden truth. He is ready to trust that it is not the author’s strategy to obscure his own work and make it even more mysterious. On the contrary, the pragmatist believes that the author’s endeavors are to open and illuminate sincerely his work in order to make it most comprehensible for the reader. Let us start, therefore, to seek an interpretative key for our reading the work in what the author himself declares about his writing. In the Author’s Note (Poznámka autora) of the first post-1989 Czech edition of his novel Zˇert (The Joke) Kundera nostalgically recalls a letter from Jan Sˇabata, who initiated the edition: “I could see Jan’s father Jaroslav, whom I admired when I was sixteen and he nineteen. And I could see the very young Milan Uhde and a walk among fields between Brno and Královo Pole, when we had long conversations at the time when I wasn’t yet twenty five and he twenty. And I felt that the circle was closing” (310). What does closing the circle mean in this last sentence? I believe that the author gives here, probably unconsciously, a very exact description of his imagination, which organizes and primarily determines all of his works. One could characterize Kundera’s novels by a circular paradigm that includes everything and leaves nothing beyond the parameter. From Zˇert ( Joke)

Kundera's Paradise Lost (Vladimír Papousˇek)

385

to Ignorance, his novelistic characters and their destinies gyrate in closed circles, encountering their past, meeting their former acts and mistakes that return to hit them from an unexpected side. What should face them, attacks from behind. The circular paradigm reveals that in Kundera’s imagination a double force seems to be in action: the imagination of an author creating his novel, and the imagination of a narrator constructing destinies of his characters in time and space. It is as if time and history created a strong gravitational field, and every act, motion, or word returned in a new shape, following some trajectory back to the “demiurges” that created them. Critics occasionally reproach Milan Kundera for returning with apparent obsession to his native Czech space, only to show that he is inclined to find more affinity with the universal space of French literature. However, the paradox is only apparent. In Kundera’s poetics, everything has to be interconnected. The Czech motives are, therefore, merely means in the author’s composition; they are merely used as material the author employs in his play of returns and unexpected meetings, where the characters consider their journey in time as a direct line, though it actually is a circle. We may understand circularity here as a symbol of references from effects back to causes, to nonhuman powers that paradoxically intervene into the life of characters in the fictional world of Kundera’s texts. Trying to explain these returns in a psychoanalytic manner as Kundera’s nostalgic dependence on his home country, or as an exile’s trauma, does not help us much further. Kundera is as nostalgic as anyone, sometimes less so, sometimes more, but research on the relevance of his nostalgic feelings on his work is completely unimportant. In the mentioned Author’s Note we can read several lines further the declaration: “I consider immoral for an author to offer his readers something that he knows is imperfect and what he does not enjoy” (319). Quoting from his own essay L’Art du roman, Kundera adds “What do I hang on to? God? Homeland? The people? The individual? The answer is as ridiculous as sincere: I do not hang on to anything except for the neglected heritage of Cervantes. […] “Of all that I have ever written, the one thing I depend on, the only thing I shall ever permit to be republished, are my novels” (321). It is evident from these quotations that Kundera considers a text a certain type of a closed unit, a circle: he is concerned about the maximum possible perfection of this entity. In his imagination, Cervantes’s definitive novel represents an esthetically closed shape that is here to stay, defying all streams of time and history. However, Kundera wants to identify himself with this entity; it does not exist in reality as a perfection given once for all, but is something that asks for continuous care from its creator. It appears that Kundera himself is not an essentialist. Let’s call him rather an existentialist in Sartre’s sense. For

386

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

Kundera, the author’s gesture of writing represents a specific image of his own identity, of his own way of being, just as Sartre’s Rocquentin in La Nausée constructs his own personal history by writing about Monsieur Rollebon’s history. The text of a novel is for Kundera a question of identity, a question of his proper existence, which becomes self-evident in action, by carrying out something, for instance writing. However, in Kundera’s view, literary works are continually threatened to remain as mere gestures because they are connected to their originator. And since these gestures aspire to perfection, an author cannot abandon his work to history. Kundera calls his works “opuses,” which points to music, one of the elementary art forms in Kundera’s imagination. We shall discuss here neither the musical environment in which he grew up, nor his fictional references to music, nor his essayistic turns to Janacˇek. Instead, we shall deal with a concept of “orchestration.” In Nechovejte se tu jako doma, prˇíteli (Don’t Behave here as at your Place, my Friend) Kundera initiates his discussion of the author’s right to orchestrate his own work with a Stravinsky quotation. Orchestration provides a tool to keep one’s work in maximum perfection; it allows enclosing one’s own work in a circle, thus preventing its dissolution in the generally ignorant and ephemeral colloquial discourses of critics, historians of literature, editors, and imitators. Kundera seems to refuse to surrender his work to this general “misreading,” because he does not want to expose himself. His efforts to protect his privacy and private identity fully correlate with his need to control the instrumentation of his work. Musical rhetoric or the rhetoric of music allowed Kundera to overcome several paradoxes, for instance that he publishes his work and at the same time considers publication a threat to his own work and identity. Every publication posits the text in a social world of copying and misreading, whereas the author desires to keep a closed, perfect harmony. His demand for control and instrumentation allows him to resist these problems. If playwrights are allowed to stage their own work, authors of novels should also be able to show their idea of the most relevant and accurate reading of their text. While composers traditionally disposed of exactly defined tonal structures and scales, authos of novels find themselves in a more complicated position. Kundera overcomes this difficulty by using as his primary material an assembly of possible or thinkable gestures and attitudes of an individual towards the universe, combined with a set of imaginative representations of possible corporeality. The patterns of causes and consequences of these attitudes, acts, and modes of corporeal presence in reality, enclosed in a circle, compensate for the lack of musical harmonic scales in literature. The question remains whether this relatively complicated and sophisticated method is

Kundera's Paradise Lost (Vladimír Papousˇek)

387

motivated only by the author’s desire for a beautiful play. Is it only a matter of aesthetics, or does it have a deeper motivation? We have suggested that we consider Kundera’s attitude existential rather than essential, due to the author’s permanent care for the appearance of his own work. Even novel writing emerges from this existential motivation. Zdeneˇk Kozˇmín had already called attention to this in the 1960s, and Kundera included Kozˇmín’s text “Román lidské existence” (The Human Existence Novel) in the mentioned 1991 edition of Zˇert. Since we have decided to trust the author, we must presuppose that he had his reasons for adopting and considering as relevant just this interpretation. To exist presupposes to be in defiance of quotidian reality, time, and history, to reflect the singularity of being. In Kundera’s novels the characters defy grand history, which cannot be harmonized and becomes the source of absurdities and paradoxes. The circles followed by human destinies are unpredictable and unexpected because they are circumscribed by time and history. They consist of paradoxical returns, ironic inversions, metamorphoses of beauty into ugliness, of great ideas into platitudes, of great human gestures into ridicule and awkwardness. This is Kundera’s world, in which individual existence defies history. Harmony and perfection in the composition of the novel are means of resistance, through which the author demonstrates his presence in existence, while narrating stories of other possible existences. For Kundera, a character is but a model of a possible existence, and it is irrelevant whether its prototype is this or that real person. Kundera is thus very different from Sˇkvorecky´ for example, who often models his characters according to figures in life. Causality is accidental in Sˇkvorecky´’s stories, for these seem to be taken from life experience; Kundera reworks and changes experience through his style, in order to create from it a whole fictional world. Looking at the titles of Kundera’s novels, one is struck that most of them designate an action, an attitude, or a character feature. Witness Zˇert, Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí (The Unbearable Lightness of Being), Pomalost (Slowness), Identita (Identity), Ignorance (Ignorance), and Nesmrtelnost (Immortality). The titles designate a dynamics of the content, which is defined by some instability or variability. Yet, the relatively high rate of generalization indicates a tendency to name a model process that is not related to only one empirical case. The essence of Kundera’s works appears here. It is defined by conflicts between stability and instability; change and the desire for identity and permanence; a tension between the world’s permanent dissonance and a desire for harmony; tension between generalization and repetitions of human destinies and uniqueness; tension between impersonal narration and personal involve-

388

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

ment of the author as a human existence sharing with others history and their public space, and at the same time longing for the intimacy of privacy. I believe we cannot interpret faithfully Kundera’s work without taking into account his art of reflection, without considering his comments and his textual metafictional reflections. Kundera is not the type of writer who reveals by means of writing, the desire to read his own gestures, as do other authors engaging in self-reflection. Kundera does not enter his works via metafictional reflections in the text. Instead, reflects on them as an author who guards the orchestration of his already completed work. His reflection relates then to his finished and definitive works; its aim is to protect them against disintegration and misuse. Kundera does not open and reopen his texts to a public debate; he only guards what is definite according to his persuasion. It is not possible to divide Kundera’s work in pre-exile and exile, in French and Czech phases. His work represents a very complex assemblage of texts, from which we can omit, with good conscience, only Kundera’s early poems, but hardly anything else. It seems that Kundera’s novelistic creation represents, as, for instance, Egon Hostovsky´’s work, a unique gradually formed and yet very homogeneous whole. Kundera’s move from Czechoslovakia to French, and his later switch to write in French are highly controversial. I believe that Kundera’s abandonment of Czech culture and his choice of French relate to his conception of the novel. To create an image of absurdity in history and existence, he needed a large scale. Czech literature was especially confining for writing the great novel that Kundera has been striving for. Czech prose of the second half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century represents, in Kundera’s view, a collection of somewhat improvised texts, rarely comparable with what had been created at the same time elsewhere in Europe. There were only a few exceptions: next to Jaroslav Hasˇek, it was Vladislav Vancˇura, an outstanding stylist in Czech prose, who became a subject in Kundera’s relatively early paper L’Art du Roman. In an interview following the publication of Smeˇˇsné lásky (Laughable Loves) in 1963, Kundera said: “I never could force myself to read Zola but I love his antipode: Anatole France. I have full respect for modern American prose, but I am closer to Thomas Mann and, for example, Robert Musil. Simply said: exactness of a reflection attracts me more than exactness of observation” (Smeˇˇsné lásky dust cover of the 1970 ed.). This exactitude of reflection, which implies understanding causal relations and not only empirical causalities, indicates Kundera’s striving for a great composed unit. His affinity with great stylists and a certain reserve towards the American prose of the 1960s show that works that had a balanced and elaborate inner composition inspired him most. His preference for the Euro-

Kundera's Paradise Lost (Vladimír Papousˇek)

389

pean intellectual tradition meant at that time an isolation in the Czech countries, not in rhetoric, evidently, but in deciding for this concept. Important authors, prose writers of Kundera’s generation like Sˇkvorecky´ and Lusˇtig, were ostentatiously showing their affinity with American style; others tried to follow specific local styles, as for instance Ludvík Vaculík, who employs in Sekyra (The Axe) a narrator that uses Moravian local dialect as a contrast to communist news speak of the period. Only Kundera strove for the idea of a great elaborated unity, and his inspiration, excepting Vancˇura, came from outside the Czech universe. Therefore I do not consider Kundera’s move to exile illogical, and I suppose that if it hadn’t been for the specific situation at home he would have sought his “large scale” and style quite independent of the historic events at home in Czechoslovakia. The same applies for Kundera’s choice for French. During my stay at Columbia University in 1994 Romanist and exile George Pistorius informed me about a debate that took place in France sometime at the beginning of the seventies. It concerned the question whether a writer can abandon his mother tongue and become a writer of a different language. Participants in this discussion were, among others, Jan Cˇep, an exile who was one of the most important prose writers of the thirties and forties, the modernist experimenter Veˇra Linhartová, and Milan Kundera. The latter two were recent exiles. While Jan Cˇep, who became an exile in 1948, argued that an author cannot change his mother tongue without important losses, Linhartová and Kundera defended the opposite point of view, giving Joseph Conrad as their example. This was not only a generational disagreement in which the older Jan Cˇep, with his experience of prewar Czechoslovakia, was much closer to the National Revival and its idea of language as an inviolable element of both national as well as personal integrity It also involved the implementation of a poetics. While Cˇep was an author with a very personal, almost lyrical concept of literature, Linhartová and Kundera considered a literary text an object of art, an object of a perfect aesthetic creation. The authenticity of existential involvement was not diminished by Linhartová’s and Kundera’s attitude. This authenticity is not connected to a unique language; it is not bound to the national tradition of a home country but is tied to the concept of modern discontentment – to existence as an individual experience of exceptionality anywhere, an experience without standbys and certainties. For Kundera, the change of language meant, in my opinion, only a choice of new means, choice of a new tool to construct his “opuses” better and more perfectly. Having mentioned musical imagination and rhetoric as shaping forces of Milan Kundera’s work, let us note that the conception of musicians and of pure instrumental music have always transgressed the border of

390

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

national or monolingual space through its universality. Furthermore, the image of the musician became in Czech literature an archetypal vehicle of a Czech’s voyage abroad. Witness Josef Kajetán Tyl’s play Sˇvanda dudák, Antonín Sova’s prose Pankrác Budecius kantor, Josef Hora’s poem Jan Houslista, as well as, in an ironic tune, Marie Soucˇková’s novel Bel Canto. To interpret Kundera’s shift from the Czech language to the French one as a political gesture or a gesture of refusing Czech culture is nonsensical. Since I believe Kundera that his novels are his main concern, I have no reason to doubt that entering into French language and culture was for him nothing else but the choice of a means to a more perfect novelistic esthetic expression. French language represents in comparison to Czech more open space for Kundera, which means more possibilities for him as an author, more possibilities for him to create his work as a perfect and finished whole and thus to transfer it to the auditorium. What conception did gradually take form in the individual novel-opuses? The author himself designated Zˇert as number one. Already in this 1965 novel we can find the fundamental elements of Kundera’s poetics. Its dominating feature is the dynamic movement of actions and gestures, the vehicles and tools of which are the individual characters. Discourse is an initiation: a seemingly innocent utterance sets off a scale of causes and consequences hitting the protagonists through time and history. The narrator conceives this flow of causes and effects as a closed circle. The movement in this circle is incalculable and unpredictable. Within the narration this conception creates a set of absurdities and paradoxes that the characters are to face. As for the form of the novel, the whole creates to a certain measure a perfect compactness of each composed unit. The perfection of the composition stages human existences in history as victims of coincidence, irony, and incalculability in history. At the same time, this type of perfection indicates a dominance of intellect – the intellect of the narrator or of a character acting in the story – over the “way of all sorts of corporeality,” the matter moving forward through history and time. To a certain measure, a perfect literary or artistic unity seems to offer the possibility to save humankind from chaos and the desperate, fatal disharmony of the world. The narrator and his work hold out thus a certain kind of hope for the hopeless destinies of the protagonists in novels. Sometimes it is as if the author referred to the medieval quarrel of body and soul: “My soul saw a woman’s body. She was indifferent to that body. She knew that the body meant something for her only as a body” (Zˇert 198). Corporeality appears here, and frequently in the author’s later works, as a strange variable. The fictional onlooker experiences distance from it, estrangement, and often disgust and anxiety: “I looked in Helen’s face, reddish and disfigured by a grimace; I

Kundera's Paradise Lost (Vladimír Papousˇek)

391

put my palm on that face; I put my palm on it as on an object we can turn and roll over, crush or press, and I felt that the face accepted my palm exactly in that way” (99). We can find similar feelings of distance in Sartre, in La Nausée for example, and in some surrealists as well. In Kundera, however, the observing consciousness is not only offset from the body, suffering from a desperate conflict with it and sensing at the same time its inseparableness from it. A selfreflective conscience can be a vehicle of the intellect or soul, of something that surpasses dull corporeality. Not in a mystical separation from corporeality, but by being able to create perfect and harmonic units of reflection thanks to which the soul gains dignity and beauty that contrasts with the chaos of history and time. In this chaos, bodies are hit: the utterance, the gesture, and the action return to wound those who are their authors, or those having no idea about these entities, erring in historical time: “my voyage to my native town, where I intended to strike the hated Zemánek ends by my holding in my hands a hit friend” (312). Human beings as physical existences are victims of such turbulences, and they are completely helpless against them. The only defense is an exact reflection on this process. Conscience and the intellect are not naturally above the body, but they defy corporeality and the whirling movement to which it is exposed. The distance between the reflective consciousness and corporeality forms, it seems, one of the most evident principles of Kundera’s poetics. Representations of consciousness vs. corporeality can be found in several short stories of Smeˇˇsné lásky (Laughable Loves). In “Let the old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead,” the ironic relation to corporeality is in a multiple way present in the title. And the narrator says about the main female character: “She disliked talking about death and getting old because they had a physical ugliness in them she abhorred” (Smeˇˇsné lásky 90). In “Eduard a Buh” (Edward and God), the protagonist teacher makes love to his ugly superior, while in “Falesˇny´ autostop” (The Hitchhiking Game), lovers engage in a game of hitchhiking, pretending they do not know each other. At the end of the love game, the man feels disgusted. In both cases, the protagonist experiences a painful discrepancy between deep feelings and and inauthentic love making. We find similar representations in Valcˇík na rozloucˇenou (The Farewell Waltz), Nesmrtelnost (Immortality), and Pomalost (Slowness). The main character of Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí (The Unbearable Lightness of Being) has a liking for bizarre women, one of which seems to him to resemble a stork. Here, as elsewhere, attention to curious aspects of a person’s body makes this person to appear as some kind of animal. The title of the book’s second part, “Soul and Body,” calls attention to the clash between spirituality and animal bodies.

392

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

At first sight, one could deduce from the narrator’s rhetoric that we have to deal with a typical? dualist: body and soul, lightness and weight go together here, as in almost in all of Kundera’s texts. The duality is evident also in the contrast between the elegant architecture of modern bathrooms and the “cloaca maxima” beneath (one of the meditations in Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí). However, we have to keep in mind that these rhetorical figures are for the author but means of a play. The dual world represents the same as contrast in music, and the narrator uses it to stress the dynamics of the whole. Lacking a fixed value in Kundera, dualities are constantly changed or reversed according to the author‘s changing ironic distance. In all of Kundera’s novels, we can find clashes between the body and consciousness – a consciousness derived from corporeality and at the same time striving for autonomy, for freedom to express, not an exact message concerning what has been observed, but one concerning the situation in which all corporeality partakes in time and history. Not the reality of one unique being is Kundera’s epistemological goal; rather, he seeks representations of situations, in which unique beings partake in historic time. From Zˇert to Ignorance, readers witness model clashes of existence with history. Kundera’s historic time and space are very concrete, and hence the Czech pre-exile experience plays as important a role as the later European one. Kundera’s vision consists of these confrontations between a reflecting consciousness and corporeality moving in a circle. Consciousness, and speech as a manifestation of intellect, inexorably returns to the body, repeatedly rediscovering physical existence and existence in history, both of which move in circles of unfathomable causes and effects. However, Kundera’s vision is embodied in the narrator’s activity, in the need to understand perfectly the relationship of human existence in history; it manifests his desire for a perfectly constructed work of art, which is an existential protest against the temporal waste of life and of reflecting human consciousness. Kundera’s disdain for narrow-mindedness, imperfection, and ordinariness is, above all, an existential protest against permanently decomposing beauty, memory, and the body. Twentieth-century prose discarded the omniscient narrator in order to present the authentic experience of an individual, and it got caught because individuals are ignorant of the other. Kundera kept the omniscient narrator, but changed him to represent the author as an active, reflecting, and creating existence, whose gesture must be permanently present in the work. In his obstinate fight to perfect his work and its interpretation, Kundera appears to me as a permanent seeker of an “accurate thought,” a seeker of contexts, actions, and gestures. Throughout his life, human beings remain the

Kundera's Paradise Lost (Vladimír Papousˇek)

393

author, the object and the victim of these. Kundera thus appears as a true romantic. He remarks in his essay Nechovejte se tu jako doma, prˇíteli (Don’t Behave here as at your Place, my Friend): “I think of Stravinsky, of his great effort to leave here his work in his own interpretation as an undeformable model” (71). His sympathy with Stravinsky and the faith in the “undeformable model” is, it seems to me, good evidence of Kundera’s romanticism. He declares that it is an authentic right of every human being to resist all evidences of reality, to fight to the very end against an omnipresent and threatening disintegration. Exposed to the chaos of history, we must repeatedly try to recapture the lost paradise of harmony and perfection, even if the effort is in vain.

Works Cited Hora, Josef. Jan Houslista. Prague: Borovy´, 1940. Kozˇmín, Zdeneˇk. “Román lidské existence” (The Human Existence Novel). Kundera, Zˇert 315–18. Kundera, Milan. “ATˇ starˇí mrtví udeˇlají místo mlady´m mrtvy´m” (Let the Old Dad Make Room for the Young Dead). Smeˇˇsné lásky 89–106. Kundera, Milan. “Eduard a Bu˚h” (Edward and God). Smeˇˇsné lásky 137–63. Kundera, Milan. “Falesˇny´ autostop” (The Hitchhiking Game). Smeˇˇsné lásky 73–88. Kundera, Milan. Identity. London: Faber and Faber, 1998. Trans. Linda Asher from the French L’identité. Paris: Gallimard, 1997. Kundera, Milan. Ignorance. London: Faber and Faber, 2002. Trans. Linda Asher from the French L’ignorance. Paris: Grand Livre du Mois, 2000. Kundera, Milan. Nesmrtelnost (Immortality). Brno: Atlantis, 2000. Kundera, Milan. Nechovejte se tu jako doma, prˇíteli (Don’t Behave here as at your Place, my Friend). Brno: Atlantis, 2006. Kundera, Milan. Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí (The Unbearable Lightness of Being). Toronto: Sixty-Eight Publishers, 1981. Kundera, Milan. Slowness. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. Trans. Linda Asher from the French La lenteur. Paris: Gallimard, 1995. Kundera, Milan. Smeˇˇsné lásky. 1963. Prague: Cˇeskoslovensky´ spisovatel, 1970. Trans. Suzanne Rappaport as Laughable Loves. New York: Knopf, 1974. Kundera, Milan. The Art of the Novel. New York: Perennial, 2000. Trans. Linda Asher from the French L’art du roman. Paris: Gallimard, 1986. Kundera, Milan. Valcˇík na rozloucˇenou (The Farewell Waltz). 1976. Brno: Atlantis, 1997. Kundera, Milan. Zˇert ( Joke). 1967. Brno: Atlantis, 1991. Sartre, Jean-Paul. La Nausée (Nausea). Paris: Gallimard, 1938. Soucˇková, Milada. Bel Canto. Prague: Prostor, 2000. Sova, A. Pankrác Budecius kantor (Pankrac Budecius, the Teacher). Prague: Cˇeskoslovensky´ spisovatel, 1954. Tyl, Josef Kajetán. Strakonicky´ dudák (The Bagpiper from Strakonice). Prague: Albatros, 1979. Vaculík, Ludvík. Sekyra (The Axe). Prague: Cˇeskoslovensky´ spisovatel, 1966.

394

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

Chapter IV Autobiographical Exile Writing

Introduction

397

Introduction By foregrounding social, historical, and personal exile experiences, our volume devotes less attention to literary form. The present short chapter tries to redress the balance somewhat by focusing on autobiographical writings. To be sure, we discuss these also elsewhere in our volume. The diaries of Béla Balázs and Ervin Sinkó figure in the introductory chapter, Imre Kertész’s Gályanapló in Susan Rubin Suleiman’s article, and Monica Lovinescu’s voluminous Jurnal in Camelia Craˇciun’s article. Readers concerned with genre should also look at Neil Stewart’s reflections on the specificity of literature in journals, Thomas Cooper’s analysis of Herta Müller’s poetic language, and John Neubauer’s comments on Albert Wass’s style – to name only a few of the relevant passages. Next to diaries, written in the proximity of the experience, readers will also find in this chapter examples of memoirs and autobiographies, such as Aleksander Wat’s My Century and Herling-Grundzin´ski’s A World Apart. We treat additional autobiographies in other chapters, especially in the first one, where readers will find discussions of Julius Hay’s Geboren 1900. Erinnerungen (1971), which is of special interest, since Hay was twice in exile during his complicated life, first in Moscow and then, towards the end of his life, in Western Europe. Born in 1900, as his title says, he regarded his book a novel of adventure with a companion, namely the century itself. Equally important are Arthur Koestler’s three autobiographical volumes, Arrow in the Blue (1952), to which we refer in the introductory essay, The Invisible Writing (1954), and Stranger on the Square (1984),. Hay and Kostler knew each other and their lives curiously crossed several times: they joined the German Communist Party roughly at the same time before Hitler came to power; they met again in Switzerland in 1935, and had a joint wedding in Zurich. The subsequent political and personal divorces were held separately; Koestler spectacularly broke with Communism in 1938 because of the great Stalinist trials that Hay [Háy] experienced directly and survived in Moscow. When Háy left Hungary a second time in the 1960s, Koestler helped getting his memoirs translated into English. Reflecting on genres, we may briefly address in this introduction two interrelated aspects: 1) how exile writing modifies the traditional constellation of

398

Chapter IV: Autobiographical Exile Writing

genres, and 2) how such writing modifies each of the practiced genres. The latter involves fundamental questions of language use, on which we can merely touch here. The autobiographical writings in this chapter are to a high degree self-reflective, even when they focus on empirical observations. Confrontations with other cultures, as well as extraordinary and existential experiences, demand this reflection, for they can be incorporated into a new conception of the self only if they are related to earlier experiences. Whatever is noted and described in diaries, travel narratives, memoirs, letters, essays, and other autobiographical genres must involve, explicitly or implicitly, the pre-exilic self as well. The outcome of that confrontation varies, according to the degree to which the pre-exilic-self retains control. Katarzyna Jerzak shows that for Kazimierz Brandys and Andrzej Bobkowski the pre-exilic self continues to dominate, because these autobiographical writers find it impossible to bridge the gulf that separates the new linguistic environment from the native one of childhood. Similarly, Sándor Márai’s observations about his readings, and his visual encounters with both art and the social world, remain enframed by his Hungarian language and the cultural (though not political) values he adopted in his youth. He envisaged this by writing already before his departure: “The writer who departs from home is eternally held accountable to his abandoned people, for he is writer only in the language that these people speak. Once he crosses the national border he becomes a cripple” (281). As Jerzy Jarze˛bski shows in the previous chapter, this was not the view of Witold Gombrowicz, who experienced exile as liberation from the straightjacket of the Polish tradition, even if he continued to write in Polish. Ksenia Polouektova writes about émigrés and exiles who made a transition to a new linguistic home, sometimes with pain (Eva Hoffman), sometimes with astonishing ease (Andrei Codrescu). Though such changeovers do not mean a total amnesiac repression of the former self of childhood or youth – a childhood self that was already tensed between Jewish and national cultural components – it leads to the acquisition of a complex, multiple personality and a multi-perspectival view of experience. Here, as in several other essays of our volume, it becomes evident that exile has not always been a confining loss but often a potentially liberating (though painful) opportunity to change, grow, and enrich the self. This process is best observable in autobiographical writings, and, vice versa, autobiographical writings gain special prominence in exile for such preoccupations with the self. A few final words about the other genres. Exile writers continue to write poetry, but with very few exceptions (e.g. Jirˇí Grusˇa) in their native language, and, at least until 1989, for a severely limited native audience in exile. Fiction

Introduction

399

constitutes by far the largest part of exile writing, and it is in this genre that we encounter perhaps most frequently exiles writing in a second language. Much of the fiction written in exile is highly autobiographical (e.g., Márai’s San Gennaro’s Blood or Josef Sˇkvorecky´’s The Engineer of Human Souls), and, in turn, exile has significantly contributed to the development of the hybrid genre of fictionalized autobiography, of which, Gombrowicz’s Trans-Atlantyk is an outstanding example. Contrary to what one may expect, theater has been exported with surprising ease into exile. This does not hold for the exiles in Moscow (Balázs, Háy); it does apply to Eugène Ionesco (who was, of course, half French), Sławomir Mroz˙ek, Janusz Głowacki, the Hungarian Squat Theater, and many Romanian directors, actors, and actresses – not to speak of the post-Yugoslav theater exiles, about whom Dragan Klaic´ writes in the following chapter. Finally, we should mention that an equally surprising number of East-Central European exiles and émigrés became successful in writing film scripts, a new, perhaps marginal genre that became infinitely more lucrative than writing poetry or fiction.

Work Cited Koestler, Arthur and Cynthia. Stranger on the Square. Ed. Harold Harris. London: Hutchinson, 1984. Koestler, Arthur. The Invisible Writing. London: Collins, 1954. Márai, Sándor. Föld, föld: Emlékezések (Land! Land!: Memoirs). Toronto: Vörösváry, 1972.

400

Chapter IV: Autobiographical Exile Writing

Life in Translation: Exile in the Autobiographical Works of Kazimierz Brandys and Andrzej Bobkowski Katarzyna Jerzak

“I tried to explain to a curious Englishman that the Polish literary tradition is linked to emigration just as the Russian one is linked to katorga. But he didn’t quite understand” (Brandys, Miesi¸ace 1978–1981 41)

Exile: a place for the displaced, a semblance of home for those without one, a commonplace of twentieth century literature. Józef Wittlin, who left Poland in 1940 and lived in New York till the end of his life, coined a term for those who were not only out of place, but who by virtue of being elsewhere were missing a certain era: “In Spanish, there exists for describing an exile the word destierro, a man deprived of his land. I take the liberty to forge another term, destiempo, a man deprived of his time, meaning deprived of the time that now passes in his country. The time of exile is different” (88). The premise of this paper is that time and space of the exile are both different. Exile in general, and specifically the displacement from Eastern Europe to the West, generates a distinct chronotope. This chronotope is characterized by a doubled perception of reality: the exile functions in a new world, but his inner compass is invariably pointed back home. Home in the temporal sense means the past, but it also colors the perception of the present. Home carried as contraband of sorts prompts a second take, second glance at everything, an eye forever discerning similarities and differences between here and there, then and now. Exile is a condition of being unaccommodated and dissatisfied. A satisfied exile does not exist, he has become an immigrant. I focus on two Polish writers of the same generation who wrote some of the best Polish prose in Paris: Andrzej Bobkowski, born in 1913, went to Paris in 1939, lived there through the war, and left for Guatemala in 1948. He died there in 1961. Kazimierz Brandys, born in 1916, remained in France in the wake of the Martial Law in 1981 and died in Paris in 2000. The books I consider are Brandys’s Miesia˛ce (Months), published underground in Warsaw and

Life in Translation (Katarzyna Jerzak)

401

then in Paris) and Bobkowski’s Szkice piórkiem (Sketches with a Quill; 1957), never to my knowledge translated into English, published in France as En guerre et en paix only in 1991. Bobkowski was only twenty-six when he began and thirty when he ended his journal, while Brandys wrote Miesia˛ce in his sixties. Bobkowski’s prose is ardent while that of Brandys is lambent. The former writes with the energy and temperament of a “hooligan of freedom,” as he calls himself, while the latter adopts a more elegant posture. “I am therefore I think” is their motto, and yet they also feel. Theirs are not books of dry deliberations or facile reconciliations; they bristle with unreconciled oppositions and contradictions: freedom versus loyalty, patriotism versus cosmopolitanism, cultural heritage versus disinheritance. Exile contains all of them. Schopenhauer is the name with which Brandys opens Miesia˛ce. It is not, however, the philosopher who interests him, but his mother Johanna, who was a friend of Goethe’s and an author in her own right. Brandys begins his own diary/memoir by evoking her memoirs, which recount her childhood spent in the Free City of Danzig. She was born there in 1766. For Brandys it is clear that Johanna experienced as an exile her permanent departure from Danzig upon its annexation by Prussia. After reading her memoirs Brandys travels to Gdansk and walks by the reconstructed townhouse where the Schopenhauer family lived and where Arthur was born. The house is reconstructed because Gdansk was completely destroyed during World War II: I was walking along the high road of Johanna Schopenhauer’s childhood as if across an empty stage where decorations still stand after the play is done and the actors gone. […] The procession of resurrected houses allowed our steps to pass by in silence. […] On both sides the windows are shut, no eyes look down from them. Large wax dolls would be at home here. In this street there are no human neighbors, no multilingual crowd rises and falls here. (Miesia˛ce 1978–1981 11)

The year is 1978, the passage is thus written before Brandys’s “defection” to the West. And yet the opening sequence of Miesia˛ce already thematizes not only exile as such, but specifically exile as a response to political authoritarianism. More than that, by evoking the Schopenhauers’ voluntary departure from their city, Brandys puts forth a precedent for many twentieth-century writers leaving their “small homeland.” The passage is an elegy not only for the multicultural past of Gdansk, where Brandys had never made his home, but above all for the multicultural Poland into which he was born (although de facto he was born in 1916, before Poland was reestablished; in Alfred Jarry’s bon mots, “en Pologne, c’est-a-dire nullepart”: “In Poland, which means nowhere”). Brandys saw this Poland disappear. He saw himself as a living relic of that past, a Polish Jew, one of the few who survived and one of the even fewer who remained in Poland after the war. Several years later in New York City,

402

Chapter IV: Autobiographical Exile Writing

marveling at the multiethnic, multilingual crowd, he will reiterate his longing for a Poland that doesn’t exist anymore; the homogeneous culture of 1978 Poland repels him. The link that Brandys’ autobiographical persona establishes to Mrs. Schopenhauer is not unlike the connection that Charles Baudelaire invokes in the opening lines of his exilic poem “Le cygne” to Andromache, the tragic woman exile figure of Antiquity: “Andromaque, je pense à vous!” (Andromache, I think of you!). You have lost your Troy, says the poet, and I have lost my Paris. Brandys’ evoking Johanna Schopenhauer serves a similar purpose: it establishes that “exile is not of yesterday” (St. John Perse), that as a writerly and human condition it has a pedigree and a history. But it also complicates the usual image of exile: Danzig/Gdansk was never simply Polish or uniformly Prussian, and Mrs. Schopenhauer, although ostensibly German, placed herself in a dissenting minority. But there is yet another connection between Baudelaire’s lyrical subject, whose greatest woe is the inexorable passing of things, and Brandys’ persona: “The sudden thought that I will never be reconstructed like that […] that my flesh and my bones, just like Mrs. Schopenhauer’s body, are impossible to rebuild and that it will only be a little while longer that I will hover in the ether of someone’s memory” (Miesia˛ce 1978–1981 12). In Brandys’s book the ultimate exile is to be forgotten. Miesia˛ce is a consciously molded counterweight not only to that commonplace forgetting that is the passage of time, but also to the other malaise, which is exile. This is not to say that Brandys’s defection is a malediction: on the contrary, he does not cease to praise the freedom to write. And yet, like Sándor Márai, who quotes in exile Goethe’s words, “In every separation there is a grain of madness” (251), Brandys lives his voluntary separation from Poland as a disquieting condition, a disease. In the final account neither Mrs. Schopenhauer, nor Andromache stand as the most radical epitome of the exile’s fate: echoing Baudelaire’s eponymous swan who is “ridiculous and sublime like the exiles,” Brandys will evoke a grotesque image of a white llama in the middle of Berlin, positing that uncanny figure as the symbol of exile’s muted grief. But what makes Brandys, or any member of the cultured Polish intelligentsia, ill at ease in Paris, Berlin, or New York? Has Eastern Europe not experienced always a powerful attraction to things foreign, and especially to the great Western cities, whose cultural superiority was beyond question? Brandys offers a most personal answer to these charged issues. Having opened his book with Mrs. Schopenhauer’s nostalgic vision of her native city, Brandys goes on to quarrel with her son, but only in passing. Spurred by Johanna’s passionate account of Gdansk he reads a book about the philosopher written

Life in Translation (Katarzyna Jerzak)

403

by the Polish intellectual historian Jan Garewicz, and then, abandoning Schopenhauer as if he had been only a pretext to a private recollection, he remembers Garewicz’s older brother who, in middle school, had lent Brandys a set of paints: They were wonderful, foreign [zagraniczne – literally, from the other side of the border] paints in a flat metal box imitating ivory, nestled in a shiny green leather case – a set of paints with a set of incredibly well maintained brushes of various thicknesses and lengths. Little Garewicz lent them to me very agreeably and I promised to return them to him after the art lesson. But before the lesson began my fellow students noticed them as they lay in front of me in an open box. Their foreign [cudzoziemska – from a foreign land, from the land of the other] elegance rendered my classmates dumb. At first everyone fell silent, staring at Garewicz’s paints, as if enchanted by the very possibility of existence of beauty so ideal, a possibility which went beyond all their dreams. Such beauty was unknown to them and seemed proof of a distant perfect state of being whose existence they had thus far ignored. Then all of a sudden they threw themselves on Garewicz’s paints and began destroying them. Within a minute the paints were a wreck. […] Until late that night my mother and I searched the city for a set of paints similar to Garewicz’s treasure. In vain, nothing like that existed. The sale clerks pulled out various boxes but each time I shook my head gloomily and at last my mother exclaimed: “You must have invented these paints!” Still, I was convinced that they were somewhere, that we could find them somehow. One of the shop owners told us to return the following day. But the next morning plump, rosy Garewicz peeked into my classroom and politely requested the return of his property. (Miesia˛ce 1978–1981 20).

The memory of this event, which reads like a parable or a fantastic happening out of one of Bruno Schulz’s tales, haunts Brandys for years, as a rather similar experience with a Polish boy Pribislav Hippe haunts Thomas Mann’s fictional Hans Castorp in Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain). The unreal beauty of Garewicz’s foreign set of paints, unmatched by anything one could find in a wealthy Polish city before the war, is the utopian beauty of foreign parts, of the West. Many years later the elderly Brandys will resent that overabundance: Colorful pyramids of grub, bright, illuminated supermarket aisles, dozens of kinds of cold cuts, coffee, chocolate, jam, huge, bloody edges of sirloin, pink hams surrounded by white skin of fat, fish from the oceans and the rivers of the entire world, pineapples, mountains of pineapples. They, their banks filled with the silence of temples, their new car models akin to immense gems behind the reflecting displays, the gold shimmer of fall furniture salons, piles of furs, rugs, royal galleries of shoes (Miesia˛ce 1978–1981 352)

Thus the beautiful albeit unreal set of paints was only a harbinger of a reality equally beautiful and unreal, the reality of French, German, Swiss super and hypermarkets. It was as if Brandys had to live now in the made-up world of Garewicz’s paints, as if he had walked into a set like the metal box that imitated ivory: beautiful, shiny, fake. And unlivable.

404

Chapter IV: Autobiographical Exile Writing

No wonder that Brandys never writes in French. He speaks it well enough, but to write in it would be as if to paint with Garewicz’s paints: they are too perfect, the brushes incredibly clean. Did Brandys have his own set of paints? What would that be? Where does Brandys belong as a Polish-Jewish writer? Who was Julian Tuwim with his “Ojczyzna Polszczyzna,” his self-appointed “homeland in the Polish language”? What about Antoni Słonimski? Adolf Rudnicki? Henryk Grynberg? When Grynberg’s autobiographical narrator in “Raccoon” identifies with the scorched wild animal momentarily imprisoned in his living room, he follows the exile’s imperative. The disoriented raccoon which falls into the fireplace is utterly out of place among the furniture, just as the Holocaust survivor who was not burnt but did not escape unscathed either, and is now “after years of continuous evacuations and escapes cowering at the end of his world and waiting,” homeless in his new refuge (Grynberg 206). The question of home becomes particularly charged in the case of assimilated or disinherited Polish Jewish writers, who may feel intensely Polish but are received – and sometimes rejected or besmeared – in Poland as Jewish and alien. Foreign. They function always as “they.” Brandys’ own Jewishness surfaces, painful, and infected like a deep-seated splinter only when he is faced with anti-Semitism. To paraphrase Gombrowicz’s dictum “I don’t know who I am but I know when someone tries to deform me”: “I don’t feel Jewish except when someone around me is an anti-Semite.” In “Sorrow and Grandeur of Exile” Wittlin points out something rather obvious that has been said before him and will be reiterated again as long as political borders exist and exile continues to be a literary category, namely that the job of a writer often isolates him or her even in the homeland. For Brandys, the writerly sense of separateness is reinforced by a tangible perception of difference: however assimilated, he is still part of a nearly annihilated minority. When these factors are compounded by a physical displacement, the sense of exile is tripled. Perhaps that’s why Brandys’ exilic consciousness is especially sharp.

1. Life in Translation A writer feels more keenly than others a distance from what happens in a foreign language. In the midst of a heart attack in Paris, Brandys marvels at his acute consciousness, which allows him to register everything: “Among other things I was aware that all along I was talking to the people around me, all along concerned about whether I was making grammatical errors, and at some point, panting, I asked the young emergency room doctor, whether one

Life in Translation (Katarzyna Jerzak)

405

says “un malaise” or “une malaise” (Miesia˛ce 1982–1987 287). If exile is life in translation, it follows that there is such a thing as death in translation and that is what Brandys nearly experiences. What does it mean to concern oneself with questions of grammatical gender in a moment when one’s life is in danger? Rather than an example of escapism, this is proof of an unmediated – and perhaps ultimately unbreachable – gap that opens between a human being for whom language is essential and his milieu. Love in translation, too, is problematic as Eva Hoffman’s memorable inner dialogue concerning her willingness to get married testifies: Should you marry him? the question comes in English. Yes. Should you marry him? the question echoes in Polish. No. (199)

The voice that says “no” speaks the language, that “seem[s] to come from deeper within” (ibid.). This inner division testifies to a self that is buttressed by the native tongue and corroded by translation. To die in a foreign language, to marry in a foreign language, to live in translation: all are equally unreal, to wit false. In 1964 in Chiavari (Italy), having just delivered a lecture in Polish that was simultaneously translated into several European languages, Brandys is cheered by a Flemish writer who exclaims “Niek zie Polska! ” – an unwittingly crude mispronunciation of “Long live Poland!” “Oh mercy, so shall it always be like that with us?” – Brandys asks. “No one will understand us, ever?” (Miesia˛ce 1982–1987 332). Like Sándor Márai, who bemoans the fact that his compatriots, the Hungarians, have been looking for understanding among the Europeans for a thousand years, Brandys perceives the Poles as insulated as it were from the rest of Europe – especially so-called Western Europe – by virtue of their language. “This indifferent, kindly applause and this niek zie Polska! But the truth about us is hidden in our language, untranslatable, familiar. The language which encloses us instead of connecting, the language with a key (a clef), history with a key, literature with a key, and we inside, locked in” (ibid.) To a Western reader his stance may seem too self-pitying, even self-indulgent. After all, there are many more Poles than Flemish people in the world. What Brandys expresses, however, is the evident provinciality of his mother tongue. Even though Polish is part of a large Slavic language family, it is not and has never been, a major language. How alive Brandys’s connection to Poland, to Polishness is becomes apparent when he recounts the drama of being cut off from the Polish language as a severing from his very being:

406

Chapter IV: Autobiographical Exile Writing

After December 13 [1981, the imposition of the Martial Law] I would wake up in the middle of the night on my sofa bed in Queens, and there, to my right, were barbiturates, and to my left, the window (six flights up). I felt with mathematical certainty that I was left with one of these alternatives. […] I tried, in the dark, to figure out what could get me out of the depression caused by being cut off from my very being. A university position? But I would have to lecture in English, whereas I can think only in Polish. All jobs would force me to vegetate in the foreign tongue, which would separate me from my cortex, formed with layers of Polish associations and reflexes. Utter torture. (Miesia˛ce 1978–1981 23)

Ironically, this fragment is one of those that is abbreviated, simplified, or outright mutilated in the English translation titled Paris-New York 1982–1984 (24). Indeed the term translation is unfit here, as the text published in English is but one third of the original Polish, a kind of Reader’s Digest version for the Anglophone reader who, so the editors suppose, does not want to be troubled by this prolegomena to Eastern European metaphysics. Brandys, like Cioran, claims that he never recognizes his texts in translation; they seem strange and alien to him. That is why the prospect of fame abroad does not entice him. If a Pole is separated from the rest of the world by virtue of his mother tongue, then a Pole abroad is necessarily marked by this language and the untranslatable reality it encodes. As Wittlin writes: “Thus the imagination of the exile is filled not only with memories of places and people left behind, memories of events, but also with memories of words heard only before his exile. Such words haunt a writer like shadows, like phantoms” (91). Brandys describes the case of his acquaintance, Zeno, who, fluent in Spanish, left Poland for Argentina unprepared for linguistic troubles: ‘But on the contrary, I’m telling you, the real disease is in language. […] In the first years it drove me crazy, I swear; it was real schizophrenia! He spoke about a pressure on the brain. At night he was woken up by foreign words, he fell asleep, and dreamt of idioms. You cannot say szklanka, you cannot say szubrawiec. You have to translate everything; you live in a perpetual translation.’ […] He proposed, married, had children. But all along somewhere within he was haunted by a feeling of incomplete truth: All this [new life] is well rendered, it’s a good translation. I have translated my life into Spanish. (Miesia˛ce 1982–1987 333)

Language, then, makes for an indivisible part of the self; and the translated self, no matter how functional, adaptable, even successful by objective standards, fails to be compelling. It is as if one’s foundation were constructed with irreplaceable native expressions: “He had a theory that all the painful aspects of life abroad: depression, nostalgia, all derives from the violence done to the language of childhood which cannot be replaced with any other” (ibid.). It is not surprising then that the passage in which Brandys recounts Zeno’s brief return to Warsaw is nearly untranslatable into English or any other language:

Life in Translation (Katarzyna Jerzak)

407

He visited Poland in 1958 or 1959 and spent his first night at the bar called Pod Kuchcikiem [Under the Cook’s Boy]. On Nowy S´wiat, at that bar he landed somebody one in the jaw […] And he was happy that he could emit his true sounds, happy like a dog who can finally bark. He rolled his eyes – To say ‘kurwa,” to say “jakbogakocham,” to roll in the bedding of words, to breathe in their wonderful smelly odor […]: ‘I’d say “daj pan spokój,” I’d say ‘odczep sie˛ pan! I‘d say‘Edek!” I’d say “Władek!’ Words were defrosting in my head … […] Brother, do you understand? (Miesia˛ce 1982–1987 333)

The fateful bar’s most prosaic and yet evocative name – Pod Kuchcikiem – uses a diminutive that functions on its own, immediately signaling a place that is familiar, informal, not to say homey. This name would not ring the same bell in Buenos Aires. The bar’s location on Warsaw’s thoroughfare street called Nowy S´wiat (New World) rings with an unintended irony, as this is the locus of the Old World. Last but not least, the string of more or less innocuous expletives emitted by Zeno indubitably identifies the place as belonging to him. Unlike English or French, Spanish is full of diminutives and someone schooled in Polish ought to find a consolation in their expressiveness. But Spanish diminutives learned in midlife will always have the smell of fresh printer’s ink, not of old bedding. One day, when all the cafés in the world are called Starbuck, this sense of nostalgia will diminish as “elsewhere” will have disappeared. This is not to say that the language one misses must be colloquial and quotidian. The literary versions of the native tongue can satiate some of the nostalgic craving as well. In Paris in1940, Andrzej Bobkowski finds himself unable to digest crystalline French prose: I cannot read in French. I cannot. Each word, each French expression gags me. I cannot bear these rounded sentences and epithets, this dryness and this cult of words devoid of feeling. I know it doesn’t make sense, but I cannot help it. When I look at my [French] books on the shelf, without exception good and carefully chosen, I cannot pick up a single one. It is as if I had eaten too much of a rich, sugary, creamy pistachio tort. Physical glut and a feeling of disgust towards words, sentences, topics. It was with a nearly barbaric greed that I devoured Pan Tadeusz and now I’m tearing Sienkiewicz’s Potop with my teeth as if it were a fatty leg of mutton. I lick my chops, I smack my lips, I wipe my greasy fingers on my pants – and I gobble it up. (Szkice 149)

It is no coincidence that the metaphors used here pertain to nourishment. One cannot survive on brioche, Bobkowski says. The dainty foreign language is a fine dessert, but for sustenance he needs the meaty, substantial Polish. Brandys calls this condition the anxiety of refugees: “I have defined this anxiety as something akin to a pang of conscience, experienced almost physically. The place where one lives is not quite evident and not quite material, it is like a protective shade, but the substance is elsewhere” (Miesia˛ce 1982–1987 221). So not only is the translated self less real, the foreign sur-

408

Chapter IV: Autobiographical Exile Writing

roundings also seem to be made of a less durable, less tangible stuff than the world at home. The Russian film maker Andrei Tarkovsky, whose film Nostalghia is a study of both physical and metaphysical exile, denounces during his visit to the United States in 1983 what he perceives as the fragility of American houses: “Telluride: the impression that all this is a set. They don’t build houses but decorations, like in a film studio”(Tarkovsky 373). “All of America is a kind of Disneyland (decorations)” (376). Shoddy, flimsy, impermanent. This impression communicates a disturbing unreality of the exile’s surroundings. Exiles perceive themselves as less real because, cut off from home and their native language, they find that the new world seems feeble, almost phantasmatic. In such optics, even the reality of war is undermined. In April of 1943 Bobkowski notes in passing the funerals of the victims of Allied bombings, which take place amid spring flowers and perfume – he recognizes Rumeur by Lanvin in the streets. “At the Longchamps racing track an acquaintance of mine from the Ministry of Work was killed by one of the bombs. An older gentleman. In his whole life he was fond of two things: horseracing and England. And he died at the races of an English bomb. A topic for an epigram by Swinarski. He was torn to pieces and his remnants were recognized only because of the tie pin: a gold riding-whip studded with small rubies” (Szkice 398). Though Bobkowski did not know the man very well, one would expect some sense of pity if not a sense of tragedy. His account offers neither, and one is led to believe that war in Paris, the war that can smell of expensive perfume, is indeed “une drôle de guerre” (a phoney war). In contrast, writing about the Katyn´ massacre on the eastern fringes of Poland, Bobkowski imagines the individual victims shot one by one. Even though the event is geographically at a great distance, his empathy does not fail when he writes of the Polish officers falling into the common grave, some only wounded. This is not nationalism or chauvinism at work but rather an incapacity to experience the new reality with an intensity that is proper only to events that pull at him from home. Death at the races. Did this Frenchman die defending France? No, he died by accident. France is here implicitly contrasted with Poland. A year and a half later, Bobkowski describes the Warsaw uprising as senseless Polish heroism, but heroism none the less. His is a complex case: a man disillusioned with Poland leaves it voluntarily but nolens volens experiences all the pangs of a true exile. Bobkowski, who repeatedly declares that “life in the corked bottle of homeland” has no appeal to him (Szkice 522), has much kinship with Gombrowicz and fittingly evokes Joseph Conrad, considered to be a traitor by many a Pole because he chose where he wanted to live and the language in which to write.

Life in Translation (Katarzyna Jerzak)

409

Proust’s narrator says somewhere that flowers he first saw later in life were less real than the flowers he had known since childhood. Jerzy Stempowski, another Polish intellectual in exile, writes in an essay ostensibly devoted to travel but one that actually constitutes a meditation on all manner of displacement, from peregrinatio domestica to colonization: “It appears that southern Italians call, with slight contempt, all trees not mentioned by Ovid by the collective name of vitachie” (321). Life in exile is a kind of afterlife, a bloodless, pale version of its earlier self. Or, to return to Tarkovsky’s metaphor, it is a life amidst theatrical decorations, a simulacrum that looks like life though its actors know full well it is not. Brandys in Paris and New York, Bobkowski in France and Guatemala – both welcome the liberating external perspective that exile offers and yet at the same time suffer from the experience of life in translation.

2. Uninvited Comparisons The exile cannot relax or take it easy. A traveler can presumably withdraw into his hotel room, close his eyes, and think: in a week, I will be home. The exile lives in the daily tension of perpetual comparison, unmitigated by a promise of a foreseeable return. When Bobkowski overhears two ticket controllers talking across the tracks of the Parisian metro about Chateaubriand, he approaches them, impressed by how deeply the literary culture has penetrated the French society. And then he realizes that they are talking about the Chateaubriand steak: Chateaubriand flies from one mouth to the other as a fat, bloody beef steak. […] And this is how legends arise about French intelligence. In reality they are as removed from Chateaubriand right now as from a beefsteak. Bifteck – while speaking about France one must not forget about this factor, about this most important of matters in the life of the French of any social class. Patriotism, freedom, homeland? No – bifteck. Thick, rare, juicy and soft: a la Chateaubriand. (Szkice 279)

The comparison, even if only implied, at first elevates the French civilization above the Polish one, only to tumble into a prosy fall: French patriotism is replaced with unthinking gourmandise. As Bobkowski sums it up elsewhere: “France is Cartesian: I eat, therefore I am” (Z dziennika podróz˙y 43). Brandys also compares constantly. The Western European affluence is but a glut to him: “An invasion of quantity and quality, food devouring man, the neon signs seducing, winking. They live in civilization – we live in drama” (Miesia˛ce 1978–1981 352). Both writers, one in the middle of World War II, the other forty years later, juxtapose the West – reduced in their optics to a well-

410

Chapter IV: Autobiographical Exile Writing

stocked supermarket shelf – to the Eastern European material scarcity. This exilic perspective is bitter, because it is overlaid with history and economics, with the awareness that the price of the heightened Eastern European consciousness is perhaps too high: We will never be able to communicate – I say – our conversations are the dialogues of the oversaturated with those tied up [unfree]. The construction of their time is different, look at the streets, at how they walk. They walk, while we, in Warsaw, drag ourselves or we rush. They stroll while we are impelled or held back by something. The only thing that links us or, rather, touches us, is the fear that we do not pull them in our mad seizures and don’t dump on their heads the lead weight, don’t throw them down into our hells. Because they stroll through life, while we crawl through history. That’s how it’s supposed to be, they took care of it a long time ago. Once in Vienna, and then again in Yalta.(Miesia˛ce 1978–1981 352)

Of course, not every Pole in France begrudges the French their relative wealth. The difference in the approach to how easy it is to make a good life abroad distinguishes, in part, an immigrant from an exile. An immigrant gratefully accepts the cornucopia of the supermarket, for the economic bounty is actually a main reason for his being there. Brandys distinguishes between the immigrant who takes his fate as a matter of fact, without analyzing it, and the exile, who, acutely conscious of the cultural displacement, does not cease to compare, to notice the differences, to look back, to feel estranged. I know Paris, I know the French culture, he says, but it is not mine. I know Paris, but Paris does not know me. One can adjust to the streets, to the shops, but not to the culture as such, because culture is history, it is not all of today. It is then the Romantic blending of the writerly and the national identity that compounds Brandys’ estrangement: even when Poland did not exist as a state, Polish writers continued to write in Polish about Poland. This is not an easy heritage to bear, and even Conrad, who often complained that he led a “double life” and Gombrowicz, who ostensibly tried to free himself of the “Polish form” did not escape it altogether. To be a Polish writer is a kind of burden: Young scientists in shorts were carrying bags out of the supermarket and loading them into the trunks of their cars. They were mostly physicists or mathematicians; in Bures, Gif and Orsay there are research centers and laboratories. Watching, I envied them that they were not writers or Polish. And most of all I envied them that they were not a combination of both because I realized a long time ago that a combination or, rather, a shackling together of Polishness and literature is something tiring, even sickening. To be a physicist and Dutch or to be a mathematician and Swedish does not necessarily perturb each other; it does not necessarily lead to drama. I watched the deft movements of their hands slamming the trunks, their precise civilization. After two turns of the steering wheel they drove away, with their children and dogs in the back seat, to their houses, labs, graphs and numbers. How normal they were. (Miesia˛ce 1982–1987 264)

Life in Translation (Katarzyna Jerzak)

411

The scene just recounted occurs regularly: Brandys is in front of the supermarket, waiting for his wife and observing intensely the goings on. The scientists are his laboratory animals, the open air – the terrarium. He watches them as if he were the true scientist and they – a different species, enticingly familiar but also quite alien, not unlike the axolotls that the narrator watches in Julio Cortazar’s short story “Axolotl.” Of course, Brandys reveals in the end that he is a kind of axolotl, a bizarre creature privy to a painful knowledge, while they are enviably normal and dumb. To live in exile is to compare. Bergson tells us that memory is a category of perception, that we perceive reality through what we have seen, what we have experienced before. The exile confronts a new reality at every level, engaging in perpetual to and fro. A tourist does not need to compare the Island of Jerba or the Taj Mahal to anything back home. The essence of tourism is exoticism: the more unreal the new sight, the better. What momentarily gratifies the tourist, however, disturbs the exile who is grafted, as it were, onto the unreality of his new surroundings, forced to function within it. Such life is indirect, it is life with a detour. An event takes place, and instead of hitting one in the gut, it only resonates. Events are echoes of other events. Because everything that happens in exile is a reminder of something else somewhere else, or because it is not. Either way the new reality means little on its own, its virtue is acquired by comparison. A comparison emerges even when there is no ground for it. On September 11, 1940, in Le Lavandou (Provence), Bobkowski and his Polish workingclass companion, Tadzio, are bicycling to Paris and have just set up their tent on the beach. It is a beautiful evening and they are eating a simple dinner: An indescribable delight, thoughtless and healthy. Beauty doesn’t stir any memories here, it brings no associations: neither with music, nor with poetry. It is a kind of beauty that can be eaten just like these fried eggs with canned spinach, washed down with a glass of red wine. One doesn’t feel here the need to bang out any emotions, longings or dreams. Here at one fell swoop one can unlearn the “Slavic pining, blue-eyed, wheatfield […].” Here beauty is; it is on the plate, it’s so graspable that I’m eating eggs, spinach, the moon, the sea, the tomato salad, beans and I lick my lips. Perhaps it’s precisely this tangibility that doesn’t cause any desire or need to loosen thoughts, no “draught in the soul.” Skylarks? Here they shoot them and eat them roasted. (Szkice 86)

The above fragment recounts the sheer enjoyment of the French landscape whose beauty can be consumed without having to pay a tribute to Romantic poetry or patriotism. It is as if Bobkowski could not believe his good fortune: such delight and with no strings attached? But the purported praise is lined with doubt. This beauty is edible; once again the French and their country turn out to be about eating, not thinking, or even less about feelings. The

412

Chapter IV: Autobiographical Exile Writing

French, it would seem, lack soul. Whereas the Poles cannot hear a bird without remembering a line of poetry, the French simply “shoot and eat.” But is their treatment of skylarks sacrilegious or liberating? And why can’t Bobkowski simply say that something is beautiful? The seemingly incomparable beauty of Provence still stirs up, by radical contrast, the Polish beauty. Poland is always implied and Bobkowski is not free, not even once he arrives in Guatemala, where the little airport seems to him decorated “in the Zakopane style.” (Z dziennika 141) His ostensible anti-nostalgia turns out to be at closer examination a kind of nostalgia once removed or the obverse of nostalgia. That’s why the anti-nostalgic Bobkowski mentions longing, pining, hankering after something lost. As the Polish saying goes, “Uderz w stół, a noz˙yce sie˛ odezwa˛.” The following morning at Saint-Raphaël, Bobkowski describes the beauty of the shore seen from a long swim out into the sea: “No, no – I would hit anyone who would say “Yes, this here, sir, is nice, but you see it’s not the same as in Koluszki … Because over there, in Koluszki … etc.” (Szkice 87). This is a Gombrowiczian insight, Koluszki being the epitome of a Polish backwater town. Gombrowicz could also have written the following lines: “I’m not a snob, the person from Koluszki is a snob. How Mickiewicz must have abhorred Paris and to what extent he must have been miserable there to have written ‘Pan Tadeusz’” (ibid.). Bang on the table and the scissors will ring. Bang – and here’s Pan Tadeusz, even if evoked only to prove Mickiewicz wrong. Mickiewicz’s misery churned out the Polish national exilic epic because his experience of Paris was poisoned by morbid nostalgia. Bobkowski, unlike Mickiewicz, takes France for what it is and takes it in. And yet, this emancipated European, or perhaps cosmopolitan, stance is still linked to Poland – this place, Bobkowski says, is unlike the Koluszki that a misguided Pole might invoke. Intent on correcting this imaginary compatriot he emphasizes that Provence has nothing to do with Koluszki, Koluszki doesn’t even come close. But why not leave Koluszki at home and its provincial apologists, in peace? Whence the constant need to refer back? In the next paragraph it becomes apparent that for Bobkowski all the Côte d’Azur towns are but a series of playthings (“toys like Le Lavandou”): nothing is real here because there is no suffering. Tadzio and the author stop for a glass of beer with lemonade and sip it watching the sea and the sky. “The thought of war, of killing each other in very complicated ways seems here … no, it doesn’t even seem” (ibid.). This reading of a landscape without war rhymes well with the reading of the French people as lacking feeling, especially the feeling of shame. Mocking Descartes, Bobkowski mocks l’esprit francais invincible: “They believe that they think, therefore they are. Well, that’s not enough today. Today you have feel in order to be. I sense therefore I am. If I only think, I

Life in Translation (Katarzyna Jerzak)

413

might easily not feel that they are smacking me in the face […] They do not feel, they have lost feeling” (Szkice 91). Elsewhere Bobkowski will accuse the French of lacking both reason and heart, of “spitting with pity” (Szkice 94) at the Poles. Brandys will repeat this diagnosis forty years later, when, following the dramatic birth of Solidarnos´c´, he finds people remarkably indifferent about events in Poland: They care nothing for us. We are as indifferent to revolutionary intellectuals as to housewives and shop owners. […] At the lectures and meetings here there are people of various professions and nations; at Ravenna Haus, in doctors’ waiting rooms, in clubs and cafés we rub shoulders with the inhabitants of this city. We talk, we bow, and we exchange smiles. They know that I am a guest from Poland. And in the last three months only one person asked me about my country, about life there now and about its future. He was a lame Czech, an émigré. The one and only time. This took place at an intellectual-artistic party, in the midst of noisy chatter in the languages of five continents, among crowded and chatty people, who were part of the present almost by vocation. And one exiled Czech made his way through them to me, limping, to ask about Poland. (Miesia˛ce 1978–1981 390)

Brandys insists on the lameness by mentioning it twice in a short paragraph. To be an exile, as Adorno said, is to be mutilated, to be handicapped: “Every intellectual in emigration is, without exception, mutilated” (33). Like Baudelaire’s Albatross, whose wings impede him when he is not in the air, or like the Swan walking painfully with his webbed feet on the Parisian cobblestones, the lame Czech, too, is ridiculous and sublime. And so is Gombrowicz when in Argentina’s New World, in the pampas where there are more cows than books, he introduces himself as a Count. In Antiquity and all the way up to Napoleon, exile used to be a privilege of sorts, reserved for those too high in the ranks or too famous to be simply killed. There is little dignity in the modern exilic condition, and what there is comes from the exile’s self-consciousness of his fate. The émigré who is free to return home, who returns regularly, is to all appearances no longer an exile. And yet his status is not clear, he too suffers from displacement; more than that, he seems doubly displaced, doubly not belonging. Such is, in Brandys’s account, the fate of the Polish Jewish writer Adolf Rudnicki: He comes to Warsaw more or less every six months, spending the other half of the year in Paris […]. He writes once in Paris, once in Warsaw, and his books are published here and there. […] He said that in Paris he is oppressed by foreignness: it is like a pressure on the brain, some go mad from it. After a few months he has to leave for Warsaw. – “So, really, an optimal situation – I declare – half a year in France, and half a year back home, perfect!” Adolf puts his hand on his chest nodding his head as if he were listening to the

414

Chapter IV: Autobiographical Exile Writing

babble of an infant. […] [T]his is a man who lives in two foreign countries, a double foreigner – from Krakowskie Przedmies´cie and from Saint-Germain. (Miesia˛ce 1978–1981 178–79)

But even Brandys himself, entrenched in one place, lives out the duality of the exilic chronotope. Waiting in Paris for the arrival of the Polish literary critic Andrzej Kijowski and his wife, he meditates on the essential incompatibility of the two worlds, his two lives: The themes and the specifics of our years in Warsaw seem more and more like a heavy restless dream, the kind in which you toss and turn and pull at your blanket. New York and Paris seem like another kind of dream, of the sort occurring mostly in the second half of the night or early morning. The odd thing is that characters appearing in the first dream can suddenly pop up in the second, simply move in, with all their luggage. I am wondering how it will feel to walk and talk again with the Kijowskis, and how in the world I can recapture the first dream’s quick, playfully absurd language. (Paris, New York: 1982–1984 178).

More is at stake here than what we call “culture shock.” This is an extended drama of exile, in which one reality recedes, slips away, yet the new one never quite materializes. Brandys in this case is the link, the bridge between the two oneiric worlds. Neither world is quite “true.” The “old” language does not adhere to the new reality, neither can it be easily imported; and the clash of characters from the first dream appearing in the second reveals the invisible border between the two. Now and then, however, life in exile is beyond translation, beyond comparison: On Kurfürstendamm I saw a white llama. […] The llama sniffed at the hands of passersby. Her nostrils trembled. Gentle and humble, she was kneeling at the edge of the sidewalk while the crowd moved in front of her. Her ears flat, she was lifting her head and neon lights were reflected in her wide set eyes. For this was taking place in the evening, on the lively Kurfürstendamm vibrant with lights. The llama was kneeling vis-à-vis the largest shoe store, one of the attractions meant to entertain the crowd. Watching her, I remembered a certain young woman, charming and wise, who told me that, having left the country and finding herself in a big foreign city, for the first few weeks she would go to the zoo every day. She would sit on a bench, book in hand, and would stare at the giraffe who was the only being to whom she felt close in that city. ‘She too was brought here from her country’ (Miesia˛ce 1978–1981 386)

Brandys’s llama, like Grynberg’s raccoon and Cortazar’s Mexican axolotl at the Jardin des Plantes, is an allegory of exile. The animal out of its element takes us all the way back to Baudelaire’s Swan. A writer who chooses a mute animal as his alter ego is motivated by the power of the untranslatable. This is not the poet’s coy reference to the “unsayable”; the white llama in the Berlin street, the wild raccoon in Grynberg’s living room, the Mexican axolotl in the Parisian aquarium, and the white swan in Haussmann’s Paris are rather alle-

Life in Translation (Katarzyna Jerzak)

415

gories of extreme displacement. The empathy of the exile goes out to them because here all comparisons stop. Allegory, like all form, has its salutary effect: exile makes the differences sharper, more visible, palpable. The writer as allegorist embraces exile and accepts it, albeit seeing its grotesque aspect. True exile cannot be shed at will. It is a dynamic form of otherness, of being other, being unlike others around you. The incomplete truth of life in exile is filled out in the creation of the exilic self in literature. Not language as such but literature is the home of exile.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia. London: Verso, 1974. Original German ed. 1951. Baudelaire, Charles. “Le cygne.” Oeuvres complètes (Complete Works). Paris: Gallimard, 1961. 81–83. Bobkowski, Andrzej. Szkice piórkiem (Sketches with a Quill). Warsaw: Cis, 2007. First ed. Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1957. French Trans. Laurence Dyevre as En guerre et en paix journal 1940–1944 (In War and Peace: Journal 1940–1944). Paris: Noir sur blanc, 1991. Bobkowski, Andrzej. Z dziennika podróz˙y (From a Travel Journal). Warsaw: Wie˛z´, 2006. Brandys, Kazimierz. Miesia˛ce 1978–1981 (Months 1978–1981). Warsaw: Iskry, 1997. First ed. Miesia˛ce 1978–1979. Warsaw, Nowa: 1980 and Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1981. Miesia˛ce 1980–1981. Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1982. Brandys, Kazimierz. Miesia˛ce 1982–1987 (Months 1982–1987). Warsaw: Iskry, 1998. First ed. Miesia˛ce 1982–1984. Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1984. Miesia˛ce 1985–1987. Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1987. Brandys, Kazimierz. Paris-New York 1982–1984. New York: Random House, 1988. Cortazar, Julio. “Axolotl.” Blow-up and Other Stories. New York: Pantheon, 1967. 3–9. Grynberg, Henryk. “Racoon.” Szkice rodzinne (Family Sketches). Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1990. 201–207. Hoffman, Eva. Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language. New York: Penguin, 1990. Márai, Sándor Memoir of Hungary 1944–1948. Trans Albert Tezla. Budapest: Corvina/Central European UP, 1996. Stempowski, Jerzy. Polska krytyka literacka (Polish Literary Criticism). Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1988. Tarkowski, Andriej [Tarkovsky, Andrei]. Dzienniki ( Journals). Warsaw: Instytut Sztuki PAN, 1998. Tarkovsky, Andrei, dir. Nostalghia. 1983. Videocassette. Fox Lorber, 1998. Wittlin, Józef. “Sorrow and Grandeur of Exile.” Four Decades of Polish Essays. Ed. Jan Kott. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1990. 81–96.

416

Chapter IV: Autobiographical Exile Writing

From Diary to Novel: Sándor Márai’s San Gennaro vére and Ítélet Canudosban John Neubauer

Márai’s autobiographical writings hide as much as they disclose. His most distinguished “confessional” work, Egy polgár vallomásai (Confessions of a Citoyen), is a beautiful fictionalized autobiography of his twenties, but it repeatedly stops where confessions would begin, and the same may be said of Föld, föld: Emlékezések (Land, Land: Memoirs), which covers the years 1944–48 and is often regarded as a sequence of the Confessions, and the diaries that Márai started to write during the war years. The memoirs end with Márai’s 1948 departure from Hungary, anticipating this event with lengthy reflections on exile, whereas the event remains all but invisible in the diaries. It is only by reading on that we notice a break in perspective: in the Hungarian sections of the diaries the world and its history intrudes upon the writer, whereas in the exile sections the writer goes, reluctantly, on trips of physical, intellectual, and artistic explorations. Since these explorations take different forms in diaries and novels, I wish to ask on the next few pages, what the link is between the first two diaries that Márai published in exile (covering the years 1945–57 and 1958–67) and the first two novels he wrote abroad, San Gennaro vére (Saint Gennaro’s Blood) and Ítélet Canudosban ( Judgment in Canudos). Márai’s diaries, just like his fictional autobiography, are not vehicles of selfrevelation, even if we learn much about his opinions: what Márai writes about himself often serves as a mask, not via misstatements but by omission. We cannot reconstruct from the diaries a chronology of Márai’s life, for the individual entries, grouped according to years, hardly ever carry precise dates, and this is actually not necessary for they seldom pertain to momentous events in Márai’s life or in the affairs of the world. What we found concerning his surely traumatic departure from Hungary in 1948, repeats itself in the critical year 1956, which momentarily enflamed his hope for a return home so much that he flew to Europe (all too late!). The diary contains only three relevant remarks: the first reacts to the reform movement in the spring, summer, and early fall by skeptically noting that critiques of the communist methods are questionable, for the methods are automatically produced by the theory and

From Diary to Novel (John Neubauer)

417

the practice (207). The other two are laconic, but dated remarks: on October 23, the day of the uprising, he notes “God’s mills are grinding fast,” whereas three days after the final Soviet aggression, on November 7, he merely notes being in an airplane. While the Napló neither follows Márai’s quotidian life nor records the momentous events in his life, it does contain plenty of reflections on his predicament. To the question why he shuns all visitors, he responds: “I can create what is human only if I keep away from people. [This is] not haughtiness, but ultimate, final humility” (66). And in 1951: “Hungarian society [I bicker with it] but, nevertheless, I absolutely belong to them (sic)” (110). Self-revealing are also Márai’s countless commentaries on his readings and visual art experiences, for they show a very sensitive and articulate critic with a dislike for modern and avant-guard expressions. His sensitivity allows him to recognize greatness, but his conservatism repeatedly rejects even those whose talent he recognizes: “Picasso and Braque: great but not true art” he notes in 1948 (66); a few years later he remarks about Dada art that it is now as it was thirty years ago, namely “just neurosis or fraud” (151). Joyce Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man he finds in 1952 masterfully constructed, and presented in a disciplined, artful way, but Finnegan’s Wake is a demented screaming [elmebajos sikoltozás] (135). More differentiated, though equally critical, are Márai’s comments from 1953 on Auden’s and Eliot’s poetry: “This contemporary Anglo-Saxon poetry is as alien to me as if I read a medical study; I ‘understand’ this poetry, just as I do contemporary music, from which, for me, melody and feeling are always absent – but I do not ‘hear’ it (144). In Kafka’s “Az óriási ürge” (The Giant Suslik) – meaning the story that Max Brod titled “Der Riesenmaulwurf ” but now is called “Der Dorschullehrer” – Márai could not find the “true” or the “genuine” (igazi) (146). Although the remark agrees with Kafka’s own self-depreciating criticism, it is striking that Márai, who was so thoroughly alienated from his world (from the Western one almost as much as from the Eastern one), should fail to recognize a kindred soul in Kafka. Alienation is evident also in Márai’s concrete and often highly evocative short descriptions of contemporary life in Europe and the US. After leaving Hungary, he briefly stayed in Switzerland, and then settled in the Posillipo section of Naples, which he found in the postwar years dilapidated, poor, and a curious blend of Catholicism and Communism. As an entry from 1948 shows, he intuitively loved, nevertheless, its broken people: “the people are sad; stench; what the people teach: not survival, not even appropriation, but simply to live. This is the true task” (55 f).

418

Chapter IV: Autobiographical Exile Writing

San Gennaro vére (Saint Gennaro’s Blood) These and other diary entries found their way into the first novel that Márai completed in exile, San Gennaro vére, which first appeared in a German translation in 1957. The Hungarian original came out only in 1965, in Márai’s selfedition in New York. The locale takes up roughly half of the text with humorous and warm characterizations of Posillipo’s simple Italian people and their post-war community. The first half of the text may be called a fictionalized travel narrative growing out of Márai’s daily diary observations. The second half of the book turns, however, from description to mediated self-analysis, by means of accounts that the novel’s fictional characters give of an exile writer/scholar from an unnamed East-European country. The writer himself never speaks directly. The first half only contains town gossip about a secluded foreigner; the second half – following his accidental or deliberate fall from a promontory to his death – zooms in on him by means of searching post-mortem reports by his female partner, a padre, and a police agent charged with writing a report on his death. In spite of all efforts, the writer and his intentions remain mysterious. He seems to have wanted to become a latter-day secular redeemer (hence the link to the book’s title, which refers to a Naples miracle reenacted each year with Saint Gennaro’s “blood”), but what exactly and how he wanted to redeem remains obscure. Clear, however, are the critical analyses he seems to have offered to his dialogue partners – remarks that are Márai’s own, for they makes unmistakable references to Hungarian culture. One passage, for instance, rather unfairly and viciously attacks György Lukács, as a “banker’s son, who joins the communists as a philosopher, for he never had an original thought of wisdom, but gets a chair from the communists, from which he declares that he, the philosopher, is actually superfluous in society, for in a communist society self-consciousness makes all philosophy superfluous … This type of spiritual cripple lustily castrates himself so that he can get a role in the seraglio, where he is allowed to sing in the chorus of ideologues in a falsetto voice” (146). A witty revenge for Lukács’s attacks on Márai back in Hungary, but one may ask whether it is fiction’s task to settle accounts this way.

Ítélet Canudosban ( Judgment in Canudos) In an introductory note to the second edition of this novel (1981), Márai reflects on a reaction he received from a reader, who understood the central event of the story as a desperate cry for a cleansing, at a moment of (Western)

From Diary to Novel (John Neubauer)

419

civilization’s moral failure. People want to flee from “the swamp of nihilistic mass hysteria” (i). Márai seems to have agreed silently with this diagnosis, for he recounted in the introduction that since writing and publishing the book (1970) chaos, terrorism, mass hysteria, religious sectarianism, and other rejections of (Western) society have intensified to the point that hope for a sane world is all but distinguished. Does the novel really portray how people want to escape from a swamp of “nihilistic mass hysteria”? Márai found the theme in a Brazilian classic, Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertoes (1902), which gives an account of a fourteen-year war that the republican army had to conduct in the backlands around Canudos against the sertanejos, led by their messianic leader Antonio Conselheiro. In a short postscript, Márai admits that he could finish this voluminous and erudite book only at the third try, for it was full of obsolete information. He then started to write what was “left out” of de Cunha’s book, but he got stuck, just as in his reading, until news of the 1968 unrests started to reach him. He saw the connection and finished the short book, which presents, by way of a scribe’s later recollection, a dramatic imaginary encounter between the Brazilian Minister of Defense and three freshly captured human wrecks of Canudos, one of whom turns out to be a woman. When she is allowed a wish, she desperately cries out, “I want to bathe” (98) – this is the cry that occasioned the response of Márai’s reader. The commander unexpectedly grants the woman’s wish; she takes her bath in the middle of the spacious barn while the rough soldiers discretely turn away, and she emerges as a transformed being, as a genuine and attractive woman. In the final moments of an inhuman war, a miraculous lull allows now a confrontation between two irreconcilable worldviews. The woman turns out to be the wife of an émigré physician from an unnamed foreign country. When the husband’s unannounced departure suddenly interrupts their long and successful marriage, the abandoned wife puts all the indices together and concludes that he must have gone to Canudos. By the time she reaches the rebels her husband is already dead, but she becomes herself a believer. While the army claims that the head they display in a jar of rum belongs to the “Councillor,” she claims to bring a message from him: he shall leave the coming night and build hundreds of new Canudoses in Brazil (iii; 157). The Minister of Defense is not a professional soldier but a highly educated civilian, a bureaucrat that believes that a democratic, liberal, and scientific order could emerge after the deposition of the king. He can understand the rebellion only as a conspiracy instigated by some anarchist who read the wrong books. The woman denies knowing anything about anarchists, philosophers, and other “seducers” of the mind, and claims she has found in Canu-

420

Chapter IV: Autobiographical Exile Writing

dos elements of a utopian society. While he wants to know about the reasons that motivated the rebellious acts, and about ways in which she was brainwashed, she insists that she had encountered a “spontaneous” community of likeminded individuals. The dialogue in the shadow of the final assault on the rebels is inevitably inconclusive: the Minister exits and leaves the three captives to their fate. Similarly inconclusive is Márai’s novel, born in the shadow of exile. We know from his diaries, as well as from his preface and postscript to the novel, that he abhorred anarchy and violence against the Western civil order. This was, surely, the ideological impulse for writing the novel. Yet within the fictional context, the Canudos “judgment” remains suspended. The war has turned the soldiers into beasts, but the civil order is not a ruthless dictatorship, while the insane rebellion manifests an irrational capacity in human beings to believe. The rebellion holds up a dangerous human capacity that also represents a ray of hope amidst a scientific and technological society of bureaucrats. It is hardly accidental that the spokesperson of the rebels is a woman who cannot be accused of barbarism. The foolhardy rebellion corresponds to the writer’s suicide in San Gennaro vére, but the cards are stacked differently here. As Mihály Szegedy-Maszák rightly remarks, Ítélet Canudosban is one of Márai’s best novels, because here he manages to go beyond his inclination to monologize (96) – as it still happened in the previous novel. The balanced dialogue of the new novel can be read in different ways, but it does not constitute a message that would unequivocally condemn anarchist acts, even if its author definitely did so. The novel suggests that irrational acts cannot be rationally eradicated from history. For Márai the “citoyen,” this was a horrifying perspective, yet he gave in this novel space for those irrational rebels. And if we reread his diaries in terms of the novel’s disposition, we may discover that he himself also saw in certain irrational acts not only a threat to civil society but perhaps also a ray of hope. San Gennaro’s blood, the writer’s suicide in that novel, and the rebellion in Canudos all represent versions of such irrational acts, but only the second novel offers for them a discursive defense. If San Gennaro vére grows out of diary observations of the world around Naples, the impulse for Ítélet Canudosban came from a reading experience. Márai may not have liked da Cunha’s book, but he must have felt some sympathy with its author, who appears briefly in Márai’s novel as an independent journalist who sharply interrogates the military leader and then departs abruptly. Da Cunha becomes this way Márai’s alter ego.

From Diary to Novel (John Neubauer)

421

Works Cited Cunha, Euclides da. Os sertoËes (campanha de Canudos). 1902. Trans. Samuel Putnam Rebellion in the Backlands. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1957. Márai, Sándor. Föld, föld: Emlékezések (Land! Land!: Memoirs). Toronto: Vörösváry, 1972. Trans Albert Tezla as Memoir of Hungary, 1944–1948. Budapest: Corvina & CEU; Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Márai, Sándor. Ítélet Canudosban ( Judgment in Canudos). 1970. Munich: Újvári “Griff ”, 1981. Márai, Sándor. Napló (1945–1957) (Diary: 1945–1957). Washington, DC: Occidental P, 1958. 2nd ed. 1968. Márai, Sándor. Napló 1958–1967 (Diary 1958–1967). Rome: author, 1968. Munich: Újvári “Griff ”, 1977. Márai, Sándor. Napló 1968–1975. Toronto: Vörösváry, 1976. Márai, Sándor. San Gennaro vére (San Gennaro’s Blood). New York: author, 1965. “Munich: Újváry “Griff, 1977. First ed. in German Das Wunder des San Gennaro. Trans. Tibor and Mona von Podmaniczky.: Baden-Baden: Holle, 1957. Szegedy-Maszák, Mihály. Márai Sándor. Budapest: Akadémiai, 1991.

422

Chapter IV: Autobiographical Exile Writing

Exile Diaries: Sándor Márai, Gustaw Herling-Grudzin´ski, and Others Włodzimierz Bolecki

In 1998 I conducted interviews with the Polish writer Gustaw Herling-Grudzin´ski (Bolecki Rozmowy), who had been living in Neaples since 1955. During one of our conversations Herling-Grudzin´ski remarked that he was fascinated with the Italian translation of Sándor Márai’s novel A gyertyák csonkig égnek (The Candels Burn to their Stump), which had just been published in Italian and immediately became a bestseller. From the Italian press, HerlingGrudzin´ski learned about Márai’s biography and other works, among which he found the diary the most interesting. By that time, Herling-Grudzin´ski had published seven volumes of his own Diary. Herling-Grudzin´ski deeply regretted that he had not known Márai’s works earlier and not had met him in person when they lived so close to each other in Italy for many years. Naples and Salerno, where Márai lived, are merely seventy kms. apart and HerlingGrudzin´ski used to be a frequent visitor in Salerno and its surroundings. In Márai‘s novel, which came out in Poland several months after our conversation, Herling-Grudzin´ski found both the topic and the poetics fascinating. Márai tells a story about a complex combination of love, passion and envy which occurs between two men and a woman. The same theme pops up continuously in many of Herling-Grudzin´ski’s works.The narration in Márai’s novel, lean, somewhat traditional, yet very intensive and free of allusions, must have been very appealing to Herling-Grudzin´ski. However, it was only the reading of the three-volume Polish edition of Márai’s Diary (which covered the years 1943–89) that made clear to me that the parallel with Márai was not only Herling-Grudzin´ski’s last great literary fascination, but also a crucial issue in twentieth-century East-Central European literature. Márai’s Diary is like a beam of light bringing out of the darkness many still unnoticed problems and similarities between Polish writers and him. Let us start then by tracing this common territory. The lives of both authors were cut into two similar halves: before World War II (in Hungary and in Poland) and after 1945 in exile. Both Márai and Herling-Grudzin´ski became

Exile Diaries (Włodzimierz Bolecki)

423

closely acquainted with Nazism and Communism, the two totalitarian systems of the twentieth century; both witnessed two occupations: the German and the Soviet one, of which the second was not known in the West; both watched the political paradox of World War II in Eastern Europe: the barbaric crimes of the Nazis caused the Bolsheviks (allies of the Nazis in the years 1939–41), to be awaited in 1945 by some Eastern European societies as liberators; both witnessed the depravation of societies and individuals under the influence of both of these ideologies and political systems; both spent most of their lives in exile, about which they made up their minds approximately at the same time, right after the communists took over the power in Central Europe. Márai’s and Herling-Grudzin´ski’s destinies and interests coincided in several ways, though neither was aware of that. Both lived for a while in Italy as well as in Germany, which they describe with great acuity, both contributed to Radio Free Europe and were among the most prominent people in their respective exile communities (though Márai, for one, consistently kept away from exile groups). Both were fascinated with art and literature, wrote about the same writers and even the same texts, often in a very similar way. Both Márai and Herling-Grudzin´ski closely watched the stances of the Western European politicians and intellectuals resigned to or fascinated by Communism and accepting the totalitarian regime in Eastern Europe. Wherever they resided and whatever they did, they lived the same hopes and suffered the same kinds of bitterness. As an example for that I can refer to the 1956 Hungarian revolution, which received no support from the Western countries – an issue they both touch upon in their Diaries. For decades, Márai and Herling-Grudzin´ski were unknown writers in their countries, banned by communist censorship, and both reconnected to their readers in Hungary and Poland only after the fall of Communism. The list of such similarities is so long that my lecture could be just an index to a book titled “Márai and Herling-Grudzin´ski.” Such a book may one day be written; in this article I shall focus only on a few introductory issues. At the beginning of this comparison, we should note that Herling-Grudzin´ski was not Márai’s peer. Born in 1919, Herling-Grudzin´ski was two decades younger than Márai, but the latter had peers among the important Polish exiled writers, including Aleksander Wat (born in 1900), Józef Mackiewicz (born in 1901), and Witold Gombrowicz (born in 1904). Like Márai, Wat committed suicide (in Paris in 1966). Mackiewicz died of cancer a few years before Márai (in Munich in 1985), and Gombrowicz died of asthma in Vence, France in 1969. Like Márai, they all died in exile, and the latter two were forbidden in their home country. Herling-Grudzin´ski died of a stroke in 2000 in Naples.

424

Chapter IV: Autobiographical Exile Writing

What these writers shared may be characterized with the title of Aleksander Wat’s memoirs, My Century (1977). The other diaries could carry similar titles, for they cover most of the century’s second half: Márai wrote his Diary between 1943 and 1989; Herling-Grudzin´ski’s Diary covers the period from 1971 to 2000 (he started it already in 1942 but did not publish the notes covering the years 1942–70); that of Gombrowicz’s covers the years 1953–66. The similarity lies not only in the use of diary as a literary genre, but also in the discourse characteristic for all these writers, which is based on memoirs of and reflections on the age, with the writer and ‘his century’ as protagonists. A century of abrupt cultural and social changes, a century of the worst crimes and ideological madness, a century in which masses became the subject and the individual was degraded. In one of the first records in Márai’s Diary in 1943 the fear of gigantomania, of surpassing human measures appears (1: 10). The question what is the essence of “my century” functions as a fundamental leitmotif in Márai’s, Gombrowicz’s and Herling-Grudzin´ski’s diaries, as well as in Wat’s My Century or Mackiewicz’s various autobiographical recollections. All these writers, Márai, the oldest among them, were part of a common intellectual formation which could be called Eastern European Modernism. Despite similarities, this Modernism differed significantly from the Western European literary Modernism in one matter: in Eastern Europe, historical heritage proved to be the driving force behind the works of the writers. The historical heritage influenced not only the topics but also the poetics of their works; above all it determined the particularity of their diaries. I am interested in what we say about the diaries of the Polish writers from the perspective of Márai’s, and, at the same time, what we can note in Márai’s diary from the perspective of the Polish writers.

Eight Issues of Comparison 1. Not all of Márai’s Diary is fully published as yet. It is even difficult to say how many volumes the diary will consist of. The Polish version comprises three volumes, the Hungarian volumes are being complemented with titles “what was left out of the Diaries,” and gradually republished in annotated “complete” editions from the huge reservoir in the Márai archives. In contrast, the Diaries of Herling-Grudzin´ski and Gombrowicz have already been entirely published. The latter writers gave themselves their final literary shape and published them. Possible supplements found in their archives will not change these diaries.

Exile Diaries (Włodzimierz Bolecki)

425

Why did Márai write a diary? Why did he publish it during his lifetime? These same questions come up when we consider the diaries of HerlingGrudzin´ski and Gombrowicz. Why did the exiled East-Central European writers publish their diaries during their lifetimes, while the ones who stayed in their homeland did not? One answer to this question is that the diary gave the exiled writers the opportunity of a non-fictional and totally unbound firstperson expression. The diary was for all of these writers an experience of independence (Márai 44). In his diary, the writer presents himself to the readers not as the author of a literary construction, behind which he himself is hidden, but as a person, as a specific, living individual. In the literary sense, the writer who publishes a diary rejects the convention of objective literature whose ideal – since the times of Flaubert – has been the so-called “author’s disappearance.” In Anglo-Saxon reflections on the modern prose, started by the essays of William James and then theoretically developed mainly in Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction (1921) and Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), the main characteristic of the modernistic novel was the disappearance of the omniscient narrator. In this conception the dismantling of the nineteenth-century realistic novel was carried out by turning the figure of the narrator into an instance invisible to the reader. This conception – well justified in the English language novel – is not suitable to describe the development of the modernistic prose in Polish literature, where the so called author’s narration (Irzykowski, Witkacy, Gombrowicz, Schulz, and others) was characteristic. In his Diary, Márai speaks in his own name – differently from what he does, for instance, in the novel A gyertyák csonkig égnek (The Candles burn to their Stubs), where the narrator is anonymous. Herling-Grudzin´ski and Gombrowicz avoid using anonymous narrators in their literary works; they are always written by an internal (first person) narrator, who has many characteristics in common with the author – for example parts of the biography and even the last name. Whatever the differences between the poetics of Márai, HerlingGrudzin´ski, and Gombrowicz, their notion of the diary allowed them to argue in their own name with the world, their nation, literature, art, politics and all twentieth-century culture. For the writers living in exile, the diary was an exceptional genre of literary expression, in which the truth about reality did not have to be replaced with literary fiction. However, this was a privilege of only writers in exile, for due to censorship the writers living in communist countries could not publish any truth about anything. This is why the diary (just like the essay) became the most characteristic and, at the same time, the most original genre of exile literature.

426

Chapter IV: Autobiographical Exile Writing

2. The diaries of Márai and Herling-Grudzin´ski differ in formal terms. HerlingGrudzin´ski’s always specifies the date and place of writing the entry. As for Márai, a large part of his Diary is a collection of reflections from the whole year; one does not know when and where they were written. Herling-Grudzin´ski’s Diary resembles an intellectual chronicle held from day to day. He wrote his diary in one city, Naples, and in one country, Italy. Gombrowicz wrote his Diary in Argentina (1953–63), and during the last three years in Germany and in France. Márai’s Diary travels along with the author across the world, and often becomes a travel journal. Of course, Herling-Grudzin´ski and Gombrowicz travel as well, however these are trips rather than long journeys. This also has consequences for the construction of the themes in the diary. Márai’s Diary could be compared to a changing, rotating stage of the world, a theatrum mundi. He purposefully chooses the role to observe the weirdness and madness of the twentieth century on different continents. The diarist Márai is aware that he is partaking in historic events that defy up-to-date knowledge about society and the individual. This is why his Diary focuses on reality. His Diary is saturated with condensed notes of a sociologist, historian, ethnographer, and explorer of civilization. Márai is moved by everything he sees: he always asks himself where people will be led by the processes and changes of twentieth-century civilization. Changes that nations, societies, groups, and individuals undergo in the twentieth century, are an important subject his Diary. As an observer, Márai often wonders and questions: unanswered questions prevail in the modality of his Diary. What the diaries of Márai and Herling-Grudzin´ski have in common is a similar description of reality, reflection on phenomena and events, behind which the diarist hides his privacy. Márai’s Diary is usually a collection of autonomous reflections, sometimes only two, three sentences. Herling-Grudzin´ski’s diary is daily chronicle, an intended portrait of his time seen from Italy and France. As for Gombrowicz’s Diary, it is a collection of micro-essays and polemics, in which the author’s “I” is the center and dominates over everything. Briefly speaking: Gombrowicz’s Diary is from the very beginning the author’s manifesto. The subject on which Gombrowicz “lectures” at many different occasions is the individual within cultural roles and institutions. The subject of Herling-Grudzin´ski’s Diary is Europe after Yalta, seen through the eyes of a former prisoner of a Soviet concentration camp. The perspective of Márai’s diary is broader because it also refers to America. Herling-Grudzin´ski’s and Gombrowicz’ Diaries consist of many commentaries and interpretations of their own works, as well as of literary works by others. Márai avoided commenting his own work. He wrote much about other

Exile Diaries (Włodzimierz Bolecki)

427

people’s works and about literature in general, but he did not turn himself as writer into a hero of his Diary. In this, he utterly differed from Gombrowicz, who purposefully created a diary of a writer – of an artist. Herling-Grudzin´ski’s Diary is in between these two variants. Just like Márai, he mainly observes the world in his Diary, and yet, at the end of his life he made himself and his writing a hero of the Diary. All of these diaries, regardless of their differences, are similar insofar as their authors believe that the diary is a literary piece. Herling-Grudzin´ski and Gombrowicz devote much space to this question. Márai, contrary to them, does not write about this issue at all. However, in the very construction of Márai’s diaries, one can find an identical artistic conception. His Diary is not a collection of notes, but a literary work whose poetics consists of a condensation and generalization of observation. Observing a concrete individual event (a conversation, a reading, or an observation of the world) the narrator universalizes the singular fact and turns it into an entity. The records in Márai’s Diary become short parables, metaphoric presentations of what happened to societies and individuals in the twentieth century. Márai is a master of abbreviation in the Diary: he switches from narration to a brilliant comparison, aphorism, or a literary climax. 3. Although Márai lived in America for many years, the main subject of his diary – if one may speak of a subject in a diary at all – is the history of EastCentral Europe: its revolutions, wars, terrors, atrocities, and suffering;, its restrictions on the freedom of thought, its contempt for the individual, and its trampling on elementary values. Márai writes about himself as a writer from the turn of the century: “I was born at the turn of two epochs.” Although his key experience– just like that of Herling-Grudzin´ski – was World War II and its consequences, the two writers take totally different perspectives. Aged thirty-nine, Márai was already a mature person at the beginning of the war. In 1939, Herling-Grudzin´ski was only twenty. Márai describes in his Diary Europe after 1939 from the perspective of a disintegrating historical unity – the disintegration of its Latin culture and tradition. These were – to quote the title of his great book – “memoirs of a citoyen” who saw the destruction of liberal Europe by totalitarianism and nationalism. Herling-Grudzin´ski’s Europe is totally different, simply because he was not a citoyen or a “patrician” in Mann’s sense of the term. Yet, there was a different, more important reason: young Herling-Grudzin´ski’s traumatic experience was the Soviet camp in which he had spent two years. He called it “a world apart,” meaning a world of reversed values, a “prison civilization.” Márai was terrified by the degeneration

428

Chapter IV: Autobiographical Exile Writing

of liberal Europe, which he remembered from before 1939. Herling-Grudzin´ski fled from the Soviet hell simply to Europe. Whatever it was: compared to the Archipelago Gulag, Europe was a normal. Márai also experienced “a world apart,” the ghetto in Budapest, which he described in his Diary. From these two different personal experiences of the “world apart” Márai and Herling-Grudzin´ski drew identical philosophical and ethical conclusions. For both authors, the question “what is the nature of man?” became a major problem. Who is responsible for and who the victim of crime in the twentieth century? The conclusions of both writers were similar. No crime may become a norm, because man – despite some horrible experiences – is a moral being. Although Márai’s stance could be described as religious skepticism, he was sensitive to the metaphysical dimension of reality and of man’s nature. In his notion of human nature, God and the gift of faith were paths to understand the mystery of man. According to Márai, man learns about himself when he is “face to face with God.” The key to his humanness is therefore his conscience, which can be neither reduced nor determined by anything. Herling-Grudzin´ski’s conception was exactly the same. As for Gombrowicz, he thought differently: he interpreted conscience not in moral or metaphysical categories but in interactive, social terms, as the result of inter-human relations. This conception was unacceptable for Herling-Grudzin´ski, and Márai would probably not have been its partisan either. Márai and Herling-Grudzin´ski experienced World War II in Europe; Gombrowicz was then in Argentina. Márai’s and Herling-Grudzin´ski’s conception should also be viewed from a different perspective. Márai’s peer was Aleksander Wat, who wrote about himself that he had been born at the moment when Nietzsche died. Wat started in the same year as Márai (1918–19), and also as a poet. However, Márai saw the fundament of European culture in its bourgeois character, Wat, who was a futurist, debuted under the banner of the Nietzschean war against all of culture and its axiological foundation. For twenty years, Wat was an advocate of the Bolshevik revolution. He changed his approach twenty years later, during the war which he spent mostly in Soviet prisons. After his return to Poland in 1945 he became one of the most profound and most religious poets of Mediterranean culture, and after he emigrated in the mid-1950s, as an uncompromising anti-communist. His Oxford lecture, The Semantics of the Stalinist Language, preceded Sovietological studies by several decades. Wat’s My Century is a result of this experience; it is a story about an anti-human utopia of creating a new civilization on the ruins of European culture and about the price paid by humanity for this common Bolshevik-Nazi madness. If Márai had titled his diary My Century, his diagnosis would be the same, only the word “we” would mean something else.

Exile Diaries (Włodzimierz Bolecki)

429

Márai and Herling-Grudzin´ski watched Bolshevism and Nazism give birth to a culture of lie. Both of them, as well as Wat and Mackiewicz, devoted much space in their diaries to the unofficial history of Communism. They all saw treachery, offense, political and moral crime, in the communist methods of taking over and holding power in Poland and Hungary. Their common reply was the decision to go into exile, because – as Márai wrote – none of them wanted to be an “accomplice in crime.” In this sense, their diaries were individual and intellectual attempts to destroy what they could not accept, namely the popularity of the pro-communist discourse in the western media. 4. Márai repeatedly asked what the social sense of twentieth-century events was. Wherever he resides, his diary is a sort of a mobile study of culture. The question concerns the commercial and consumptive aspects of modern civilization. Márai interprets this question in an extremely original way. Commercialization itself is not a danger. It becomes one when the writer is requested to adjust to the rules imposed upon him. Thus, a writer is, in Márai’s view, an unadapted man, and consequently free and independent. This idea can also be found in the diaries of Herling-Grudzin´ski and Gombrowicz. However, Herling-Grudzin´ski and Gombrowicz do not become critics of commercialization, for they limit themselves to the defense of individual liberty against totalitarianism and the collectivization of thought. Márai knew the problems of modern civilization undoubtedly better than Herling-Grudzin´ski and Gombrowicz, and he was more sensitive to this kind of discourse than they were. He praised the American Revolution as a pragmatic one, in which commercialization and consumption turned out to be the result of satisfying human needs. This result, Márai says, tends to be unpleasant in its symptoms; it is, nevertheless, accompanied by enormous progress in the twentieth century. At the same time, praising the American pragmatic revolution means in Márai’s Diary rejecting the myths of such European revolutions as the French and Bolshevik one, whose realization required guillotine, terror, concentration camps, and the “Archipelago Gulag.” 5. One of the many common features of Márai’s and Herling-Grudzin´ski’s diary writing is landscape description. It plays a crucial role for both writers: they are sensual, they take into account colors and shapes, and they form a neverending admiration for the beauty of nature. Descriptions of nature in Herling-Grudzin´ski’s diary are decidedly subjective and always very intimate. The landscape is moving and changes according to the moves of the observer in

430

Chapter IV: Autobiographical Exile Writing

space. Márai’s conception of description is totally different. What matters in his diary is not what the landscape is to him but what the meaning is of what he sees and observes. The landscape in Márai’s descriptions is then objective, independent of the observer. He tries to inform neutrally about what he sees. Things are different in Herling-Grudzin´ski’s Diary, in which the Naples area is described as his other homeland, using for this description symbolic reminiscences of the lost Polish landscape. Márai’s description of landscape is first of all a means to reflect on the social world rather than on nature. My “everyday task is to see history in the landscape” (279), he writes, but he actually means the present understood as history, which produces itself in our eyes without having a name as yet. Márai and Herling-Grudzin´ski renewed the literary and reflective function of description. What Gombrowicz did was utterly different: he deprived description of every bit of cognitive function. 6. One theme in Márai’s and Herling-Grudzin´ski’s diaries is common for both writers in a very special way: the descriptions of southern Italy, its customs, the mentality of its people, its cultural remains, its landscapes, cities, and works of art. Next to each other, these descriptions give us the impression that Herling-Grudzin´ski and Márai followed each other’s tracks, as if they complemented each other’s observations, lived through the same fascinations, and paid attention to the same facts. We would need a large study to show this. 7. The last theme of Márai’s Diary is old age, the description of the dying body and of consciousness rebelling against this process, his feelings and his whole spirituality. This is also Herling-Grudzin´ski’s big theme, though he develops it in his last stories rather than in his Diary. 8. Márai, just like Herling-Grudzin´ski and Gombrowicz, considered himself a writer by vocation. Reading was for him a starting point for taking up a dialogue with other writers, a dialogue upon which he would build their condensed mini-portraits. Herling-Grudzin´ski acted in a like manner, treating his Diary also as a place for practicing literary criticism. Gombrowicz’s case is different: everything he writes in his Diary about other authors is only an excuse to formulate his own conception of literature. What is significant, however, is that Márai, Herling-Grudzin´ski, and Gombrowicz directed their blade of his criticism against literature. Each of them required that literature uncover the

Exile Diaries (Włodzimierz Bolecki)

431

truth of life and surpass literary conventions and taboos. Herling-Grudzin´ski could repeat after Márai that he is interested in literature and not in the literary life (44), that he finds “golden thoughts” and fictional stories without ties to experience boring. Herling-Grudzin´ski and Gombrowicz would underwrite Márai’s protest against a literature of “pretty words” (2: 256). It is perhaps precisely for this reason that diary writing was so important to them: in post-1945 East-Central European literature it was the only genre that allowed neither the emptiness of “pretty words” nor Orwell’s “news-speak.”

Works Cited Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1961. Gombrowicz, Witold. Dziennik 1953–1956 (Diary 1953–1956). Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1971. Hay, Julius. Geboren 1900 (Born in 1900. Recollections). Reinbek bei Hamburg: Wegner, 1971. Herling-Grudzin´ski, Gustaw, and Włodzimierz Bolecki. Rozmowy w Dragonei (Conversations in Dragonea). Ed. Włodzimierz Bolecki. Warsaw: Szpak, 1997. Herling-Grudzin´ski, Gustaw, and Włodzimierz Bolecki. Rozmowy w Neapolu (Conversations in Naples). Warsaw: Szpak, 2000 Herling-Grudzin´ski, Gustaw. A World Apart. London: Heinemann, 1986. Trans. Joseph Marek of the Polish Inny ´swiat. London: Gryf, 1953. Herling-Grudzin´ski, Gustaw. Dziennik pisany noca˛ 1971–2000 (Diary Written at Night 1971–2000). 7 vols. Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1995–2000. Herling-Grudzin´ski, Gustaw. Dziennik pisany noca˛ 1971–1988 (Diary Written at Night 1971–1988). 4 vols. Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1973–89. Lubbock, Percy. The Craft of Fiction. 1921. New York: Viking, 1957. Márai, Sándor. A gyertyák csonkig égnek (The Candels Burn to their Stump). Budapest: Révai, 1942. Italian trans. Marinella D’Alessandro as Le braci. Milano: Adelphi, 1998. English trans. Carol Brown Janeway (from the German) as Embers. New York: Knopf, 2001. Polish trans. Feliks Netz as Z˙ar. Warsaw: Czytelnik, 2000. Márai, Sándor. Napló (1943–1944) (Diary 1943–44). Budapest: Révai, 1945. Márai, Sándor. Napló (1945–1957) (Diary 1945–57). Washington DC: Occidental P, 1958. Márai, Sándor. Napló (1958–1967) (Diary 1958–67). Author’s ed. 1968. Munich: Újváry “Griff,” 1977. Márai, Sándor. Dziennik (fragmenty) (Diary [covering the years 1943–89]). Trans. Teresa Worowska. 3 vols. Warsaw: Czytelnik, 2004. Márai, Sándor. Egy polgár vallomásai (Confessions of a Citoyen). Budapest: Pantheon, 1934. Trans. Teresa Worowska as Wyznania patrycjusza. Warsaw: Czytelnik, 2002. Wat, Aleksander. My Century. The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual. Ed. and trans. Richard Lurie, foreword Czesław Miłosz. Berkeley etc.: U of California P, 1988. Abbr. translation of Mój wiek. Pamie˛tnik mówiony. 2 vols. London: Book Fund Ltd., 1977. Wat, Aleksander. Semantyka je˛zyka stalinowskiego (The Semantics of the Stalinist Language). Poznan´: SIW, 1981.

432

Chapter IV: Autobiographical Exile Writing

“Is There a Place Like Home?” Jewish Narratives of Exile and Homecoming in Late Twentieth-Century East-Central Europe Ksenia Polouektova

Exile, it says somewhere in the Satanic Verses, is a dream of glorious return. But the dream fades, the imagined return stops feeling glorious. The dreamer awakes. (Salman Rushdie, “A Dream of Glorious Return” 182)

Throughout his two-and-a-half decades of exile, Romanian-born poet and essayist Andrei Codrescu had been nursing many fantasies of return, “all of them triumphant, involving Bucharest in late summer or fall”: I saw myself at a sidewalk café, drinking the new wine, in animated conversation with the friends of my youth. Now and then a spray of linden flowers would descend gently from the trees above us to land in the wine and in our hair. The girls had deep black eyes and long raven black hair. We were, all of us, exactly the way I left us, in the faraway autumn of 1965 when I took the airplane to another world. […] I came back countless times in my fantasy, not always modestly unannounced. Sometimes I pulled up to the famous Capsa Café in Bucharest, the meeting place of venerable writers for over a century, in a convertible white Cadillac with the poet’s laurel crown at a jaunty angle on my long tresses. I could see the astonished faces of the venerable writers descended from the covers of books for just this occasion. “I’ve come to rejoin Romanian literature,” I said casually, the ash from my expensive cigarette falling languorously on a gold ashtray held by one of my three top-hatted dwarfs (The Hole in the Flag 16).

The sudden “explosion of history” that swept across East-Central Europe in 1989 made even the most extravagant fantasies look possible. Codrescu’s actual return to Romania in late December 1989 did, indeed,contain all the promises of being triumphant, and was as laden with self-conscious clichés as his playful mental rehearsals of it. As a correspondent with America’s National Public Radio and ABC television, Codrescu traveled to Bucharest at the height of the festive exhilaration that followed the toppling of the Ceaus¸escu’s regime, a native son who hoped to explain the meaning of these historical transformations to Americans. However, once the returnee immersed himself into the political feuds of post-Ceaus¸escu Romania, the euphoria of

“Is There a Place Like Home?” (Ksenia Polouektova)

433

both his rather theatrical homecoming (on the Budapest-Istanbul Orient Express) and of the skillfully staged “democratic revolution” that he came to witness turned into “eeriness” that began to creep in, “alongside the genuine emotional power of the events” (The Hole 240). As the televised romantic drama of the December events proved to be a scripted show, the American journalist ceded to the Romanian poet, who discovered that he had more to explain to himself than to his viewers overseas. Retold against the backdrop of a snowy Bucharest with charred tanks and the facades pock-marked with bullets during the December street-fighting, the earlier dream of return into the summery boulevards covered by a spray of linden flowers became incomprehensible to both Romanian and American audiences. “It fades away. The imagined return stops feeling glorious. The dreamer awakes.” Edgar Hilsenrath went on to Tel-Aviv and New York, Celan to Paris, Appelfeld to Jerusalem, Rezzori to Italy. And they all know that as far as Central Europe is concerned, they can’t go home again. It’s no longer there. (Stenberg 133)

Codrescu’s homecoming was one of many in post-communist East-Central Europe, but very few of them were as grotesque and glorious as his imaginary return. In May 1994, Alexander Solzhenitsyn came back “to rejoin Russian literature,” crossing the entire country by train from the Far East to Moscow. With massive media coverage, and public speeches at every stop, this impressive homecoming was designed to symbolically reverse the vector of Solzhenitsyn’s expulsion to the west twenty years earlier. It was also meant to position him as a quasi-prophetic figure, whose return was both redemptive and symbolic of Russia’s true regeneration. However, the majority of the returning exiles and émigrés preferred to shun publicity and to conduct their visits privately, often semi-secretly. They found this in good taste, and many would have certainly found Solzhenitsyn’s pompous arrival to Russia and his subsequent short public career there a travesty both aesthetical and ethical. The expulsion of public intellectuals from their native country was first and foremost a political gesture; so is the exile’s voluntary return – an ostensible reversal of the earlier injustice. Fear of an adoring vulgar crowd (or, perhaps, an equally strong anxiety that there may be no crowd at all) was not the only reason why many deferred a return trip. For forcibly exiled intellectuals, going back can imply a symbolic undoing of the wrongs committed against them, a forgiving and closure to what, in fact, refuses to heal and be forgiven. It also threatens to co-opt the historical victim of the overthrown regime into the new, no less controlling ideological discourses and exigencies of the regime

434

Chapter IV: Autobiographical Exile Writing

that allowed the return. The question of return seems particularly charged for East-Central European exiles, and audiences at home and journalists everywhere seem especially eager to raise all of its ramifications, often to the exiles’ dismay. Norman Manea recounts a story of homecoming of another famous exiled writer, Milan Kundera. When in 1994 he was awarded a prestigious Jaroslav Seifert prize, an award that, in Manea’s sarcastic assessment, should have “reconciled the motherland to its famous wandering son” (257) Kundera, who had by then been living in France for seventeen years, refused to attend the ceremony. In 2007 he similarly refused to pick up the Czech National Literature Prize, the first in the history of the award to do so. His gesture naturally raised the question of whether Kundera, who has been writing in French since the early 1990s, can still be considered a Czech writer. In the early 1990s, Joseph Brodsky was similarly invited to return to his native city by the Mayor of St. Petersburg, who promised him a lavish reception and a huge mansion downtown, which could only discourage Brodsky with his professed distaste for any sort of public adulation. The visit never materialized, although Brodsky’s friend Mikhail Baryshnikov recalls that the two were entertaining the idea of a secret trip from Helsinki to Leningrad by ferry with a tourist group. To avoid being recognized, they jokingly considered arriving in disguise, “fake beard, wig and all.” Nothing came of these plans either. “I do not know if I am in a state to come as a tourist,” Brodsky confessed in one of the interviews. When the journalist flinched at the word, he explained: “Well, how else? A guest is a tourist. That’s one thing. And […] I am not a metronome swinging back and forth. I probably won’t do it. It’s just that a human being moves only in one direction” (qtd. in Graffy 142–43). Regardless of all the posturing that one may discern in some of these examples, the rationales of the non-returnees and the reactions of the domestic publics to them are worth pondering. Writing about exilic homecoming prompts, I shall argue, reflection on the many non-returns, on stories of exiles that choose to remain abroad even after the gates of the homeland had been flung wide open and the return could earn the former persona non grata abundant comfort and popular veneration. These problematic returns and non-returns keep the very subject of exile topical, despite the common assumption that the very concept must have lost its relevance with the lifting of the Iron Curtain, and, more recently, the end of the Balkan wars. Not only does the term itself show no signs of disappearing, but its many impressions and expressions continue to organize fields of cultural production and ideological strife. While other contributions to this volume amply discuss the political costs implicit in the homecoming of both the exiled intellectuals and

“Is There a Place Like Home?” (Ksenia Polouektova)

435

their work, I shall concentrate on the cultural constructions of the conventional antithesis of home and exile, belonging and dislocation. Does homecoming really spell the end of exile, and is there much intellectual and analytical gain to be had from pitting exile and home so staunchly against each other? What are the ruptures and continuities between the historically and spatially bound discourses of “exile” and “home” and how do we account for the perseverance of them despite the rapidly changing political and social contexts? The current academic fascination with issues of memory, time, and space, has generated a manifest output of critical writing on exile, making the subject an academic common place of sorts. If it is “compelling to think about,” as Edward Said famously remarked, it is precisely because exile embodies the master tropes of modernism, which affect much of twentieth-century art and thought, such as alienation, estrangement, longing, restlessness, and displacement (Said 173). As a powerful metaphor of modern consciousness, post-Romantic condition of exile invites theoretical reflections on the relationship between nation, identity, and location (Kaplan 117–122; Naficy 1–3). In examining the various deployments of “exile” in contemporary critical theory and across the wide range of disciplines – from history to literary criticism, to anthropology, sociology, media studies and psychoanalysis – one is struck by the sweeping thematic diversity that is being inscribed into it. It seems no longer enough, they suggest, to think of exilic experience as predicated on the spatial displacement, on the physical inaccessibility of home. While the idea of “home” itself has been increasingly under erasure on the part of postmodern critical theorists, the condition of exile is universalized and diffused to the extent that most of the social, political, and economic and cultural issues of today appear to produce their own “exiles”: from one’s body, gender, selfhood, culture, community, etc. In his essay “Exile, Nomadism and Diaspora” John Durham Peters explores a wide range of theological, philosophical, and political uses of different mobility concepts. Out of them all, he argues, the notion of exile is the one that most explicitly evokes a home place (19). Unlike nomadism and diaspora, for instance, that entail adaptability and accommodation to the foreign context, the traditional understanding of exile presents it as a melancholic, solitary state that is heavily dependent on the idea of home being “elsewhere,” inapproachable and remote. The very waiting for the possibility to return sums up the essence of the exilic being: “if he [sic!] stops waiting and adapts to the new circumstances, then he is not an exile anymore,” argues Mary McCarthy in her own taxonomy of exiles, expatriates, and internal émigrés (49). In a situation of exilic uprootedness, the yearning for a home that is the locus of se-

436

Chapter IV: Autobiographical Exile Writing

cure identity and completeness inspires “nostalgic compensatory projections of former stability, coherence and happiness” (Lupton 34). To sustain the exilic identity, then, means to defer endlessly the exilic homecoming, so that home remains an impossible, inaccessible object of desire. In contrast to the exile that pins for a fixed location in time and space, a nomad does away with the very idea of such attachment, defying the spatial anchoring of home in order to make it portable and endlessly replicable anywhere and everywhere. Nomadism rewrites the nostalgic axiom of “there is no place like home” to ask whether there is such a place as home to begin with. Different stances towards home and belonging, Peters argues, places exile and nomadism on the opposite poles of contemporary debate about identity. Discourses of exile operate within the primordial holistic understanding of the self that considers cultural belonging (“home”) to be the essential attribute of being. Nomadism, on the contrary, perceives identity as constructed and challenges the power of places and attachments to settle and define its freely roving subject. Exile and the attendant discourse of nostalgia, adds Caren Kaplan following dean McCannel, expresses the propensity of the occidental moderns “to look elsewhere for markers of reality and authenticity” while celebrating alienation and distance (qtd in Kaplan 34). Nomadism, then, is the articulation that recycles some of the tropes of Romanticism in order to defy the settled power, and it regards all forms of belonging and identity not as rigorous givens, but as subjects to construction and (re)invention. Does this mean that exilic discourse is necessarily rendered obsolete by the postmodernist deconstructions of home/identity, and that contemporary western mobility has effectively turned us all, however differently, into easily adapting nomads, indifferent to roots and cultural anchors? Hardly. The dichotomy of exile versus nomadism, as Peters remarks, is metaphorical rather than historical and refers to attitudes, not to experiences that are not always chosen freely (38). Obviously, theoretical readings of exile that uncritically conflate various kinds of displacements and estrangements in the name of the perennially suffering postmodern/post-colonial/subaltern, or artistic subject, obscure what Said called the “unbearable historicity” of the exilic condition. However, exile continues to be an idiom readily available for both description of the actual experience and the general attitude of the mind as long as the political authorities maintain the power to expel and to settle. Exile and nomadism possess a remarkable capacity to evolve and nearly merge, even beyond the historical conditions that give birth to them – marking the moment of continuity, rather than rupture, between the modernist and postmodernist discourses of identity. Thus, exile, as my reading of the literary exile’s autobiographical writing shows, can be conscious of the impossibility of

“Is There a Place Like Home?” (Ksenia Polouektova)

437

home, of existential homelessness – “unhousedness” in George Steiner’s terms – just as well as of an “at-homeness” in the world, the cosmopolitan feeling of being at home anywhere (Steiner 326). Ultimately, both nomads and exiles move in a post-structuralist theoretical landscape today, pass the ruined houses of criticism, historiography, and intellectual certitude (Chambers 18). The traces of affiliation – language, culture and myths of origin – no longer lead them back to “authenticity” and “roots,” but, as Iain Chambers deftly put it, “linger on as […] voices, memories, and murmurs that are mixed in with other stories, episodes, encounters” (19). Articulating exile and home, the narratives of homecoming analyzed here probe the relationship between the metaphorical and the historical, the literary and the literal. They are situated at the intersection of intimate self-portraiture, family biography, political commentary, and philosophical reflection, speaking therefore in multiple voices: personal, communal, mythological, political, and poetic. As any first-person testimonial narrative, this autobiographical writing is first and furthermost an exercise in self-(re)invention that reveals and “remembers” as much as it fictionalizes and “forgets,” ever mindful of the different audiences it addresses and the multiple rhetorical registers on which it operates. The authors’ awareness of and sensitivity to the broader cultural discourses of “exile” and “home,” as well as their current theoretical deconstruction, make these accounts of homecoming at once highly wrought in style, and self-conscious of the narrative and rhetorical strategies that they employ, self-ironic and self-reflexive. Since I am reading exile and home through autobiographies, I am interested in their tropes, themes, and structural features, which help, on the one hand, to delineate the polyphonic corpus of exilic storytelling, and offer, on the other, new readings of modernist and post-modernist discourses of exile and home. At the same time, alongside the narrative constructions of exile through autobiographical writing, I shall look at the historically and culturally specific discourses at play in these autobiographies. The four authors and five texts I have selected for this paper offer an interesting range of “variations on the theme” of twentieth-century East-Central European exile. They come from different cultures and generations: two are Romanian (Norman Manea and Andrei Codrescu), one is Hungarian (Susan Rubin Suleiman) and one is Polish (Eva Hoffman). Each had a different trajectory of leaving home and returning to it, complicating, as it were, the “purist” definition of exile. For instance, Hoffman and Suleiman, having emigrated to North American as children, could and did first return to East-Central Europe before 1989. Andrei Codrescu and Norman Manea, both “genuine exiles,” could only come back after the demise of the communist regimes. Yet at the same time, it is the

438

Chapter IV: Autobiographical Exile Writing

authors’ Jewishness, I shall argue, that weaves these diverse narratives together across the circumstantial and cultural differences. In a crucial way, all of the texts I shall analyze are returns to a post-Shoah East-Central Europe that ceased being “home” to Jewish exiles before their actual departure or even birth, thereby adding new meanings, both historical and ontological, to the notion of “exilic consciousness.” By reading the exiles’ autobiographies both as narrative performances and instances of particular cultural and historical discourses, I probe at the relationship between constructions of EastCentral European exile and return, and the twentieth-century Jewish narratives of exile and (impossible) homecoming. How do contemporary American intellectuals and culture-makers of East-Central European and, importantly, Jewish descent, map the post-Shoah and post-communist Europe in their autobiographical writing? What is the function of the exile’s Jewishness in the narratives of non-return? How does one ever return to the “home” that is no more? [W]riters in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we also do so in the knowledge – which gives rise to profound uncertainties – that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost: that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands. Indias of the mind. (Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 10)

For an exiled writer still pining for home, the native realm is a terrain of artistic-imaginative recreation and of heightened memory that sublimate the impossible homecoming. To live out one’s own fantasy of return would mean to endanger the elegiac completeness of what Michael Siedel, following Nabokov, calls “the unreal, narrative estate,” to surrender the “imaginary homeland” to the actuality of the place (5). Homecoming calls into question exilic identity, the workings of memory, the relationship to both the old and the new home places, as well as the romantic cultural and political discourses of nostalgia associated with these relationships. Because homecoming is a choice – while exile is usually not – reflections on the possibility of going back, the journey itself and the subsequent narrativization of both the return and of “the life entire” problematize the exilic status of the writer while challenging the conception of exile as something stable, a-historical, and wholly imposed from without. Return to the place of origin, whether actual or imagined, un-

“Is There a Place Like Home?” (Ksenia Polouektova)

439

locks the ambiguous relationship between home and homeland. It puts to the test both individual expectations and the more general cultural idea of nostalgia, which, as Svetlana Boym deftly remarks, often falters at the actual reunion, not unlike other long-distance relationships (xiii). In my readings of narratives of homecoming, both fictionalized – “rehearsed” through writing – and actual, I look at the ways in which the authors’ constructions of home and belonging reaffirm, deconstruct, or undermine nostalgia in relation to both the individual trajectory of an exile’s life story and the political meta-narrative of personal and national salvation. Exile and nostalgia are traditionally conceived of as inseparable. The incessant yearning to return home is what distinguishes exiles from émigrés, expatriates, or nomads who accommodate themselves to the foreign country. The original meaning of the term used to be limited to those long separated from their homelands – travelers, merchants, sailors, soldiers, etc. – to whom a special medical healing method had to be applied in case the real return was impossible. Gradually, however, nostalgia came to mean the yearning for the temps perdu, not the patria, but the past (Peters 30). As such, it does not only reflect the idiosyncrasy of an individual psyche, but is an essential attribute of modern consciousness, which cherishes the myth that authenticity is associated with traditional societies, and a slower pace of life untouched by the sweeping forces of modernization and progress. Childhood is an archetypical object of such nostalgia, with its carelessness and obliviousness to the passing of time. Not only the past itself is nostalgically mourned as lost and irretrievable. To recall Pierre Nora’s famous utterance, modern consciousness also laments the disappearance of memory itself in its most archaic, pristine, spontaneous form that could have given us an unmediated access to the past (7). Modern nostalgia is fundamentally self-conscious of its own futility. Having lost the idealism and innocence of traditional religious consciousness, modernity has made a cultural predicament out of auto-reflexivity and skepticism. Hence modern discourses of nostalgia are staked out by the two fundamental impulses of modernity: a utopian longing for a more harmonious past on the one hand, and incredulity towards its own myths on the other; they “are enamored of distance, not of the referent itself ” (Stewart 145). Long after the eighteenth-century prescriptions of opium, leeches, and trips to the Alps have gone out of medical fashion as treatments against nostalgia, there seem to remain two interconnected antidotes for the nostalgic restlessness: the realization of one’s desire through the actual homecoming, and the exercise of historical consciousness. “Nostalgia,” writes Svetlana Boym in her seminal study of the subject, “is a rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress. The nostalgic desires to oblit-

440

Chapter IV: Autobiographical Exile Writing

erate history and turn it into private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition” (xv). In what follows I shall examine nostos (homecoming) as a potential cure for algia (painful condition), to see what happens when the space of the past is literally revisited. I shall explore it through the accounts of intellectuals and culture-makers that have accomplished the feat of return and documented it in their autobiographical writing: Eva Hoffman, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Andrei Codrescu and Norman Manea. These accounts trace individual journeys of homecoming, and work against nostalgia’s “obliterations of history” by interrogating the trustworthiness of personal memory and by considering the individual in collective terms, as part of the shared historical experience. The intersection of the personal memories with the larger historical narrative opens up a space for irony and self-reflexivity, for anguish or distress, shame or ambivalence – in short, for sentiments that are quite different from nostalgic sentimentalism and can shatter the idealized “India of the mind.” In her autobiographical novel Natura the Polish-born writer Maria Kuncewiczowa describes her return to the town of Kazimierz. An American citizen since 1955, she first came back for a visit in 1958 and moving to Poland permanently in 1968. Kuncewiczowa registers a shock of recognition, not familiarity, at the encounter with her old house: “My house in Kazimierz where I’ve returned, is now standing in a world that’s completely different from the one in which it was built. And I am different too … I now see my house not so much as my regained living quarters, but as a historical monument” (qtd. in Zaborowska vii, x). The experience of her lost home, the place once inhabited that marks simultaneously the passing of her autobiographical time and the site of history, is a key to the narrative of the returning exile for it embodies the relationship between history and autobiographical memory. The main thrust of the autobiographical accounts of return, indeed the main tension that underlies them, so deftly expressed by Kuncewiczova, is the struggle to reinsert one’s own idiosyncratic life story into a shared historical predicament, “to see,” as Susan Rubin Suleiman puts it, “the personal in historical terms, as part of a collective experience” (Budapest Diary 163). Yet equally strong is the impulse to wrestle the idiosyncratic and the intimate from the personal and parental pasts (however distressing, embarrassing, even humiliating it might be) by admitting their complexity and ambiguities that resist both the unproblematic closures of historization and a-historical nostalgia. The dual fit of writing your own life history in and out of the larger historical narrative helps to disentangle, in Hoffman’s words, “the easy pieties of

“Is There a Place Like Home?” (Ksenia Polouektova)

441

memory from history’s difficult and complex truths”; it is made possible by the authors’ awareness of and sensitivity to the sentimental discourses of “homecoming” into which their own journeys of return may potentially be co-opted (qtd. in Kreisler, n.p.). Discussing the accounts of “retournees” in her recent work on the emergence of the Holocaust discourse in post-war western societies, Hoffman admits to being “weary of the ready-made metaphors and the pre-fabricated observations,” a sentiment that permeates her own, extremely and even painfully, self-conscious writing (After Such Knowledge 204). Both Hoffman and Suleiman are involved in the subject of exile, not only emotionally, by virtue of their lived experience, but also intellectually. Eva Hoffman has been a professor of literature and of creative writing at several American institutions, including Columbia, Tufts and MIT, and Susan Rubin Suleiman was editor of and contributor to the 1998 anthology titled Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances. Many other similarities in biographical circumstances suggest a comparative reading of Suleiman’s and Hoffman’s narratives of homecoming. As we shall shortly see, their accounts are, however, very different, and so are the exilic identities that they (de)construct therein. Both Suleiman and Hoffman are daughters of Holocaust survivors. Hoffman’s parents were hidden by a local peasant in the small Polish shtetl of Zalozce (now Ukraine) while most of the extended family perished. Susan Rubin Suleiman is a child-survivor of what she calls “a ½ generation.” She was about to turn five when the deportations of the Hungarian Jews started in the summer of 1944; her parents procured forged identity papers, enabling them to get a job as caretakers at a Gentile estate in the hills of Buda. Hoffman’s family left Cracow for Vancouver, Canada in 1959, seizing on the temporal lifting of the ban on the emigration of Poland’s Jewish population. Ewa was thirteen years old at the time. The ten year-old Susan fled with her family illegally in 1949, moving through Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Haiti before finally settling in the United States. Both Rubin Suleiman and Hoffman were educated at Harvard, and received their PhDs in literature; both have made successful academic and public careers in the United States with English as their language of artistic and professional expression. No less importantly, both Hoffman and Rubin Suleiman underwent name changes in emigration. Ewa became “Eva,” and Zsuzsa was renamed “Susan.” Although Susan reminisces in passing on her mother’s and grandmother’s affectionate way of calling her Zsuzsika, the memory of another, earlier, and much more disturbing identity change seems to carry more weight for her: she was taught by her mother another Christian name, Mary, as a way of protecting the family’s false identity during the war-years. Once in the

442

Chapter IV: Autobiographical Exile Writing

States and pursuing an academic career, Susan chose to be rather called/ known by her ex-husband’s last name (Suleiman) rather than by her Hungarian family name (Rubin) alone. It is Hoffman, though, who has more to say on the effects of what she calls “careless baptism” (Lost 105). However insignificant the name change might seem within each narrative, it shows how the preexilic past functions within the the author’s identity. For Hoffman, the namechange literally embodies two familiar tropes that describe the initiation into exile: a split into two selves, and a second birth. Adoption of a new name, this standard rite of passage, marks the emigrant’s embrace of Americanness (or Canadianness). The thirteen-year-old Ewa experiences this as a cultural dispossession, all the more shattering as it touches on both the national and the most intimate familial aspect of her being: Nothing much has happened, except a small, seismic mental shift. The twist in our names (her sister Alina becomes Elaine – K.P.), takes them a tiny distance from us – but it’s a gap into which the infinite hobgoblin of abstraction enters.[…] These new appellations, which we ourselves cannot yet pronounce, are not us. They are identification tags, disembodied signs pointing to objects that happen to be my sister and myself. We walk to our seats in a roomful of unknown faces, with names that make us strangers to ourselves. When the school day is over, the teacher hands us a file card on which she has written: “I’m a newcomer. I’m lost. I live at 1785 Granville Street. Will you kindly show me how to get there? Thank you” (Lost 105).

An incessant awareness of this “mental shift” that splits the Canadian Eva off from the Polish Ewa, is central to Hoffman’s exilic consciousness. She is, indeed, a perfect case of Kristeva’s étrangere à elle-même, which she directly evokes in the passage quoted above. She is just as estranged from her earlier self as from the new cultural environment around her. The space of her exile is, then, an unbridgeable gap, her “Great Divide” as Hoffman calls it, between two names, two vocabularies, and two cultural systems. And this gap can never be fully closed for she “cannot have one name again” (Lost 272). “The largest presence within me is the welling up of absence, of what I have lost” she writes, a feeling that she compares to “pregnancy without the possibility of birth” (Lost 115). But this absence is recompensed by the gift of a bicultural consciousness that allows her to shuffle between her allegiances to both cultures, and to perform the difficult balancing act of translation and reconciliation. The very title of Hoffman’s memoirs reveals that the acquisition of the new language is a means of remedying her “otherness,” however partially. The “conquest” of English becomes not only an emancipatory gesture that grants her acceptance and freedom of expression in the new society, it also facilitates a cultural translation of her Polishness, however incomplete, into that newly conquered space.

“Is There a Place Like Home?” (Ksenia Polouektova)

443

In her study of literary bilingualism, Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour argues that bilingual and polyglot writers should not be considered a mere sum of their languages, but a much more complex phenomenon, involving a different form of celebral organization for language, a different degree of cognitive flexibility, and a heightened responsibility to the language bred by the incessant awareness of the relativity of all the linguistic codes that they employ. Although bilingual writers, especially those who are forced to switch languages by the circumstances of their emigration or exile, are often obsessed with trying to maintain the purity of their mother tongue, this linguistic “innocence” is hardly ever possible, for the active use of the two languages makes up for an integrated whole, an intricate configuration that cannot be easily decomposed into two independent parts (Beaujour 26–27). The concluding remarks of Eva Hoffman’s autobiography capture the essence of bilingual consciousness well: No, there’s no returning to the point of origin, no regaining of childhood unity. […] Polish is no longer the one, true language against which others live their secondary life. Polish insights cannot be regained in their purity; there’s something I know in English too. […] When I speak Polish now, it is infiltrated, permeated, and inflected by the English in my head. […] Each language makes the other relative. (Lost 273)

The native and adopted language cross-fertilize, challenge and “shuddup” (i.e., shut up) each other, so that the writer uses each of them in radically different ways from somebody who is monolingual. The incessant tension between the two semiotic systems brings forth a third language state that is structured by the incessant awareness of the fissures and fractures between linguistic “building blocks” of one’s consciousness (Lost 273). The relativity of cultural meanings, revealed to her by the fundamentally frustrating feat of cultural translation, is the point where Hoffman’s memoir enters into a diverse field of critical theory that allows her to intellectualize and theorize her experience beyond its historical and biographical specificity, often at the cost of it. Her urge to deconstruct every apparently stable certainty is turning against itself again and again throughout the narrative, seeking meaning and exposing its relativity, claiming location in the very states of ambivalence and doubt (Fjellestad 142; Proefridt 124). Self-conscious references to psychoanalytical theory, structuralism, poststructuralism and postmodern philosophy generate a meta-commentary that, however overwhelming its deconstructivist urge, allows Hoffman to turn her “manifold otherness” into a form of “normalized” identity. “Exile” (the title of the second part of her memoir) ceases to be her temporal private state of being and becomes permanent and shared in the “New World” that she is about to enter (the title of the third part) once she abstracts it away as an “archetypical condition of contemporary lives.” The “being lost” written on her old school

444

Chapter IV: Autobiographical Exile Writing

file card has become a location in itself, one that she shares with so many displaced, exiled, and uprooted others, by fate or by choice, by the very ethos of changeability and relativism of their times: In a splintered society, what does one assimilate to? Perhaps the very splintering itself. […] I share with my American generation an acute sense of dislocation and the equally acute challenge of having to invent a place and an identity for myself without the traditional supports. It could be said that the generation I belong to has been characterized by its prolonged refusal to assimilate – and it is in my very uprootedness that I’m its member (Lost 197).

The abundance of psychoanalytical terminology and references to Lacan and Freud, as well as the writer’s own experiences with an analyst, suggest that Hoffman’s memoir is not just an account of her life but also a form of therapy, an exercise in “explaining herself to herself,” in “translating backwards” her complex otherness that could possibly reconcile the competing voices in her, so that in the end a more cohesive self emerges, a “person who judges the voices and tells the stories” (Lost 271–2). The process resists straight narratives, “any confidently thrusting story line” as sentimentality and untruth to the many splinters and fragments of her self. Despite the retrospective, chronological shape of her autobiography, Hoffman chooses to tell her story in the present tense, a “liberating” decision, as she admits, that holographs her exilic experience as a permanent and multifaceted condition, in which she is free to go back and forth into the past, not to heal the spatial or temporal rifts, but to make sure that “I – one person, first person singular – have been on both sides” (Kreisler; Hoffman, Lost 273). Susan Suleiman does not seem to share Hoffman’s sense of the bifurcated self, and admits to have drawn a clear line separating her Hungarian childhood from the rest of her life. But, then, she was three years younger at the time of her departure and has, perhaps, fewer memories of her birthplace: “It was as if a door had shut behind me when I left, sealing the first 10 years of my life in an air-tight room. For 35 years I had managed not to give much thought to that room. What would happen now that I had turned the knob on the door?” (Diary 20) Return to the country of origin and to a past that is quite literally “a foreign country,” inevitably implies “risking who one is” to borrow the title of the book that Susan Suleiman wrote while in residence at the Collegium Budapest. Whether this personal history has been sealed off in an air-tight room as in Suleiman’s admission, or carried within like some “private heaviness,” an “embryo that can neither be aborted nor given birth to,” as in Hoffman’s striking metaphor, the return destabilizes the very notions of being native and foreign.

“Is There a Place Like Home?” (Ksenia Polouektova)

445

In the introductory chapter of Budapest Diary that Suleiman tellingly titles “Forgetting Budapest,” she briefly tells the story of her family’s escape from Hungary and her career in the United States. Apart from her fleeting involvement in relief efforts organized on her campus for the refugees of the 1956 revolution, Suleiman’s life in America had “nothing to do” with the place and the culture in which she had spent the first ten years of her life. She learns French, and returns to Harvard as professor of comparative literature and culture, spending long periods of research and writing in Paris, the place that she refers to throughout her Budapest Diary as “the most beautiful city in the world,” and “a country of choice” (59, 63). She passes her love of the French language on to both of her sons, but does not teach them Hungarian or anything about their Hungarian heritage. The very term “heritage,” she argues, is for her as “for any other European Jew” inherently ambivalent: Were the picturesque horsemen of the Hungarian plains, not far from my mother’s birthplace, part of me or my children’s heritage? Then what about the “Jewish laws” of the 1920s and 1930s, which barred access to university education for all but a few Jews, or the murder of thousands on the streets of Budapest by Hungarian Nazis in the fall and winter 1944? Were they part of my heritage too? (Diary 9)

Reflecting on her first return to Budapest that she and her two young sons spent pursuing all the usual tourist entertainments, Suleiman is aware that she had chosen the most impersonal, most ritualized way of revisiting her native city after thirty-five years of absence. She wonders whether this detached identity of a tourist that she had adopted for herself on this first visit reflected something of her estrangement from her native city, which failed to immediately trigger waves of sentimental recognition in her. What she registers after her visit to her childhood house on Akácfa utca is not disappointment at not being moved but rather a sober awareness that emotional involvement with the place and recapturing the meaning it once held for her would require a connection with the people who once inhabited this house – with herself and her parents. The opportunity avails itself several years after the death of her mother, when the Collegium Budapest offers her a fellowship for the first half of 1993. The rest of the Budapest Diary documents Suleiman’s stay in Budapest and her quest for the traces of her family history, and the papers attesting to her birth and the births of her parents. Hence the subtitle of the book In Search of the Motherbook, which alludes to the Hungarian expression “copies of official documents.” She keeps a diary and does research in order to mourn her mother, and to “un-forget” what she has “forgotten.” The two conflicting relationships that Suleiman flags in her introduction – the relationship between her Jewishness and Hungarianness, and the relation-

446

Chapter IV: Autobiographical Exile Writing

ship with her mother are interconnected insofar as they both seem instrumental in her “forgetting” Budapest, in estranging herself from it the way she felt estranged from her mother. Once in Budapest again, she resorts to the familiar tourist mode: exploring the city as any other visitor would, taking cabs instead of public transportation, observing the locals with the detached eye of a foreigner who speaks the language but can never be sure whether she has a full grasp of the subtleties and nuances of the cultural content behind the words. Suleiman is conscious of her difference, of “sticking out here like a sore thumb,” and she does not seem to mind it (Diary 57). It is not only the slight accent in her Hungarian that gives her away as an outsider. When she asks an acquaintance whether she can pass as a “native,” she is told of her foreign-sounding intonations; she seems reconciled to the fact that “she can never be a “real” Hungarian” but also refuses to be considered “an ordinary American,” setting the record straight when a colleague mistakes her for one. “I do have a connection here,” she asserts. But what is this connection and what is she then? (58, 81, 95–96) Rather than reclaiming an identity through belonging, Suleiman continuously affirms “not-fitting in” as her major modus operandi. Her return is geared not towards embracing her Hungarianness but rather proving to herself yet again that she “does not completely fit anywhere, not even in her native city” (95). Elsewhere she remarks that her sense of affinity with the Hungarian community in the United States is minimal, reserved for people with whom she has professional, academic connections. In a conversation with her friend Julie, also a Hungarian emigrant and a Jew, Suleiman says she does feel Hungarian, but that this statement always “needs to be qualified if one is a Jew” (92). Jewishness as an epitome of “otherness” offers an identity of inherently “not-fitting-in,” of trying to pass and never really succeeding, an identity that implies and excuses ambivalence towards and estrangement from the majority culture. The question is, however, how much of this is constructed in an affirmative gesture towards one’s own foreignness in the city of birth, and how much of it is forced upon Suleiman by the dramatic experiences of the Holocaust that loom large in her childhood memories in Budapest. The matter is very private and sensitive, leading to a question about the reception of Suleiman’s memoirs in Hungary, which is, unfortunately, beyond the scope of this paper. It seems that Jewishness, rather than Hungarianness, offers Suleiman the link to her war-time childhood, sustaining a sense of incomplete and problematic connection to contemporary Hungary. For Hoffman, the Jewish and Polish parts of her history, identity, and loyalties coexist and infringe upon each other, refusing to “separate or to reconcile”

“Is There a Place Like Home?” (Ksenia Polouektova)

447

(Exit into History 101). Growing up in post-war Poland, she identifies with the words of the Polish-Jewish poet Aleksander Wat, who always defined himself as “Jewish-Jewish” and “Polish-Polish” without ranking the adjectives. Parenthetically, Wat converted to Christianity during his incarceration in the Soviet Union. Unlike Suleiman, whose idea of “Hungarian heritage” is irreversibly tainted by the country’s history of anti-Semitism and collaboration, Hoffman incessantly shuffles between her allegiances to Poland and her Jewishness: At the very moments my attachment to Poland, my admiration for all that is powerful in its culture is strongest, I upbraid myself for insufficient vigilance on behalf of those who suffered here, on behalf really, of my parents who survived the Holocaust in awful circumstances here. Every time I hear Poland described as an anti-Semitic country, I bridle in revolt, for that I know that reality is far more tangled than that (Kreisler).

Suleiman does not attempt reconciliation, but rather pits both parts of her history against each other, inhabiting “the good old inbetweenness.” Her perception of contemporary Hungarian society and her interest in current politics (she closely follows the rise of the right-wing and the chauvinistic and anti-Semitic rhetoric of its leader István Csurka) is invariably filtered through her private memories and her knowledge of the Jewish historical experience in Hungary. A characteristic entry during her June visit to Pécs describes her visit to the synagogue and a conversation with an elderly porter, who tells her about the deportations that had wiped out the local Jewish community. Later that day she records a conversation at a party, in which someone remarks: “It is dangerous to be a Jew in Hungary.” “When?” somebody asks him, “in the 1930s or 1940s, or do you mean now?” “Always,” he answered (153). While Jewishness opens questions about a collective Jewish historical fate, inquiry into her family’s history offers important correctives to this impersonal meta-narrative, a fuller, but perhaps also more ambivalent past (Burstein 801, 822). Despite the initial impulse of identifying with her parents, Suleiman’s search for the “Motherbook” imbues her parents’ lives with a meaning that is independent of their entanglement with hers, making some of her inquiries seem almost intrusive. She learns about her Mother’s first and lost love, her father’s repeated infidelities, her parents’ feuds over their mismatched marriage, and about Hungarian anti-Semitism that well predated the outbreak of World War II. There can be no nostalgia for that world, so much is clear, although the final statement of the Diary, related to Suleiman’s 1994 visit, sounds oddly upbeat. Having folded the past and present together like those family papers that she has found during her visits to Hungary, Suleiman concludes: “[These documents] tell a story, however minimal: A girl is born, marries and gives birth to a girl. The continuity of generations has prevailed over war and destruction, and I am the beneficiary of this victory” (219).

448

Chapter IV: Autobiographical Exile Writing

This “minimal story” seems to obfuscate another, less reconciliatory, one that the Diary left untold. When asked whether she had acquired a feeling of “at-homeness” in Budapest, she responds that she certainly did find home here; “not the home, sentimentalized found at last,” but rather another place, like Boston and Paris, where she feels at home and which would not “slam the door shut behind [her] as [she] leaves” (14). “The process of displacement/replacement, which I’ve thought of as the pattern of my life – each new home displacing the one before it – no longer adds,” she concluded: Budapest “doesn’t displace or replace any other home but is added to them” (171). Yet three years after her stay in the Collegium, Suleiman publishes a study of the Holocaust memoirs written by Hungarian women-survivors, “Monuments in a Foreign Tongue,” which expresses a sentiment radically different from the unproblematic resolution of her previous visits. Her compelling interest in these memoirs is certainly not accidental; it is another means to revisit and re-member her own war-time experience. The accented voices of the women-writers she reads bring to her mind not only locales like Szombathely or Tolcsva, but Hungary in general, not just the diminutive names like Bandi, Laci, or Ica, but Hungarian men and women. She savors these sounds, but the signified behind them are decidedly historical. They evoke places and people gone, not the present-day Hungary she has recently visited: But it’s not today’s Hungary, or today’s Hungarians, that these names evoke most vividly: to go to Szombathely is not my desire. (I have been to Nyíregyháza, my mother’s birthplace – once is enough.) […] The name resurrects the lost objects, but at the same time reinforces the sense of their pastness, their goneness. These people, these places (as they were, towns with many Jews in them) no longer exist (“Monuments” 650–51).

The theme of chance versus choice haunts most Suleiman’s reading of these memoirs. She returns to the episode that she had already recounted in her Budapest Diary – how she and her mother miraculously escaped from their house in Budapest during the rounding up of the Jews, which could have ended tragically, for the concierge (who certainly knew their true identity) could have given them away to the soldiers (Diary 33). Yet the concierge pretended to ignore them and the family survived. The study of the Holocaust autobiographies occasions yet another return to Suleiman’s own “spectral biography” of conditional tense, of “what if.” This time, however, it is not about the life she could have led if she did not emigrate. The moment of rupture, of loss, she realizes, predates the family’s departure from Hungary in 1949, and return is impossible since there is no pre-Holocaust place “as it was” to return to: Budapest has a flourishing Jewish community, the largest in Eastern Europe. It’s a beautiful city, wonderful to visit briefly or for longer sojourns. But once you have left it as a Holocaust survivor, there is no going back, not for good: you have no family there,

“Is There a Place Like Home?” (Ksenia Polouektova)

449

the few who may have remained have died or will do so very soon. In this respect, Budapest is like other Hungarian cities or towns, even though most of the Jewish population escaped extermination (“Monuments” 651).

Suleiman’s remark echoes statements of many other East European exiles and émigrés of Jewish origins, such as Andrei Codrescu, Aharon Appelfeld, Susan Vaga, Helen Epstein, Henryk Grynberg, and Norman Manea, all of which suggest that for Jews the discourse of exilic homecoming has been thoroughly inflected by the Holocaust, which had made the notion of an East-Central European “home” questionable already before the establishment of brutal communist regimes across the region. In her seminal study of the poetics of exile and return in the modern Jewish imagination, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi argues that the dramatic experiences of the twentieth century, – the Holocaust and the creation of the secular Jewish state in Palestine – have radically challenged the romantic discourses of Jewish homecoming (not the traditional religious/messianic longing for the “Next year in Jerusalem!” of the Passover seder, but rather the secular nationalist, Zionist, use of it). The disappointments and trivialities of the mass immigration to Israel undermine the romantic premises of the Zionist program of “ingathering the exiles,” built around the notions of closure, redemption, and normalization of the supposedly “unnatural” exilic condition of the Diaspora Jews. At the same time, the Holocaust has all but eliminated the Jews in some historically most Jewish lands (Galicia, Bukovina, Lithuania), turning these into sites of pilgrimage, of “symbolic homecoming” for Israeli and North-American Jews. This, however, is a “homecoming” to a “home” that had been destroyed, to an “unredeemed ruin,” an analogue or even a substitute “for Jerusalem as the ruined shrine” (Ezrahi 17). The growing popularity of a “Jewish-heritage tourism” to East-Central Europe from the United States and Israel has already elicited many scholarly responses, by scholars like Zvi Gitelman, Jack Kugelmass, Rona Sheramy, Oren Stier, Jackies Feldman, Ruth Gruber, and Erica Lehrer to name just a few. The usual criticism dismisses the practice of such pilgrimages as “scripted, nondialogical reenactments of the past” that prevent genuine intellectual or emotional engagement with both the past and the present of the countries visited. The sites of the formerly thriving Jewish communities function as mere theater props; none of their present-day actuality and vividness matters to the tourists. It is this culture of “returns” and of the literature it produces that Eva Hoffman ironically characterizes as “standard accounts, written with predictable frameworks of perception and featuring standard tropes: Poland as “one big cemetery”; the mean peasants facing visitors with their closed faces; the gaping sense of absence, of nothingness, where the Jews had once been, the anti-Semitism one can feel in the very air” (After Such Knowledge 203–204).

450

Chapter IV: Autobiographical Exile Writing

Andrei Codrescu, who returned to Bucharest and his native Sibiu after twenty-five years of exile via Budapest, deftly captures a genuine sense of historical loss at the sight of former Jewish communities. Hungary, he confesses, made him feel “the insistent mystery” of his Jewishness, for the country was once home to hundreds of thousands of Jews, including his two great-aunts, “who lived here and then were taken to Auschwitz and were no more” (The Hole 57). It is noteworthy that the experience of absence, of loss and decay, is what triggers Codrescu’s reminiscences of his Jewish roots, recalling for the first time in his narrative his Hungarian Jewish origins (and his original name, Perlmutter). Contemplating the neglected facade of the synagogue in the Dohány utca, and later joining the Hanukkah service inside and recognizing some of his own features in the others present in the room, Codrescu experiences “a strange homecoming” that merges his personal history with the larger currents of a collective Jewish fate: As I strolled past peeling columns, peering into the winter dark at Hebrew letters on the rows of graves in the old Jewish cemetery inside, I had the feeling that I had been here before. I felt the chill – and it was not the December cold – of a once-full world that was now empty, a deserted center that was also somehow at the center of my being. Something lost, gone, irretrievable. (59)

Codrescu’s emotion almost verbatim echoes that of Suleiman. Her gaze at present-day Budapest is also a “backward glance” at the traumas of the past. Eva Hoffman, however, is apprehensive of the “pathetic fallacy” of seeing East-Central Europe exclusively in terms of such sentiments, rather than appreciating the place in all its present-day actuality and concreteness. In her 1993 travelogue Exit into History: A Journey Through the New Eastern Europe, she abandons the explicit autobiographical mode of Lost in Translation for a journalistic travelogue. Like Andrei Codrescu, who goes to post-communist “New Eastern Europe” to witness the Romanian “Revolution,” Hoffman travels to Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary at the end of the 1980s and the early 1990s to “catch history in the act” (Exit x). And, like Codrescu in The Hole in the Flag, she is also on a personal quest to recapture, however fleetingly, “the lost territory” of her childhood before it disappears under the tide of “Change.” The autobiographical impulse is superimposed in both texts on the rhetorical and discursive mode of a political commentary. The discursive ambiguity of the texts is paralleled by the traveling writers’ own fluid identity: both are naturalized Americans born in Eastern Europe, who had spent most of their lives in the West and are thus neither perfect strangers nor completely confident insiders. At a first glance, the journalistic undertaking can only benefit from the insight of one’s own biographical and emotional involvement with the subject matter. But how

“Is There a Place Like Home?” (Ksenia Polouektova)

451

long can the duality of allegiances and the constantly shifting vantage points really be sustained before autobiography and political commentary collapse into each other? Reading these autobiographical travel accounts, how does one begin to disentangle the retrospective workings of memory and the current political and cultural discourses that shape any such venturing into the past? To write about one’s place of origin is, perhaps, the most difficult form of autobiography, in which objectivity and subjectivity, generalities and intimate nuances subvert each other at every turn, instigating endless interpretations. Embarking on her trip, Hoffman self-consciously distinguishes between “the idealized landscape” that “stayed arrested in [her] imagination as a land of childhood sensuality, lyricism, vividness and human warmth” – the “Poland of the mind” to paraphrase Rushdie – and the “real Eastern Europe” that she is about to re-discover (Exit v). However, her anticipation of the reality she is going to experience – and her related journalistic objectivism – are also inflected by the western discourses of the “Other Europe,” staked out by a familiar repertoire of tropes and clichés about the region as “a lifeless monochrome realm where people walked bent under the leaden weight of an awful System,” – a fiction she sets out to interrogate (xii). Hoffman’s first visit to Poland took place a decade earlier, in 1977, when she traveled to Cracow, despite her parents’ admonitions. In Lost in Translation she admits to having been propelled on the first trip by a mixture of conflicting desires common to many returnees who are never quite sure whether “they have come to say hello or good-bye” (Rushdie, “The Dream” 183). “Maybe to be done with it,” Hoffman muses, or “to see how the story might have turned out (Lost 232). Upon her arrival, she delights at her ability to decode the undertones, connotations, and half-meanings of the most insignificant details around her – the jostling of the street crowds, the body language, intonations, and glances. Yet she also registers her own strangeness, having gotten “unused” to what seems most natural to her Polish hosts, and what surely must have been a norm to her family in Poland as well – communal proximity, intimacy, abundance of free time, soul-searching conversations. Her web of signification is torn asunder, and she struggles, not always successfully, to translate some of her American background to her hosts. The reverse translation – the “catching up” with the Polish experiences she had missed – does not seem necessary as yet. “Nothing ever changes here” asserts her friend, and to Hoffman too, Cracow “remains remarkably unchanged” (Lost 234, 238). In her reading of Exit into History, Andaluna Borcila charges Hoffman with having failed to depart from the western discourse about “Eastern Europe,”

452

Chapter IV: Autobiographical Exile Writing

which sees the region as a site of “non-identity,” of instrumental projections and stereotyping, in short, as the quintessential “other” of the West (55–56). The image of communist Eastern Europe as a time-capsule of sorts, a place of arrested history and development is, of course, both a domestic and western commonplace of the “Other Europe.” György Konrád famously quipped that trains and movies run slower in Eastern Europe because of a slower passage of time (qtd. in Drakulic´ 166–67). Perhaps it does not run at all, preserving the past with all its material manifestations in a piece of amber, as a Nabokovian moth, which may be a more striking discovery for a returnee than a failure to recognize or to relate to anything at all. What Andaluna Borcila takes issue with as an Orientalist example of “othering” is, to my mind, a discursive coincidence of an exile’s personal fiction of the lost home with western rhetorical configurations of “Other Europe.” These configurations, also imagine the region as “frozen” in time, incomprehensible, “murky,” and “innocent,” i. e., not unlike the way it stays arrested in an exile imagination that fails to grapple with the irreversibility of time and the changes wrought by it upon the original home. What role returning exiles have played before and after the changeover in the construction and dissemination of images of Eastern Europe is a fascinating subject in and of itself, which would require an extensive comparative reading of the vast corpus of travel writing, political essays, and journalism written in and of the region during the past two decades. The authors include Robert Kaplan, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Timothy Garton Ash, Anne Applebaum, and Omry Ronen to name only a few. Borcila is certainly right to point out particular patterns in the way that Eastern Europe is typically conceived of in the West. However, the entanglements between the autochthonous and imported articulations of the fiction and reality of East-Central Europe seem to go beyond the simple dichotomy of subjugation and inequality. Tropes and ideas travel across borders and texts; they are not merely imposed by the “othering” West, but also produced locally, inspired by the actualities of life in the region. Besides, Hoffman is writing in English for a western audience, which inevitably compels her to pull into the text cultural meanings and codes that her readership can locate and interpret. Andrei Codrescu’s travelogue-cum-memoir The Hole in the Flag, also written in English, reveals the same tension between voices that speak differently to outsiders and to those intimately familiar with the realities of socialist Romania. Readers must then piece together and interpret these voices into a coherent cultural and political text. Neither Codrescu nor Hoffman entirely succeeds in avoiding the traps of a nostalgic romantization of Eastern Europe and of western stereotypes and mythologies. What marks off

“Is There a Place Like Home?” (Ksenia Polouektova)

453

their accounts from the countless contemporary reports about the “New Europe,” is the authors’ awareness of their dual cultural allegiance and the bifurcated observing consciousness that this awareness produces. Both Codrescu and Hoffman alternate between first-person plural (i.e., “us, the West”) and first person singular, acting out their multiple identities as American journalists, emigrants, and English-language authors. As a naturalized American, Hoffman, for instance, feels “a sense of loss – from the part of me that has become Western” at the disappearance of a myth that Philip Roth famously termed “the Other Europe,” but she immediately catches herself registering “a touch of anger from the other side” (Exit 209). The exilic identity, played out rhetorically through the incessant shifting of discursive registers in the text, reveals itself to be essentially an identity of difference from both sides. Of course, there is for Codrescu, as well as for Hoffman, an “additional and richer source of alienation” – their Jewishness (The Hole 164). In a Romanian interview Codrescu confesses that the feeling came very early: “[M]y sense of being different [has] accompanied me since the day I was born. I am a Jew, so I was ‘different’ in Romania before ever being different in the States” (qtd. in Marin 90). Whereas Jewishness offers for Suleiman an important “qualifier” to her relationship to Hungary, Codrescu’s Transylvanian-Jewish roots do not at first seem to disturb his identification with Romanian language and culture. Codrescu refers to Jewishness in his memoir each time he reflects on the perseverance of anti-Semitism and the post-1989 rise of nationalism and xenophobia, which target him both as a Jew and as an “émigré-renegade.” Characteristically, Codrescu’s otherness is thrust upon him every time he is most comfortable with the illusion of being an insider, a native son. During his second visit to the country, in July 1990, Codrescu attends a twenty-fifth high school reunion that becomes a bleak travesty of all his earlier fantasies of return. In the aftermath of the interethnic riots in Târgu Mures¸ and the “miners’” ruthless suppression of the May demonstrations, the second journey to Romania and the school reunion take place in a radically different political and emotional climate. As the euphoria of his first visit gives way to the shock and disappointment at the violent politics of the National Salvation Front, Codrescu admits that he has been rather uncritical in his earlier idealism and trust in the televised representation of the December events. As a culmination of the travelogue, the school reunion highlights the author’s manifold identity, for Codrescu attends it both in his capacity of a “steelygazed observer journalist” and as a hopeful, “sentimental friend eager to recapture the past” (The Hole 226). By the end of the meeting, the American journalist in him could rejoice at the wealth of the material to report on the “murky depths” and the “deeply troubled soul” of Romania, while the exiled

454

Chapter IV: Autobiographical Exile Writing

Romanian poet recoils, for alienation and bewilderment darken his cherished memories of youth. Instead of unchanged friends, to whom he was earlier prepared to forgive “whatever they had done to survive under the long dictatorship” (17), he finds himself surrounded by supporters of the National Salvation Front and by specters of the missing others, “the Germans and the Jews who have emigrated […] the ones who were sent to prison for trying to escape, the ones who faded away, unable to pay the system as well as my friends here” (230). The childhood feeling of his own difference painfully returns: “I felt suddenly remote in time and place, no more remote, perhaps than I once felt back in high school, where I was also a minority: a poet, a Jew” (230). A new fissure appears next to temporal and spatial dislocations; his former schoolmates are separated from him not only by language but now also in terms of politics: My whole adult life had taken place in America in the American language. My Romanian was frozen in that eighteen-year-old curl of existential and sexual melancholy smoke at Marishka’s café. I barely got their jokes, and I was no doubt missing all the subtleties, where the real story was. Here came another revelation, just as eerie if not eerier than the rest: I was missing the story! […] But there was also hardly any way I could have made them see my story, the ecstatic madness of an American’s poet’s life lived in several cities on the coasts of different oceans, a life, I might add, in complete sympathy with rebellious students of all causes. (232)

The literal homecoming brings a moment of epiphany, a painful realization of his outsider position and inability “to translate himself backwards” to his former classmates. The bewilderment only deepens the next evening, when he invites his high school friends for dinner: They hired a singer and panpiper for the occasion […] a man who looked me directly in the eye and […] asked me why I had left home, my mother country, my hearth. Just as I began to wonder myself, awash as I was in sentiment and brandy, the tenor of his songs changed. He began to sing nationalist Transylvanian songs, and the whole table joined in. The Hungarians, Germans, Jews, and even people from Bucharest cringed at their tables. Songs forbidden during Ceaus¸escu’s era, Fascist Iron Guard anthems poured out, directed against foreigners, of which clearly I was one – through forgiven for the moment – and against émigrés, and I was forgiven for that, too. (234)

The episode is an almost grotesque assault against illusions of belonging that the visiting poet could have entertained, an assault against his memories of the past and the ideals of his rebellious youth – the very stuff of his Romanian identity. Codrescu’s attempt at balancing identities and allegiances is rendered impossible once he is denied a Romanian identity. Several days after the reunion Codrescu admits he is happy to return to America, and his desire to leave the country is reconfirmed by the intimidating treatment by the Roman-

“Is There a Place Like Home?” (Ksenia Polouektova)

455

ian police at the airport check-in: their rudeness brings back the elation and fear that he felt when first leaving the country in 1965. Yet his flight is canceled, and the return is postponed. Codrescu has to take the cab back to the city and witness crowds of students protesting the abuses of the new regime. He joins the demonstrations, “not as a reporter or as an old supporter” but as somebody who can identify with the cause and the spirit of the demonstrators, himself a member of the ‘68 generation. “There is hope still” he affirms, and with hope comes a new locus for identification – not with the former friends of his own generation, who now seem so much older because, having swapped political sides, then oppose the cause upheld by the young, but with these students that carry on the protest ethos of his youth (238). Codrescu’s account might seem to illustrate perfectly the dangers of living out one’s nostalgic fantasies. By the end of his stay in Romania, when the dream of both the glorious return and the Revolution he came to witness fade, just as Salman Rushdie had warned, the journey of return begins to make sense within the context of his larger journey: emigration. Its essence: an incessant oscillation between two different cultural, rhetorical, and linguistic frames; a fundamental discontinuity of exilic identity that an exile cannot fully overcome, least of all by an act of homecoming. By interrogating the relationship between the concepts of home and homeland, Codrescu reaffirms his cultural identity as a mobile, transferable entity that can be dislocated from the place of his original homeland (Lomsky-Feder and Rapoport). The very act of his departure from Romania at the end of his visit defies, then, the redemptive closure of a romantic exile’s return. Codrescu affirms the preeminence of his American voice: “my whole life has taken place in America in the American language” (232). Hoffman’s journey, too, ends in a clearly dominant voice: that of an American journalist. Although the returning émigré/exile can maintain his or her split identity during the journey and through the narrative medley of autobiography and travelogue, the very fact of departure asks for an explanation. To all of the authors I discuss here, homecoming confirms their own strangeness to the original home, thereby destabilizing one of the split parts of their identities and alerting them to the perils of such intercultural travel into time and space. Recalling Gustav Aschenbach and his attraction to the Polish otherness of Tadzio in Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice,” Hoffman concludes: to travel toward Otherness, even if it is most ardently desired, is to risk disintegration; it is to lose the firm certainties of yourself. Not at all coincidentally, Mann’s parable could be read as a cautionary tale about the dangers of travel. It is the figure of a traveler, ambiguous, slightly sinister, and evocative of primal jungle imagery that beckons Aschenbach toward his glorious misadventure. Perhaps, I should take warning; except of course, Mann’s

456

Chapter IV: Autobiographical Exile Writing

Otherness is, in some degree, my notion of home; and in my travels for all their hardships, I am pursuing the essence of the familiar – through that too, after long separation, can become oddly elusive. (Exit 78) (emphasis KP)

Four decades after my first exile, the current one has the advantage that it allows no fantasies about return. The witnesses of my life are now scattered to all corners and cemeteries of the world. (Manea 217)

Norman Manea’s memoir is perhaps, the most internally complex of all the ones discussed here. It is also the only one written in the exile’s native tongue. Structurally, it negotiates between the genres and narrative strategies employed by each of the other three authors, mixing political and poetic commentary, personal memoir, travelogue, diary, philosophical reflection, and well-positioned quotations, to chart Manea’s own exilic trajectory and to wrestle the concept of exile – and his own exile – from the “straightjacket of stereotypes” (295). Not unlike Hoffman’s autobiography, that of Manea’s is staked out by the marked tensions between an intellectual understanding of his condition and the intimate experience of pain and dispossession that he “estranges” by admitting a plethora of voices into his narrative, as if hoping that “the rhetorical hysteria of other people’s words” could release him from himself (295). Acutely sensitive to cultural and political clichés, as well as to the fallacies of retrospective nostalgia, Manea declares himself to be an “embarrassed inhabitant” of his own biography, refusing to submit to both the “boring sound of Eastern European self-pity” and to the western variety of popular “tell-all confessions and self-revelations of group therapy,” in other words – to the identity of a victim: Outer adversities? I had received my initiation into such banalities at a very early age. As for the hostile campaigns of more recent years, when one is under siege, it is not easy to avoid narcissistic suspicions, or pathetic masochism. Again a victim? The idea exasperated me, I must admit. […] But the mask was now glued to my face – the classic public enemy, the Other. I had always been an “other,” consciously or not, unmasked or not, even when I could not identify with my mother’s ghetto or any other ghetto of identity. Outer adversities can overlap with inner adversities and the fatigue of being oneself. (18–19; emphasis KP)

To subvert the logic and rhetorical power of the “masks glued to the face,” Manea devises a narrative at once oblique and blunt, highly allegorical and mercilessly historical, which constantly refocuses his lens, moving between personal recollections, national history, family past, and reflections on Romania’s cultural and intellectual scene. The authorial voice is similarly frag-

“Is There a Place Like Home?” (Ksenia Polouektova)

457

mented and self-effacing. Manea moves from the first-person singular to second and third-person evocations and back, while densely saturating his self-ironic and ambivalent discourse with quotations, literary echoes, and paraphrases from Kafka and Blanchot to Heiddeger, Mihail Sebastian, Cioran, Celan, Kierkegaard and – unavoidably – Derrida. In place of straightforward recollections and the documentary premise typical of most memoirs, Manea self-consciously blurs the boundaries between memory and literature, recollection and fiction, alluding rather than describing, so that the narrator himself “dissolves into fiction.” His “fatigue of being oneself,” “fatigue of belongings,” spurs forward an array of other voices, transient characters (Nicu Steinhardt, the poet Mugur, etc.), and allegorical names. Just as his friends come into the narrative in the disguise of elaborate nicknames – e.g. HalfMan-Riding, Half-One-Legged-Hare, the Flying Elephant, Golden Brain, Donna Alba, – the exile writer never discloses himself completely either, never quite inhabits the one and only name. For instance, during his clandestine romance with the Gentile Juliette, disliked by his controlling mother, the protagonist is referred to as “Romeo.” The cramped cattle trains conveying the deported family to the concentration camps of Transnistria – unlikely arks promising destruction rather than survival – give a cruelly ironic twist to Norman’s Hebrew name, Noah. The communist regime had variously labeled him a “dwarf from Jerusalem,” a traitor, an American agent, “extraterritorial” and “cosmopolitan.” In post-communist Romania he was attacked by the new nationalists, who called for the “extermination of the moth.” He is Leopold Bloom, an emblem of restlessness and uprootedness, also Joyce’s new Ulysses (Chapter 14, “Bloomsday”). Finally, as the title suggests, he is a returning hooligan, a reference to Mircea Eliade’s novel The Hooligans (1935). Eliade’s hooliganism was a “togetherness in death” and a “rebellion unto death,” of “perfectly and evenly aligned regiments intoxicated by a collective myth,” acted out by the Romanian fascist Iron Guard. The 1991 publication of Manea’s article about Eliade’s Legionnaire sympathies in The New Republic coincided with the murder of professor and writer Ioan Petru Culianu at the University of Chicago, a former disciple of Eliade’s. Manea’s article unleashed a heated controversy in the Romanian press, so that his arrival at the cusp of the ongoing public debate over the legacy of the interwar period was indeed an act of hooliganism in the American sense: “troublemaking” (70). However, it is another famous troublemaker that he most closely identifies with: the Jewish-Romanian writer Mihail Sebastian ( Joseph Hechter), who published in 1935 a booklet with the telling title How I Became a Hooligan? His Journal was published in the spring of 1997, at the time of Manea’s visit to Bucharest, and further fueled public debate over the

458

Chapter IV: Autobiographical Exile Writing

legacy of the interwar period. Sebastian’s best-known novel, Two Thousand Years, caused a scandal in 1934 when it came out with a preface written by Sebastian’s mentor in the literary group Criterion, the Iron Guard philosopher Nae Ionescu. Ionescu’s blatantly nationalistic rhetoric, unmistakably directed against Sebastian’s Jewishness, has turned Sebastian into a pariah for both his Jewish friends and for the sympathizers of the ultra-nationalist right-wing. “Rootless, exiled, and a dissident … the archetypal Jewish hooligan” (24), Hechter/Sebastian is Manea’s answer to the haunting question of a Chinese sage: “What did you look like before your father and mother met?”: “[I]n 1935, the year before I was born, I was the hooligan Sebastian – and so I would be fifty years after and then ten more years after that and another ten years and all the years between” (76). Hooliganism was also a charge common to most communist regimes, leveled against dissident intellectuals and culture-makers, especially those not employed “productively” and leading a “parasitic life.” In a sad parody of Sebastian’s story, Manea was not only attacked by the communist authorities but also shunned by the officials of the Jewish community following his public declarations against official nationalism and anti-Semitism in 1982 (266). Perhaps the most important of these many appellations and literary Doppelgängers through whom Manea focalizes his account is the circus clown Augustus the Fool, an import from Manea’s earlier writings, the 1979 book The Years of Apprenticeship of Augustus the Fool and the 1992 collection of essays On Clowns: The Dictator and the Artist. Augustus the Fool, the writer’s foil, is a bungler “ill equipped for everyday life,” who comes up against the White Clown, the tyrant, “the representative of power and authority” (20–21). Augustus the Fool is also a quintessential nomadic, exilic figure, “the pariah, the loser, the one who always gets kicked in the ass, to the audience’s delight,” and whose sarcasm “is turned on himself rather than others” (253). The country that Augustus the Fool is about to revisit, his “Eastern European circus,” also gets another name: Romania, whose language and literature he truly inhabits, is engulfed by the terrifying “Jormania” of Ioan Petru Culianu’s short stories, a domain of lies, demagoguery, corruption, “a banana-style ‘democracy’ of pornography and execution squads” (14). Re-membering, as the exiled writers are well aware, does not promise a complete recuperation of the previous self, but rather a painful process of piecing together the past and the present in ways that confer meaning on the life story. Narrative is essential to the process of remembering, it seeks to remedy its lacunas by forging a continuous self and a consistent consciousness. It imparts coherence and integrity on the personal history interrupted or compromised by traumas and losses incurred by dislocation, establishes

“Is There a Place Like Home?” (Ksenia Polouektova)

459

cause-effect connections between the past and the present that could have not been there, straightens out ambiguities and smuggles in a moralizing plot. Thereby the controlled linearity of an articulated (narrated) memory “forgets” as much as it evokes, redressing the past in accordance with the exigencies of the present (King; Seyhan; Brooks, etc.). Post-structuralist analyses of narration, emplotment, the constructedness of subjectivity, and other formal elements of representation have produced a large body literature on the artifice of articulated memory and the invention of the self in autobiographical writing, and Manea is certainly well aware of these critical deconstructions. In order to transmute an existential fragmentation into a textual composition, Manea seizes on the euphemerality and instability of memory as a powerful metaphor. His text structurally assumes the shape of a memory-stream that lurches back and forth in a temporality of its own, strewn with sinkholes and whirlpools of constant revision that bubble up images and visions of the past. To foreground the fallacy of “seamless” straight narration, this autobiographical writing breaks the plot with flashbacks, repetitions, and inter-textual references that are unpredictable, and often incoherent. Self-narratives that consciously yield to the idiom of memory by imitating its dream-like fluid form lack the closure and the certainty of the more conventional modes of autobiographical writing, but they do gain what Eva Hoffman calls a “breathing space” or a “space of borderless possibility” that only dreams have – the space where past can be redressed, reassembled anew from its shimmering fragments (Lost in Translation 280). The complex chronotope of the narrative and the polyphony of the authorial voices are engendered by and matched with Manea’s troubling subject: the essential ambiguity of belonging and fixed identity. He is as suspicious of the traps of “the pretentious home called the motherland” as he is apprehensive of “the perils of uprootedness” (Manea 363). The “ghetto of identity” from which Manea seeks to escape encompasses his family, national, ethnic, and ideological affiliations – i.e. his early flirtation with Communism, his Jewishness, his mother’s “tyranny of affections” (her “claw”), and the patriotism expected of him. Belonging spells certitude, and Manea regards these as suspect, even when he is “the one who utters them.” Instead, he continuously speaks about ambiguity: “the ambiguities of the labor camp, of the Communist penal colony, and of exile” refuse exclusive definitions by a collective destiny and claims by the “clans” of either victims or victimizers (247). ‘“Being excluded is the only dignity we have,’ the exiled Cioran has repeatedly said” (48). Jewishness is certainly the most ambiguous of all identities that Manea examines in his book. Growing up in the traditional Jewish milieu of a small town in Bukovina, a “restricted world trapped by its own fears and frus-

460

Chapter IV: Autobiographical Exile Writing

trations,” and “suffering from the disease of its past,” Manea, like many in his generation, embraces the ideology of communism that holds a promise of combating with its ethos of internationalism both the “decease of the ghetto” and anti-Semitism. The new socialist rituals that Manea undergoes as a young pioneer are farcical evocations of the ritual practices of traditional Judaism that he had abandoned. At the age of thirteen, for instance, he is baptized in the pioneer organization instead of being properly bar-mitzvahd. To mourn the death of Stalin, he puts an armband on his left hand at the very place where observant Jews wind their phylacteries (153). In the late 1950s, when the Romanian Jews begin to emigrate to Israel en masse, Manea registers a feeling of relief for “being freed from their proximity,” for no longer being associated with them (146, 153, 167): Most of the family were to follow, taking with them their ancient names – Rebecca, Aron, Rachel, Ruth, David, Esther, Sarah, Eliezer, Moshe – names that had wandered for hundreds of years through foreign lands and among foreign peoples and tongues, now returning to the place and language where they thought they belonged. The echo of those names would gradually fade and with them their famed qualities – their mercantile spirit and group solidarity, their anxiety and tenacity, their mysticism and realism, their passion and lucidity. Where did I fit in among all these stereotypes? […] I no longer felt at ease among the names and reputations of my fellow clansmen, nor did I feel bound by the fluctuations of their nomadic destiny. Had I become alienated from those among whom I had been reborn ten years earlier? (187).

What could all too easily be dismissed as a typical case of proverbial Jewish self-hatred, is certainly more complex. As a concentration-camp survivor, Manea keeps repeating to himself Kafka’s famous remark, “what have I got to do with the Jews? I have got hardly anything in common with myself,” but he realizes that this does not sound all that convincing after the horrors of the Holocaust and in view of Romania’s history of violent anti-Semitism. Pondering Freud’s famous question, “What remains Jewish in a Jew who is neither religious nor a nationalist and who is ignorant of the Bible’s tongue,” Manea, his own most ruthless analyst, replies as Freud did: Much (241): At the age of five, in Transnistria, the little Jew was known as Noah, not Norman. At the age of fifty, on the eve of the new exile, the relation between self and Jew had become a complicated knot, one that could not fail to interest Dr. Freud. The psychoanalyst should be asked, finally, to answer not only the question he himself has asked but also the question posed by posterity: not necessarily what is left after you have lost what you did not possess, but how you become a Jew after the Holocaust, after Communism and exile. Are these, by definition, essentially Jewish traumas? Are these initiations carved in your soul, not only your body, that make you a Jew when you are not one? (242)

For Manea, his 1941 deportation was an “Initiation into Exile,” and also an initiation into Jewish collective destiny, but he bridles against this ascribed

“Is There a Place Like Home?” (Ksenia Polouektova)

461

shared identity, refusing to be a mere “sum of collective catastrophes,” an eternal victim who peddles his suffering publicly (246). Ethnicity, he argues, is a strictly private matter, and he protests the unceremonius inclusion of his name in the 1982 anthology of Romanian Jewish writers. The weight of history, of shared suffering, persistent xenophobia, and a gamut of myths and cultural clichés associated with it make Jewishness, in Manea’s eyes, a form of belonging from which it is especially difficult to get “unstuck” and impossible to be indifferent to. However, he refuses the abstract parentheses of Lyotard’s “non-Jewish Jew,” preferring, instead, Hechter/Sebastian’s formulation that calls on the alienated Jewish writer to be with his fellow believers when difficult times strike, and warns him of the ensuing disappointment – a delicate balancing act of walking away from one’s kin yet still claiming kinship (70, 341). Evasiveness is Manea’s ultimate refuge, the modality of his autobiographical voice. But evasiveness has a flip side: hypocrisy. The Romanian language, “the fluid shelter and true home,” the promise of “real citizenship and real belonging,” the protective and isolating “snail’s shell” that an exiled writer carries with him into exile, offers the writer an idiom that could be both elusive and contaminated by a communist doublespeak: Reading between the lines became the normal practice […] it was a language of encoded terminology, charades, a restricted monotonous language that only served to undermine people’s confidence in words, encouraging their suspicion of words. […] The slogans, the clichés, the threats, the duplicity, the conventions, the lies big and small, smooth and rough, colored and colorless, odorless, insipid lies, everywhere, in the streets, at home. (155–56, 160)

Despite Manea’s early interest in literature, he chooses to study hydraulic engineering, so as not to be implicated in the ubiquitous “single Party language.” His first work of fiction, tellingly called “The Story of the Word,” was published only in 1966. Much of Manea’s subsequent writing came under sharp critique from the Party, particularly the last novel that he had published in Romania in 1986, The Black Envelope. Manea’s decision to leave the country, which then meant permanent exclusion, is literally a transition from the monotonous language of lies to the language of evasiveness and self-doubt. Was it successful? Are exiles ever entirely free to devise a personal idiom uninfected by the traces of their earlier belongings? And is language not too fluid and untrustworthy a shelter to begin with? It is not accidental, perhaps, that one of the first disappointments of the writer’s return to Bucharest, a harbinger of the many disappointments-to-come, is the post-communist Romanian parlance that “has recycled all the old clichés of the socialist wooden tongue with injections of jargon deriving from American movies and advertising” (275).

462

Chapter IV: Autobiographical Exile Writing

Exile offers the advantage of contemplating the meaning of one’s “belonging from a distance,” though Manea is quick to assert that “no one can ever claim they are far enough from themselves” (314). Paradoxically, return helps to gain distance – and indifference – to the past. Like Hoffman’s Lost in Translation, Manea’s book opens with a scene in Paradise. However, it involves a “stage set of his afterlife,” a dream-like cityscape of the exile’s destination, New York, rather than luminous memories of a European childhood (4). The sheer profusion of colors, scents, faces, objects, and languages around him, none irreplaceable, summons up the image of some celestial realm in which the exile can even encounter the shadow of his dead mother and follow her up Amsterdam Avenue (4–5). Articulations of exile as “life after death” and a “second re-birth” (the first was his liberation from the camp) dominate Manea’s intonation when describing his homecoming. Return is a voyage into an afterlife (“postmortem tourism” as Manea calls it) and the homecomer is more of a ghost, a panoply of masks and names obliquely referring to his former selves (277). Early in the text Manea defines himself as a “survivor,” a term, as Katarzyna Jerzak convincingly argues, that points beyond his experience of Transnistrian concentration camps and the communist dictatorship to the existential condition of living above, beyond, on the surface of life. The term comes from the Latin supervivere: to survive is to be beyond life, next to life, but not in it ( Jerzak 12). Hoffman describes the train that carried her family from Montreal to their new home in Vancouver as giant “scissors cutting a three-thousand-mile rip” through her life, which was from then on forever divided into two parts (Lost 100). For Manea, the cuts and ruptures are even more complex, marked off with capital letters to emphasize the myth-making potential of the different stages: his “Initiation” into Exile with the family’s 1941 deportation to Transnistria; his 1945 “Return” from the camps; his 1947 unsuccessful “Departure” from Romania; and his final “Escape” in 1988. The Hooligan’s Return charts not just Manea’s visit to Romania a decade after his emigration, but weaves the three journeys together, shifting time and space from Manhattan to Bucharest, from Suceava to Ataki, from Tirgu Frumos to Cluj, crossing the border back and forth between “Jormania” and Romania. The wheels of the train that carries him to Cluj in 1997 beat out the same rhythm as the wheels of the packed freight car that carried him to the camps in 1941 and of another train that brought him back in 1945. Nightmare and feverish reality, past and present, all melt into a fluidum in which they are impossible to tell apart. “Death has prevented Culianu from returning to Romania and Sebastian from leaving it. With me, death, that nymphomaniac, had adopted a different

“Is There a Place Like Home?” (Ksenia Polouektova)

463

game: she offered me the privilege of a voyage to my own posterity” (Manea 18). The themes of death and rebirth first enter the narrative when Manea speaks about his return from the camp: he “crossed the Styx” returning to the Eden of his native land, which was soon to become a Kafkaesque “ penal colony” He re-crossed the Styx of Atlantics again in 1997, only this time the crossing is a parody of the earlier Return and the “aura of survival that surround [the writer] is now a prop in the more recent dramas staged by memory” (245). Manea’s frequent resort to terms like “setting,” “stage set,” “circus,” and “farce,” accentuate the theatricality and, perhaps, impossibility of an exile’s return “from the dead.” In contrast, his war time experiences are marked off with capital letters: e.g. Initiation into Exile, Return, Departure, as if to safeguard them from the relativist parentheses, postmodernist deconstructions, and the parody of symmetrical repetitions. In an ultimate act of inversion, Manea comes back to Romania on the eve of Passover, the Jewish holiday celebrating exodus from Egyptian slavery. It takes a while before he finds the place where the seder is held – the streets are renamed, some roads are demolished to make way for new constructions, and the usual marker of such gatherings in the socialist times, the ever present police cordons in front of Jewish restaurants, are now gone. Inversing the traditional four questions asked by the youngest child present at the seder, “Ma nishtana ha-laila ha-ze?,” Manea’s former self asks: ‘Wherefore is this night different from all other nights,’ my former self asks. Age has plastered new masks on the faces of yesteryear. At the present gathering I cannot detect the former air of festive duplicity, the quarter-truths, wrapped in puzzling hints and gestures, as required by the secret code of the time, equally, by attempts to undermine it. […] The atmosphere of the year 5757 lacks the former air of excitement and risk it had in the time of slavery, complicity, and evasion. All that is left is a sleepy assembly of apathetic survivors, gathered to join in the ancient recital (267).

Everything is the same, yet not quite the same. It lacks the former color, solidity, seriousness, and passion, as if a result of a double exposure, in which the dream-like images generated by exilic memory were superimposed on reality to burn the film: “The facades look dirty, the pedestrians rigid, diminished, ghost-like. The atmosphere is alien, I am alien, the pedestrians alien” (263). Manea revisits the former houses of his relatives, now dead, only to realize that his presence has been similarly wiped from the scene: Something indefinable but essential has skewed the stage set, something akin to an invisible cataclysm, a magnetic anomaly, the aftermath of an internal hemorrhage. […] Death has passed this way, in the footsteps of the dead man now revisiting the landscape of his life, in which he can no longer find a place or a sign of himself. After my death, death visited this place, but was it not already here, was it not that from which I had fled? (263–64)

464

Chapter IV: Autobiographical Exile Writing

Fleeing from the tyranny of the past and its imposed identities, Manea sought to find in America an impersonal, anonymous home, a “hospitable, democratic and indifferent” homeland (244). The return confronts him with the former homeland, which was indifferent all right, but neither hospitable nor democratic. Her indifference too, is hard-won. Manea’s article on Eliade’s right-wing politics and the 1997 publication of Sebastian’s Journal have provoked the ire of Bucharest’s intellectuals to the extent that anticipating yet more abuse and slander from his former countrymen Manea can “read the future in the past” by recalling the insults leveled at Sebastian in the 1930s: “Augustus the Fool has come back for more! Augustus the Fool will write about that hooligan Sebastian’s Journal and will, once more, become a hooligan himself ” (338)! As his brief twelve-day visit draws to an end, Manea opens his notebook that he took with him in order to jot down his impressions. The first pages are covered with quotations from Levinas, Arendt, Celan, and Derrida, words by others that Manea hoped would prepare him for the trip. When he sits down to write in his own voice, a stream of unanswerable questions pours onto the pages: Was my journey irrelevant? Did this very irrelevancy justify it? Were the past and future only good-humored winks of the great void? Is our biography located within ourselves and nowhere else? Is the nomadic motherland also within ourselves? Had I freed myself from the burden of trying to be something, anything? Was I finally free? (382)

The answers offer themselves promptly: the need to accept fate, the permanence of passage, the impossibility of repeating or redeeming anything. And something else still, the consolation of being sheltered by one’s language, however hybrid it has become in exile: “August the Fool could have experienced such revelations without ever submitting to the parodies of return,” he quips, but he consents that it took a “postmortem tour” of return to accept the exilic “afterlife” as the only homeland available for the uprooted and dispossessed, and America as the best route of transit. The exile takes his flight back, a flight from “nowhere to nowhere.” Upon arrival he realizes that the blue book containing all his impressions, the only proof that his “voyage to posterity” has indeed taken place, is gone, lost, and “would not allow [itself] to be found.” In a sense, the infinitely more polyphonic and rich Hooligan’s Return is Manea’s reconstruction of the lost blue notebook, which is still unable to provide firm answers to the unanswerable questions of exile. But at least he now knows where the blue book should be sent in case it is miraculously found: “Home, to my home address, in New York, of course, the Upper West Side, in Manhattan” (385).

“Is There a Place Like Home?” (Ksenia Polouektova)

465

Oz finally became home: the imagined world became the actual world […] because […] once we have left our childhood places […] armed with what we have and are, we understand that the real secret of the rubber slippers is not that “there is no place like home,” but rather that there is no longer such a place as home: except, of course, for the homes we make or the homes that are made for us in Oz: which is anywhere, and everywhere, except the place from which we began. (Rushdie, The Wizard of Oz 57)

In the grip of the desire to identify with the writers of exilic discourse it is all too easy to overlook its constructedness and subjectivity. This is not to say that the (re)inventions, revisions, and editing inherent in autobiographical writing diminish the credibility of the exiles’ accounts or discredit their identity claims. Rather, it is a reminder of the multiple and competing ideological contexts (political, cultural, philosophical, etc.) that these claims address or seek to undercut, and the distinct audiences for which the memoirs are written. Except for Norman Manea, Joseph Brodsky, and Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, who were forced to leave their countries, the authors discussed above had left voluntarily or had been taken along by their emigrating parents – i.e. they were not exiles in the strict sense of the term used elsewhere in this collection. Should that mean that their accounts should be dismissed as “inauthentic,” belonging to other fields of study? Or – which was my contention in this essay – should this rather suggest that the term “exile” has a broad and powerful symbolic appeal for those contemplating the deep-seated ruptures and losses wrought by the twentieth century on the East-Central European nations, as well as other, more theoretical issues of modern and postmodern alienation and cultural amnesia? The writers selected for this study all share a common identity: they are East-Central European Jews, survivors of their near-exterminated communities. They are exiled from the history and culture of their people in the region not by physical displacement alone, but also by the devastations of the Holocaust and the subsequent Soviet suppression, which had jointly conspired to destroy most traces of once flourishing Jewish cultures. The perpetuation of exilic consciousnesses and concomitant claims to identity abundantly reveal why these émigrés’ distrust unproblematic closures and resolutions of their complex life stories. Given the persistent presence of anti-Semitism and xenophobia in the former socialist countries, exilic identity offers an escape from the strictures and ideological pressures of the post-1989 Eastern European political and cultural discourses. It is also a way to keep a distance and maintain one’s skepticism and non-partisanship visà-vis “the Old Country,” a skepticism, we should add, that frequently camou-

466

Chapter IV: Autobiographical Exile Writing

flages an exile’s orientalizing posturing. In other words, exilic identities can be produced beyond the departure, by the circumstances of return, of which much is left untold or edited out even by the most scrupulous of writers. The reception of the very memoir by the domestic audience, the fate of the entire literary or creative oeuvre within the domestic literary or academic post-1989 canon, the political discourse accompanying the émigré’s visit, and much more – all these affect the self-perception of the homecomer and ultimately fix the distance between the exilic home and the old country. Thus, it seems that those willing to embark on a trip back and narrate the story of this journey have no choice but to engage the spacious elasticity and relativity of the textual, discursive exile as it functions in the autobiographies examined here. In his Fictions in Autobiography, Paul John Eakin emphasizes the heightened self-consciousness of autobiographical writers by comparing their practice to a “second acquisition of language, a second coming into being of self, a self-conscious self-consciousness” (9). The autobiographical writings of exiled intellectuals and culture-makers embody this “self-conscious self-consciousness” most poignantly, since the rebirths and language acquisitions that they speak of are not mere metaphors. As my narratives of homecoming vividly show, the heightened self-awareness of the authors, their “observing consciousness,” works against forces of oblivion and the blandishments of nostalgic retrospection, the tyranny of belonging and the anguish of uprootedeness that are the exile’s ongoing lot. Self-narratives, then, are essentially instruments of self-(re)invention, but they are also inherently therapeutic: in addition to reconciling the authors to what has been “lost” (and gained) in translating their pre-exilic self into an exile consciousness, they prompt the exile to confront and to contemplate the inescapable otherness within, the conflation of inner and outer adversities wrought by the spatial and temporal dislocations and discontinuities of the exilic condition. In Strangers to Ourselves, Julia Kristeva argues that the only way to escape the hatred and burden of this essential strangeness is not through a “leveling and forgetting” but “through the harmonious repetition of the differences it implies and spreads” (103). Return and its narrativizing, as Eva Hoffman, Susan Suleiman, Andrei Codrescu and Norman Manea have discovered, are means of confronting and re-presenting one’s past in order to comprehend one’s distance from it. As Eva Hoffman concluded at the end of her memoir: As every writer knows, it is only when you come to a certain point in your manuscript that it becomes clear how the beginning should go, and what importance it has within the whole. And it’s usually after revisiting backward from the middle that one can begin to go on with the rest. To some extent, one has to rewrite the past in order to understand it. I have to see Cracow in the dimensions it has in my adult eye in order to perceive that

“Is There a Place Like Home?” (Ksenia Polouektova)

467

my story has been only a story […]. It is the price of emigration, as of any radical discontinuity, that it makes such reviews and re-readings difficult; being cut off from one part of one’s story is apt to veil it in the haze of nostalgia, which is an ineffectual relationship to the past, and the haze of alienation, which is an ineffectual relationship to the present (Lost 241–42).

Works Cited Ascher, Maria Louise “The Exile as Autobiographer: Nabokov’s Homecoming.” Radulescu 67–86. Borcila, Andaluna. “How I Found Eastern Europe: Televisual Geography, Travel Sites, and Museum Installations.” Over the Wall/After the Fall: Post-Communist Cultures through an East-West Gaze. Ed. Sibelan Forrester, Magdalena J. Zaborowska and Elena Gapova. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2004. 42–64. Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1984. Burstein, Janet Handler. “Recalling Home: American Jewish Women Writers of the New Wave.” Contemporary Literature 42.4 (2001): 800–24. Chambers, Iain. Migrancy, Culture, Identity. London: Routledge, 1994. Codrescu, Andrei. The Hole in the Flag: A Romanian Exile’s Story of His Return and Revolution. New York: Morrow, 1991. DeKoven Ezrahi, Sidra. Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000. Drakulic´, Slavenka. “On the Quality of Wall Paint in Eastern Europe.” How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed. London: Vintage, 1987. Eakin, Paul John. Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988. Friederich, Paul. “Binarism versus Synthesis: Eastern European and Generic Exile.” Radulescu 159–85. Graffy, Julian. “Émigré Experience of the West as related by Soviet Journals.” Under Eastern Eyes: The West as Reflected in Recent Émigré Writing. Ed. Arnold McMillin. London: McMillan with SEES U of London, 1991. 115–57. Hoffman, Eva. Exit into History. A Journey Through the New Eastern Europe. New York; Viking, 1993. Hoffman, Eva. Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language. London: Vintage, 1998. Hoffman, Eva. After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust. New York: Public Affairs, 2004. Jerzak, Katarzyna. “Exile as Life After Death in the Writings of Henryk Grynberg and Norman Manea.” The Writer Uprooted: Contemporary Jewish Exile Literature in America. Ed. Alvin Rosenfeld. Bloomington: Indiana UP, forthcoming. Kaplan, Caren. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement. Durham: Duke UP, 1996. King, Nicola. Memory, Narrative, Identity: Remembering the Self. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000. Klosty Beaujour, Elizabeth. Alien Tongues: Bilingual Russian Writers of the “First” Emigration. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989.

468

Chapter IV: Autobiographical Exile Writing

Kreisler Harry, “Between Memory and History: A Writer’s Voice: Conversation with Eva Hoffman, author.” October 5, 2000) Available at http://globetrotter.berkley.edu/ people/Hoffman/hoffman-con1.html Kristeva, Julia. Strangers to Ourselves. Trans. Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. Lupton, Catherine. “The Exile of Remembering: Movement and Memory in Chris Marker’s ‘San Soleil.’” Cultures of Exile: Images of Displacement. Ed. Wendy Everett and Peter Wagstaff. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2004. 33–48. Lomsky-Feder, Edna and Tamar Rapoport. “Seeking a Place to Rest: Representation of Bounded Movement among Russian-Jewish Homecomers.” Ethos 30.3 (September 2002): 227–48. Manea, Norman. The Hooligan’s Return: A Memoir. [Întoarcerea huliganului] Trans. Angela Jianu. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2003. Marin, Noemi. “The Rhetoric of Andrei Codrescu: A Reading in Exilic Fragmentation.” Radulescu 87–106. McCarthy, Mary. “A Guide to Exiles, Expatriates, and Internal Emigrés.” Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile. Ed. Marc Robinson. Boston and London: Faber and Faber, 1994. 49–58. Naficy, Hamid. “Framing Exile: From Homeland to Homepage.” Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place. Ed. Hamid Naficy. New York: Routledge/AFI Film Readers, 1999. 1–13. Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les lieux de mémoire.” Representations Special issue: “Memory and Counter-Memory” 26 (Spring 1989): 7–25. Peters, John Durham. “Exile, Nomadism and Diaspora: The Stakes of Mobility in Western Canon.” Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place. Ed. Hamid Naficy. London and New York: Routledge/AFI Film Readers, 1999. 17–37. Proefriedt, William. “The Education of Eva Hoffman.” Journal of Ethnic Studies 18:4 (1990): 123–34. Radulescu, Domnica, ed. Realms of Exile: Nomadism, Diasporas, and Eastern Voices. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002. Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991. New York: Penguin, 1991. Rushdie, Salman.“A Dream of Glorious Return.” Step Across This Line: Collected Non-Fiction, 1992–2002. New York: Random House, 2002. 180–210 Rushdie, Salman. The Wizard of Oz. London: British Film Institute, 1999. Said, Edward. “Reflections on Exile.” Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000. 173–86. Seyhan, Azade, Writing Outside the Nation. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000. Siedel, Michael. Exile and the Narrative Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1986. Steiner, George. “Our Homeland, the Text.” No Passion Spent: Essays 1978–1998. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998. 304–27. Stenberg, Peter. “From Skutchno to Prawda or You Can’t Go Home Again.” Literature and Politics in Central Europe: Studies in Honor of Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz. Eds. Leslie Miller, Klaus Petersen, and Karl Zaenker. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1993. 122–33. Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1985. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1996.

“Is There a Place Like Home?” (Ksenia Polouektova)

469

Suleiman, Susan Rubin. “Monuments in a Foreign Tongue: On Reading Holocaust Memoirs by Emigrants.” Poetics Today 17.4 (1996): 639–57. Suleiman, Susan Rubin, ed. Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances. Durham: Duke UP, 1998. Suleiman, Susan Ruben. Crises of Memory and the Second World War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2006. Zadworna Fjellestad, Danuta. “The Insertion of the Self into the Space of Borderless Possibility’: Eva Hoffman’s Exiled Body.” MELUS 20.2 (1995): 133–47. Zaborowska, Magdalena J. How We Found America: Reading Gender through East European Immigrant Narratives. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1995.

470

Chapter IV: Autobiographical Exile Writing

Chapter V The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

Introduction

473

Introduction As in 1944–45, exiles simultaneously exited and returned during the first half of the 1990s, except that in the latter case the going and the returning concerned different countries. After 1989, exiled writers – or their literary legacy – could return to the East-Central European countries, whereas disintegrating Yugoslavia sent exiles both abroad and to other newly formed nations of the former Yugoslav Federation. Furthermore, as Dragan Klaic´ wittily and convincingly shows, exile has become digitalized by the 1990s, making thus communication infinitely easier with those left behind. Weighing the “transitory, partial, and digital” exile of the ex-Yugoslavians (which did not make the atrocities that forced people into exile more palatable), we may well conclude, after having read the articles of Sándor Hites and John Neubauer, that the problematics of homecoming have become as disturbing as those of departing. This is a main reason for including homecoming in the overall title of our volume. What exactly are these problems? Some are familiar to us from earlier homecomings, especially the post-World War II return of German exile writers, which released that bitter debate on “internal emigration” between Thomas Mann and those at home who claimed that they chose a harder opposition to Hitler’s regime than those that had left “disloyally” and “comfortably.” In post-war Germany, as in post-1989 Hungary, this led to longer debates about the relative merits of literature written at home and in exile. However, the post-1989 “homecomings” in Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia are special, because they involve the question whether earlier fascists and fascist sympathizers should be rehabilitated. Here, the comparison the post-1945 homecoming in Hungary is more relevant. Those who returned in 1945 to Hungary were mostly “Muscovites,” writers who lived through the war in the Soviet Union. Though their exile experiences in the glorified home of Socialism had often been devastating and traumatic, most of them returned optimistically and, weaponed with communist ideology, ready to assume power at home. Those who returned after 1989 formed a much looser group, whose members ranged from the democratic center to right wing nationalists. These latter ones, most of whom fled in 1944–45, usually participate by means of their writings rather than personally, in the nationalist revivals of

474

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

Hungary Slovakia, or Romania. Within fifteen years or so, the writings of most Arrow-Cross writers, Romanian Legionaries, Slovak followers of Jozef Tiso, Croatian followers of the Ustasˇe, and Serbian chauvinists have become available in bookstores and acquired considerable readership. To illustrate this problem we have included an article on one of the most popular writesr in Hungary today, Albert Wass, an anti-Semitic and anti-Romanian writer from Transylvania, who has been condemned to death in absentia by a Romanian court in 1946. The formal or ideational rehabilitation of writers like him is today a symptom of rising nationalism and anti-Semitism in the region. Hence “homecoming” is, as Ksenia Polouektova convincingly shows, no longer a simple and joyous reunion, but a divisive and aggressive event, which, we should add, makes many liberals and democrats in these countries uncomfortable at home. While it would be too pessimistic to envisage another wave of exodus, one cannot rule out a further shift to the extreme right, especially under the financial and economic crisis now shaking the world. However, the situation in Western Europe and North America has now become different, for the influx of non-European writers, intellectuals, and masses of refugees have essentially shifted attention away from East-Central Europe. The exile landscapes of Paris, London, New York, and other Western metropolises are populated by non-European arrivals. That East-Central Europe is now part of the European Community may help prevent future waves of exile from the region, but success is by no means guaranteed. Exile, or some metamorphosed variant of it, continues to haunt the region.

Herta Müller (Thomas Cooper)

475

Herta Müller: Between Myths of Belonging Thomas Cooper

The work of Herta Müller is arguably paradigmatic of the paradoxes of home and homeland that are brought into relief through the construction of the concept of the author in exile. Her ambiguous status as an outsider, in several senses, raises the question to what extent the notion of the exile, because it rests on an assertion of exclusion, necessarily lends at least tacit validity to disputed notions of belonging. A writer who published first as a member of a linguistic minority in Romania and later as a recognized novelist and poet in Germany, Müller deviates from the model of the literary exile exemplified by Vladimir Nabokov, Czesław Miłosz, or Milan Kundera. Whereas these writers left the communities of their mother tongues and in some cases chose to write in a new language, in leaving Romania for Germany Müller left a community in which she was a member of a linguistic minority and entered a state in which her mother tongue was the common language. She thereby constitutes a counterpoint to the classic model of exile; her case exposes the limitations of the figure of the exile as outsider by reminding us that notions of belonging are elusive and often lose their consistency on closer scrutiny. Her ambivalent status as a critic of the conservative community of her birth, an exile from a country in which as a member of a linguistic minority and a victim of state persecution she was arguably never at home, and a cultural foreigner in her adopted country of Germany foregrounds the notion of the author in exile as a value-laden concept that borrows from and reinforces often competing narratives of belonging. Her work is a reminder that the conception of exile as a traumatic rupture from a unitary culture is to some extent a narrative that rests for its force on the construction (and thereby fictionalization) of this unitary culture, a process that separation enables. It is precisely this fictionalization that Müller refuses. Far from reifying visions of integral cultural identity, her fiction, collage poetry, and essays subject such visions to continuous interrogation, suggesting a new understanding of the location of exile not as a space outside but as a space between. Indeed her refusal to participate in the construction of a static identity suggests a reconsideration of the nationalist and gendered connotations of exile, inviting us to reconceptualize the lit-

476

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

erature of displacement not as an affirmation of an opposition of homeland and exile but rather as an articulation of experiences of movement, mixture, and instability. Herta Müller was born in the village of Nitzkydorf (or Nit¸chidorf, to use its Romanian name) in Banat, a region in western Romania bordered by the southern Carpathian mountains in the east and the Danube, Tisza and Mures rivers to the south, west, and north respectively. As part of the Habsburg Empire until 1918, Banat was home to communities of diverse linguistic make-up, including primarily German, Romanian, Hungarian, and Serbian speakers, and even following the incorporation of the majority of the region into Romania (nominally a nation state) after the First World War it preserved its multinational character. During and in the wake of the upheavals of World War II, in which many of the Germans of Romania fought as part of the Wehrmacht and the SS, the demographics of the region changed dramatically, partly as a consequence of large scale deportations of German speakers. Whereas the German speaking population of western Romania, including the Banat Swabians and the Saxons of the neighboring region of Transylvania, had numbered some 530,000 in 1941, by 1948 this number had dropped to 330,000 (Kocsis 182). Over the course of the following decades this number continued to drop as German speakers in Romania took advantage of West German immigration policies (according to which people of German ethnicity living in the Eastern Bloc could claim German citizenship) and, following Nicolae Ceaus¸escu’s rise to power in 1965, the opportunistic practice of the Romanian government of allowing German speaking citizens to leave the country in exchange for hard currency. By 2002 there were only 49,000 Germans still living in Romania, roughly half of whom lived in Banat (Kocsis). In 1968 Müller left Nitzkydorf to attend ‘Gymnasium,’ roughly the equivalent of English grammar school, in the city of Timis¸oara, where from 1972 to 1976 she then enrolled at the university to pursue German and Romance studies. She was affiliated with the so-called Aktionsgruppe Banat, a group of German speaking writers founded with the aim of pursuing literature that was socially and politically engaged. The group soon attracted the attention of the Securitate, and in 1975 several of its members were arrested and the group itself disbanded. Following completion of her university studies Müller worked as a translator in a factory until 1979, when she was dismissed for her refusal to cooperate with the secret police. Niederungen, a collection of stories depicting life in the small, conservative village of her birth, was published in 1982 in Romania in a heavily censored version, but the manuscript was smuggled to the west and was published uncensored by Rotbuch Verlag in 1984. In the same year Drückender Tango, another collection of stories was pub-

Herta Müller (Thomas Cooper)

477

lished (the title story of which, “Oppressive Tango,” is included in Nadirs), followed by the publication of her first novel, Der Mensch ist ein grosser Fasan auf der Welt, in 1986. In 1987 Müller left Romania for West Berlin with her then husband and fellow German-Romanian author Richard Wagner. In 1989 she published Reisende auf einem Bein, a novel portraying the displacement and alienation suffered by a political refugee from the East in Germany. She has since published three novels, namely Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jäger (The Fox was then the Hunter; 1992), Herztier (1994), and Heute wär ich mir lieber nicht begegnet (1997), several collections of essays, copious articles in wide array of forums, and four collections of collage poems, the most recent of which, Este sau nu este Ion (It is or it is not John), is in Romanian. She has been awarded numerous literary prizes, including the Marieluise-Fleißer Prize (1990), the Kranichsteiner Literary Prize (1991), the Kleist Prize (1994), the European Literary Prize Aristeion (1995), and the Berlin Literary Prize (2005); in 1998 The Land of Green Plums won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Müller’s first impulse to write came after she left the village of her birth as a girl barely fifteen years of age for the city of Timis¸oara. As someone from a German speaking community in which she had studied Romanian only as a foreign language in school Müller had difficulty communicating with the people of the city, even after having lived there for a few years. She likened her vocabulary to an allowance that, even as it grew, never seemed quite enough to buy what she wanted (“andere Augen,” 26). As she commented in an interview in 1984 soon after the publication of the uncensored version of Nadirs: “For some time I was entirely thrown back on my own devices. I couldn’t establish contacts, I couldn’t speak with the people” (“Ort” 124). Reflecting in this new setting on the experiences of her childhood, she realized that it had been “sprachlos” (speechless). She first began to write poetry “in order to reassure myself that I had a language […]. I began to dismantle my childhood systematically” (“Ort” 124). Through this process of dismantling she came to realize that beneath the customs and practices of the community of her native village lay repressed collective memories of the recent war, in which the majority of the men, including her father, had fought as members of the SS. She observed the recurrence of the word “Heimat” (homeland) in the drinking songs: “Nach meiner Heimat, da zieht’s mich wieder / Es ist die alte Heimat noch” (To my homeland I again am drawn / It is yet the old homeland), and began to grasp that, “beyond the drunkenness there lay another yearning. Not for another place, but rather for another time: the memory of the war” (“Heimat” 214). With this perception came an altered understanding both of the culture of the village itself, which increasingly came to seem a community living in denial of its own past, and of her own identity as a Banat Swabian. As

478

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

she later wrote, “This is how I suddenly came to stand outside and wanted to stand outside. That I could not stand the folk festivals and the glossiness of the black boots” (“Teufel” 24). She began to write the stories of Nadirs as a deliberate gesture of separation and an attack “against this identity, […] this Banat Swabian village, against this speechless childhood, that stifled everything” (“Resig-Nation” 300). In Nadirs Müller situates herself as a figure on the margins of an oppressive community in which corruption is rampant and adherence to rigid norms of behavior is exacted through physically harsh and psychologically abusive means. Told for the most part in present tense from the perspective of a young girl, the stories portray the hypocrisy of a community of Banat Swabians at once proud of their distinctive cultural heritage and unable or unwilling to confront either their recent past or the violence of the social practices through which they enforce conformity. Stark descriptions merge with visions from fantasies and nightmares, creating a tense contrast between the mundane and the surreal. The narrator attempts to negotiate her place in a community in which she is expected to pay tribute even to the most transparently false images. Far from an evocation of a home for which the author might cherish even the faintest nostalgia, Nadirs is an unsparing attack on the idyllic image of life in the German villages of Banat. In an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung Müller commented that the title of the work referred literally to the low-lying plain of the Banat, but metaphorically to “base consciousness […], isolation, the desire not to look up and the inability to see outside oneself ” (“lebensfeindlich”). Curiously, though there is little mention in the stories of the communist regime in Romania, some reviewers were nevertheless hasty to characterize the book as a critique of life under the rule of Ceaus¸escu. Irena E. Furhoff, for instance, writing for the International Fiction Review, comments: The poetry clashes with details used to describe fear, for example, in suppressed sexuality as a signum for the inability of communication in fascist Romania […]. Grotesque descriptions of peasant life in a small village act as a metaphor for the oppression of dictatorship. The text implies a summary of fascism: the absence of humanism, the absence of communication, in short, the lack of appreciation for life. (1)

Such a conclusion implies that writing coming out of Romania in the 1980s, and perhaps particularly writing by an author who was soon to emigrate, must concern itself primarily with the communist regime, implicitly if not explicitly. Moreover it implies that it was ultimately the authoritarian government that was the source of all oppression. The grotesqueness of the depictions of village life is ascribed to their function as metaphors, thus depriving them of any referential value, and the failure of communication is blamed on the dictator-

Herta Müller (Thomas Cooper)

479

ship. Perhaps more astute, if less enthusiastic, were those who responded to the publication of Nadirs with the accusation of Nestbeschmutzung, or befouling the nest. While the dictatorship is undeniably present as a backdrop to many of the stories, the focus of the collection is the hypocrisy of a minority community intransigent in its insistence on conformity and adherence to retrograde traditions. “The Funeral Sermon,” the first piece in the collection, is perhaps the most expressive of the narrator’s status as an outsider. In a nightmarish vision she tells of her father’s funeral, over the course of which members of the village approach her and denounce her father as an adulterer, rapist, and murderer. They then turn to her to speak in his memory, and when she fails, they pronounce judgment on her: We are proud of our community. Our achievements save us from decline. We will not let ourselves be insulted, he said. We will not let ourselves be slandered. In the name of our German community you are condemned to death (11).

The narrator’s transgression against the community consists both of her knowledge of her father’s crimes, albeit knowledge imparted to her by the villagers themselves, and her failure to intone a ritualistic eulogy, a failure that indicates her unwillingness to disregard those crimes. Such a failure is tantamount not merely to an admission of her father’s wrongs, but also to an acknowledgment that the image of the community that the villagers have been at pains to preserve is false. The narrator thereby constitutes a threat to a selfimage that relies for its maintenance on a conspiracy of silence on the part of every member of the group. In writing these stories Müller herself violated this conspiracy and suffered, like her narrator, ostracism. She herself comments: “After the publication of my first book the people of the village spat in my face when they came across me in the street” (“In jeder Sprache” 29). Indeed, because of her writings the village barber turned away her grandfather, a ninety-year-old man who had been a customer of his every week for decades. If the figure of the exile is constructed by means of the notion that the homeland is a unified ethno-culture, Herta Müller’s Nadirs upsets this process by revealing this identity to be a narrative built on denial of the past, intolerance with respect to difference, and a tenuous interlinking of social custom and language. As the title of the story “About German Moustaches and Hair Parts” suggests, Swabian identity is as much a matter of adherence to a set of arbitrary practices as belonging to a linguistic minority. Through such gestures as parting one’s hair or wearing a moustache the individual expresses a willingness to submit to the will of the group, however apparently absurd or whimsical. The mechanical performance of tradition functions as an ex-

480

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

pression of restraint and submission, even, or rather precisely, when these traditions have become anachronistic. The mothers in the title story continue to wear their traditional garb, and it “only appears that their daughters have abandoned their regional costumes. […] But their brains are dressed in them” (47). The maintenance of what is perceived to be a distinctive German identity is crucial to the preservation of the community’s belief in its superiority. However, this conviction depends on the willingness of the entire community to sanction or deny violence both past and present, whether it be the participation of the majority of the men of the community in the war as members of the SS or the domestic violence that mars the narrator’s childhood. The story concludes with a striking metaphor as night falls over the village: The frogs were croaking from all the living and the dead of this village. Everybody brought a frog along when they immigrated. Ever since they’ve existed they have been praising themselves that they are Germans, and they never talk about their frogs, and they believe that whatever you refuse to talk about doesn’t exist either. (75–76)

Müller offers an explanation of this metaphor of the frog as an embodiment of the inescapable gaze of the community: “The German frog in Nadirs is an attempt to find a formulation of a feeling – the feeling of being watched. […] The German frog transformed everything into vanity and interdiction. It knew that individual parts, when they are peculiar, do not build a group” (“Teufel” 20–21). In this dismantling of the community of her childhood Müller’s bilingual existence played a role by helping her to establish a critical distance between experience and language. However, as she observes in the essay “In jeder Sprache,” this tension between different manners of naming the world was in fact part of her childhood. In the dialect of her native village one said “der Wind geht” (the wind blows or literally the wind goes), while in the High German spoken in school one said “der Wind weht.” Because the verb to blow (or more precisely “waft”), “wehen,” sounds like the noun “Weh,” or pain, as a seven-year-old child Müller understood the sentence to mean that the wind was suffering. In Romanian, which she had begun to learn at the time as a second language, one uses the verb “bate,” which coincidentally bears the same double-meaning as the verb “to blow” in English. In other words to the seven-year-old this formulation sounded as if in Romanian the wind were doing harm to someone else. Such tensions undermine the complacency of language, calling attention to the metaphorical nature of figuration, and the modalities through which language establishes systems of value as apparently self-evident. As Müller commented in an interview, “in bilingual regions both

Herta Müller (Thomas Cooper)

481

languages assume their place in one’s head and acquire their own naturalness, while however throwing each other into question” (qtd. in Haines ed. 15). The tension between languages transforms apparently simple objects from sites of consensus into subjects of contention, and “the word in one’s mother tongue is no longer the only measure of things” (“In jeder Sprache,” 26). This tension between languages is present in the title of her first novel, Der Mensch is ein grosser Fasan auf der Welt (translated as The Passport). Written while Müller herself was awaiting her papers to leave the country, the novel recounts the struggle of Windisch, a village miller, to obtain passports for himself and his family in order to immigrate to Germany. Like Nadirs, this novel is a bleak portrayal of the corruption, narrow-mindedness, and vain ethnocentrism of village life, and in particular the abuse of power by village authorities to extort money and sexual favors. The title, literally “man is a big pheasant in the world,” plays on the contrasting connotations of the word pheasant in German and Romanian. As Müller explains, in German the pheasant is a braggart, in Romanian a loser (what in English one might call a turkey). Though the characters of the story are German speakers, when they utter this phrase its Romanian connotations prevail, an interpretation emphasized in the English rendering, “A man is nothing but a pheasant in the world” (Passport 9, my italics). First spoken by the night watchman, the phrase is repeated by Windisch when he learns that his daughter is taking the contraceptive pill and is therefore undeniably sexually active and presumably submitting to the desires of local officials in order to facilitate the family’s application for the papers necessary to obtain passports. The statement has the quality of proverbial knowledge and thereby knowledge that is second-hand, but in German it has undergone a peculiar transformation because of the very different connotations of the word pheasant. Even as Windisch invokes this common knowledge and performs the ritual of its assertion he is doubly distanced from the phrase, both by the fact that as a formula it is not his and uttered in his native tongue it bears an absurdity similar to the absurdity it has in the literal English rendering. (One might note that the English translation of the title, by substituting the eminently logical title “passport” for the German, misses the opportunity to create in English an effect of estrangement and ambiguity similar to that of the German title.) Indeed as he utters the phrase, “[w]hat Windisch hears is not his voice. He feels his naked mouth. It is the walls that have spoken” (70). There is an analogy between this failed attempt to assert proverbial knowledge as fact and the incongruence between the realities of the villagers’ lives and the images of collective identity conjured by their invocation of formulaic language. The post woman laments to Windisch that young people no longer come to funerals when a village elder has passed away, reminding him be-

482

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

tween her sobs to bring her a few sacks of flower as a bribe if he expects her to process his application for passports. In conversations between Windisch and the night watchman contradictory languages prevail concerning women. While Windisch persistently disparages women in general, and his wife in particular, as dissolute and prey to the most base desires, in his need to sustain the narrative of the moral superiority of the community he nevertheless insists on the virtue of Swabian women in comparison with women in the west, remarking that “[t]he worst one here is still worth more than the best one there. […] They would prefer to walk naked on the street if they could” (64). Yet he remains aware that in order to obtain passports for the family his daughter will have to offer herself both to the Romanian militiaman and the German priest: If things go well, [the priest] looks for the baptismal certificates five times. If he’s doing his job thoroughly, he looks ten times. With some families the militiaman loses and mislays the applications and the revenue stamps seven times. He looks for them on the mattress in the post office store room with the women who want to emigrate. (43)

Infuriated by his own helplessness, Windisch takes refuge in a superstitious, fatalistic understanding of the world according to which chance events dictate the fate of the individual; he explains the death of a local boy in an accident, for instance, as the consequence of the whim of an owl who had settled the night before on the rooftop of the young man’s house. He refuses to recognize his own complicity in his daughter’s prostitution, instead venting his frustration by castigating his wife as a whore, a reference to the time immediately after the war, when as a prisoner in Russia she survived by exchanging sexual favors for food and other forms of assistance, including a physician’s certification that spared her from working in the mines. As Karin Bauer observes, the phrase “women who want to emigrate” is a substitution expressive of this denial on the part of the men of the community of their roles in the exploitation and abuse of women, as the women who visit the priest and the militiaman are in fact wives and daughters of men who want to emigrate (270). Ironically, by reinforcing the perception of helplessness and providing a pretext for inaction, this strategy of denial contributes to the passivity and conformity on which both the communist regime and the narrowly ethnocentric community depend. The Passport, like Nadirs, depicts the village as a place of corruption and hypocrisy, but the presence of the communist government as a force in the lives of the villagers is more palpable here, creating a broader context in which the rigid codes of behavior acquire greater significance as part of a strategy to preserve the communal identity (however narrowly defined, ethnocentric, or anachronistic) as a site of refuge from their helplessness in the face of the

Herta Müller (Thomas Cooper)

483

authoritarian regime. The plot of the novel centers around the struggle of Windisch and his family to leave the country and the suffering and humiliation they are willing to endure to do so; it reflects the grim circumstances of life in Romania under Ceaus¸escu, where the villagers, living already meager existences, are subjected to unannounced requisitions of their livestock and the fruits of their harvests. The official rhetoric demands allegiance to “our fatherland the Socialist Republic of Romania” and “Comrade Nicolae Ceaus¸escu […] the father of our country” (51), but Windsich is reminded of his status as a member of a less than welcome linguistic minority in this fatherland by the hostile reactions of a Romanian who cautions him: “No more German. […] This is Romania” (53). Adherence to tradition becomes a flight into a lost elsewhere or else-time, in which the villagers can conceive of themselves as having been in control of their destinies; and the more the villagers fear the loss of this identity as a refuge, the more crucial its maintenance as something static and assured. Müller commented: “As the situation worsened in the villages, people thought ever more distinctly in two directions when they spoke of ‘homeland.’ The old direction remained. And the new one that emerged was Germany” (“Heimat” 218). This alternative, however, only hardens the need for tradition, as it too poses a threat to the survival of the community. This explains the tension in the novel between the utter stasis of village life and Windisch’s perception, his first utterance in the novel: “the end is here.” The novel portrays adherence to a static notion of cultural identity, not as a promise to preserve that identity, but as a symptom of its imminent demise. Müller’s later novels set in Romania, The Fox was then the Hunter, The Land of the Green Plums, and The Appointment, give greater attention to persecution suffered under Ceaus¸escu’s dictatorship, but the Banat-Swabian village as a site of oppression is never far in the background. The Fox was then the Hunter, an adaptation of an earlier screenplay, tells the tale of a school teacher who, warned by a friend that the authorities intend to apprehend her as part of a series of mass arrests, takes refuge in a village from where she watches on television the events of Ceaus¸escu’s fall in December 1989. Drawing on Müller’s experiences as a teacher and someone who, having declined to serve as an informant, was then repeatedly summoned for interrogation, the story depicts the gradual fragmentation of an individual’s sense of self. The Appointment, or, literally translated, “today I would rather not have met myself,” tells of the hardships suffered by a nameless factory worker who, in desperate hope of fleeing the country, has sewn her address and the plea “marry me” into garments bound for Italy. Fired from her job and summoned repeatedly for interrogations, she struggles to maintain her sanity in a world in which even the agents of the state seem to be victims of the same tragic farce; the

484

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

novel closes with the words: “[t]he trick is not to go mad” (214). A devastating depiction of the psychological damage inflicted by Ceaus¸escu’s dictatorship, the novel also offers a disturbing portrayal of the techniques of unpredictable and seemingly arbitrary harassment employed by the totalitarian state to corrode even the most intimate relationships. A complex intermeshing of the protagonist’s childhood memories, her experiences as a university student in the city of Timis¸oara, and then as emigrant bound for Germany, The Land of Green Plums is perhaps the most autobiographical or “autofictional” (a term she borrows from George Arthur Goldschmidt) of Müller’s novels. The German title, Herztier or heart-beast, is a word used by the narrator’s grandmother as she enjoins her to “rest your heart beast,” or be at peace. The narrator herself repeats this phrase standing over her grandmother’s dead body at the close of the novel. The English title refers to the admonition of the protagonist’s father not to eat green plums, for the soft pits cause a “raging fever [that] will burn your heart up” (15). The plums take on significance not only as a symbol of the superstitions and dishonesty of the narrator’s family and the community from which she hails, but also as a characterization of the policemen in the city, who stuff their cheeks with the sour fruit: “Plumsucker was a term of abuse. Upstarts, opportunists, sycophants, and people who stepped over dead bodies without remorse were called that. The dictator was called a plumsucker too” (Green Plums 50). The novel begins with the narrator as a university student in Timis¸oara, where she makes the acquaintance of Edgar, Georg, and Kurt, three other Banat Swabians who share her grave doubts concerning the death of one of her dorm mates, declared a suicide by the authorities. The four become close friends, sharing one another’s writings, reading forbidden books smuggled from the west, and discussing shared feelings of alienation from the communities of their birth. Upon completion of their studies they are each assigned positions in different parts of the country, but they visit one another and maintain their friendships. Eventually dismissed from their jobs and subjected to increasingly brutal harassment by the authorities, the narrator and her friends begin ever more resolutely to contemplate emigration to Germany. Georg finally departs, and six weeks later is found dead on the street beneath the open window of his room on the sixth floor of a hostel in Frankfurt. Edgar and the narrator too finally emigrate, leaving behind Kurt, who dies amidst mysterious circumstances in 1989, just before the fall of Ceaus¸escu. Several connections emerge between the events and characters of the novel and Herta Müller’s experiences as a child in a Banat Swabian village, a university student in Timis¸oara, and an immigrant. The narrator’s small circle of friends is clearly drawn on Müller’s ties to the Aktionsgruppe Banat men-

Herta Müller (Thomas Cooper)

485

tioned above. As mentioned earlier, they parodied the narrowly nationalistic traditions and literature of their home communities, for which they were denounced as “Nestbeschmutzern,” and adopted a critical stance towards the government, but placed great hope in visions of reform socialism. Indeed, the same year the group was founded Richard Wagner, for a while Herta Müller’s husband, joined the communist party. For a brief time in the climate of post-1968 they were able to write with some freedom, but as Ceaus¸escu’s rule became increasingly autocratic they found themselves under ever more invasive scrutiny by the secret police. In 1975 four members of the group, including Wagner, were arrested under suspicion of plotting to flee the country, one, William Totok, was sentenced to eight months in prison, and the group itself was dissolved. The censorship and abuses of the authorities notwithstanding, the literature of the Aktionsgruppe Banat remained significant not only as the work of a linguistic minority living under what was later to become infamous as perhaps the most oppressive of Central Europe’s communist regimes, but also for its influence on the Romanian literature of the following decades. Simona Popescu, a member of the so-called “eighties generation” of poets in Romania (who drew their inspiration from such authors as Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, and John Ashbery), wrote of the poetry written in German in Romania that it “said more and in a form full of force and artistry” than Romanian poetry: “This poetry was a synthesis of the mentality, expressivity, and sensibility, individual and communal, of that time […], profoundly current, profoundly Romanian, and vital” (cited in Mihaiu). Without overstating parallels between the work of fiction and the biography of the author, I suggest that three of the main characters are based at least loosely on members of the Aktionsgruppe Banat. Edgar could be identified with Wagner, Georg with Rolf Bossert, who, like the character in the novel, was found dead on the street beneath the window of his room soon after his emigration to Germany and presumed to have committed suicide, and Kurt with Roland Kirsch, who died in Romania in 1989 under circumstances that remain unexplained. As revealed in the essay “Hunger und Seide: Männer und Frauen im Alltag” (Hunger and Silk: Men and Women in Everyday Life), published in 1995 as part of a volume by the same title, the fate of Lola, the narrator’s dorm mate who is alleged to have committed suicide, is clearly modeled on one of Müller’s experiences as a student in Timis¸oara. As the narrator learns from the diary she left behind, Lola had probably been pregnant from one of many casual sexual encounters with men unknown to her. Her pregnancy threatened to embarrass the Party, to which she had recently been admitted. Whether her death was actually a murder staged by her new lover, himself a man prominent in the Party, is unclear, but it is declared a suicide by the auth-

486

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

orities. They hang a photograph of Lola at the entrance to the dormitory with the text underneath: “This student has committed suicide. We abhor her crime and we despise her for it. She has brought disgrace upon the whole country” (23). In Hunger and Silk Müller writes of her memories of a similar incident from her time at university: A medical student in the last year of her studies was pregnant. She performed an abortion on herself. In the following days she ran a high fever. She needed to go to the hospital. Out of fear of the hospital and fear of being sentenced to prison she hanged herself in a room in one of the dormitories. After the burial there was a meeting of the university administrators. In the presence of other students she was expelled post mortem from the party and the school. In the main hall of the dormitory in which she had hanged herself a photograph of her was hung. Alongside it a caption that presented her as a ‘negative example’ (79–80).

The pro-natal policies of the Ceaus¸escu regime, according to which “the fetus is the socialist property of the whole society,” (de Nève 68) offered women incentives to have children, and banned abortion, as well as any form of contraception. The policy infringed on the most intimate spheres of life. Women were obliged to undergo regular gynecological examinations and couples were interrogated about their sexual habits. Both abortion and contraception were punishable by prison sentences. In an essay written for a book of photographs by Kent Klich entitled Children of Ceaus¸escu Müller describes the now infamous orphanages across Romania, where the unwanted children of the government’s pro-natal policies were domiciled: “They were for the children with no parents, whose mothers were in prison after an illegal abortion or dead at the hands of some back-street abortionist” (n.p.). Although Land of the Green Plums centers on the torments suffered by the four main characters at the hands of the authorities, much of what the narrator endures bears an eerie similarity to the mechanisms of the tyranny under which she lived as a child in a Banat Swabian village. The belt with which Lola strangles herself reminds the narrator of the belt with which her mother would bind her to a chair as a child in order to cut her nails, and the brutal methods of her interrogator recall how, as a child, she was maltreated: “They slapped my hands and looked me right in the eye to see how I took it” (34). As she begins to read works of German philosophers that have been smuggled into the country she is startled by the difference between the use of German as a language of inquiry and the language of suppression she had known in her childhood: The books were written in German, our mother tongue […] Not the official language of the country. But not quite the children’s bedtime language of the village either. The books were in our mother tongue, but the silence of the villages, which forbids thought, wasn’t in them (47).

Herta Müller (Thomas Cooper)

487

As she gradually comes to understand the significance of her father’s participation in the Second World War, the narrator begins to see him as a member of a community burdened by memories of its participation in the crimes of the war. Rather than confront their past, her father and the other members of his generation continue to take refuge from their guilt and powerlessness by exacting conformity and reciting reactionary assertions of racial superiority to assert their difference and distance from the corruption of the Romanian state under communism. Her mother enjoins the narrator “to clap along with everyone else,” and when she suspects that her daughter has taken up with three different men she chastises her in a letter, noting “[t]hank God, they’re all German, but it’s still whoring” (165). The narrator suffers under the weight of her father’s sins, and she is ill at ease in the presence of Herr Feyerabend, a Jewish man, fearing that he “could feel that someone like me was staring at a Jew” (133). She confesses to him that her father was an SS man who “up until his death had sung songs to the Führer.” Herr Feyerabend, as preoccupied with the tyranny of the dictatorship of the proletariat as he is with the events of the war, responds that the children of the community salute to their leader “just like they did under Hitler” (134). And Kurt, having mentioned to the narrator that his father was also a member of the SS, notes: “a couple of years after Hitler, and they were all crying their hearts out over Stalin. […] And since then they’ve been helping Ceaus¸escu make graveyards” (174). In many of her essays Müller discusses more explicitly the parallels between what she perceives as the tyranny of her native village and the tyranny of the communist regime. In stark terms she goes so far as to equate the two: “the first dictatorship that I knew was the Banat Swabian village” (qtd. in Haines ed. 17). She continues: “I experienced a pale version of being subjected to surveillance and conformity to norms, and then the truly jarring, and I was familiar with certain basics.” Her family, she writes, had taken great care to keep her in hand, just as the state later did for different reasons and with admittedly more destructive methods. “It nevertheless took root in the family circle, and there was this fear that the individual would assert herself, and the individual is always seen from the outset as a possible enemy of all that is institutional.” What she later come to refer to as the totalitarian state or the dictatorship was, Müller noted, from a certain point of view merely an extension of the village in which she felt herself under constant watch. In 1989, two years after her departure for Germany and well before the publication of The Fox was then the Hunter, Müller published Reisende auf einem Bein, a work which stands out as her only extended prose narrative set in Germany. The protagonist Irene leaves a country in the east referred to only as “the other country” for Germany, initially to join Franz, a man she had met

488

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

during his travels as a tourist in her native country, but as their relationship frays she resolves to stay in Germany and begins the process of application for citizenship. Her decision to seek asylum notwithstanding, she remains an outsider in Germany, set apart by her distinctive dialect and her antagonism towards any normative notion of belonging, a reaction the origins of which lie in her unpleasant experiences of the oppression of ethnic and national identity in “the other country.” As Brigid Haines argues, the novel can be read as a depiction of the fragmentation of self as both a symptom of trauma and a survival strategy through which the victim of trauma finds refuge from rigid concepts of identity imposed from the outside (“The Unforgettable”). As Haines notes, however, Irene’s trauma is, in contrast to the traditional narrative of exile, not a break with something whole, but rather another in a series of displacements. Aussiedler is a somewhat paradoxical term that has come to refer to Germans who, as emigrants or the descendents of emigrants to the east, sought to return to Germany during and immediately after the Cold War. Reisende auf einem Bein explores the many unresolved ambiguities that reside in the term “German,” both as an adjective referring alternately to citizenship, ethnicity, or cultural affiliation, and as a noun designating a single language. Arriving in Germany, Irene finds herself very much an outsider. As an “ethnic” German (an Aussiedler) she is guaranteed citizenship, although only after going through the routines of a formulaic application process that leaves no room for anything other than officially sanctioned distinctions. Culturally, however, she remains a foreigner. Asked repeatedly where she is from by people confused by her unusual German, she is confronted with the paradoxes of national identity and can only think of herself as “a foreigner in a foreign country” (Reisende 50). When a Swiss born Italian describes himself as an outsider, she replies “It’s not that I don’t have a homeland. It’s just that I am abroad” (my translation; the published English translation misleadingly renders Irene’s “Ich bin nicht heimatlos” as “I have a homeland,” which transforms Irene’s tentative claim that, literally, she is not “homeland-less” into a confident and overly assertive affirmation). The distance between the German of her native community and the German spoken in Berlin foregrounds the plurality of contrasting voices (dialectical, socioeconomic, generational) inhabiting any language, and serves as a reminder that language is not a stable sanctuary but rather a site of contestation. For a writer like the Hungarian Sándor Márai, who left Hungary in 1948 but continued to write in his mother tongue, Wilhelm von Humboldt’s contention that “Die Wahre Heimat ist eigentlich die Sprache” (the true homeland is really language) may have had some substance; for Irene (and Müller), however, who lives amidst the diversity of voices comprising the German language, the notion

Herta Müller (Thomas Cooper)

489

that language is a refuge separable from place, a “portable homeland” as Müller ironically refers to it (“In jeder Sprache” 29), is chimerical. Irene’s (and Müller’s) experiences with the formalities of the immigration process reveal further complexities and ambiguities of the term “German,” including latent meanings that bear the imprint of ethnocentric notions of identity resting for their substance on conflict. Just as Irene, who thinks when asked to identify herself in accordance with the various categories on the immigration documents, “There was no column that could have described me” (19), Müller herself encountered difficulties when the circumstances of her flight from Romania did not correspond to the possible models offered by the office of immigration: I had left a dictatorship for political reasons, and the German officials wanted to know a bit about my status as a German [mein Deutschtum]. When I answered yes to the question as to whether, given my deportment, I would have been persecuted had I been Romanian, the official sent me to the police division for aliens. He stated: either German refugee or political refugee (“Hunger und Seide.” (25)

Müller’s experience raises questions concerning the ambiguities of West Germany’s policies towards immigrants from the East and exposes the historical locatedness of the categories on which they are based. The secondary literature on German immigration law is unanimous that German citizenship has been based on the Jus sanguinis, the ‘law of blood’ or principle of descent since the Nationality Law of the German Empire and States of 1913. Indeed, this consensus has perhaps contributed to somewhat hasty overstatements, such as the contention by Rogers Brubaker that the “system of jus sanguinis, with no trace of jus soli, continues to determine the citizenship status of immigrants and their descendents today” (65). While the principle of Jus sanguinis unquestionably played a crucial role in the issue of citizenship in Germany throughout the Cold War and in its immediate aftermath, descent was by no means a sufficient condition for the granting of citizenship. If, for instance, the child of Aussiedler parents who had been granted citizenship did not speak German, or was unable to demonstrate that he or she partook of a German cultural heritage however vaguely defined, the application could be, and many times was, declined. As Stefan Senders observes, such cases demonstrate that German citizenship, and by extension German identity, was, far from being merely a question of descent, a question of affirming Germany’s cultural conception of itself. In some cases an applicant could compensate for ignorance of German and unfamiliarity with German culture by demonstrating that he or she had identified him/herself as German and suffered discrimination as such. In the case of an applicant from Russia who was at first denied and later granted German citizenship the court found:

490

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

if [the applicant] was regarded as having continuously counted as a German and as having suffered as a consequence disadvantage, then she could be considered as having a ‘connection of acknowledgment’ with the German ethnie, even without mastery of the German language (qtd. in Senders 93).

As Amanda Klekowski von Koppenfels argues, the granting of citizenship is not based solely on descent, but rather on persecution arising as a consequence of having been identified as German: the potential Aussiedler must have represented himself “as a German to others and, as a direct result, have suffered ethnically based discrimination” (107). Müller’s insistence that she had suffered persecution for her personal comportment and not as a member of the German minority calls into question the rationale of the practice of considering maltreatment a factor in one’s cultural or ethnic identity. The presumption of conflict as a constitutive element of cultural identity revives the more strident strains of nineteenth and twentieth century nationalism. As a portrayal of the alienation and estrangement experienced by a German émigré from the east, Traveling on One Leg is less a critique of contemporary capitalist Germany than a deflation of the narrative of homecoming implicit in the paradoxical term Aussiedler. Though refugees from the tyranny they suffered in “the other country,” neither Irene nor Müller herself can regard Germany as a homeland, and most certainly not the “land of her dreams,” as Klaus Bittermann contended in an article highly critical of Müller’s stance on political issues. Müller writes with palpable bitterness on the responses that characterized her vision of Germany as false: “where I am from, that is what I should write on. In my second, better life here at the German bread crust I have the right to bite and swallow. But with this mouth, then empty, now full but still foreign, it is only fitting that at least I do not speak while eating” (“Und noch erschrickt unser Herz” 30–31). Her experience constitutes a reminder of the traumas suffered by successive generations of Aussiedlern since the end of World War I, who were received with more and less acceptance in West Germany and expected to shed their distinctive cultural habits in exchange for a life of relative prosperity. As Peter Paul Nahm, state secretary from 1953 to 1967 of the German Federal Ministry for Expellees, Refugees, and War Victims (Bundesministerium für Vertriebene, Flüchtlinge und Kriegsgeschädigte), wrote: “the assumption or expectation that the home of an individual can be replaced by general economic advancement is a fallacy born out of a purely materialistic outlook on life” (153). In 1993 Müller published her first collection of text based collages as a box set of postcards entitled Der Wächter nimmt seinen Kamm (The Guard takes his Comb). This was followed by Im Haarknoten wohnt eine Dame (In the Topknots Lives a Lady) in 2000, Die blassen Herren mit den Mokkatassen (The

Herta Müller (Thomas Cooper)

491

Pale Men with the Mocha Cups) in 2005, and the Romanian language collection Este sau nu este Ion (It is or is not John) in 2005. The poems of these collections are accompanied by images ranging from silhouettes of human forms, often disproportionate or maimed, to collages combining color images. Like Müller’s prose works, many collage poems touch on themes of displacement and alienation, but the genre affords her new means of visually depicting traumas of rupture and dislocation. Shifts in color, size, and font from word to word or phrase to phrase dramatize stark semantic incongruities, revealing a poem as a whole to be a brutal assembly of divergent parts torn from different contexts. As such, the collages can be read as expressions of Müller’s resistance to any unifying total vision, including national communism and ethnic nationalism. The genre also enables Müller to resist the concentric tendencies of language itself. The interruptions of collage disrupt unities, fracturing sentences, and, in the case of many of Müller’s poems, even individual words. A collage poem from Die blassen Herren mit den Mokkatassen depicts a gathering of men wearing traditionally German accoutrements, including edelweiss and bird feathers in their hats, and speaking of their local band: … stundenlang pfeifen wir Lieder wie Rätätä, rätätä, morgen hamma Schädelweh (… for hours we pipe songs like ‘ra ta ta, ra ta ta, ’morrow we’ll have pounding skulls)

Whereas almost all the other words of the collage are single cut-outs set apart from one another by distinct fonts and colors, the phrase “Rätätä, rätätä, morgen hamma Schädelweh” is itself a single cut-out, i.e. drawn as a unified phrase from a single source, though sliced at the penultimate word. A line from an Austrian drinking song (the word Schädelweh, peculiar to Austrian German and the Banat Swabian dialect, means headache or literally “skullpain”), it constitutes an instance of purely rhetorical language, a call for conformity through the incantation of stock language. By visually rendering the formulaic character of this phrase, Müller draws attention to the normative force of language as an accumulation of exhortations to consent through perfunctory repetition. The fragmentation of collage allows Müller to stage her use of language as a form of resistance to this force. She writes of her poems: “In prose I never got so far away, I was lamed by wounds and fears. But here I am able to get out of this” (“Schule der Angst” 338). As visual depictions of Roland Barthes’ notion that the subject is never the source of writing, Müller’s

492

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

collage poems cast language not as a homeland but as a totalizing system inimical to difference. In her discomfort with visions of a unitary language as a stable site of identity, Müller differs markedly from many of the canonical figures of exile. For writers such as Heinrich Heine, Sándor Márai, Andrzej Bobkowski, Kazimierz Brandys, or even Eva Hoffman, language constituted a kind of a homeland, either as a place of origin or a source of self. Certainly, Müller’s experience of exile was fundamentally different in that her flight from the country of her birth was a return of sorts to her mother tongue. Yet it is precisely this continuous contact with German that made her keenly sensitive to the multitude of voices through which language is negotiated as an intersection of divergent identities. Whereas the rupture of exile enabled the writers mentioned to mythologize their native tongues as an essence or place lost, Müller located her identity in broader cultural terms not limited to language. Indeed she writes with ire on the notion that she and other German speakers from the former dictatorships of Central Europe share an identity with West Germans through a common language: I cannot get over the comparison according to which the people from the former DDR are in a situation similar to mine: German through their language. […] The similarity in lifestyle that people from the DDR share with Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, and Romanians is greater than the similarities they have with the lifestyles of West Germans. The dictatorships in Eastern Europe were similar to one another on the streets and in inner spaces. […] This is not divisiveness, this is the truth of the facts. But it sounds sacrilegious compared to the studied sanctimoniousness of sameness. (“Hunger und Seide” 45–46)

Müller’s most recent publication of a collection of collage poems in Romanian is a further expression of her transnational cultural identity. Rich with complex word games, such as the splicing of pronouns out of letters from different sources in order to fracture the unity of “I,” “you,” or “mine,” the poems treat familiar themes of dislocation and disjuncture. In a poem on her mother’s death Müller uses the ruptures of collage to explore sentiments of displacement: “A s¸asea gara˘ e-o alta˘ t¸a˘ra (indiferent care o fi ea)” (the sixth station is another country [no matter which it might be]). Rhyme links the train station (gara˘), a symbol of transience, to country (t¸a˘ra), a human construct that delimits and asserts possession over geographic space. This suspicion concerning country as a source of stability is further expressed in the phrase “indiferent care o fi ea,” which figures, unlike the rest of the poem, as a single cut-out. Whereas stark shifts in font and color in the rest of the text continuously arrest the process of interpretation, the uniformity of this phrase allows it to be read as an authentic (authorial) utterance not tinged with

Herta Müller (Thomas Cooper)

493

irony. Müller’s dexterity with the Romanian language and her ability to appropriate and destabilize it suggest that it is as much a part of her identity as her so-called native tongue German. Müller’s rejection of the notion that language is homeland invites us to consider the ideological motivations underlying the construction of the author in exile. It is a reminder that traditional interpretations of exile have at times relied on the force of complacent myths of national identity. Yet, far from existing outside of the space of a national culture, writers in exile have often figured prominently in the construction of these identities (Polish literature offers abundant examples). In literary history exile has functioned as an ideal site for the reification of allegedly distinct and discrete national identities, as the borders of such identities can be more easily delimited in a foreign environment. Furthermore, the space of exile has often been cast in gendered terms. As Linda McDowell and Joanne Sharp cogently argue in A Feminist Glossary of Human Geography (1999), travel itself has been understood in western narrative as a gendered practice, frequently the travel of the heroic male. Exile has often born similar connotations. The archetypal exile Heinrich Heine writes in his poem “In der Fremde” (“Abroad” or “In a Foreign Land”) of being kissed “in German,” while Hungarian poet György Faludy describes himself and his fellow Hungarians in exile in France as “a bunch of roving knights hopelessly in love with the same woman” (see the introductory essay above). Such metaphors of exile, centered on the figure of a narcissistic masculine subject, are utterly incompatible with Müller’s experience of displacement. Given these connotations, the term migrant, which has increasingly gained currency in literary criticism over the past two decades, may be more applicable to Müller than exile. This would constitute more than a mere change of terminology. While the classical notion of exile tended to take cultural identities for granted and use these identities as the foundation for interpretation of experience, the term migrant lays emphasis on experience as the source of continually changing identities. This shift in emphasis brings with it a loss of the prestige that the term exile has accrued and a deflation of the oppositional tension from which it derives its appeal. Migrant literature emphasizes the movement and mixture exemplified by Müller’s collage poems in Romanian. However, this term is no less ideologically weighted. As Carine Mardorossian argues, while the move from exile to migrant literature offers occasion for reflection on the assumptions guiding critical practice, “[the] reconfiguration of these metaphors of displacement also runs the risk of obscuring the change from an epoch of revolutionary nationalism and militant anticommunism which produced exiles to an

494

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

epoch of capitalist triumphalism which makes various migrant experiences possible” (17–18). In other words the upheavals of the Second World War and the Cold War created impermeable borders and exiles, while the end of the Cold War and the spread of the global market has made political borders porous and led to an increase in migrants. Müller is perhaps more an expatriate now, who often travels to and from Romania, but she was an exile when she left. Yet simply to characterize Müller as a migrant is to overlook the fact that she fled Romania under threat to her person and without any foreseeable hope for return. Her work cannot be approached through reliance exclusively on concepts of exile or migrant as the sole basis of interpretation. Rather it invites interrogation and historical contextualization of these notions themselves. Situated in opposition to three competing narratives of belonging, the “Deutschtümelei” (as she calls it) of her native village, the communist utopia of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and West Germany’s (and now reunified Germany’s) conception of itself, Herta Müller’s work discredits concepts of unitary homelands and exposes the deceptions and processes of exclusion through which they are articulated. As her biography makes clear, German identity is neither merely an issue of language, nor of cultural traditions, descent, or geography. Rather, it is a matter of belonging to a contested but chimerical vision of ‘Heimat,” of which Celia Applegate observes: “Heimat has never been a word about real social forces or real political situations. Instead it has been a myth about the possibility of a community in the face of fragmentation and alienation” (19). In Müller’s case this fragmentation is not something to be overcome. Rather it is part of a strategy through which the individual maintains her freedom. In this respect it is misleading to characterize Müller as an exile, even if we qualify the term as in this volume. Unlike the traditional figure of the exile, whose work tends to participate in this struggle against fragmentation, Müller perceives diffusion, discontinuity, and dispersal as opportunities for the active construction of individual identity rather than as obstacles to the maintenance of collective identity. Moreover, while the narrative of exile reinforces an opposition between the place lost and the place found, the familiar past and foreign present, Müller portrays the relationship between cultures of her new home and the country of her birth not as one marked by irreparable rupture and schism, but rather as an ongoing process of dialogue and interaction.

Herta Müller (Thomas Cooper)

495

Works Cited Applegate, Celia. A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990. Bauer, Karin. “Patterns of Consciousness and Cycles of Self-Destruction: Nation and Gender in Herta Müller’s Prose.” Gender and Germanness: Cultural Productions of Nation. Ed. Patricia Herminghouse and Magda Müller. New York: Berghahn, 1998. 263–75. Bitterman, Klaus. “Warum sachlich, wenn’s auch persönlich geht. Diesen Monat: Herta Müller” (Why Objective when it Can also be Personal? This Month: Herta Müller). http://www.live-magazin.de/rubriken/whoswho/who9909.htm. Viewed on December 1, 2007. Brubaker, Rogers. Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992. De Nève, Dorotheé. “Zwanghafte Gleichberechtigung und kontrollierte Körper – Zu den Lebensbedingungen von Frauen im sozialistischen Rumänien” (Compulsive Equality and Controlled Bodies – On the Circumstances of Women in Socialist Romania). Frauen in Südosteuropa (Women in Southeast Europe). Ed. Anneli Ute Gabanyi and Hans Georg Majer. Munich: Südosteuropa-Gesellschaft, 1998. 59–78. Furhoff, Irena E. “Herta Müller: Nadirs.” International Fiction Review 30 (2003) P.1. Haines, Brigid, ed. Herta Müller. Cardiff: U of Wales P, 1988. Haines, Brigid. “The Unforgettable Forgotten: The Traces of Trauma in Herta Müller’s Reisende auf einem Bein.” German Life and Letters 55.3 (2002): 266–81. Klich, Kent and Herta Müller. Children of Ceaus¸escu. New York: Umbrage, 2002. Kocsis, Károly. “Changing Ethnic Patterns in Transylvania since 1989.” Journal of Hungarian Studies vol. 21 (2007): 179–201. Mardorossian, Carine M. “From Literature of Exile to Migrant Literature.” Modern Language Studies 32.2 (2002): 15–33. McDowell, Linda and Joanne Sharp, ed. A Feminist Glossary of Human Geography. London: Arnold, 1999. Mihaiu, Virgil. “Scriitori germani din Romania: ‘Vânt potrivit pâna˘ la tare’ la momentul potrivit” (German Writers from Romania: ‘A Moderate to Loud Wind’ the Moderate Moment). http://www.memoria.ro/?location=view_article&id=966. Viewed on December 6, 2007. Müller, Herta and Beverly Eddy. “‘Die Schule der Angst’: Gespräch mit Herta Müller, den 14. April 1998” (‘The School of Fear’: Conversation with Herta Müller, April 14, 1998). The German Quarterly 72.4 (1999): 329–39. Müller, Herta, and Gebhard Henke. “‘Mir erscheint jede Umgebung lebensfeindlich.’ Ein Gespräch mit der rumäniendeutschen Schriftstellerin Herta Müller.” (‘Every Surrounding Seems Hostile to Me.’ A Conversation with the Romanian-German Author Herta Müller). Süddeutsche Zeitung, November 16, 1984. 16–17. Müller, Herta. “‘Und ist der Ort wo wir leben’: Interview mit Herta Müller” (‘And is the Place where We Live’: Interview with Herta Müller). Reflexe. Aufsätze, Rezensionen und Interviews zur deutschen Literatur in Rumänien (Reflexes. Articles, Reviews and Interviews on German Literature in Romania). Vol. 2. Ed. Emmerich Reichrath. Cluj-Napoca: Dacia, 1984. 121–25. Müller, Herta. “Hunger und Seide. Männer und Frauen im Alltag” (Hunger and Silk. Men and Women in Everyday Life). Hunger und Seide 65–87.

496

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

Müller, Herta. “In jeder Sprache sitzen andere Augen” (In every Language there Sits the Gaze of Another). Der König Verneiget sich und tötet (The King Bows and Kills). Munich: Hanser, 2003. 7–39. Müller, Herta. “Nachrichten aus der Resig-Nation” (Reports out of the Resig-Nation). Nachruf auf die rumäniendeutsche Literatur (Obituary of Romanian-German literature). Marburg: Hitzeroth, 1990. 288–300. Müller, Herta. “Und noch erschrickt unser Herz” (And our Heart still Takes Fright). Hunger und Seide 19–38. Müller, Herta. Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jäger (The Fox Was already then the Hunter). Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1992. Müller, Herta. Der Teufel sitzt im Spiegel: Wie Warhnehmung sich erfindet (The Devil Sits in the Mirror: how Perception Invents itself). Berlin: Rotbuch, 1991. Müller, Herta. Der Wächter nimmt seinen Kamm (The Guard takes his Comb). Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1993. Müller, Herta. Die blassen Herren mit den Mokkatassen (The Pale Men with the Mocha Cups). Munich: Hanser, 2005. Müller, Herta. Drückender Tango (Pressing Tango). Bucharest: 1984; Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1996. Müller, Herta. Este sau nu este Ion (It is or it is not John). Bucharest: Polirom, 2005 Müller, Herta. Heimat ist das, was gesprochen wird (Homeland Is what is Said). Blieskastel: Gollenstein, 2001. Müller, Herta. Hunger und Seide (Hunger and Silk). Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1995. Müller, Herta. Im Haarknoten wohnt eine Dame (In the Topknots Lives a Lady). Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2000. Müller, Herta. Nadirs. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 1999. Trans. Sieglinde Lug of Niederungen. Berlin: Rotbuch, 1988. Müller, Herta. Reisende auf einem Bein. Berlin: Rotbuch, 1989. Trans. Valentina Glajar and André Lefevere as Traveling on One Leg. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1998. Müller, Herta. The Appointment. New York: Metropolitan, 2001. Trans. Michael Hulse and Philip Boehm of Heute wär ich mir lieber nicht begegnet. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1997. Müller, Herta. The Land of Green Plums. New York: Metropolitan, 1996. Trans. Michael Hofmann of Herztier (Heart-Beast). Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1994. Müller, Herta. The Passport. London: Serpent’s Tale, 1989. Trans. Martin Chalmers of Der Mensch ist ein grosser Fasan auf der Welt. Berlin: Rotbuch, 1986. Nahm, Peter Paul. “Der Wille zur Eingliederung und seine Förderung” (The Will to Integration and its Promotion). Die Vertriebenen in West-deutschland. Ihre Eingliederung und ihr Einfluß auf Gesellschaft, Wirtschaft, Politik und Geistesleben (Expellees in West Germany. Their Integration and Influence on Society, Economy, Politics, and Intellectual Life). Vol. 1. Ed. Eugen Lemberg and Friedrich Edding. Kiel: Hirt, 1959. 145–55. Rock, David, and Stefan Wolff, ed. Coming Home to Germany: The Integration of Ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe in the Federal Republic since 1945. Oxford, New York: Berghahn, 2002. Senders, Stefan. “Jus Sanguinis or Jus Mimesis? Rethinking ‘Ethnic German’ Repatriation.” Rock and Wolff 87–101. von Koppenfels, Amanda Klekowski. “The Decline of Privilege: The Legal Background to the Migration of Ethnic Germans.” Rock and Wolff 102–118.

Post-Yugoslav Theater Exile (Dragan Klaic)

497

Post-Yugoslav Theater Exile: Transitory, Partial and Digital Dragan Klaic

The disintegration of the former Yugoslavia in war, violence and ethnic cleansing throughout the 1990s has caused a mass population displacement within and among the former federal republics and beyond the 1991 borders of the country. Hundred-thousands of people sought refugee abroad and only a small number returned after the Dayton Peace Accord of 1995. The Kosovo crisis in 1999 prompted further displacement from that province: most Albanians returned after the end of the NATO intervention and most Serbs and Roma left for good. In the ensuing years, migration from ex-Yugoslavia has continued and since it has been driven by political motives more than just economic hardship it can in many cases be qualified as exile. Among those who left Yugoslavia at the beginning of the crisis (1990–93) there were quite a few writers opposing nationalism and its bellicose politics: Slavenka Drakulic´, Dubravka Ugresˇic´, Rajko Djuric´, Bora C´osic´, and David Albahari were among the better known figures in a mass exodus of artists, intellectuals, academics, and students. All of them undoubtedly have their own proper story and complex motivations for moving, but together they created the new post-Yugoslav Diaspora, spread across Eastern and Western Europe, North and South America, Australia and New Zeeland, with some persons resettled in Maghreb and South Africa as well. The post-Yugoslav exodus took along some theater people, belonging to various performing arts professions: playwrights, directors, actors, dramaturgs, designers, critics, producers, and technicians. If exiled literati need translators, publishers, and engaged critics to sustain them and help them reach an audience, the theater professionals need even more: translators and publishers for sure, but also directors, actors, designers, producers, festival programmers and, indeed, engaged critics. Theater is a constellation, an infrastructure, a system of provisions and therefore difficult to take along into exile or to reconstruct and re-deploy.

498

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

1. Historic Antecedents Let us consider as a paradigm the German anti-Nazi exile after 1933. Some theater professionals found a temporary refuge in Austria until the 1938 Anschluss, and a few in Zurich until the end of the war. All efforts to set up German exilic theater companies in Europe were short lived. A few German actors and writers who made it to the US found employment in the Hollywood studios. Brecht wrote diligently in a Santa Monica (CA) cottage, distant from the American show business and quite bewildered by it. Playwright Carl Zuckmayer kept chicken and grew potatoes in New England, writing a bit at the end of a long farmer’s day. Among theater directors, Leopold Jessner came via Palestine to the US in 1937 but couldn’t find any professional work, Max Reinhardt ran an acting school in California that was supported by a rich fan, and Erwin Piscator taught “The March of Drama” at the New School in New York. Broadway offered no opportunity to any of them, and could not replace the theater infrastructure they left behind in Germany – American show biz remained incompatible with the spirit and the production model of the European repertory theater that shaped those refugees, their theater notions, and directorial practices. Those German theater professionals who got stuck in Europe, especially Nazi-occupied Europe, were cut off from the stage and had to fear for their life. Those who found refuge in Great Britain or the Soviet Union had to develop alternative skills in order to survive, and they ran the risk of being isolated as enemy aliens. As the war advanced, theater life was disrupted not only in Nazi-occupied Europe but also in the UK and in the Third Reich and its allies. Another historic paradigm is provided by the exile of artists from the communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe after 1948. In the long ColdWar period until 1989, some theater professionals sought refuge in the West in several waves but their size remained limited. In 1976, the Hungarian police put Péter Halász and his Szobaszinház ([Private] Room Theater) group on the plane and sent them to Paris. After playing in an abandoned store in Rotterdam, they relocated to New York in 1977 and continued in a store front on 23rd street, as Squat Theater. Among the intellectuals and authors who went abroad after Warsaw Pact armies crushed the Prague Spring reformist movement were theater director Otomar Krejcˇa, who found occasional director’s work in Germany, France, Sweden, Italy and Austria between 1975 and 1988, and dramatic author Pavel Kohout, who worked as dramaturg in the Vienna Burgtheater. For all practical purposes, theater director Jerzy Grotowski left Poland in the mid-1970s, after becoming known world-wide with his international tours in 1969. Made practically stateless after the Jaruzelski military

Post-Yugoslav Theater Exile (Dragan Klaic)

499

coup of December 1981, Grotowski found refugee in the Odin theater of his follower Eugenio Barba in Holstenbro (DK), taught shortly in Rome and at Columbia and settled at the University of California Irvine, more as an artist in residence than as a teacher. He spent his final years in Centro per la Sperimentazione e la Ricerca Teatrale in Pontendera, Italy (1983–99). His colleague Kazimierz Braun lost his directing and teaching jobs in Wroclaw in 1983 and settled in the USA as a university teacher of theater directing. In Romania, the harsh cultural policies of Nicolae Ceaus¸escu forced quite a few theater directors to leave the country in 1970s. Andrei S¸erban left very young with a Ford grant in 1971 and stayed in the US, making a successful international career as theater and opera director. Lucian Pintilie distanced himself from the Romanian stage in 1973 after his production of Gogol’s Inspector General was banned by the censors. He sought to stay abroad as much as possible, working as theater director in France, in the US, and in the UK. David Esrig also left Romania in 1973; he led municipal theater companies in Bern and Essen, and founded in 1995 his own theater academy in Germany. Throughout the 1970s, Liviu Ciulei worked time and again abroad: he led the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis in 1980–85, staged plays at the Arena Stage in Washington, and taught at Colombia and NYU. Radu Penciulescu, Vlad Mugur, and Lucian Giurchescu also left Romania to direct abroad. Most artists left their country after some previous short term absences and after gaining some international recognition abroad. The pattern was set in the later 1960s by the Polish film and theater director Andrzej Wajda, who was not officially in exile but often abroad for a long time, staying away from troubles at home. In the stage profession, notorious for its discontinuity and high unemployment, directors sought to patch up their stage careers by teaching performing arts at universities. Behind those relatively known personalities there were dozens of lesser known artists who did not succeed to sustain their theater career in exile. Similar cases could be found in the waves of refugees from the Latin American dictatorships in 1960s-70s ( Jorge Lavelli), Iranian artists after 1979, and occasional exiles from African dictatorial regimes.

2. Pre-exilic Theater Life in former Yugoslavia In order to grasp post-Yugoslav theater exile, we must sketch the theater constellation of former Yugoslavia. Its developed system of performing arts rested on some hundred publicly subsidized repertory theater companies with a permanent ensemble, as well as an administrative and technical staff. Since cultural policy was a responsibility of the six federal republics and two

500

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

autonomous provinces rather than of the national government, each federal unit had a well-rounded infrastructure of companies, theater academies on the university level, festivals, professional associations, theater magazines, numerous amateur groups, and institutions of theater research. Each season some eight-hundred professional drama productions were presented in various variants of the Serbo-Croat language as well as in Slovene, Macedonian, Hungarian, Italian, Albanian and Turkish, while amateur and semiprofessional groups made productions also in a few additional minority languages. In addition, several opera houses staged opera and ballet productions. Many productions traveled around the country attending numerous festivals and occasionally went on tours abroad. Since late 1960s, contemporary domestic playwriting became the most popular repertory component. The most successful Yugoslav playwrights could expect to see their new play staged by a dozen of rep companies in various languages within one or two seasons. Since mid-1960s, Yugoslavia had been remarkably open to cultural communication with the rest of the world, which resulted in a rich and diverse repertory, many translations of the contemporary plays, aesthetic influences and frequent appearances of foreign companies at the international theater festivals in the country. Among them, the BITEF festival of experimental theater, held in Belgrade since 1967, and the Dubrovacˇke ljetnje igre (Dubrovnik Summer Festival, 1950–) should be singled out for their appeal and influence; they were joined in the 1980s by the Eurokaz experimental theater festival in Zagreb. There was no formal censorship but occasionally authorities silently intervened to end the run of a production they disliked; however, because of the federal system, they could not enforce the ban on the entire country. Beside publicly subsidized repertory companies, there were occasional productions of informal professional groups and a growing circuit of small-scale commercial productions. Some major summer festivals created their own productions, pooling artists from various cities. When several simultaneous nationalist escalations endangered the survival of the ailing federation in the late 1980s, performing arts went along with the new fashion, but the chauvinist outbursts were more pronounced in other forms of cultural production and especially in the media. Nationalist commonplaces popped up in popular comedies, historic plays, or in the commercial cabaret, but historians, poets, and linguists played a much greater role in the dissemination of nationalist propaganda in books, magazines and television talk-shows. Sensitive to popular appeal, the stage followed in invoking the supposed injustices and suffering imposed on own nation and blaming others for oppression and genocide. In contrast, KPGT, a theater and cultural movement (an acronym formed from the first letter of the world theater in

Post-Yugoslav Theater Exile (Dragan Klaic)

501

different Yugoslav languages) established in 1985 a stronghold in the Narodno pozorisˇte-Népszinház (National Theater) in Subotica/Szabadka, where it systematically used the stage to resist cultural separatism, and advocated an inclusive and dynamic notion of Yugoslav cultural space, based on cultural diversity. With its intensive inland tours, festivals in different cities, co-productions with other companies, international tours and hosting of foreign productions, KPGT opposed nationalism and took a critical stance against the worsening socio-economic and political crisis of the country. In 1991–92, KPGT and its spiritus movens, Ljubisˇa Ristic´, lost some of key collaborators to exile. In 1994 Ristic´ further alienated his remaining artistic collaborators and fans by becoming the President of JUL, a nominally leftist and “Yugoslav” political party, set up by Mirjana Markovic´, the spouse of Slobodan Milosˇevic´, and by associating himself with their regime. By then, the disintegration of the country had made KPGT already irrelevant and obsolete as a cultural political movement; as a producing system, KPGT was made dysfunctional as the nationalist onslaught made its infrastructure collapse at the outset of the war in 1991. Armed conflicts cut communication lines, drew new borders, and instigated ferocious ethnic cleansing. Military budgets preempted culture subsidies, and rampant inflation made everyone a pauper – except the warlords and their smuggler allies. Cultural production, especially in the performing arts, shrunk radically, while borders, war zones and international sanctions enforced cultural immobility and an overwhelming sense of isolation. This is the background of the theater exile from former Yugoslavia.

3. Squandered Opportunities: the Roma Theater Pralipe Most theater exiles were individual artists. Before we make any attempts to systematize their experiences and trace their exilic paths, attention is due to two cases of collective theater exile. One is the unique case of the Roma Company Pralipe from Skopje. Founded in late 1971 by Rahim Burhan as an amateur and increasingly semi-professional company, Pralipe created poetic productions in the Romani language, inspired by Artaud, sometimes adapted from classics (Shakespeare, Sophocles), or works of contemporary Macedoˇ ivko Cˇingo, Goran Stefanovski) and foreign authors (Lorca, Brecht). nian (Z Being practically the only Roma company on the Balkans, if not in Europe, Pralipe took part in the Yugoslav and international festivals, and co-produced with the Yugoslav rep companies, esp. with KPGT. It made its mark with temperamental, passionate, poetic, and ritualistic productions pulsating with

502

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

emotions, but lacking a careful structure and the development of its own stage esthetics. With Yugoslavia about to collapse, Pralipe, as many other companies, was threatened by a loss of its territory of engagement, and could find no means of survival in the unstable and extremely impoverished conditions of the soon to be independent Macedonia. Roberto Ciulli of the Theater a.d. Ruhr in Mülheim, Germany, who maintained intensive cooperative ties with theaters across Yugoslavia since 1979, felt that Pralipe was a European asset and could not be allowed to disappear. With special subsidies of the German public authorities he succeeded to bring the company to Mülheim already at the end of 1990 for the premiere of Blood Wedding, and he ensured that it settled there in July 1991. Theater a.d. Ruhr provided working opportunities for Pralipe, and extended its own marketing and publicity resources to make sure that the old and new Pralipe productions appear at some international festivals in Europe and on the stages of German cities. Burhan created under the aegis of Ciulli fifteen new productions (among them of Blood Wedding, Othello, Romeo & Juliet, Der Klassenfeind) between 1991 and 2000, but he experienced the desertion of some of his best actors and had difficulty in finding new qualified Romany-language performers. He failed to establish a strong rapport with Roma and Sinti organizations in Germany, which perhaps saw in Pralipe an upstart competitor for media attention and subsidies. The company itself profited from the professional possibilities in Germany but lacked professional actors, except for Nedjo Osman, Suncˇica Todic´ and Ruisˇ Kadirova. Instead of furthering an intensive professional development of the group, stability and security created a certain complacency and even unhealthy dependence on Ciulli’s team and its services. Since the audience was predominantly German, a certain exotic aura of the work shown was inevitable. Pralipe could not find its own support among the German and European Roma (who are generally lacking their own cultural and media infrastructure and effective political representation) and was losing ground in competition with the German companies (freie Gruppen) for space and bookings on the German stages and with other European autonomous companies at the international theater festivals. Theater a.d. Ruhr remained Pralipe’s only structural backer and this overloaded their relationship. After departure from Mülheim in 2001, Pralipe worked on its own in Düsseldorf, Berlin, and Cologne, producing eight new pieces until 2004, and it sought support in co-productions with the Mostarski teatar mladih (Mostar Youth Theater), Budva grad teatar (a Montenegro festival), and the MOT festival in Skopje (Happy Roma 2004). However, it found no sustainable production and operation model. While nowadays Burhan occasionally directs in the regular repertory

Post-Yugoslav Theater Exile (Dragan Klaic)

503

companies of former Yugoslavia and earns praise of Macedonian theater scholars for his pioneering interculturalism (see Luzˇina and Stojanovska), Pralipe is for all intents and purposes a finished history. This originally Macedonian and Yugoslav Roma Company was for a decade a German Roma ensemble but was unable to win a legitimate position in the German theater landscape or to become truly European – even though Burhan re-baptized it in 2001 as European Roma Pralipe Theater. For such a project Burhan and his colleagues had no artistic capacity and no political astuteness; Roma and European Union political and professional theater support did not materialize. Romani language and Roma identity, which gave Pralipe for a long time a specific weight and cultural-political importance, were not enough to guarantee a professional production machinery or an artistic vibrancy. If exile initially offered professional consolidation thanks to the Theater a.d. Ruhr, and brought, at least in principle, exposure to a larger potential Roma and non-Roma audience in Germany and across Europe, exile ultimately became a desert in which Burhan lost his way.

4. From Exile to Integration: Théâtre Tattoo Mladen Materic´’s Théâtre Tattoo is another, rather resilient, exilic group. It developed in the 1980s around the Sarajevo Akademija scenskih umjetnosti (Academy of Scenic Arts) and its experimental venue Obala. In 1986, Materic´’s production of The Tattoo Theater unexpectedly won the Edinburgh Fringe Award, and this was followed with much foreign touring. A new production, Moonplay (1988), brought Materic´ to France for a tour. When the war broke out in Bosnia in April 1992, Materic´ and some of his actors succeeded in leaving Sarajevo at the very beginning of the siege and finding, via Belgrade, a shelter at the Théâtre Garonne in Toulouse. Supported by gestures of solidarity by several French co-producers, Materic´ staged there with his group Le jour de fête (1993), which was shown in the Théâtre de la Bastille in Paris and elsewhere on tour. Settled in Toulouse and integrated in the French system of public subsides, co-productions, and pre-arranged tours, Materic´ and Théâtre Tattoo offered a series of productions: Le Ciel est loin et la terre aussi (1995), Le Petit spectacle d’hiver (1997), L’Odyssée (1999), La Cuisine (2002), Sequence 3 (2004), and Nouvelle Byzance (2007). This regular rhythm of new productions by a company in exile, each shown in many places internationally, would be impressive for any theater group in Europe. Materic´’ advantage was his aesthetics, derived from the vocabulary of the mime theater, of performance without practically any spoken words, made of

504

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

movement, gestures, and images. Even in the early Sarajevo phase he discarded spoken language, the curse of any exilic theater effort, and thus gained a significant creative advantage for the Théâtre Tattoo. Over the years in France some of his Sarajevo actors abandoned him (in fact, only two remained with him, Jelena C´oric´ and Haris Resˇic´) but he recruited and even trained additional French performers to fit his style, which was communicable and accessible in his new domicile and elsewhere as well. In addition to the eliminated language barrier, Materic´ profited from an international reputation, established even before exile, from the initial hospitality of the Théâtre Garonne at the beginning of his exile, and from a sense of shame and powerlessness that overcame many theater professionals in Europe when seeing the war in former Yugoslavia and eager to do “something,” to find a way to engage themselves productively. Since most theater professionals did not possess the courage of Susan Sontag, who went into besieged Sarajevo to direct there Becket’s Waiting for Godot in 1993 under the light of candles and solar batteries, supporting Materic´ was the least they could do. By the time the war came to the end with the Dayton Peace Accord (1995) and global interest for Sarajevo and Bosnia started fading, making space for other, newly developing catastrophes in the world, Théâtre Tattoo was established quite well in the French system. Moreover, Materic´ profited from a less visible but continuous patronage of his old friend form the Sarajevo Academy, the well-known film director Emir Kusturica, who also left Sarajevo at the beginning of the siege, settled in Serbia and France, and continued making successful films with subsidies from the Milosˇevic´ government, and international producers. Kusturica’s success, popularity, and network greatly helped Materic´ establish his company in exile. In 2001 these two ex-Sarajevans, called now “two Serbians” in a web blurb, made jointly an installation at the First Valencia Biennale entitled “A Land Looking to a Continent (The Four Horsemen),” using land, transported in trucks from Belgrade and Sarajevo, to convey the leading role it played “in a series of illusionary metaphors on the horrors of war and destruction, as well as on love, life and hope” (www.union-web.com/la_bienal_de_valencia). Truncated metaphors aside, Kusturica was an early apologist of Milosˇevic´’s bellicose politics, and consistently played down the horrors of the Sarajevo siege, blaming all parties equally; whereas Materic´ avoided political statements and played in public a refugee with no special solidarity with his besieged former fellow citizens. Not surprisingly, in 2002 Materic´ used for his new production La Cuisine a play by Peter Handke, a staunch advocate of the Serb cause against the demonization of the Western media. Handke’s defense of the Serbs made him a popular author of the Serbian repertory, but when

Post-Yugoslav Theater Exile (Dragan Klaic)

505

Materic´, supported with several French co-producers, came in 2006 to Belgrade to stage Handke’s play The Hour When We Did Not Know Anything About Each Other (Die Stunde da wir nichts voneinander wussten) in the Narodno pozorisˇte (National Theater), the premiere was postponed and then cancelled, with Materic´ returning to France quite embittered (“Blamazˇa”).

5. Between Music and the Stage Another successful artistic exile from Sarajevo, Goran Bregovic´, reached fame in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1970 as guitarist, leader, and composer of the rock band Bijelo dugme. He made music for Kusturica’s films before the war, and once in French exile in 1992 he continued composing for him and other well-known film makers (recently for Patrice Chereau’s La Reine Margot). He embarked with his Wedding and Funeral Band on increasingly complex stage pieces, such as Silences of the Balkans, directed by the Slovene expat Tomazˇ Pandur for the Thessaloniki European Capital of Culture in 1997. While composing for Kusturica’s films and Pandur’s international productions, Bregovic´ turned his mélange of Balkan, Eastern European, and Roma melodies, world and pop music in an appealing intercultural concoction, open for the input of other composers and musicians, and increasingly popular from France to Poland and further to Singapore, once billed as international, then as an intercultural and, when needed, as an inter-confessional music event. After the music piece Karmen with a Happy End (2004) Bregovic´ made in 2007 Forgive me, is this the way to the future, commissioned by EHO, a consortium of most prestigious European concert halls, eager to attract a new young audience. Bregovic´’ success rests very much on his ability to take along the intercultural capital developed in the dynamic and mobile cultural production of former Yugoslavia, and reinvest it in the broader European cultural space, in multiple genres, forms, and media, and re-launch it in the realm of a globalized music industry. He is especially apt to intertwine specific music traditions and idioms and integrate them under the successful label of ‘world music,’ appealing to most divergent audiences with intense emotions, fast rhythm, and a careful dosage of exoticism.

506

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

6. Career Shifts and Turns Undoubtedly, musicians have it easier in exile than actors. Most actors who left ex-Yugoslavia during the war could not sustain themselves in the profession. Like many other exiled actors before, Dragana Varagic´, once she left Belgrade, found only occasional opportunities to be on stage in Toronto, and she started, after further studies, teaching theater. Exceptionally, some outstanding actors, well known from the stage, film, and television, reached the Hollywood studios, just like their predecessors, refugees from the Nazi Germany in 1930’s. Mira Furlan, reviled in Zagreb as a traitor of the Croat cause for playing on the Belgrade stage on the eve of the war, left for New York in disgust (see Furlan) and she landed by sheer luck in the TV series Babylon. Rade Sˇerbedzˇija, the foremost Yugoslav actor, by origin a Serb from Croatia, left Zagreb and moved to Belgrade before the outbreak of the war, then to Ljubljana, and finally to London. Unexpectedly, his success in Milcho Manchevski’s USA-Macedonian film Before the Rain (1994), much noticed at a Venice film festival, opened for him the prospect of a Hollywood acting career. Exiled theater directors had a different path. For some of them, exile was a temporary option, with a return home as the ultimate outcome. From Croatia, caught in the violent secession and nationalist escalation, Goran Golovko moved to London but ultimately returned to Split and is now the Director of Drama at the Croat National Theater. Larry Zappia moved from Rijeka to Toronto but came back to his old theater. Boris Bakal went at the outbreak of the war from Zagreb via Paris, Belgium, Luxemburg, and the Czech Republic to Bologna, set up his company there and made seven productions, but returned to Zagreb in 2001, after the end of the Tud-man regime in Croatia, to start his Bacacˇi sjenki (Shadow Casters) initiative. In Croatia, the death of Tud-man and the electoral defeat of his HDZ party in 2000/2001 marked a watershed, the end of the militant nationalism as ruling power but not as a political factor. Consequently, these theater people, and perhaps some other artists, chose to return to Croatia in 2001, judging that the leaden 1990s are over. Not Nada Kokotovic´, a choreographer and theater director originally from Zagreb, who has worked since 1978 all over Yugoslavia, chiefly in the KPGT framework, often in tandem with Ljubisˇa Ristic´, and then increasingly on her own. She left Subotica in 1992 and settled in Germany. There she started her career from scratch and proceeded to direct over 30 dramatic and music-theater productions, especially choreodramas in several German repertory companies; in Cologne she ran her own small production organization TKO with the ex-Pralipe actor Nedjo Osman. In her work, feminist, Roma and exilic motives invoke frequently the anomic, distant gaze of an outsider; works of

Post-Yugoslav Theater Exile (Dragan Klaic)

507

ex-Yugoslav authors, such as Biljana Srbljanovic´ and Filip Sˇovagovic´, appear only rarely. Most complicated was the trajectory of Haris Pasˇovic´, a Sarajevo theater director who worked chiefly in Belgrade before the war. In 1990 he started teaching at the Sarajevo Academy of Scenic Art (where Kusturica and Materic´ were his colleagues), but feeling increasingly uncomfortable in the worsening political situation he went in the spring of 1991 with some of his students to Subotica, to work under the aegis of KPGT. When the war started in Bosnia in April 1992, he came to Amsterdam. Offered a chance to direct an international co-production on the martyrdom of Sarajevo for the opening of Antwerp European Cultural Capital 1993 (Sarajevo, Tales from a City, written by Goran Stefanovski), he moved to Stockholm and started rehearsing; however, at the end of 1992 he succeeded to smuggle himself into the occupied Sarajevo, at the time when most Sarajevans dreamed about leaving the besieged city. Once there, he worked with Susan Sontag on her Waiting for Godot production and became a key figure of Sarajevo’s cultural resistance to war as a producer, director, pedagogue, and a foremost a cultural activist who sought various cultural forms to convey the world the outrage of the war in Bosnia and to strengthen among the Sarajevans their sense of civic and cultural solidarity. In 1994, and again in spring 1995, Pasˇovic´ left the still besieged city with a group of actors, mainly young people, and toured Europe with two of his productions, eliciting gestures of solidarity with his city. He stayed quite a long time in Amsterdam even after his company returned in 1996, but ultimately he also returned to Sarajevo, with some reluctance. The war and its chaotic aftermath pushed Pasˇovic´ in different professional directions, including publishing, film, and television, but he ultimately resumed teaching at the Sarajevo Academy and, after a long pause, continued directing in theater. His anabasis indicates the confusion and contradictory impulses of an exile: the need to be engaged and involved; a desire to be freed of political contingencies and pressures; exploration of theater as an instrument to induce solidarity; a search for more effective tools in other media; internalization of the role of a director as an instigator, organizer, and leader; and the urge to go on alone, without compromise and encumbering arrangements. Pasˇovic´’ long march before, during, and after the war through institutions in Novi Sad, Belgrade, Sarajevo, Subotica, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the UK lead him, as we described it earlier (Klaic “Crisis”), ultimately to the Sarajevo National Theater and then, in frustration, to his own institution, The East West Center, where he directed Hamlet, Faust and Nigel Williams’ Class Enemy (2005–2007). With this last production he appeared in 2008 at the major international festivals in Singapore and Edinburgh.

508

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

7. Double Track Among the playwrights from former Yugoslavia, one sees various exilic strategies that tend to rely on some preserved or renewable professional ties with the home territory, a double track existence of being ‘here’ and ‘there,’ in exile and in some way, symbolically or even occasionally physically, at the home base. Goran Stefanovski, a much appreciated Macedonian author with dozens of productions of his plays across former Yugoslavia, followed his English spouse and children, and settled in Canterbury, UK in 1992, but continued for several years to teach occasionally his playwriting courses at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Skopje. He was in a sort of commuting exile. His plays, old and new, continued being produced in Macedonia, while in the UK and Sweden he started university teaching and collaboration with performing arts producers and groups as an author who had no particular trouble switching from Macedonian to English. If as a playwright he was more an émigré than an exile, he was, one could say, in a self-chosen exile from his native language, at least for a while. In 2006 he wrote again a play in Macedonian, Demonot od Debar Maalo (The Demon from Debar Maalo), which was promptly produced in Skopje; it is not on exile but on the post-communist transition, real-estate speculation, and money-making fever of ’wild capitalism’. Though Stefanovski cannot be classified as an exile according to the strict nomenclature applied in this volume, he has been intellectually and politically part of the wargenerated Yugoslav intellectual and artistic Diaspora; even if he keeps returning to Skopje regularly for short stays and has had a continuous cultural presence there in terms of publications and productions, he has been sharing with his fellow Serb, Croat, and Bosnian theater exiles a sense of loss that the integrated and pluralist Yugoslav cultural space and its interconnected theater infrastructure to which he and they once belonged has disappeared. Similarly, László Végel, a Hungarian language playwright, novelist, and essayist, dismissed from his job at the drama program of the Novi Sad Television at the beginning of the war, did not join the wave of Hungarians who left Vojvodina in 1992–94 because of the war, pauperization, UN sanctions, and an increasingly hostile Serbian nationalism. He has continued living in Novi Sad, though he spends more time in Budapest and publishes more in Hungarian publications, benefiting from the cultural opening there after 1989. At home, he has kept out of public life, especially during and after the 1999 NATO bombing, as his published diary, Exteritorijum, indicates. Stefanovski’s former student, Dejan Dukovski, had his first play Bure baruta (The Powder Keg; 1996) successfully produced in Skopje and in Belgrade, and this production traveled much abroad, making it possible for him to settle temporarily in

Post-Yugoslav Theater Exile (Dragan Klaic)

509

Hamburg, away from the turbulence of Macedonian party politics and the Macedonian-Albanian rift; his plays have been produced in Germany, Denmark, France, and later in Split, Croatia. Now he is again in Skopje, at least for a while. Dzˇevad Karahasan, an essayist, playwright and theater scholar, left Sarajevo under more pressing circumstances, after a year of daily mortal danger and continuous depravation, chronicled in his Dnevnik selidbe (1994). He lived in Berlin, Graz, and Göttingen, but started to return regularly to Sarajevo after the war to teach and publish. Like Végel, many authors, directors, dramaturgs, and actors were caught during the 1990s in a sort of internal exile, opposing the war, militant nationalism, and the political forces in power, shunning public life as if their appearance would mean some tacit approval of the prevailing politics. At the same time, some of them have felt banished from Europe and the rest of the world, isolated by the UN sanctions against Serbia that affected cultural and academic relations; they have been suffering from repression and living in fear as Kosovo Albanians did until the 1999 NATO intervention, and as the few remaining Serbs still do in the handful of enclaves in Kosovo. Many have resented being kept away from most of Europe by the restrictive EU visa regime, which applies to most of the Yugoslav successor states and their citizens. Displacements within the borders of the former Yugoslavia became important: individual artists moved from Belgrade to Zagreb and Ljubljana, from Zagreb to Belgrade, from Sarajevo to Ljubljana and Zagreb, from Cetinje to Zagreb and from other places to other destinations, resisting nationalist homogenization, fearing discrimination due to them not belonging to the majority ethnic group, or seeking to avoid war, violence, and forced mobilization.

8. Excursions, not Returns Those who went abroad from former Yugoslavia in 1991 and afterwards remained attached with many emotional, social, and professional ties to the cultural world from which they departed. In most cases, leaving did not mean cutting all the institutional ties, and over the years some temporarily severed ties have been renewed, new relations have been established, and new professional opportunities have emerged. The post-Yugoslav theater exile was prompted by the 1991–95 war, but the exiles reacted to all significant punctuating events that followed and to the altered circumstances they caused: the 1999 NATO bombing and the practical (if not de jure) secession of Kosovo from Serbia; the toppling of the Milosˇevic´ regime in Serbia in 2000; the end of

510

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

the Tud-man era in Croatia in 2001; the 2001 Ohrid Agreements ending the Albanian guerilla upraising in Macedonia; the 2006 declaration of independence by Montenegro and Kosovo’s self-declared independence in 2008. All these political changes during a more than fifteen years period have altered the cultural constellations and professional opportunities, and have limited as well as enlarged the communication channels available among the successor states and with their exilic communities. Trains have started running again across some new frontiers, airlines resumed flights, economic, political, and cultural ties were re-established among the successor states, visa regimes softened or were even abolished. All these changes had an impact on the attitudes and behavior of those who left and watched these developments from abroad. Now that the war has ended, several ex-Yugoslav theater professionals living and working abroad are initiating projects that reconnect them with the theater infrastructure they once left. While working as programmer in Cardiff ’s Chapter and then in Hamburg’s Kampnagel, Gordana Vnuk kept running every spring the Zagreb Eurokaz festival and has initiated collaborative projects among ex-Yugoslav colleagues, culminating in a complex program package for the 2007 Eurokaz that highlights the historic and mythic dimensions of J.B. Tito in five different productions. She has succeeded in initiating a series of international co-productions because she was outside Zagreb and Croatia, and because she was running this project from Hamburg, deploying the Kampnagel production resources. Some components were performed in other countries but the most confrontational was the presentation of the entire package in Zagreb – a cultural-political gesture opposing the systematic derision of Tito that has marked the Croatian public discourse since independence. Now she is back in Zagreb. Nada Kokotovic´ and Nedjo Osman went from Cologne to the Belgrade Center for Cultural Decontamination to stage Heiner Müller’s Hamletmaschine and Medea respectively. Vesna Stanisˇic´, who became a Swedish language playwright and dramaturg in exile, initiated a three-year-long project between Swedish and Serbian theaters for children and their professionals, seeking to upgrade this theater segment in her former country. Director Milosˇ Lazin, who left Belgrade and settled in Paris before the war, kept returning to Zagreb, Sarajevo, Mostar, and Osijek to work as theater director and pedagogue. Mira Erceg, who lived between Berlin and Belgrade even before the outbreak of the war, continued to return from her Berlin domicile to Belgrade to direct. Belgrade actors Snezˇana Bogdanovic´ and Uliks Fehmiu, and producer Milena Trobozic´ Garfield, returned from New York to Belgrade in 2004 to produce and perform thirty times in a row The Graduate, a well-known film repackaged

Post-Yugoslav Theater Exile (Dragan Klaic)

511

now for the stage and running every evening for an entire month – an entrepreneurial novelty against the routines of the Belgrade theaters with their rotating repertory. Behind these artists, all well known and accomplished even before they went into exile, there is an army of performing-arts students that also left the country with the war, but without diplomas, credits on the CV, and networks, thus generally unable to pursue theater careers. Together with other post-YU exiles not connected to the performing arts, they could rely on many invisible and yet crucial networks that have been established in the early 1990s, providing comfort, help, support, with Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, and Stockholm as the key hubs. Exiles could also rely in these cities on the ex-Yugoslavs who settled there before the war. These inter-ethnic and inter-generational networks have been marked by the rejection of violence, war, and nationalism. Many students who interrupted their studies in order to go abroad could continue studying thanks to the support of a worldwide emergency grant program that George Soros’ Open Society Institute provided in 1993–2000, and grants offered by the UAF in the Netherlands, the WUS in Austria, and other generous provisions. Jasenko Selimovic´ started studying at the Sarajevo Academy of Scenic Arts and came in 1992 to Stockholm as a refugee. He joined by chance the production of Sarajevo, Tales of a City, prepared by Intercult for the opening of the Antwerp European Cultural Capital ’93. Selimovic´ subsequently completed his studies at the Drama Institute in Stockholm, directed a few productions, and became the director of the Municipal Theater in Göteborg. Later he worked with several other Nordic companies and for the drama programs of the Swedish television and radio. In a few instances, the new post-YU Diaspora was highlighted in small festivals held in Amsterdam, Vienna, Stockholm, Berlin, and Mülheim a.d. Ruhr. In these and some other instances, cultural organizations in Western Europe created events that grouped exiles dispersed in Europe and connected them with their peers and colleagues who came from some of the successor states. These were precious occasions to catch up with each other, check on turbulent developments, and gain new insights, both on exile and on the culturalpolitical conditions in ex-Yugoslavia (Klaic´, “Reconnecting in Ruhr”). Vienna Theater G.m.b.H sought to reconnect separated ex-Yugoslav theater realms by organizing a competition in 2001 for new plays from the region. The result, two volumes of plays (Olof), stimulated in the German speaking theater an interest in new post-Yugoslav dramas.

512

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

9. In the Internet Exile What characterized this specific exile wave was the rapid development of e-mail and internet. Post-Yugoslavs or ex-Yugoslavs, dispersed over several continents, are among the first cyber-exiles; communication among them, and with those who stayed in the countries of former Yugoslavia has been greatly facilitated and accelerated through the new technology, affecting not just the exchange of news and personal messages but also the circulation of cultural products, made at home and in exile, of plays, reviews, photos, music, video snippets of new productions, polemics, and blogs. For the first time, a generation of well educated exile artists had instantaneous access to huge amounts of information about the territory and cultural constellation they left behind, and about cultural developments in areas where their fellow exiles reside. Online libraries enable exiles to access cultural goods left behind and to share their own creation with many, as if they still disposed of a tightly knit social and artistic circle they once enjoyed at home. Actually, with the arrival of the internet, some of the most stereotypical assumptions about the nature of exile, such as isolation, loneliness, a sense of disconnectedness, and acculturation, need to be re-examined. They have not been made altogether irrelevant by the cyber-communication boom but certainly diminished and modified, at least among the better educated exiles and those residing in the cities with a concentration of post-Yugoslav intellectuals. This new exile group did not set up publishing houses and magazines (except for the three issues of the review Erewhon that Slobodan Blagojevic´ and Hamdija Demirovic´ published in 1992–93 in Amsterdam) but initiated web pages, e-newsletters, circular e-mails, later enriched with photos and video clips. The accomplishments of the performing artists from former Yugoslavia should be seen in conjunction with the cultural production of their fellow exiles in literature, music, the visual arts (Milica Tomic´, Tanja Ostojic´, Sejla Kameric´ …), and film. All the frustrations and difficulties notwithstanding, the exile years have been productive and creative for many. Where one resides has become less important, global networks connect artists, cultural organizations and platforms, and the cyber communication among them is steady and intensive. One hardly gets lost, disappear, and drop in the black hole of exilic isolation and despair. Internet offers telephone books of virtually all countries and cities. Those who think they disappeared in the anonymity of exile will be soon traced, reconnected with fellow exiles, with friends left behind and with many other artists who also live a nomadic existence by choice, more as expats then as exiles. With Skype and other VOIP systems, the exilic dialogue is a matter of familiar voices and faces vis-

Post-Yugoslav Theater Exile (Dragan Klaic)

513

ible online, dissecting distances and making them less important. The internet search engines are powerful integrators of dispersed exilic communities, and individual artistic careers, punctuated by exile, regain their virtual continuity in the long lists of web pages Google produces on the computer screen if one searches for a particular name. In fact, Google helped reconstruct dozens of artistic careers, discussed in this chapter. If previous generations of exiles mourned their private libraries left behind and their papers and art works lost in many moves, dispersed among former residences and left in various shelters and warehouses, today’s exiles may calmly remark: “My homeland is my laptop!” Of course, laptops do crash, fall, and get stolen, but Goran Stefanovski, as many others, travels with his entire oeuvre safely stored on his USB stick, including his scripts, essays, and plays (and probably photos of their past stagings). Many exile writers, photographers, visual artists, composers, or directors keep their own oeuvre in the cyberspace, stored in some of the virtual warehouses, such as gmail with its comfortable capacity of 6 Gb and accessibility from wherever one can get online. Exiles are not necessarily dispossessed of their own artistic or intellectual opus, as the historic exiles often were.

10. Exiles as Mediators Thanks to the internet, the flow of cultural products from “home” to abroad has also increased. The presence of many theater exiles in Western Europe and North America increased the circulation abroad, the foreign translations, and, eventually, the publication and staging of plays by the ex-Yugoslav authors who did not emigrate. The performing artists in exile have become cultural intermediaries, facilitating the circulation of plays from former Yugoslavia, translating them or finding translators for them, occasionally staging them or urging others to do so. Since the 1990s, the translations of such plays, and of the number of authors involved perceptibly increased. Most of these non-exiles are young authors who became active in the years of the war or even afterwards; the proportion of women among them is very high, most come from the university playwriting programs in Belgrade, Zagreb, and Skopje. Most translations are into English and from there often further into other languages, but the translations into French and German have also become more numerous in comparison with the decade before 1991. There are, for instance, some seventy plays of ex-Yugoslav authors written after 1991 that are translated into French (www.troisiemebureau.com/3d/regards_ croises/data/biblio.pdf). This wave initiated also the translation of many

514

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

plays written before the war in the territory of former Yugoslavia, including classics by Miroslav Krlezˇa and Branislav Nusˇic´. ˇ eljko Theater exiles have become cultural mediators and promoters. Z Djukic´ graduated in theater directing from Belgrade, went to the US for graduate studies, and stayed there because of the outbreak of the war. He established his theater TUTA (The Utopian Theater Asylum) in Washington, D.C. and later in Chicago, where after several successful productions of Brecht, Handke, Heiner Mueller, and Aristophanes he directed two new Belgrade plays, Ugljesˇa Sˇajtinac’s Hadersfild in 2006 and Milena Markovic´’ Sˇine (Tracks; 2006, revived in 2007), designed by his partner Natasˇa Vucˇurovic´. The nonrealistic, non-psychological, and non-linear approach of both plays, as well as their powerful evocation of youth crushed by war and violence, caught the attention of the Chicago critics. They were acknowledged as fine plays, but without Djukic´ in all probability they would never have reached the Chicago stage. Much as exiles habitually provide the core audience, the successful run would only be possible with an appeal to the usual American theater audience. Milosˇ Lazin, in Paris since 1989, directed in 1996 in CDN de Montluçon Hôtel Europe, his own adaptation of the novel La Neige et les chiens (The Snow and the Dogs) by Vidosav Stevanovic´, a Belgrade author, at the time a Paris exile, who later went to Sarajevo and lives now in his native village near Kragujevac, Serbia. Subsequently, Lazin used his French network to set up a complex international co-production of Ines & Denise by the Zagreb author Slobodan Sˇnajder. He directed it and toured in 1997–99 with this bilingual production of his company Mappa Mundi in France and Bosnia. In 2007 he directed Zˇena bomba (Woman Bomb) by the young Croat author Ivana Sajko, taking it to Rennes, Paris, Orleans, and Le Mans. Sˇnajder never left Zagreb, but his plays Zmijski svlak (La Dépouille du serpent; 1994) and Hrvatski Faust (Le Faust Croate; 1982) were subsequently translated and published in France. Quite a ˇ anina Mirfew foreign productions of plays by Maja Pelevic´, Ivana Sajko, Z cˇevska, Dusˇan Kovacˇevic´, Matjazˇ Zupancˇicˇ, Milena Markovic´, and Asja Srnec-Todorovic´, and several other playwrights who are not in exile, should be credited to the efforts, attention, and direct involvement of ex-Yugoslav theater exiles. An encounter of playwrights from former Yugoslavia that Milosˇ Lazin organized in Sarajevo in 2000 brought thirty participants together, and resulted in the publication of the anthology De l’Adriatique à la mer Noire (2001) in France. Sava Andjelkovic´ from the Slavic Department of the Sorbonne launched a series of conferences of French and ex-Yugoslav theater scholars that took place since 2003 in Paris, Cetinje-Podgorica, Zagreb, and Sarajevo, leading to the essay collection Le théâtre d’aujourd’hui en Bosnie-Herzégovine,

Post-Yugoslav Theater Exile (Dragan Klaic)

515

Croatie, Serbie et au Monténégro, Nationalisme et autisme (2006). The Maison de l’Orient et de l’ Europe in Paris and its publishing arm L’espace d’un instant brought out in French some twelve books of plays by ex-Yugoslav authors. Exiles created a receptive infrastructure and shaped an economy of attention for plays by authors who stayed in the countries of former Yugoslavia. They have been often directly involved in the translations, publications and foreign production of those plays. It is difficult to judge how much the strong breakthrough of the Belgrade author Biljana Srbljanovic´ into the international repertory could be ascribed to this exilic infrastructure of attention and support. Her success has been formidable: according to Milosˇ Lazin (“A quoi tient le succès de Biljana Srbljanovic´?”) she had more than 130 professional productions abroad since 1997 and has surpassed the total number of foreign productions of all authors who ever lived on the territory of the ex-Yugoslavia, including Branislav Nusˇic´, Aleksandar Popovic´, Ljubomir Simovic´, Dusˇan Kovacˇevic´, Slobodan Sˇnajder, Dusˇan Jovanovic´, Goran Stefanovski, who all had more than twenty foreign productions each. For Srbljanovic´’ success the presentation of her plays at the Bonner Biennale was particularly important, for it brought her early plays Beogradska trilogija (The Belgrade Trilogy; 1997) and Porodicˇne pricˇe (Family Stories; 1998) to the attention of many critics, dramaturgs, directors, and translators, who congregated at this festival of new European plays. That those and her subsequent plays quickly entered the international repertory could also be explained by a new curiosity about Balkan culture and its contemporary cultural production that has emerged around or despite the ravages of war and the related profound social collapse and moral impasse. Srbljanovic´’s success facilitated also the foreign production of other playwrights from Belgrade, Zagreb, Ljubljana, and Skopje. Though there is no causal connection between the efforts of the post-Yugoslav theater exiles and Srbljanovic´’s international success, there is behind this individual breakthrough a complex dialectic of artistic exile and domestic artistic production, another indication of interdependence and connectivity between home and abroad, often shaped in a form of a collaborative relationship. In Beogradska trilogija Srbljanovic´ was the first to foreground in drama the massive exodus of urban youth from Serbia, the unprecedented brain drain that a few generations will not be able to balance, and the new exilic enclaves of Toronto, Sidney, Oakland, New Zealand, with their schizophrenic subculture. She set this new exile as a theme of the post-Yugoslav domestic and exilic cultural production, but it did not become an issue of public debates in former Yugoslavia, and in her subsequent plays she moved to other topics, avoiding to be pigeonholed as an author of exile. Ironically, ten years and sev-

516

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

eral plays later, she herself lives both in Paris and Belgrade as an uneasy, irritable commentator of post-Milosˇevic´ Serbia and of the exile his politics once prompted. She fuses the career of an internationally acclaimed and much produced author with that of a teacher of new domestic playwrights at the Belgrade Faculty of Dramatic Arts, acting as a mobile and polemic columnist and blogger, a part-time expat. Lazin has argued in his articles that her success and that of her even younger colleagues from the post-Yugoslav states derive from their ability to write in the currently prevailing dramaturgical modes. They eschew previous models of historic drama, appropriate to the recent nationalist euphoria (Nikcˇevic´).

11. Reconstruction and Normalization After 2001, more ambitious reconstructive projects became possible, bringing the exiles together and in professional relationship with those who did not leave their country. Most important of these is the Theater Ulysses, founded by the ex-Zagreb (now Los Angeles) actor Rade Sˇerbedzˇija and Zagreb author Borislav Vujicˇic´. In the National Park of the Brioni archipelago that once was Tito’s secluded Adriatic resort, Sˇerbedzˇija and Vujicˇic´ set out to develop summer theater seasons. From King Lear in 2001 onward, they premiered one new production each summer and continued performing some old productions as well. The performances are given mostly in the ruins of an ancient Austro-Hungarian fortress on the uninhabited Mali Brijun island, whereas the audience is transported over by boat from the nearby port of Fazˇana. In this pastoral environment, loaded with symbolism, most performing artists come from Zagreb, Rijeka, and Split, as well as from some other parts of former Yugoslavia. The musicians of the Mostarska Simfonieta and the singers Putokazi come from Mostar, led by the Edinburgh composer Nigel Osborne. Some who went into exile come here to work: for instance. Lenka Udovicˇki, Rade Sˇerbedzˇija and Mira Furlan from Los Angelos, Aleksandar Cvjetkovic´ from Italy, Tomazˇ Pandur from Madrid, Zijah Sokolovic´ from Vienna. In King Lear, Medea, Play Becket, Marat/Sade, Tesla Electric Company, and other productions they reconstructed some of the cooperative ties and artistic relationships broken in 1991, and included a younger generation that was too young to partake in the dynamics of mobility and cooperation in the prewar Yugoslav theater. Some of the Brijuni productions were shown in Zagreb and at some festivals in the ex-Yugoslav countries, including Bitef in Belgrade. This new practice signals a sort of post-war normalization, as do the guest appearances of Slovene, Croat, Bosnian, Macedonian, Montenegrin, and Ser-

Post-Yugoslav Theater Exile (Dragan Klaic)

517

bian companies in the cities that now lie for them abroad. Initially, these were eagerly awaited and deeply emotional events, with tumultuous applause, loads of flowers, and much tears, marking the family reunion among professionals that were separated for years by the war and its aftermath, and also between the performers and their loyal audiences. Gradually, they have become if not too frequent then fairly normal occurrences. In the follow-up phase, repertory companies have been engaging guest actors and directors from across the new borders, and festivals have included in their juries old colleagues who have in the meantime become foreign citizens; critics cover the premieres across the recently drawn borders. On the eve of 2008, Katarina Pejovic´, once a Belgrade dramaturg, for years already settled in Zagreb after living in the US and in Ljubljana, has returned for a few weeks to Belgrade to work as a dramaturg in the Atelje 212, alongside Dusˇan Jovanovic´, a Ljubljana theater director doing his second post-war production in Belgrade. They staged a new adaptation of what was an Atelje 212 hit thirty-five years ago: Uloga moje porodice u svetskoj revoluciji (The Role of My Family in the World Revolution; 1970) by the ex-Belgrade author Bora C´osic´, now a Berlin resident. A family reunion of sorts. These gestures follow the slow and hesitant improvement of political relations among the successor states of former Yugoslavia, whereby cultural openings follow the re-establishment of economic relations and bring re-integration of cultural systems, cultural production and distribution chains that were even before 1991 autonomous but interconnected in the decentralized cultural setup of the federal Yugoslavia. The reconnection has no exclusively Yugoslav character but is enhanced by a positive reframing of political and cultural cooperation in the Balkans, some curiosity for the neighbors, in the Balkans as well as in Europe. In fact, this new dynamics reduces the importance of the new borders drawn since 1991, up to the recent Montenegro independence since theater professionals increasingly see themselves as players in a dynamic, integrated, and inclusive European cultural space. Not as equal players for sure, and not all professionals – there are still many who feel they need to defend their national culture from all sorts of real and fictitious menaces, who see their native language as a shield protecting endangered identity and identify European integration with cultural standardization and a general dumbing down.

12. The Fading of Exile In 2008, Croat wines and Slovene food are widely available in Belgrade stores, but books published in Zagreb do not make it to the Belgrade bookstores, or from Belgrade to Zagreb. Sarajevo remains a privileged territory where both

518

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

are available but are quite expensive for most potential readers. Explanations of those paradoxes are supported by implausible economic arguments, not political ones. And the status differences among the new states (and thus of the opportunities of their citizens, artists not exempted) cannot be ignored: Slovenia is a member state of the EU, Croatia and Macedonia are official candidate members but with an uncertain accession schedule; Serbia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Montenegro are not even candidates, while Kosovo’s status is much debated and remains disputed after the declaration of independence in 2008. Consequently, the welfare, mobility, and creative opportunities of artists in ex-Yugoslav states are unequal; artists in Kosovo are most isolated and most dependent on international donors to patch up an inadequate, long neglected cultural infrastructure. None of the successor states has altered much its performing-arts system.. They are still dominated by repertory theater companies, and even the newly established producing organizations follow mainly the repertory model with steady ensemble and staff. Such companies are as a rule quite immobile, and their touring is cumbersome and expensive. Aesthetic notions and practices have not yet diverged far from each other, although Ljubljana might have another stage style than Belgrade, and Belgrade a different one from Zagreb. Ljubljana, Zagreb, Belgrade, and Skopje each have an alternative scene of uneven importance and visibility, while Bosnia & Herzegovina and Montenegro have practically none. That those divergences are not substantial is shown when exiled colleagues return to work as actors, directors, designers, or authors, and fit in without much trouble. The input of exiles is individual, it does not induce a substantially different energy or vision in the existing theater constellation at “home.” If anything, the exiles got used to higher standards of professional discipline than what some rep companies are able to provide, so when they go “back” for a project, they need to develop some mode of cohabitation with the prevailing professional and institutional routines and standards. Those who left since 1991, even if once marked as traitors (see Panovski), tend to stay in their new worldwide domicile, even if they occasionally return to some theater endeavors in ex-Yugoslavia, and they are being joined by a newer generation of performing artists and authors seeking to become émigrés and expatriates in Western Europe and North America, driven by their search for professional opportunities rather than by some pressing political motivations. Some have started writing plays in English, though they still live in Belgrade and Zagreb. Their departure, real or imminent, is part of a steady brain drain, enhanced by globalization and reinforced by the European integration.

Post-Yugoslav Theater Exile (Dragan Klaic)

519

A generation of theater artists resented nationalism but could not prevent the war, neither as artists nor as citizens; so many of them went with revulsion into exile, and their dispersion mirrored the disintegration of the country (see Medenica). Those who found ways to feel more or less at home as exiles in Berlin, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, or Toronto have no special difficulties adjusting to Belgrade, Zagreb, Ljubljana, Sarajevo, or Skopje as some kind of new abroad, where they come as visitors, expatriates, or short-term Gastarbeiters. In a globalized world of accelerated and intensified flow of people, products, and creative ideas, in a Europe that seeks to affirm a common public space to match a functioning unified market, in the Balkan that compensates its contentious memories with innovative cooperative practices, post-Yugoslav artistic exile loses some of its specific markers. Some of its stern and rigid attitudes are fading and thus exile blends into the regional cultural conditions that have by and large remained unaltered – still permeated by a certain dosage of staunch and aggressive nationalism that resists cultural decontamination, propping up institutional models resilient to change, and cultural policies that refuse efforts to update them and make them more effective. But if the prevailing conditions of cultural production remain locked in some anachronistic patterns and structural poverty, the rhetoric of Europe also creeps in, and the dynamics of economic globalization alters urban life and consumer habits. The gap between home and exile gets narrower, edges are blunted, and theater exiles thus occasionally fit in the infrastructure whose old habits and mechanisms they still know quite well, not as subversive elements nor as reformers but as appreciated and welcome talents. What started as artistic exile, driven by anti-war and anti-nationalist politics, seems to be transforming into prevailing artistic nomadism, into a pattern of mobility based on shifting cooperative partnership and quickly changing points of infrastructural support: a studio here, a theater there, one festival or another in this city and then in that one, in one country or another, a grant, a workshop, a residence, a coproduction … here, there, anywhere. Clearly, it is a European and not specifically post-Yugoslav cultural practice, one that is neither home nor abroad but maneuvers through temporary zones of creativity and short-term platforms of public exposure. Without nostalgia and cynicism, mobility is in, and recent exile is out, passé, diffused, relegated to cultural memory, and turned into a dignified subject of scholarly research. The author acknowledges the generous help and nuanced criticism of numerous fellow exiles in completing this chapter, and especially of Milosˇ Lazin.

520

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

Works Cited Andjelkovic´, Sava and Paul-Louis Thomas, ed. Le théâtre d’aujourd’hui en Bosnie-Herzégovine, Croatie, Serbie et au Monténégro. Nationalisme et autism. Revue des études slaves. 77.1–2 (2006). “Blamazˇa nacionalnog teatra.” Danas (Belgrade), January 26, 2006. C´osic´, Bora. Uloga moje porodice u svetskoj revoluciji (The Role of My Family in the World Revolution). Belgrade: author, 1970. Furlan, Mira. “A Letter to my Co-Citizens.” 1991. Performing Arts Journal 18.2 (1996): 20–24. Karahasan, Dzˇevad. Dnevnik selidbe (Diary of a Move). Zagreb: Dureux, 1994. Klaic, Dragan. “Reconnecting in Ruhr.” Theater 2 (1993): 112–15. Klaic, Dragan. “Theater in Crisis? The Theater of Crisis.” Theater in Crisis? Ed. Maria Delgado and Caridad Swich. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002. 144–59. Lazin, Milosˇ. “Otkud uspeh Biljane Srbljanovic´?” (What Makes Biljana Srbljanovic´ successful?) 50 godina Sterijinog pozorja (50 years of Sterijino Pozorje). Scena & Teatron (2005): 25–44. Lazin, Milosˇ. “La nouvelle écriture théâtrale des Balkans et d’ailleurs.” Cahier de théâtre Jeu nr. 120 (September 2006): 70–76. Lazin, Milosˇ. “A quoi tient le succès de Biljana Srbljanovic´?” (What Makes Biljana Srbljanovic´ successful). Andjelkovic and Thomas 217–43. Luzˇina, Jelena. “A Unique Theatre Miracle: Thirty-five Years of the Romany Pralipe Theatre (1971–2006).” Trans. Rajna Kosˇka Hot. Identities. Journal for Politics, Gender, and Culture (Skopje) 4.8–9 (2005): 279–94. Markovic´, Milena. Sˇine (Tracks). In Tri drame (Three Plays [Sine, Paviljoni, Brod za lutke]). Belgrade: LOM, 2002. Medenica, Ivan. “Un théâtre désintégré à l’image de son pays?” L’Est désorienté. Alternatives théâtrales (Brussels) nr. 64 (2000): 54. Nikcˇevic´, Sanja. “Historical Plays in Search or National Identity in Croatian Theatre Today.” Slavic and East European Performances (New York) 17.2 (1997). Olof, Klaus Detlef, and Kollektiv Theater G.m.b.H, ed. Stücke (Plays). 2 vols. Vienna: Folio, 2002. Panovski, Naum. “New Old Times in the Balkans: The Search for a Cultural Identity.” Performing Arts Journal 28.2 (2006): 61–74. Sˇajtinac, Ugljesˇa. Hadersfild. Belgrade: Jugoslovensko dramsko pozori˘ste, 2005. Sˇnajder, Slobodan. Zmijski svlak 1994. Trans. Mireille Robin as La Dépouille du serpent. Paris: L’espace d’un instant, 2002. Sˇnajder, Slobodan. Le Faust Croate (The Croatian Faust). Paris: L’ espace d’un instant, 2005. Trans. Mireille Robin of Hrvatski Faust. Zagreb: Prolog, 1982. Srbljanovic´, Biljana. Beogradska trilogija (The Belgrade Trilogy). Scena 3–4 (1996): 162–185. Srbljanovic´, Biljana. Porodicˇne pricˇe (Family Stories). Scena 3–4 (1998): 106–127. English trans. Vida Jankovic´ Scena, English language edition 18 (1999–2000): 38–57. Stojanoska, Ana. “Intracultural Theatrical Dispersion or On Recent Macedonian Theatrical Matters.” Intercultural Theater. Ed. Jelena Luzˇina. Skopje: Institut za teatrologija FDU, 2005. Stefanovski, Goran. “Sarajevo (Tales from a City).” Performing Arts Journal 16.2 (1994): 53–86. Vegel, Laslo. Exteritorijum. Trans. Arpad Vicko. Belgrade: Stubovi culture, 2003.

Losing Touch, Keeping in Touch, Out of Touch (Sándor Hites)

521

Losing Touch, Keeping in Touch, Out of Touch: The Reintegration of Hungarian Literary Exile after 1989 Sándor Hites

To begin with I recall two events as allegories of Hungarian literary exile in the second half of the twentieth century. The first relates to the 1944–49 wave of émigrés, the second to that of 1956. Both represent notions and experiences of a “return.” László Cs. Szabó, a well-known essayist of the 1930–40s, was aware of the approaching communist takeover; he left for Italy in 1948 and settled later in England. In exile he enjoyed the highest reputation as critical authority, organizer, and spokesman. Among the later émigrés and those few domestic scholars and writers who were luckily allowed to visit England during the Kádár era it became costmary to pay one’s respect to him in his solitary London flat. Cs. Szabó strictly opposed cooperation with the communist authorities, even when they initiated contacts in the late 1960s to get some recognition for the regime. After decades of absence, and years of informal preparation by the influential writer Gyula Illyés, Cs. Szabó eventually visited Budapest in 1980, on the stipulation that some of his works be published and he could give a lecture at the Academy of Fine Arts, where he used to lecture on art history. Facing a crowded classroom, Cs. Szabó opened his lecture with the ironic remark: “As I said in my last class.” Alluding to a lecture thirty-two years earlier, he insisted on both the possibility and the absurdity of restoring continuity with the pre-communist era, probably not merely on a personal level. Cs. Szabó’s attitude may be generalized insofar as the self-image of the 1944–49 exiles continued to adhere to a virtually frozen domestic perspective, no matter how much they differed from each other in all respects. For them, going home meant resuming what had been interrupted; if some of them admitted that Hungary is not what they were familiar with, they also realized that “we are not the very same either” (Kovács 4). However, a belief in continuity could be sustained only as long as official exclusion could be blamed for its

522

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

absence. Cs. Szabó died in 1984 during a Budapest visit. Had he lived to see the 1990s, he might have agreed with Gyula Borbándi, another prominent exiled man of letters in Munich, who admitted in 1996 that he never thought that geographical distance from people at home would create such a gap between their views (“Küldetésem” 92). The political exclusion of exiles was terminated in 1989, but new problems emerged, especially for those who left in 1956 and started their literary career in exile. László Márton, a co-founder of the prominent Parisian exile literary journal Magyar Mu˝hely (MM), entered the domestic literary scene with a collection of short stories, and subsequently announced in 1992 his long-felt wish that his namesake in Budapest, the novelist László Márton, should use a pen name to avoid confusion (“Törvényen kívül”). An article by Borbándi, editor of the periodical Új Látóhatár (ÚL) in Munich, supported his case, for it broached the subject of namesakes at home and abroad (“Névazonosságok”). The domestic László Márton was much younger but ranked among the most promising novelists. Refusing the demand, he claimed in an interview with Lajos Márton Varga titled “Who is the real László Márton?” that he had priority for he had already published his books years before his Parisian namesake managed to release in 1989 his first publication in Hungary. Answering under the same title, the ex-exile Márton recalled that he had appeared in exilic journals and anthologies. He felt especially offended that the other Márton questioned his literary credentials. Bitterly complaining that his namesake considered him “non-existent,” and his claim as an external threat, he concluded that former émigrés remained “outlaws.” The Parisian Márton brought the case to court, whereas domestic writers and intellectuals defended the domestic Márton and joined a press campaign, imploring the Parisian in a private letter to abandon his claim. The case ended with an out-ofcourt settlement that stipulated that each must add something distinctive to his name in journal publications. The 1993 edition of the New Hungarian Literary Encyclopedia distinguished the two authors but still mixed up some of their publications. Theoretically, controversies of this kind can easily be solved by convention. However, in this peculiar case the rule was hard to apply. The exilic Márton was known only within very small circles in Hungary, but justifiably he regarded the criterion of book publication in Hungary a sophistry, since exiles could not publish in the country. He rightly claimed also that his publications in exilic periodicals and anthologies should be regarded as presence in what émigrés were keen to call “global Hungarian culture,” even if he was not allowed to publish in Hungary. In a sense, the incident revealed that introducing émigré authors in Hungary led to a collision of two distinct although in-

Losing Touch, Keeping in Touch, Out of Touch (Sándor Hites)

523

terrelated Hungarian literatures. The extreme case of the homonyms emblematized the collision. The exilic Márton represented those who had to wait for decades to make their debut in their homeland, whereas the domestic one spoke, if only unwittingly, for those who necessarily considered themselves the “genuine” Hungarian literature because they had little information about the ones abroad. Notice that the exilic Márton had next to his fellow MM editors also Borbándi’s backing: those who were at odds, or even hostile to each other during their exile years, often joined forces when they returned. Similarly, those who asked him to yield to his domestic namesake were exclusively domestic intellectuals; it represented a well-mannered but clear unity against a former émigré – which the latter uniformly resented. The Márton vs. Márton case created little public stir, but may be treated as an allegory of exclusion. The domestic Márton became one of the main novelists on the Hungarian scene, while his exilic namesake, who moved home in 1994, remained an active contributor to the press and has recently published a biography of Arthur Koestler, thus moving away from fiction writing. The incident may have helped weaken his ambition and struggle to become a writer, a struggle that preoccupied all the young literati of 1956: they were rather unknown at home when leaving and had difficulty in getting recognition even after 1990. The title short story of Márton’s L’égiposta (Airmail/Mail from Heaven) may indicate, next to doubts about his own talent, a complaint common among exiles writers that they get no responses. It could be also taken as his anticipation of the later controversy. When the narrator, a neurotic writer, gets no reactions to his works, he suspects a global conspiracy against him. His stream-of-consciousness monologue, punctured by brutal sexual desires, by allusions to a father complex, and by references to Jewish fate in twentieth century, ends when he receives a letter with characters cut out of a paper, probably self-written: “Seeking advice, eh? Or some direction? There’s none, all run out of it there. You cannot even properly finish off your own story, you moron … leave all this, leave it, shut up. Are you still unable to keep your mouth shut …?’ That was their message” (21).

1. Closely Watched Connections A history of Hungarian literary exile in the second half of the twentieth-century could be depicted as a series of misunderstandings and misconceptions. After 1989, when the motives for going into emigration were gone, the problem did not get resolved, and in a way its irresolvable character came to light.

524

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

The post-45 exiles and émigrés were in a double bind from the very beginning. They declared their independence from or hostility towards the communist regime, even if they happened to have been devoted Party members, as it was not that rare among the ’56ers. Yet, Hungary never ceased to be the focus of their attention and ambition, in contrast to other East-European exile writers and some Hungarian émigrés from the interwar period, like the Polányi-brothers, the classical scholar Károly Kerényi, the political journalist Ferenc Fejto˝, or the humorist writer George Mikes, who all became successful on the international scene. Those who left between 1944 and 1949 were mostly convinced, for various reasons, that literary exile would substitute for Hungarian culture, which was oppressed at home. In the 1950s many held that Hungarian literature itself emigrated. Those 1956ers who had already had a literary career at home also adopted this approach, declaring in the headline of the first issue of Irodalmi Újság on March 15, 1957 that it was to represent the “writers of an exiled nation.” In the 1960s, particularly when the young ’56ers with literary ambitions came forward, making exile literature even more multilayered, this ideology of substitution faded or became less attractive. The editors of MM, whose avantgarde orientation was already a provocation to many, urged several times the admission that exile can only make a limited contribution to the big picture, and the domestic scene will never cease to be the “genuine home” of Hungarian literature. Other young exiles of 1956 also tried to detach their literary ambitions from political standpoints. As Endre Karátson suggested answering a questionnaire by the IÚ, it makes no sense to turn literature into a means of political struggle aiming to liberate the homeland, for a work would thus become a “monument” of that struggle and lose its specific literary character. In the late 1960s, as the Kádár regime consolidated its power and the hope of an imminent political solution vanished, the exiles came to realize that their absence will be lasting. Hence harsh disputes emerged in the ÚL in 1967–69 over the question whether, and if so how, to start a dialogue with people at home. Though émigré literati could rely on their own quite well developed network of periodicals and publishers, their ultimate aim was to publish in Hungary. Although some of Sándor Márai’s, Lajos Zilahy’s, Gyo˝zo˝ Határ’s work was translated, and Kriszta Arnóthy, Ágota Kristóf and a handful of other writers decided to change language, Cs. Szabó must have expressed a fairly common view by asking the émigrés to continue to write for their fellow Hungarians and not for “the English, the American, the French, the Germans or the Swedes” (“Még vagyunk” 29). Their desires and efforts to gain or regain domestic audience, or to have at least some response, were enhanced by the

Losing Touch, Keeping in Touch, Out of Touch (Sándor Hites)

525

indifference of the Hungarian Diaspora. Exilic journals had to cope with constant financial problems for the lack of patrons. Most writers resorted to selfpublication with subscribers. They came to realize that they would never have a proper audience unless they get home, at least via their writings. Craving for publishing at home found a new ideology when in the 1970s the opening dialogue with the home-folks converted the notion of substitution into correction. The exiles intended to follow attentively, and, as far as possible, to influence the homeland’s cultural and political life, in order to correct what they considered communism’s distortions in taste, historical consciousness, and public opinion. Despite their deep disagreements, they tacitly agreed that the exile is to keep up values and measures discredited or pushed into the background at home. As Cs. Szabó envisaged at a 1975 Netherlands conference titled “Hungarian Literature in the West,” the émigré efforts should lead to an “intellectual blood transfusion” back home. The concept of correction was expressed in the profile of the exile periodicals as well: ÚL and IÚ took up the cause in the political-historical sense, MM in the aesthetical-poetical one. This ambition was based upon the conviction that exilic literature was, in contrast to the one at home, “authentic,” because it was free of political constraints. The other source of the émigré commitment, as Áron Kibédi Varga expounded it, was to consider Hungarian culture genuinely oriented toward the West, an orientation temporarily surrendered in communist Hungary but still held up by the émigrés. Accordingly, the exiles and the émigrés had become part of the West, and could, by virtue of their status, serve as mediators (“Nyugati magyar irodalom”). Both arguments held only partially. Though Hungarian writers abroad did not need to follow what Party authorities said, personal relations and political biases did influence the Hungarian literary culture abroad. Patrons had, for instance, an influence on the choices made in anthologies. As to the second point, a scholar like the Hungarian born but Western trained Kibédi Varga, who achieved a respectable international career in literary theory, could certainly consider himself Western-minded; but the majority of émigré authors encountered the new trends as readers at best, without applying it to their art (Karátson, “Milyen magyar író lettem” 129). Older generations understandably held on to their earlier orientation, which in many instances ironically coincided with some views still prevailing at home. The young ’56ers were more receptive to new Western cultural, poetical, and philosophical movements, for they adapted more to their new home. The MM editors Pál Nagy and Tibor Papp had connections with the Tel Quel circle and were more open to structuralism and deconstruction than any of the other exile circles.

526

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

In pursuit of the mission of “correcting” things in Hungary, literary exiles certainly had great achievements, even if their attempts to mediate Hungarian literature to Western countries met with only limited success. Nevertheless, they invited Miklós Mészöly, Sándor Weöres, Miklós Erdély, and other authors maginalized Hungary to deliver lectures at the meetings of the Mikes Kelemen Circle in the Netherlands and the Magyar Mu˝hely Munkaközösség in France. They also offered the possibility of uncensored but potentially damaging foreign publication for those who dared. MM published not only the works of underground authors like Erdély, but also a volume of Weöres’s poetry (1964), which the author was force to declare in Hungary as unauthorized. They also reviewed significant works by Lajos Kassák and Miklós Szentkuthy, which were all but ignored at home. Some texts of the literary tradition that did not fit into Hungary’s cultural policy also appeared in exile. In 1981, Arkánum in Chicago published Attila József ’s psychoanalytic diaries, which did not dovetail with the Hungarian view of him as a “proletarian poet.” Understandably sensitive to the fact that one third of the Hungarians lived outside the country, émigrés also promoted the cause of the Hungarian minorities in the surrounding countries, an issue ignored or mistreated by official Hungarian politics. They tried to reach and include in their activities Hungarian writers from Romania, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. In return, émigrés appeared in the Új Symposion and other minority periodicals in the more liberal Yugoslavia. The most ambitious project gathered Hungarian culture in the motherland, in Diaspora, and in the minority cultures that lived beyond the Versailles Treaty borders. A triple workshop on these entitled “Magyar Mérleg (Hungarian Balance)” was held in Switzerland in 1979–80. The attitude of the communist authorities toward exile was marked by somewhat similar tendencies. In the 1950s and early 60s, émigrés were treated within the cold war, as agents of American intelligence services and enemies of the socialist democracies. Yet short reviews from the middle 1960s onward gradually revealed more conciliatory approaches, which, to be sure, still strictly separated political exile from “cultural Diaspora.” As a sign of easing, the very designations changed. From the 1970s onward, the label changed from “exilic literature” to “Hungarian literature in the West.” However, a recently recovered secret document of the Publishing Office (Kiadói Fo˝igazgatóság), which dealt with censorial issues, shows that the sporadic critical attention was governed by the Party doctrine that only those authors living abroad should be given permission to publish at home, who emigrated before World War II, namely those who fled from the Nazis and not from communism (Tóth and Veres 373). This is why the French short stories of László Dormándi (left in 1938) could appear in translation in 1965.

Losing Touch, Keeping in Touch, Out of Touch (Sándor Hites)

527

The Anyanyelvi Konferencia (Workshop on the Mother tongue), first held in 1970 in Hungary, was a conciliatory move of the Hungarian officials, but it was actually one of several publicity attempts to legalize the Kádár regime via Western émigré guests who longed for a recognition at home. Only a select number of émigrés wanted or were allowed to participate. Authorities even tried to enlist some to report on their fellow exiles, baiting them with promises of publishing, further entry permits, or passport for their relatives. The Hungarian officials made it clear, however, that nothing would be allowed that touches on ideological taboos, such as the Soviet subjection, memories of ’56, or the revisions of Versailles Treaty. Cs. Szabó cherished hopes of publishing in Hungary through the 1970s, but when he gave an interview to Radio Free Europe, this was taken off the agenda for a while. The same happened to György Faludy after he published a poem on Kádár in 1981. Some scholarly works, for instances by Lóránt Czigány or by Kibédi Varga, managed to slip through somewhat easier, giving a boost to domestic research as well. Some émigrés accepted compromises, others did not. Issues of MM free of political statements somehow appeared on the open shelves at the National Széchényi Library, while other exilic materials were kept in sequestered collections. Márai refused a publishing offer to him, by making free elections a condition of his permission; but the popular novelist Lajos Zilahy of the interwar era, who left for the United States in 1947, was republished in Hungary in the 1970s and enjoyed a great success. He died while planning to move home. Even Cs. Szabó accepted mild censorship to have his essays On the Greeks (which formed the background of his mentioned 1980 lecture) and several works be published in Hungary. It must have given him pleasure that, although ancient Greek culture seemed to be a safe topic, he could slip in some messages. For instance, he started his opening chapter entitled “Spread out into the world,” by defining culture as diasporic in its Greek origins. However, he hurt the sensitivity of his former exilic publisher, Aurora, by remarking that the release of one of his books in Hungary made him feel like a real writer again. Others followed, though in limited numbers. The most striking case was that of András Domahidy, who went in 1956 to Australia. His novels made a favorable impression on Péter Nagy, an influential literary historian and Party member, and thus permission was given to release them in the mid 1980s. Domahidy’s poetically sophisticated way of portraying in Vénasszonyok nyara (Indian Summer; 1969) the fate of aristocrats during the early years of communism, and his stream-of-consciousness analysis of an exilic psyche in Árnyak és asszonyok (Shades and Women; 1979), brought him success as well as critical attention. Ironically Domahidy became a household name in the Hungarian

528

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

Diaspora once his novels were published in Hungary: his second novel was translated and published in Australia in 1989. With the easing political climate, publishing and republishing gathered speed. During the 1980s, anthologies of exile poetry, prose, and essays were simultaneously released by émigré and domestic publishing houses. However, Béla Pomogáts’s collection Párbeszéd Magyarországgal (Dialogue with Hungary), a volume of studies on touchy historical and political issues, was published only in 1991, after the changeover. Next to the anthologies, a systematic elaboration of exilic literature also started in Hungary. In the fourth part of the seventh volume (1945–75) in the Literary History of the Academy, Miklós Béládi and his co-editors surveyed the minority Hungarian writers of the surrounding countries under the general title Hungarian literature Abroad, and they “smuggled” in a chapter on exile literature. After some delay, the same scholars came forth with the more comprehensive Hungarian Literature in the West after 1945. Both volumes attributed excessively painful and nostalgic emotions to the émigrés. Those abroad, strongly criticized the volume for praising as reasonable those who were reluctant to criticize communism in a direct way, and for regarding exilic literature merely as an expression of lost perspectives. Still, it is ironic that a synthesis was only attempted in Hungary; the émigrés themselves did not venture to give a comprehensive picture of their own achievements.

2. Encounter of an Ambivalent Kind: Inside and Outside in the 1990s Most émigrés saw in the collapse of communism a mission accomplished; the long-awaited “homecoming” had arrived. Realizing that they no longer had a purpose, IÚ and ÚL closed down. MM, Katolikus Szemle (Catholic Review) in Rome, and Szivárvány (Rainbow) in Chicago, and other journals moved their editorial offices to Hungary. Publishing houses like Arkánum in Washington, Aurora in Munich, Occidental Press in Washington closed down, Püski moved from New York to Budapest and maintained its profile of publishing populist writers. In the enthusiastic years after 1989 many held that the overcoming of separation restored the “organic” form of Hungarian culture, and that censor-free exile publication could actually become a model at home (Pomogáts, “A nyugati magyar irodalom” 42). Instead, the return of the exiles sharpened the differences within Hungarian culture. A major distinction soon became evident between those émigrés who had started their literary career at home, and those who entered it only in exile.

Losing Touch, Keeping in Touch, Out of Touch (Sándor Hites)

529

The former counted as household names and were more likely to be noted, even if most of them, including Cs. Szabó, Márai, Zoltán Szabó, or Nyíro˝, did not live to see the end of emigration. Their reception involved recalling their works published at home. Old copies survived in family libraries and in the special sections of public collections. New editions of their works were started. Some received state decorations from the new governments as a compensation, and they regained their memberships in the Academy and in the Writer’s Association, be it posthumously. The poet György Faludy was one of the few survivors who soon re-settled in Budapest. During the communist era, handwritten copies of his poems had a limited illegal circulation, but his autobiographical volume My Happy Days in Hell, first in samizdat (1987) then legally (1989), instantaneously regained for him an immense popularity. Gyo˝zo˝ Határ, who left for the UK in 1956, did not give up his residence in Wimbledon, but editions of his huge oeuvre, which ranges from fiction and drama to philosophy, started to appear in Hungary after 1985. His eccentric poetics, often likened to that of Joyce and Sterne, intrigued writers and evoked a more professional interest than that of Faludy. Határ started to publish in the later 1940s, but he was silenced: the Stalinist critic István Király called him “anti-humanist,” and he was jailed between 1950 and 1952 for attempting to cross the border illegally. The 1991 facsimile edition of his first novel Heliáne (1948) suggested a continuity with the short-lived democratic post-war intermezzo. Prose writers like György Ferdinandy, Endre Karátson, Mátyás Sárközi, and poets like József Bakucz, Elemér Horváth, László Kemenes Géfin, Géza Thinsz, and György Vitéz, did not publish in Hungary before leaving and could not reestablish continuity. Some domestic critical surveys introduced them in the 1980s, but this could not compensate for their disadvantage, as some of their works were not available, not even in the prohibited collections of public libraries. These authors had to find an audience and interpreters not only for what they had already written but for their forthcoming works as well. They differed from earlier exiles in that most of them avoided the extremes of complete assimilation or nostalgically clinging to a domestic perspective. Márai, who left already in 1948, thought that his European culture was disappearing; going into exile seemed to him as losing the last possibility of feeling at home anywhere. In contrast, those who left in 1956 led a double life well after 1990. For some, a respectable academic career was still running in their new home, which they would not give up merely for moving home; only a few settled in Hungary even after their retirement. As Kibédi Varga set forth in his aphoristic diary titled Amsterdam Chronicle (1999), and Karátson in his two-volume autobiographical essay titled Otthonok (2007), they felt at

530

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

home at several places and in several cultures. For Márai and his contemporaries, being at home meant an intimate, though problematically maintained, relation with the Hungarian language; the young ones developed a multilingual identity, even if they often continued writing literature in their mother tongue and publish only their scholarly works in their second or third language. In search of historical precedents, one might refer to the return of the 1848 exiles after the 1867 Compromise with the Habsburgs, and the return of the 1919 exiles from Moscow in 1945. Both group gained key positions in the new cultural and political establishment. Those returning after 1989 did not even attempt to do this, although decades of absence and failed, or partially successful, attempts to publish raised their expectations. The last issues of ÚL revealed that to gain impact at home, or even to get involved, would be harder than expected. Contributors returning from their recent first visit to Hungary noted that they and their works were little known at home (Sztáray 153). Further complaints about domestic reception were voiced at a conference on exile held in Debrecen in 1989, which intended to pay tribute to the “home comers.” Actually most émigré authors frequently published in Hungary after 1989, although, as they rightly anticipated, their critical reception remained low keyed. A workshop in Hévíz in 1994 titled “Who’s afraid of Hungarian literature from the West?” was symptomatic of the emerging mutual disappointments and frustrations. The debate concerned the responsibility for the failure of “normal” returns. While the chief organizer rather naively hoped for an era in which “natural reception” would overcome ideological stances and exaggerated expectations (Pomogáts, “A befogadás” 100), the émigrés insisted that their exclusion continued and “Hungarian literature” remained “domestic literature” (András 89). Accusing the writers at home that they fear competition, some revived the cold-war accusation that émigrés were “boycotted” at home (Kemenes Géfin 137). However, their expectations were sometimes contradictory. On the one hand, they missed critics who would be devoted exclusively to their works to systematically locate the “Western” achievements in the big picture. On the other, they disliked the notion of a “Western” Hungarian literature, for they quite rightly considered themselves simply Hungarian writers. Paradoxically, they longed for a special treatment while claiming to be ordinary. Some had an impact with their scholarly work while their poetry or fiction remained unacknowledged; some had not managed to find a modus vivendi, others did. The poet and art historian László Baránszky remarked that when he started to frequent Budapest he could continue the conversations once “suspended” (107).

Losing Touch, Keeping in Touch, Out of Touch (Sándor Hites)

531

Those with an international academic career expected domestic intellectuals to turn to them for help and advice how to find cultural and scholarly connections in the West. Their disappointment was deepened when they recognized that their competence was not needed or even questioned. Anticipating controversies on the question, who might be given authority to judge Hungarian culture, Péter Balassa in Hungary responded to one of Határ’s essays with the remark that émigré notions of literature and nation had become awfully obsolete (440). László Kósa pointed out in more general terms that due to ageing and loss of an oppositional task the intellectual contribution of émigrés to domestic affairs regrettably proved less than impressive (71). While admitting that distance also provides a unique perspective, Mihály Szegedy-Maszák suggested that sketchy knowledge of the domestic conditions was a severe handicap (“hontalanság” 165–67). Memoirs of political refugees and émigré historians writing on World War II, Hungarian Stalinism, or 1956 received wider attention than exilic poetry or fiction, though at times they also had to face devastating domestic critiques. The Frankfurt Book Fair chose in 1999 Hungarian literature as its special concern, but this great opportunity for self-representation aroused hot debates. Former émigrés found it another occasion to complain that they were depreciated, that their works were underrepresented, and that the Hungarian organizers failed to contact them. After 1990, exilic writers came to realize that the political piquancy attributed to them was quickly fading away. During the economic crisis after 1989 public interest in literature appeared to be vanishing, in part also because it no longer functioned as a spearhead in the fight against censorship. The loss of literature’s social significance lead the Chicago linguist and poet Ádám Makkai to diagnose a decline of literary culture in Hungary, and to suggest that if he moved home he would paradoxically be even more homesick for Hungarian literature. The reintegration of exilic literature proceeded parallel with greater challenges to Hungarian society, namely a redefinition of national culture and local integrity amidst globalization and Europeanization. Former émigrés had to find their space in a deeply divided society. Intense political hostilities shortly followed the democratic transition, reviving the controversies between the “populists” (népies) and the urbanists that prevailed the 1930–40s. Domestic literati got deeply involved in what some have called a new Kulturkampf. It roused some émigrés to express their disapproval, although, ironically, that division also allowed others – e.g. Borbándi on first side and Fejto˝ or Méray on the other – to rejoin their former circles. Émigré authors did not get integrated into the domestic scene, but this was only partly due to the minor role delegated to émigré critics after 1989. The return of the émigrés coincided with a change of guard in Hungary’s intellec-

532

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

tual life, which deprived those abroad of some informal though supportive personal connections. The younger domestic critics were keen to canonize in the 1980s the “postmodern turn” of domestic authors like Péter Nádas and Péter Esterházy, thereby also establishing their own critical authority. Exilic literature was not treated as entirely irrelevant. Still, when a “potential place” in recent literary history was ascribed to Hungarian authors in the West, this meant insertion into a framework that had been established without recognizing their works and achievements. Reintegration was carried out as necessary domestication. Some émigré works obviously corresponded to newfound canonical values at home: those of Karátson to the poetics of metafiction and those of Ferdinandy to the avant-garde syntax in prose. Though Határ’s novels could have made him a forerunner of postmodernism in Hungary, his late reception turned him into a latecomer of that movement. Hungarian literary exile had no canon of its own. The connections between the exile writers were too loose and remote to form an interpretive community. Moreover, the most qualified literary historians and theoreticians in exile did not exclusively study Hungarian literature, or did not study it at all. Another source of misunderstanding was that some of the “home-comers” held on to a canon of yesteryears with writers like Gyula Illyés or László Németh who no longer, or no longer exclusively, prevailed in Hungary. That was why Erno˝ Kulcsár Szabó’s impressive study of Hungarian literature between 1947 and 1991 was rejected by George Gömöri and some other émigrés, though it actually did attempt to integrate the exilic literature into the domestic one. Kulcsár Szabó’s much debated concept of an “interrupted continuity” in the Hungarian literature of the 1950–60s was loosely based on the émigré notion that “a whole literature went into exile.” Kulcsár Szabó assigned significant canonic positions to Domahidy, Ferdinandy, Határ, Kemenes Géfin, Márai, Vitéz, the MM-writers, and other émigré authors, writers who could be considered excluded representatives of a fading modernism or as yet unregistered forerunners of postmodernism. Before 1989, émigrés disagreed about the domestic literary canon mainly on political grounds. However, as disagreements survived at the end of exile, it became evident that the differences were mostly due to personal predilections. Kibédi Varga claimed that he could ascribe the worshipping of the poet Imre Oravecz only to domestic misconceptions about poetry (Amszterdami 34). His exaggerated generalization ascribed a matter of personal taste to cultural differences. Nevertheless, in an interview he pointed out that it was illusory to believe that the collapse of communism would make the writing of a “true” Hungarian literary history possible (“Legyo˝zhetetlen” 62).

Losing Touch, Keeping in Touch, Out of Touch (Sándor Hites)

533

3. Redefining Exile, Redefining the Canon Towards the millennium, the discussion on exile that started around 1989 exhausted itself and became repetitious. Exilic organizations still in Diaspora came to realize that “cooperation” with the homeland would never reach the level and form they desired, thus they ceased to attempt to interfere directly with domestic affairs. The Svájci Magyar Irodalmi és Képzo˝mu˝vészeti Kör (SwissHungarian Society of Literature and Art) gave up, for instance, its Luganoconferences, due to lack of interest from home. As they bitterly commented on their homepage, they turned “back unto themselves”: henceforth they would maintain, register, and preserve in archives the cultural life of local Hungarian communities, and support Hungarian minorities in their proceedings and programs. The Mikes Circle, however, goes on with its conferences, dedicating its activities to a syncretic view of a “global” Hungarian culture. Around the millennium, exile was redefined in the domestic critical scene. Instead of the earlier, ethically or ideologically motivated welcoming gestures, a more formalist approach came to prevail, as in Zsófia Szilágyi’s monograph on Ferdinandy, which refused the “melancholic myth” of emigration and considered tracing the author’s exilic experiences in literary texts as irrelevant. Gábor Csordás tried to universalize the notion of exile by asking whether it was at all possible “to feel at home.” He vigorously claimed that Unheimlichkeit was an insurmountable human condition, and the alienation of exilic writers exemplified par excellence the general impossibility of being at home in Western culture. With the widening of focus, interest developed also for those previously disregarded authors who had appeared on the international scene in another language, like Kriszta Arnóthy, or writers that did not write in their mother tongue, which they forgot having left the country as a child, like Tomaso Kemény. The periodical Hungaricum, launched in 2006, is entirely devoted to writers and artists with Hungarian background around the globe, whatever their language. In addition, second generation authors of exilic families start to get special attention. Books of Tibor Fischer, a noteworthy British novelist and a descendant of ’56 exiles, have been translated into Hungarian, for they have evident connections to Hungarian history and culture. A chapter on to his novels in the latest Hungarian literary history suggests that authors may appear in the future without a definite national identity (SzegedyMaszák, “A magyarság” 837). In the meantime, the cultural scene has reached a medialized phase, and this transforms the way literature, even that of former exiles, is consumed. Faludy’s marriage over ninety and his declared bisexuality entered the tabloids and TV-shows, making him something of a celebrity. Bestseller writers of the

534

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

interwar era who went into exile and became fairly unknown at home, started to attain attention. The novelist Ferenc Körmendi, for instance, who had a great international success in the 1930s, left for the US in 1939 and worked for the Voice of America; Jolán Földes, who won first prize at an international novel contest in 1936, sold millions of copies in a dozen languages, emigrated to Britain in 1941, and switched to writing in English under the penname Yolanda Clarent. Both authors reappeared in the Hungarian series “forgotten classics” in 2006. Their posthumous “return” was due to the current wave of interwar nostalgia and the market’s need for quality light reading. However, they also moved some to urge that the ascension of popular genres should redefine the canon and the process of canonizing. Földes’s reappearance was especially appreciated by the feminist. The reception of two emblematic exile writers around the millennium stirred up such interest that it all but transformed the whole Hungarian literary scene: Sándor Márai and Albert Wass have rather unexpectedly become the most popular and best selling writers on the Hungarian literary market. Their lives and novels were both put on the screen recently. During the Hungarian “Big Read campaign” in 2005, which franchised the original British campaign, three of Wass’s titles made the “Top 50” most popular Hungarian novels of all time, one of them even getting into the final twelve. With Faludy’s My Happy Days in Hell and Márai’s Embers and Bekenntnisse eines Bürgers in the Top 50, the campaign revealed that these emblematic figures of exile reach a wide public. Márai’s works were republished in Hungary only after his death. As one who committed suicide at the age of 89, and as an emblematic anti-communist, Márai became a symbolic figure of exile. He represented “the writers of the bourgeoisie” and the lost continuity with pre-communist Hungarian society. After the democratic transition he received a keen though ambivalent scholarly attention as one who had been excluded from the literary traditions. Kulcsár Szabó has emphasized that his classical modernism revealed a broken continuity with Europe but provided Hungarian postmodernism with a useful link to world-literature (22–23). Szegedy-Maszák’s study aimed at getting Márai posthumous appreciation, but well in advance it warned against overestimating him or turning him into a cult figure. His popular reception was at the outset not overwhelming. Many copies of a new complete edition of his works, which counted on elderly readers still recalling his former success, ended up in street-vendor sales. Thus the international fame that Márai received around the millennium in Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and England, was quite a surprise to many, not only in Hungary but also among his fellow émigrés, since he had already appeared on the European scene in translations decades earlier without much notice. The Frankfurt Book Fair in

Losing Touch, Keeping in Touch, Out of Touch (Sándor Hites)

535

1999 was the breakthrough. His Glut (original title A gyertyák csonkig égnek), considered by Hungarian critics as one of his weakest works, sold hundredthousands of copies in Germany. Recognizing that his works of lesser importance achieved international success, even István Fried, an admirer of Márai, labeled his success a possible “misunderstanding,” finding it an enigma that still needs to be puzzled out (185–98). Wass, a Transylvanian novelist who wrote parables of the Trianon trauma that were repressed during the communist era, had not attracted much attention until his suicide in 1998, certainly not one that could be compared to his recent inexplicably vast popularity (see John Neubauer’s essay in this volume). He became a right-wing cult figure, a code for ideological identification: admiring him or being indignant about him reveals political predilections. The leftist philosopher Gáspár Miklós Tamás labeled him “our only entertaining fascist,” others find his new-fangled cult of myths and counter-myths rather psychotic. From the extreme right some label him “the last Hungarian writer with a true national sentiment.” Wass’ enormous success is not the product of new critical currents, but ideology and interest in minority issues do not explain it fully either. Being a right-wing Transylvanian author did not bring him much popularity in the early 1990s; he became an object of worship only when a younger right-wing generation appeared on the scene. Some of his less politicized fans probably enjoy just his old fashioned storytelling, a counterpart to “postmodern decadence.” According to the latest news he dominates the prison libraries. Works Cited András, Sándor. “Befogadás vagy együttlét?” (Reception or Co-existence?). Kortárs 39.2 (1995): 89–91. Balassa, Péter. “Összehasonlító sérelemtudomány” (Comparative Grievance Studies). Újhold-Évkönyv (New-Moon Yearbook). Vol. 2.2. Ed. Balázs Lengyel. Budapest: Magveto˝, 1988. 440–50. Baránszky, László. “Én még egy töredékkel is beérem, ha az igazi töredék” (It Takes a Fragment to Satisfy Me, If It Is a Real One). Hazajöttünk hát … hazajöttünk? 12 beszélgetés határon túli alkotókkal (We Have Come Home … Have We? Twelve Conversations with Authors from Abroad). Ed. Erzsébet Erdélyi and Iván Nobel. Budapest: Tárogató, 1998. 97–107. Béládi, Miklós, et al. A magyar irodalom története 1945–1975 IV. A határon túli magyar irodalom (History of Hungarian Literature 1945–1975. Vol. IV: Hungarian Literature Abroad). Budapest: Akadémiai, 1982. Béládi, Miklós, Béla Pomogáts, and László Rónay. A nyugati magyar irodalom 1945 után (Hungarian Literature in the West after 1945). Budapest: Gondolat, 1986. Borbándi, Gyula. “Névazonosságok” (Homonyms). Élet és irodalom 36 ( July 3, 1992): 2.

536

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

Borbándi, Gyula, “Küldetésem nem volt, szolgálatra sem kért föl senki” (I Had No Mission, nor did Anybody Asked Me to Serve). Erdélyi and Nobel. 92–98. Csordás, Gábor. Odüsszeuszok és tékozló fiúk (Ulysseses and Prodigal Sons). Élet és irodalom 41 (December 17, 1997): 20. Domahidy, András. Vénasszonyok nyara (Indian Summer). Rome: Lehel-pályázat, 1969. Budapest: Magveto˝, 1986. Domahidy, András. Árnyak és asszonyok (Shades and Women). Bern: Európai Protestáns Magyar Szabadegyetem, 1979. 2nd ed. Budapest: Magveto˝, 1985. Shades and Women. Trans. Elizabeth Windsor. Perth: Aeolian, 1989. Erdélyi, Erzsébet and Iván Nobel, ed. Induljunk tehát: otthonról haza. 12 beszélgetés határon túli esszéírókkal (Let Us Go then: from Home to Fatherland. Twelve Conversations with Essayists from Abroad). Budapest: Tárogató, 1996. Faludy, György. Pokolbéli víg napjaim (My Happy Days in Hell). Budapest: AB Független, 1987. 2nd ed. Budapest: Magyar Világ, 1989. My Happy Days in Hell. Trans. Kathleen Szász. London: Deutsch, 1962. Fried, István. “A siker valóban félreértés? Szempontok Márai Sándor német utóéletének értelmezéséhez” (Is Success really a Misunderstanding? Perspectives on Interpreting Márai’s German Afterlife). Siker és félreértés között. Márai Sándor korszakok határán (Between Success and Misunderstanding. Márai on the Divide between Epochs). Szeged: Tiszatáj Könyvek, 2007. 185–198. Gömöri, George. “Erno˝ Kulcsár Szabó: A magyar irodalom története 1945–1991.” World Literature Today 68 (1994): 401. Határ, Gyo˝zo˝. Heliáne. Budapest: Magyar Téka, 1948. Facs. rpt. Budapest: Magveto˝. 1991. Karátson, Endre [alias Boldizsár Székely]. “Az oszthatatlan magyar irodalom” (Undividable Hungarian Literature). Irodalmi Újság 5 (August 1, 1962): 7. Karátson, Endre. Milyen magyar író lettem a Mikesen (What Sort of a Writer I Have Become at the Mikes Conferences). Számadás. Hollandiai Mikes Kelemen Kör (1951–2001) (An Account. The Kelemen Mikes Society of Holland, 1951–2001). Ed. Melinda Kónya, Áron Kibédi Varga, and Zoltán Piri. Bratislava: Kalligram, 2001. 127–39. Karátson, Endre. Otthonok (Homes). 2 vols. Pécs: Jelenkor, 2007. Kemenes Géfin, László. “Maradok továbbra is kívülálló” (I remain an Outsider). Erdélyi and Nobel. 132–39. Kibédi Varga, Áron. “Nyugati magyar irodalom” (Hungarian Literature in the West). 1976. Párbeszéd Magyarországgal (A Dialogue With Hungary). Ed. Béla Pomogáts. Budapest: Szépirodalmi, 1991. 347–51. Kibédi Varga, Áron. “Legyo˝zhetetlen távolság van élet és irodalom között” (An Unbridgeable Distance Exists between Life and Literature). Várnak a kapuk (The Gates Are Waiting). Ed. Erzsébet Erdélyi and Iván Noble. Budapest: Tárogató, 1997. 59–63. Kibédi Varga, Áron. Amszterdami krónika 1999 (Amsterdam Chronicle 1999). Bratislava: Kalligram, 2000. Kovács, Imre, “Kijózanult emigráció” (Emigration Sobered up). Látóhatár 6 (1956): 4–11. Kósa, László. “Mino˝ség – elit – kisebbség” (Quality, Elite, Minority). Kisebbségben lenni nem sors, hanem feladat (Being in Minority is not Fate but a Task). Pozsony/Bratislava: Ausztriai Magyar Egyesületek és Szervezetek Központi Szövetsége, 1992. 64–72. Kulcsár Szabó, Erno˝. A magyar irodalom története 1945–1991 (A History of Hungarian Literature, 1945–1991). Budapest: Argumentum, 1993. Makkai, Ádám. “Minden egyes nyelv más-más ablak a világra” (Every Language Is a different Window onto the World). Erdélyi and Nobel 48–52.

Losing Touch, Keeping in Touch, Out of Touch (Sándor Hites)

537

Márai, Sándor. Embers. Trans. C. B. Janeway from the Hungarian A gyertyák csonkig égnek (The Candles Burn to their Stub). London: Penguin, 2003. Márai, Sándor. Bekennentnisse eines Bürgers. Trans. Hans Skirecki from the Hungarian Egy polgár vallomásai. Berlin: Oberbaum, 2000. Márton, László. L’égiposta (Airmail/Mail from Heaven). Paris: Magyar Mu˝hely, 1989. Márton, László. “Törvényen kívül” (Outlawed). Élet és irodalom 36 ( July 24, 1992): 2. Márton, László. “Ki az igazi Márton László?” (Who is the genuine László Márton?), Népszabadság 37 (November 4, 1993): 17. Pomogáts, Béla, ed. Párbeszéd Magyarországgal. Nyugati-Európai és tengerentúli magyar tanulmányírók (A Dialogue with Hungary. Hungarian Essayists in Western Europe and Overseas). Budapest: Szépirodalmi, 1991. Pomogáts, Béla. A nyugati magyar irodalom a kirekesztésto˝l a befogadásig (Hungarian Literature in the West from Exclusion to Admission). Alföld 41.2 (1990): 41–53. Pomogáts, Béla. A befogadás konfliktusai. A nyugati magyar irodalom Magyarországon (Conflicts of Admission. Western Hungarian Literature in Hungary). Kortárs 48.10 (1994): 94–100. Szabó, László Cs. “Még vagyunk” (We Still Exist). Nyugati magyar irodalom (Western Hungarian Literature). Amsterdam: Hollandiai Mikes Kelemen Kör, 1976. 11–36. Szabó, László Cs. Görögökro˝l (On the Greeks). Budapest: Európa, 1986. Szegedy-Maszák, Mihály. Márai Sándor. Budapest: Akadémiai, 1991. Szegedy-Maszák, Mihály. “A hontalanság irodalma” (Literature of Homelessness). Újraértelmezések (Reinterpretations). Budapest: Krónika Nova, 2000. 151–74. Szegedy-Maszák, Mihály. “A magyarság (nyelven túli) emléke” (Memory of the Hungarians – beyond Language). A magyar irodalom történetei III. 1920-tól napjainkig (Histories of Hungarian Literature). Vol. 3 (From 1920 until today). Ed. Mihály Szegedy-Maszák and András Veres. Budapest: Gondolat, 2007. 831–37. Szilágyi, Zsófia. Ferdinandy György. Bratislava: Kalligram, 2002. Sztáray, Zoltán. Gondolatok a nyugati magyar irodalomról (Reflections On the Western Hungarian Literature). Új Látóhatár 31 (1989): 145–57. Tóth, György and András Veres, ed. Írók pórázon. A Kiadói Fo˝igazgatóság irataiból, 1961–1970 (Writers on a Leash. From the Documents of the Publishing Office, 1961–1970). Budapest: MTA Irodalomtudományi Intézete, 1992. Varga, Lajos Márton. “Ki az igazi Márton László?” (Who is the Genuine László Márton?). Népszabadság 37 (October 29, 1993): 17.

538

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

Albert Wass: Rebirth and Apotheosis of a Transylvanian-Hungarian Writer John Neubauer

1. Immigration, and Literary Debut in the US: 1951–52 After two years in a DP camp near Regensburg (1945–47), two years in the Bavarian village of Bleibach (1947-May 1949), and two years (1949–51) of working in Hamburg for his wife’s family as a night-watchman, the Transylvanian-Hungarian writer Albert Wass disembarked in New York on September 21, 1951. He went on to work on the Ohio farm of William G. McClain in Bellair (on the Ohio river, southwest of Pittsburgh), probably with the help of Robert A. Taft, the anti-communist and anti-New Deal Senator of the state, who was a distant relative of McClain. Within a year, Wass divorced his wife and married McClain’s daughter. Radio Free Europe offered, and Wass gladly accepted, the opportunity to write at $ 200/month a weekly column for the radio titled “Letter from the West” (Nyugati levél), in which Wass reported on American agriculture and the American way of life (Turcsány, élete 19–20). Eager to introduce himself to the Hungarian-American reading public, he arranged for the republication of two works that he wrote and published already in Europe: Elvész a nyom (The Trace Disappears) and Ember az országút szélén (Man at the Roadside), which turned out to be questionable visiting cards for the New World. Nobody could imagine, however, that these American failures would become key works in making Wass one of the most popular author in early-twenty-firstcentury Hungary. The story of failure and resurrection deserves a closer look. “Kicsi Anna sírkeresztje” (The Cross on Little Anna’s Grave) The story claims to be based on historical events, but Mezo˝bölkény, the name of the setting, is not on the map (though there are various villages with -bölkény). The villagers of Mezo˝bölkény are, according to the narrator, neither communists “nor particularly fond of Jews,” but they decide to hide Bihora,

Albert Wass (John Neubauer)

539

the communist smith, and the Jewish Mr. Weis, for the “Germans and people who were similarly quarrelsome” are intensely hunting for their kind (18). They hide them in an abandoned grain cellar, and tell orphan Little Anna, who watches the village sheep, to provide them daily with food and other necessities. When the Russian arrive, the two come out, and now the villagers turn to them for help, for the liberators rape women, rob, destroy the church, and kill the household animals. Bihora tries to intervene but cannot communicate with the Russians; Weiss, who seems to know Russian (presumably he came from the Pale), sits already in a departing car and shouts back, “I am needed in the city! If you need anything, turn with confidence to the commanding comrade! He has a translator at his side!” (21) However, the commander mistrusts Bihora’s communist conviction and chases him away with a whip. Little Anna is raped by eight soldiers, and Bihora, who tries to intervene, is severely beaten. Several weeks later, he drags himself to her grave and plants on it a cross with the inscription “Here lies Little Anna and Liberty” (22) – for which he is once more beaten up and jailed. In sum, Wass allows his communist Bihora to convert to a liberal Christian humanism, while his Jewish Mr. Weis shows ingratitude, betrayal, and collusion with the beastly violent Soviet soldiers. The violence of the German and Hungarian Nazis remains here (and elsewhere) beyond the horizon of Wass’s fiction. We may add in anticipation that Jewish ingratitude will be a recurrent theme of his. “Kicsi Anna sírkeresztje,” Wass’s first US publication, appeared in the Amerikai Magyar Népszava in May 1952. The same month already, János Kereszthegyi accused Wass of anti-Semitic agitation in a highly critical review of the story in Ferenc Göndör’s New York weekly Az Ember: “The novella is a cleverly and, for the time being, cautiously formulated anti-Semitic propaganda indictment of Mr. Weiss, and, through him, of all Jews”: they are responsible for the terrible situation in communist Hungary. Kereszthegyi saw in the publication of the novella and Wass’s engagement as a contributor, a sign that the new editors of the Amerikai Magyar Népszava were giving the paper a neo-Nazi turn, but he also knew about Wass’s Transylvanian past, and, especially, about his novel Adjátok vissza a hegyeimet! (see below), which he regarded as a serious distortion of the historical events. Kereszthegyi felt compelled to speak up against Wass’s “masked anti-Semitism” because he did not want to fight Bolshevism at the cost of reviving Nazism, fascism, and antiSemitism. Wass responded angrily with the article “Álarcos bohózat kicsi Anna sírkeresztje körül” (Masked Farce around the Cross on Little Anna’s Grave; Turcsány, élete 82–85), claiming that nobody objected when he had published the story in 1949 in Hungarian, German, and French papers. Why the fuss now?

540

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

After all, he claimed, Weis was merely a minor character in the story and his real target was communism. In support, he cited a Rabbi whom he met at Senator Taft’s campaign tour to win the Republican presidential nomination. The Rabbi volunteered to read the story and exonerated him of the charges (83–84). Encouraged by the Rabbi’s testimony, Wass went into a counterattack, and accused Göndör and Kereszthegyi: “This group had escaped after the collapse of the 1919 Hungarian communist reign of terror, and slipped into the US” (82). Under the banner of democracy and freedom, it now agitated for a repetition of what happened in 1945: “Then, it celebrated with drunken ecstasy the Bolshevik terror and the bloody massacres that hit the Hungarian people. It applauded when Cardinal Mindszenty was put in jail and tortured, applauded when thousands of Hungarian peasants were carried off into captivity” (82). The writers around Ember did not return home, because their main goal was to prepare American Bolshevism. Hence Wass’s conclusion: “Poor, poor little scared rats there, in the cavities of New York. See, they lost their head in panic” (84). Anticipating Taft’s election and McCarthy’s rise to higher power, Wass foresaw the end of Communism and the dawn of a new world. A few months later, the Republicans nominated Eisenhower, who won the elections afterwards. We ought to add that Wass’s attack missed its target. Göndör briefly served as President of the Press Directorate during the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, but Az Ember, which he had started on October 1, 1918, was soon forbidden during the Commune, and Göndör became for the rest of his life an anti-Bolshevik left-wing social-democrat. He restarted Az Ember in Vienna in 1926, and took it with him to New York. The paper advocated cooperation with the post-1945 coalition government in Hungary, but turned against the communist regime in 1948, when the Communist Party swallowed up and liquidated the Social Democratic Party. The Rákosi regime put the paper on its black list. By 1952, Az Ember was as violently anti-communist as Wass himself (see Borbándi életrajz 1: 211, 232–35, esp. 234), save that it attacked the old and new Nazis with equal passion. Göndör’s aggressive fight against Communism, as well as the neo-Nazis, explains why he is attacked even today from both sides: while the neo-Nazis abuse him as a communist Jew (see the top internet item on him titled “Eltiltott káderlapok” [last checked on November 22, 2008]). In the internet version of the Magyar Életrajzi Lexikon (Hungarian Biographical Lexicon), which has obviously not been revised since 1989, Az Ember is called “a yellow paper that reviles the communists.” The contributors of the paper included such highly respected Hungarian exiles and émigrés as Pál Tábori, Pál Kéri, Menyhért Lengyel, István Borsody, Mikes György, and Sári Megyeri.

Albert Wass (John Neubauer)

541

Elvész a nyom (The Trace Disappears) Curiously, all these violent controversies neglected Elvész a nyom (1952), Wass’s first US book publication that was much more explicitly anti-Semitic than “Kicsi Anna sírkeresztje.” Only Andor János, a frequent contributor of Az Ember, published in Buenos Aires a devastating review of the novel (Wass, élete 88–91; no source indicated; very likely it was the Jewish Buenos-Aires weekly Hatikva [Hope], to which János was a contributor). Elvész a nyom appeared with “Kossuth,” a Hungarian publisher in Cleveland, whose directorship Wass was to assume a year later. This variation on Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1928) traces the lives of six Boy Scouts who miraculously escape from drowning in their boat under a waterfall. Baradlay, the local protestant minister, immigrates later to America, but seeking to resolve the miracle he looks up the boys one by one towards the end of his life, in 1949, and urges them to immigrate to America. Their lives are told by a conventional external narrator. Each of the men represents an ethnic group, a profession, and a nationality: the Hungarian Prince Gergely Drágffy is a landowner; the Czech Basil Vranin a petit-bourgeois blue-collar worker; the Pole Kazimir Lubovszki a bohemian artist; the Romanian Jon ( Jonel) Bursanu a nationalist politician; the German Herbert Habicht a natural scientist; and the Jewish Gottfried Pohrisch a banker (how could it be otherwise!). The heart of the novel is the double story of Lubovszki and Pohrisch. Kazimir is poor, reckless, and irresistibly attractive to women. In dire need, he remembers Pohrisch, the fat Jewish boy who became his servile follower in school because Kazimir once defended him against bullying (105). The adult banker greets him with a “sickeningly sweet voice” (106), but his “thick lower lip” protrudes and a “satanic triumphant smirk” spreads over “his swollen face” when Kazimir pumps him for money: “no money, only work” (107). Kazimir becomes engaged to Éva, a seemingly rich girl, but she breaks the engagement after visiting his desolate quarters. Éva then marries Pohrisch to save her father’s faltering department store, mostly owned by Pohrisch’s bank. Kazimir finds out at a dinner that this “fat toad” (122) married her, and convinces Éva to run away with him. When Pohrisch tracks them down and threatens her to ruin her father (126), Kazimir knocks down this “disgusting, slimy oyster” with a full hit “into the fatty, swollen face” (127). Éva stays with the “miserable vile rat who bought her body for money like the butcher buys cattle on the market” (128) – but she is finally driven to suicide. A complementary story focuses on Pohrisch’s relation to the lurid Jewish community. His father’s visitors carried big bags, and smelled of sweat; they

542

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

whispered self-importantly with his father, always about business and money; “sometimes they were very old, must colored, and in rags, with black fur hats, red beards, and hanging corkscrew curls” (152). Jassa Mendelovits, agent of a mysterious worldwide Jewish organization, tells Pohrisch that the Jews of the world will support all his business ventures but will curse him, despoil him, and expel him if he breaks Jehova’s Law (164). Although Gottfried marries the gentile Éva, Mendelovits’s organization rescues his wealth from the Nazis, for it belongs to all Jews, not him alone (162). Instead of using the American visa that Mendelovits provided for him, Gottfried stays behind and witnesses how enthusiastically the Austrians greet the Nazi troops. For the first time he becomes aware of the unbridgeable gulf that separates him from the Viennese, and he remembers Mendelovits’s words that the home of the Jews is an idea: they are not Austrian, Polish, or English but everywhere only Jewish (199). Gottfried survives the Holocaust and becomes the administrator of a former concentration camp. Trafficking with gold, diamonds, dollars, and American smuggled goods, he does, like all other Jews, excellent business: People who lost everything, Jews who survived the claws of death, became millionaires within weeks on the German black market. The invisible net that served so well for centuries worked splendidly once more: the threads reached over oceans and continents, and the goods streamed over water, land, and air, via forbidden and permitted routes. And it was good so: ‘I entrust all the people to you’ said Jehova. (205)

However, Kazimir ruins Gottfried glorious new ventures when the two meet again in a DP camp, where Pohrisch – once more characterized as puffed up, short, and fat – is a Screening Officer for a UN organization. Gottfried gives all the money, the goods, and the immigration slots to the Jews (206), and he falsifies Kazimir’s record by labeling him a collaborator. Kazimir, unaware of this, hates this “Shylock” for having taken Éva from him (147): hissing her name into his “disgusting, swollen face,” he knocks him down again. Facing the military court, he declares his only regret: not having killed Pohrisch (149). Of the remaining boys, the honest and courageous Drágffy builds a model farm in Czechoslovakia but loses everything under the communist regime. Still, he tells Baradlay that morality, not wealth, makes a gentleman, and that loyalty, decency, and goodwill matter, not the political regimes (57). The Romanian Jon ( Jonel) Bursanu becomes a politician and demands in his parliamentary maiden speech that the permit of the Pohrisch Bank to exploit the upper-Moldavian forests be rescinded (213). He sympathizes with the Nazis, holds anti-Semitic speeches, and vainly tries to prevent the return of Northern-Transylvania to Hungary (216). Baradlay tells him that the US seeks a decisive victory over the Soviet dictatorship and it would help the small

Albert Wass (John Neubauer)

543

nations of the region if they overcame their nationalism (232). Herbert Habicht becomes a professor of science at Königsberg University and makes a major discovery; but when the Nazis pressure him to exploit the invention for building weapons of mass destruction, he denies his success. After the war, he feels guilty for having placed humanity above patriotism, especially since other nations successfully used the invention to defeat Germany. Baradlay convinces him to go to the US. Six of the seven men gather in a compartment of the train that takes them to the port of Bremen. The seventh, Pohrisch, is also on the train but he is reluctant to join them. When he finally appears with Baradlay in the door, the train derails and the accident kills Baradlay. The seven ex-boys stay alive, but whether they will proceed to the US remains open. Wass himself did, and Elvész a nyom shows that the baggage he brought along contained a heavy dose of anti-Semitism.

Meeting Emil Havas Towards the end of his life, in December 1992, Wass published in the Katolikus Magyarok Vasárnapja a much-quoted account of a meeting with a certain Emil Havas: I had hardly arrived in America, a good forty years ago, when a gentleman knocked at the door of my hotel room in New York, who was once, a long time ago, a scribbler at a Kolozsvár daily called Ellenzék. Emil Havas, as he was called, became meanwhile an American journalist, contributor to the New York Times and co-editor of the Reader’s Digest; entering my tight room he first sized me up with eyes screwed up and shook his head. – I thought you were older, he confessed, it would be a great pity if you wasted your talent on things you write in these days. I come with a proposition, my visitor came to the point. Write a book as we plan it for you, and I guarantee that we’ll make a bestseller out of it. The Reader’s Digest would also bring it, we make a film of it, and in less than a year you will earn with it a million dollars! I asked what the topic would be. My life, for instance, came the reply. A Jewish boy is beaten up by fascist students; after many adventures he arrives in America and his talent unfolds, he becomes a famous man. We must have spent about ten minutes this way. Listen, he said finally, if you accept our offer and write the way we want it, we make a successful writer out of you. But if not – and Mr. Havas raised his voice here – not a single book of yours will appear in this country ever. Do you understand? We control the American press, the book publishing, and the film industry. In this country, people read only what we put in their hands; they see and hear what we want. If you want to live here, you will write as we want it or you will not write at all. It took less than two years for me to realize that Emil Havas was right. I sent in vain the English translations of my manuscripts to the publishers and journals; most of the time they did not even return them. Finally a man at a reputable agency gave the secret away: “Your name is blacklisted. No publisher would dare to accept them.” (Turcsány, élete 120–21)

544

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

Anyone wondering what “we” can mean here should read a 1993 variant of the anecdote at http://www.halas.net/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=4341. The second article, titled “How I became an anti-Semite,” spells it out: Havas meant the (American) Jews. His threat revives the anti-Semitic allegation that the American press, publishers, and film studios are all in the hands of an all-powerful Jewish network. And the coda of the anecdote proves that the network was not simply invented by a sick mind: Wass claims that he became truly boycotted. He conveniently ignores the blacklists that did indeed exist in the US around 1951–52, which were set up by Senator McCarthy and his ill-famed House Committee on Un-American Activities. They listed leftist writers and people in the film industry, who were more often than not Jews. Wass was not shy to resort to an even more radical version of such stunning “conspiracies” in 1966: “Today, it is clear to everybody that both world wars served only the aims of a very cunningly organized conspiracy, and that the invention of Marxism as well as the creation of the United Nations was meant to place at the head of the world this small conspiratorial group” (Józan 1: 163 – nota bene in a volume titled With a Sober Hungarian Eye!). Did Havas really exist? Did the meeting really take place? With such questions in mind, I did a little research and found, to my own surprise, positive answers to both of them in the New York Times Index and an article that the real Havas published in the November 1952 issue (p. 5) of his Antibolseviki Fórum, a “reporter paper” edited and published by him in New York (a copy of it is preserved in the “Vasváry Collection” of the Somogyi Public Library in Szeged, Hungary). Let us rewind then our reel and look at the meeting through the eyes of Havas. Both his account and that of Wass leave no doubt that they describe the first (and probably only) meeting of the two men. It took place in October or November 1952 (not 1951), for Wass appeared with his new wife, Elisabeth McClain, whom Havas describes as a “very pretty and clever” distant relative of Senator Taft. Wass was apparently on a visit in New York, tried to reach an official of a Hungarian association, found accidentally Havas on the line, and the two agreed to meet next day. Hence the subtitle of the Havas article, “An Accidental Conversation with Count Albert Wass, the Writer,” which contradicts Wass’s claim that Havas had sought him out. Havas writes: I was very curious about this writer, who started as a great talent and has apparently come in recent years under bad political influence, because two of his writings – an undoubtedly anti-Semitic novella, and his latest book, Thirteen Apple Trees, which has a political background – reveal strong anti-Semitic tendencies.

Albert Wass (John Neubauer)

545

Addressing Wass in the interview, Havas added that in the criticized texts (the first of which was, of course “Kicsi Anna”) the writer had portrayed the Jew as a thankless, wicked, and ill-willed person, and did not say a single good word about the people that suffered most in the war, and undoubtedly innocently. Wass defended himself by claiming that he had “no ulterior political motives when writing” and nothing was further from him than to “offend the Jews that suffered so much.” However, he reserved himself the right to portray bad as well as good Jews. Havas was fair enough to use as title of his article Wass’s self-defense, “I Protest being Called an anti-Semite”. The interview part of Havas’s article concludes with an agreement that Wass would develop his response in an article that Havas would publish. The second part of the article concerns the controversy that Wass unleashed after the interview with a speech commemorating the 1849 Hungarian martyrs of Arad. Drawing a parallel with the post-1945 execution of Nazis and their collaborators, he labeled as “henchmen” (pribék) Márton Himmler and his Hungarian unit of the US Army that received orders to round up and hand over to the Hungarian government former Nazi and Arrow-cross leaders – many of whom were then tried and executed. For Wass, most of these were good Hungarian patriots who fought against Hungary’s bolshevik occupation. Andor Fisher-Fáy, editor of the Detroit paper A Magyarok Bányászlapja (Mining Paper of the Hungarians), found this outrageous, and criticized Wass so bitterly that the writer denounced the paper as communist in a letter to President-elect Eisenhower (Ember December 6, 1952: 5). Havas asked Wass to restate his position against the accusations, and he did, indeed, print Wass’s response of November 11, 1952, together with Havas’s own final comments, which were critical, but highly polite to the very end. The tone of the article simply excludes the alleged threats and boycotts.. I shall not deal here with Wass’s highly questionable self-defense and his defense of Nazi criminals. Instead, I want to ask why Wass invented his version of the meeting with Havas at the end of his life, when Havas was no longer around to contradict it. (The obituary of Havas appeared in the NY Times on January 4, 1957. He was born in Ungvár/Uzhgorod, where he also worked for a while. Later he did work for the Times, though in a minor position.) Wass must have received a copy of Havas’s article, but he probably forgot or suppressed it. At the end of his life he needed, I suggest, a self-defense that would put the blame for his American failures on somebody else, and the Jews, via Havas, were convenient and familiar means to do this. I shall trace the literary and political career of Wass from its Hungarian beginnings to its American decades to substantiate my suggestion.

546

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

2. Transylvanian Decline and Resistance: 1934–40 The decisive event in Wass’s life was the annexation of Transylvania to Romania in 1919. Wass’s family of nobility stayed on its estate in Romanian Transylvania, most of which fell on the Hungarian side of the border when Northern Transylvania was re-annexed by Hungary in 1940. He fled with his family in 1944, when the Soviet troops conquered Transylvania and returned it to Romania. From a political perspective, 1945 was a watershed in Wass’s writing, but the periods before and after it divide once more in two. For the pre-1945 period, the 1940 re-annexation of Northern Transylvania was crucial, whereas the dividing point of the second period was Wass’s immigration to the US in 1951. The present and the following section are devoted to the main works of the two pre-1945 phases. Section III will deal with the works that Wass wrote during his European exile but did not republish in the US, whereas Section IV gives an account of his activities in Florida.

Farkasverem (Wolf Pit) Wass’s first novel, published in 1935, established him as a promising young writer. In the following years he became an important figure in Transylvanian Hungarian literature, which flourished during the interwar period. Farkasverem portrays three Hungarian/Transylvanian landowner families that lead, in the 1920s, a depressed existence in the Mezo˝ség, now annexed by Romania. The older generation, represented by Ábris Bedo˝, Ferenc Zenthay, and the half-demented widow Baroness Rápolthy, has no grip on the world. Towards the end of the novel she is torn to pieces by her beloved wolfs. Until then, however, she has absolute power over her son, Baron Jeno˝ Rápolthy, once a promising writer in Budapest who now lives at home in Csudákfalva (“village of marvels”), drinking heavily, and falling apart. A ray of hope appears when he falls in love with his neighbor Klára Zenthay, and even tries to write again. However, Klára, who just returned from the “world,” is so shocked by his dissolute room and surroundings that she terminates the budding love-affair. In the end, Jeno˝ marries a sober widow who assumes his mother’s former power over him. Tibor Zenthay, Klára’s brother, works hard to develop his father’s estate at Halasd, but he does not understand people and is so un-romantic that Ágnes, the teen-age daughter of Ábris Bedo˝, turns him down. She “grows up” and acquires self-assurance in Budapest. Árpád Halász lives with his three spinster aunts, and manages his estate with difficulty. He is also attracted to Klára, but

Albert Wass (John Neubauer)

547

she does not care for his manners, not even when he returns after a few weeks in Budapest. Árpád and Tibor dislike Cluj/Kolozsvár, and Budapest even more. In short, Jeno˝ and the young women are attracted to a glittering mundane world, but cannot afford joining in, whereas Tibor and Árpád are stuck with the managing of poor estates. They are all lonely, unhappy, and dissatisfied with their lives. Of the rest of the world we see little, except for some servants and the keeper of the village pub, who is one of Wass’s more attractive Jewish characters. The novel concludes on a rainy, grey, and muddy day, in a barren landscape. A “student-like” poor young Romanian walks with his little belongings towards an “uncertain future.” Between potholes in the fog he wanders from “Ciudac towards Campina,” not from Csudákfalva to Halasd: the future belongs to the Romanian youth in a Romanian setting. Hungarian culture is on the decline. Farkasverem generally blames the Hungarians rather than the Romanians for their plight. Only one episode shows Romanian corruption: a Romanian peasant cuts down and steals an apple tree from a Hungarian, who smacks him so that it breaks his jaw; false Romanian testimonies enable the Romanian to win his lawsuit against the Hungarian. As Aladár Schöpflin, a leading critic in the leading journal Nyugat wrote, the work shows how a social class dies off, “not under the pressure of external circumstances, but from inside, due to the desiccation of internal energy. This class […] goes into its final ruin voluntarily, by its own initiative, almost consciously” (1). Schöpflin had not read anything as depressing and disturbing for a long time, but he found the novel honest, and the characters genuine. The portrayal was consistent and without tendentiousness.

Csaba Five years later, Wass published his second novel, Csaba. The exact dating of the writing is of considerable importance. The Hungarians reoccupied Northern Transylvania in September 1940, and since the first reviews of the book appeared already in November, Vilmos Ágoston cannot be right in claiming that Csaba was the first product of the post-re-annexation period (223). Indeed, it is much more likely that Erzsébet Kádár’s November review reflected the new, more aggressive Hungarian disposition: she found the heroes of the novel “too meek” (“Csaba”). The novel starts with little Ferkó Fileki’s experience of the changeover in 1919, and becomes a portrayal of how, as an adult, he manages to shake up the Hungarian community of the little mixed village Móruc. He comes from an

548

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

urban middle-class family that his doomed under the Romanian regime. However, Ferkó turns into a successful farmer in Móruc, and he repeatedly overcomes confrontations with the Romanian peasants, who cut down a beloved forest, and the officials, who unsuccessfully try to exclude the Hungarians from voting. His most important achievement is to replace an aged and lethargic Hungarian Calvinist minister with an enthusiastic young one who helps him activate the Hungarians. Together, they are able to save the Hungarian elementary school by building a new home for it with their own hands and with other Hungarians who thought that this was impossible. Ferkó is friends with the older Hungarian “Bandi bácsi,” but he knows how to restrain him when he gets temperamental and dictatorial in confrontations, mostly with the Romanian peasants and local bureaucrats, but also with the Hungarian peasants, whom he does not trust. The Romanians are seldom vicious; they may attempt to misuse their power, but they are ready to follow the law, though only when they are reminded of it. In contrast to most of Wass’s later novels, the Jews here are not powerful, but only few of them are attractive. Reich bácsi, a pub owner, is a harmless and rather attractive old man, but his son aspires to play a role in the glittering mundane world, steals money from his father, and seduces and abandons Bandi bácsi’s gullible daughter. Ferkó, who always found him disgusting, gently returns her into her father’s arms. A second Jew, Ferkó’s socialist student friend, becomes a bourgeois storekeeper who refuses to help Ferkó’s school project. In one of Wass’s typical railroad encounters, Ferkó sits in a compartment with two Romanians and a scared old Jewish man. Ferkó listens silently to the Romanian abuses of Jews; but silences them when they start to agitate against the Hungarians (178–79). Ferkó’s intellectual friends in the village are Berán and Anuca, the Romanian teachers, who are more literate than Ferkó. Anuca knows that the ethnic groups of Transylvania’s multi-cultural society are often closed, and speak only their own language. In general, she thinks, they are all good people who will, in a few years, “integrate into a unified Romanian society” (82). Anuca falls in love with Ferkó, and he is touched by her beauty, but his leadership in rebuilding the Hungarian school fortifies his Hungarian identity and gradually widens the gap between them. In the end, Ferkó’s attention turns to the Hungarian teacher, Annuska, though not because ultra-nationalism. In one of the novel’s final scenes he tells his vision to the Romanian Tódor Jepuruc: Every nation will direct its own destiny, for this is the truth, and they will all be in a grand federation. Of course, this cannot be done overnight. The nations will first be reconciled with each other here in Transylvania, then the small nations of the Danube will join. There will be a big common country. Borders and duties will disappear. (184)

Albert Wass (John Neubauer)

549

This is not the rhetoric that accompanied the annexation of Northern Transylvania. The picture of the Hungarian and Romanian communities of Transylvania is not only broader here than it was in Farkasverem, but also more hopeful. Erzsébet Kádár mistakenly sees in this passivity. Indeed, none of the characters in Farkasverem is as active (and successful) as Ferkó is. Ferkó’s reinterpretation of the ancient Csaba legend supports his activism, which is indebted in part to the ideas of interwar Transylvanianism. In the legend he heard from his grandfather, Csaba, youngest son of Attila, had settled his people in Transylvania, but had to return to their ancient home to get help against attackers. When the news reached him on the way that the Székelys in Transylvania were in dire need, he returned with his warriors, and their hoofs created the sparks we now see as the Milky Way (called in the Hungarian version “Warriors’ Way”). Csaba saved the Székelys and left again, but promised that he would return whenever he was needed (37–38). At the end of the novel, Ferkó reinterprets the legend: recklessness, quarrels, and prejudice suppress a secret idea that exists in all Székelys (Hungarians). However, people in great danger rediscover Csaba’s ancient law that all dangers can be overcome if love of peace, work, and truth break the seal of the secret. Just as Csaba’s warriors returned in the legend, so too, cohesion, inventiveness, love of work, and self-assurance will bring victory and permit everybody to live in peace with everybody else. A somewhat cloying sermon, coming from an idealized Székely hero. Still, its message is more palatable than the bitter-shrill messages that emerge from the novels that Wass wrote subsequently.

3. Against the “Intruders”: 1940–1945 Wass portrays the 1940 re-annexation of Northern Transylvania in a thinly disguised autobiographical first-person narrative titled Jönnek! (They are Coming!), published still the same year. The story follows the growing hopes of the Transylvanian Hungarians, the final devastations, robberies, and murders of the retreating Romanian troops (Turcsány, élete 15), and the ecstatic reception of the “liberating” Hungarian troops that behave impeccably. Wass was always conspicuously silent about the atrocities committed by the arriving Hungarian troops, which included the authenticated killing of several Romanians and Jews around his estate. The question is whether Wass and his father were implicated in the murders. Wass himself has always denied any responsibility, claiming that the troops arrived on September 11 at his family estate and he was absent between the 14th and the 25th (Turcsány, élete 15).

550

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

Nevertheless, a hastily convened Romanian court in Cluj/Kolozsvár condemned in 1946 both him and his father to death in absentia. Whether the trial was fair is an open question. Whether Wass will be ever exonerated in court is a political question, not one of truth. We shall probably never find out exactly Albert Wass did or did not do in 1940. However, we may get some idea of how Wass’s ideological orientation changed as a result of the events, once his journalistic publication between 1940 and 1945 becomes available. The manipulators of his legacy are understandably not eager to explore his dispersed archive that very likely contains some embarrassing texts. According to his own statement, Wass became in March 1941 the literary editor of the Kolozsvár paper Ellenzék (Opposition), which was of high quality in the previous decades but sharply veered to the right under the editorship of Gyula Zathurecky. Wass claims that he himself actually became the chief editor of the daily between March and early July 1943, after Zathurecky was drafted (Turcsány, élete 16). However, Wass published during those years only two short stories in the paper, and research conducted for the present article found no other traces of his name in the paper during this period, whereas Zathurecky regularly published lead articles and travel reports in it during the first half of 1943. Involvement with Ellenzék seems another mystification of Wass, together with his claim that he resigned from his post when two Gestapo men appeared in the office (in 1943!) to take over the paper. In the absence of non-fictional prose, we must try to distill Wass’s position during 1940–44 from his fictional works: the loosely interconnected story collection A titokzatos o˝zbak (The Mysterious Roe-Buck), published in 1941, and, above all, the two-volume sequence Mire a fák megno˝nek (By the Time the Trees Grow up) and A kastély árnyékában (In the Shadow of the Castle). The former returns to some of Wass’s earlier themes from a more nationalistic perspective, and opens mystifying visions of a pristine Transylvanian nature of woods, brooks, and mountains. The young boy, who focalizes the early parts of the text, dislikes the “stone-Babel” of cities (37), and not only because they are crowded. A trip to Hungary opens his eyes to recognize that the Romanians are “rootless” foreigners, visiting “usurpers.” These “unkempt and disorderly” people run around and shout; “they are unable to keep order because God has not appointed them to do it; they are puzzled by power, for it accidentally fell in their lap.” They make noise because they fear the quiet peace of the soil, which conceals “unknown, black laws of past and future, of blood and culture.” Even the stones of the houses radiate letters of an alien history they cannot decipher. They are “pushy” guests that destroy and defile the world that they do not possess and cannot be proud of. But the boy prophetically

Albert Wass (John Neubauer)

551

foresees (with the hindsight of the writer) that this will end one day: “They will slink away, these debauching insatiable ones, these scoundrels and clowns, the whole comedian troop that forced its way to the stage of history to produce a new drama and did not get further than buffoonery.” Anticipating the Hungarian reoccupation of the land, boy knows he has birthrights to the white peaks of the mountains (74–75). For now, he experiences a silent, dark, pure and transcendental nature when he encounters the mysterious roe-buck. The last story, titled “Mósule,” takes place after the turnover, when power is exercized by the rightful owner. In conclusion, the narrator addresses the old Romanian Mósule of the mountains: “we are again in Hungary. What do you say?” He regrets the tactless question, but the old man chimes in: it was always like that. The Hungarians were the lords here since the beginning of the world. The Romanians? He waves them away and leaves (119).

Mire a fák megno˝nek (By the Time the Trees Grow up) Before we turn to the texts of Mire a fák megno˝nek and A kastély árnyékában, we must make a bibliographical correction. In Ildikó Balázs’s Wass bibliography the first edition of Mire a fák megno˝nek is listed as 1940 (item 135), but no such edition can be found in the Hungarian libraries, and the earliest reviews of the book are from 1942. The matter is of some importance, because a 1940 edition would imply that it was written before the re-annexation of Northern Transylvania. The content itself makes this highly unlikely. These two novels delineate Wass’s view of Transylvanian history from the post-1848 years until the eve of World War I, antecedents of the age portrayed in Farkasverem. Here, as there, the Hungarians, especially the landowner class, are shown to be guilty for losing Transylvania to Romania, but in the new double novel the Hungarian conflicts and failures are overshadowed by the pressures that the “intruding” Romanian, German/Austrian, and Jewish newcomers exert on the Székelys with help from outside. The heroes of Mire a fák megno˝nek are Baron István Varjassy and his wife Minka from Mezo˝varjas. Upon returning from Kolozsvár, after the defeat of the 1848–49 Hungarian revolution, they find that their castle, their stables, and their church had been burned down and plundered by Romanians, who even excoriated their overseer alive. The story, which encompasses the 1850s and 60s, reaching into the first years of the Dual Monarchy after the Compromise of 1867, portrays how the Baron and his wife resettle. The Székelys find themselves besieged from below by the Romanians and suppressed from above by the Austrian military and administrative rulers who use the Roma-

552

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

nians as pawns against the Hungarians. The Varjassys intensely dislike all “intruders,” be they Romanians, Jews, Germans, or Austrians. They decide not to rebuild the castle but to settle in a modest homestead itself – a decision that the social climbers, even their own children, cannot understand. The narrator identifies with the hard-working, severe, brave, and just couple, and pours savage irony on the Romanians. The most important Romanians of the novel are the villagers Mitru and Indrei Muresan (the Greek-orthodox popa) and Szándu Bács, the Dascal, who lives in the neighboring village Doboj. The three of them led the mob that burned and pillaged the estate and killed the overseer. Once they hear about Varjassy’s return, most Romanians (and Hungarians) readily surrender the booty they carried away, but Varjassy has to go personally to Indrei, Mitru, and Bács. Indrei, servile to god and those in power (15), relinquishes what he took, though his wife, unkindly characterized as “an aged dwarf peony tossed out of its vase, tossed around at the foot of the wall amidst garbage” (16), puts up a mild resistance. Mitru’s “fat” house looks like “a big, overweight frog that gobbled up the soil until it became sluggish and overextended, hunching at the end of the wide plot with protruding [guvadt] eyes” (17). When he puts up resistance, Varjassy strikes him down with an axe. The Baron’s visit to Bács occasions a narratorial portrayal of the Romanian Doboj, a village “hiding” amidst steep and “dreadfully” ugly mountain slopes that nearly suffocate it. The details of the picture constitute a psychology of the Romanians in Transylvania: Its houses, pressed together in pain, piled on each other, its streets became bent, and the whole village was like a heap of hatred and bitterness. Nothing straight in it: neither its streets, neither its brook, neither the intertwining line of its houses, neither the direction of the gardens, nor that of the fences. There was nothing open: its streets were continuously hiding from themselves, the brook was loafing under shores, willows, and walls, the houses turned away from each other slyly. (31)

Romanian slyness, hatred, bitterness, and bending resist the Baron’s Hungarian directness, openness, and honesty. To make sure that the Hungarians are not blamed for the helter-skelter dishonesty of the village, the narrator adds that Doboj’s primordial inhabitants (read Székelys) had solid houses on wide garden plots. Due to wars and soldiery in Austrian service, few of those are left. The old and ineffective parson Ábris Bibarc still preaches in the Hungarian church (echoes of Csaba), but the wooden Greek-orthodox church of Dascal Bács dominates today, be it with a deep-seated inferiority complex: the Romanians copied their original Trans-Carpathian church, but since they had to use oak instead of native pine, the new church became too heavy.

Albert Wass (John Neubauer)

553

A Romanian psycho-history reveals that the psychology of the village houses represent more than just a counterpart to the Baron’s character: It resembled some worn-out, sad bird settling with tiredness, with drooping wings; a foreign bird, some bird that lost its way. That small wooden church was the bird of people that lost their way […] of people that had to flee far from their home because of the Turks and the Tatars to find work and life on foreign people’s soil. This is why they built their houses so close to each other, almost clinging to each other, so helter-skelter and disorderly. Already the first settlement, like the church, was a tired foreign bird that landed for a rest and never thought for a moment to build a nest on foreign grounds. It settled only because it had to stop somewhere, it had to look for a job and work to stay alive and to be able to return once. […] Without love they built small and gloomy mud houses, just good enough against rain and frost until time comes to return home. (36)

However, the narrator adds, this original Romanian Heimweh faded with time; the small foreign huts merged with the wide gardens of the Hungarian population and started to meddle in the affairs of the big houses: “They started to behave like somebody who feels at home” (37): Instead of the warmth of pure peacefulness, hatred settled in the settlers’ souls, caustic and bitter hatred against the alien people that had received them, against the alien lords that gave them work, and the sadness of remembering the distant home slowly intermingled with this hatred. It mixed in, slowly and quite unconsciously transforming the images, and suddenly it seemed as if this soil had been the old home, the old country. In the mirrors of the slanted windows of the temporary huts, it suddenly seemed that they had been here the true primordial inhabitants, and those who lived in the old big houses were the aliens who moved in on them, crowded them out, and suppressed them. This is how the hatred against the Hungarians started. (37)

These passages constitute Wass’s first fictional formulation of an ethnic history that he was to repeat countless times, in his fiction as well as his journalism. We need not contest here its primitive psychologism and historical inaccuracies. Suffice to note that the Romanians’ suppression of their true intruder identity needed a complementary explanation of how they acquired power. How did these poor and powerless Romanians become a political factor in Transylvania? How did the ressentiment become a threat? Within the logic of the novel and Wass’s ideology, the key factor is Austria’s imperial power: Vienna continued to be in collusion with the Romanians (and the other minorities in Hungary) after the 1848–49 war, and even after the 1867 Compromise that allowed Hungary to participate in the Monarchy. The novel suggests that in the final decades of the century Vienna continued to undermine Transylvania’s traditional Hungarian culture by encouraging also the “intrusion” of the German/Austrian bureaucrats and the Jews. Wass completely ignores thereby, here and elsewhere, Transylvania’s old urban German/Saxon culture, which had been a major source of its well-being. In the final pages of

554

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

the novel Varjassy and his wife are out of touch with the brave, new, and cosmopolitan world of their children, and of Austro-Hungary in general. Varjassy’s growing preoccupation with death signals the passing away of his simple and old-fashioned patriarchal patriotism. Could the negative perception of all those Romanians, Jews, and Austrians merely be focalized from the perspective of Varjassy and his wife? Could the narrator (and in this case the author as well) have a different worldview? Is there, perhaps, an ironic discrepancy between narrator and the protagonists, as it so often happens in the best nineteenth-century novels? Not here, in a novel lorded over by an all-powerful narrator. The passages we have quoted about the Romanian village, its houses, and its inhabitants, are clearly marked as reflections of the narrator, not as Varjassy’s perceptions. We cannot read them as free indirect discourses, as spoken by the narrator but actually seen by Varjassy. Vision and words coincide, the narrator is behind and above his fiction, and certifies Varjassy’s perception of the world.

A kastély árnyékában (In the Castle’s Shadow) The fictional time of this sequel to Mire a fák megno˝nek ends roughly in 1898, after Hungary’s millennial celebrations (191), but an epilogue (198–99), dated sometime after 1920, offers a glimpse of the future under Romanian rule. The novel reveals what went wrong, and what the right attitude should have been, but it refrains from claiming that better politics could have prevented the national catastrophe of losing Transylvania to Romania. In the Dual Monarchy, the old Varjassys are gradually pushed into the background. These followers of Kossuth remain 100 % Hungarians: they reject the Compromise with Austria, for it brings all kinds of foreign riff-raff into Transylvania and stimulates technological and social changes they distrust. Their son Gábor, who was elected to the parliament already in the previous book, represents the new and fashionable Hungarian attitudes towards these changes. He rebuilds the old castle against the wishes of his parents, and takes a distance from the poor Hungarians. Gábor becomes the Lord Lieutenant of the County (fo˝ispán), and he welcomes the foreigners because they (at least some of them) bring European culture to the isolated Székely communities and because he is convinced that all those Germans, Austrians, Jews, Romanians, and Slovaks will gradually assimilate and become no less patriotic than the indigenous Hungarians. The plot of the story, the characterizations, the narrator’s portrayals and commentaries, all make clear, however, that Gábor has it all wrong. For moments, he realizes this, but he is unable to draw the consequences. He

Albert Wass (John Neubauer)

555

suspects, for instance, that the Romanian leaders are in secret collusion with unspecified Austrian powers to “buy” and to convert Hungarian land into Romanian one, but he is too weak and undecided to act upon this insight. Skipping the other novels that Wass published during the war years – Egyedül a világ ellen (Alone against the World; 1943), and Vérben és viharban (In Blood and Storm; 1943) – we give a brief account of his play Tavaszi szél (Spring Wind), which was to be staged in the National Theater of Budapest around Christmas 1944, when the city was already under Soviet siege.

Tavaszi szél (Spring Wind) The play covers the years 1910–19, and blames the Monarchy’s Hungarian politicians and Hungarian ruling class for adopting a liberal attitude towards “intruders.” Imre, a lover of the soil, the woods, the mountains, and a simple peasant girl, accepts his “Hungarian” responsibility when called upon, and he rises to the post of county Lord Lieutenant and member of the parliament, while marrying the former Lord Lieutenant’s daughter. At the outbreak of World War I, he violently disagrees, however, with the Hungarian politicians. He claims that the Romanians receive secret funds to buy up land and that the Jews were allowed to take over commerce, whereas the poor Hungarians could only to emigrate. The Hungarians are too hospitable and chivalrous to the “impolite” intruders (42, 44). As Lord Lieutenant, Imre arrests a Romanian popa who agitates against the Hungarians, but the Minister of Interior releases him (59). The ruling class has become “European,” and Imre’s wife does not understand “that the holiest secret and law of human beings is the nation, the connectedness through race and blood (59). The French general who arrives in 1919 to oversee the transfer of Transylvania to Romania claims that the Hungarians ruled over the other people “too much” (66), Imre responds that they stupidly gave up ruling because they accepted the rhetoric of human rights, European rights, and humanism (66). France would not have allowed that infiltrating nomadic people (“telepes-nép”) should suddenly join another nation and take its land. Shouting inebriated, the Hungarians throw away their weapons, or they join the Jews “as barking dogs,” under the leadership of Károlyi [Minister President of the 1918 “pink” revolutionary government] (71). Imre returns to his mountains. Though the plot of the play differs from the narrative of the novels just discussed, the types and ideological perspectives perfectly dovetail. We have to ask, then, whether Hungary’s second disastrous war of the twentieth century – in which Wass had participated – came to modify this worldview.

556

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

4. Perspectives from Exile in Europe: 1945–1951 Wass lived under difficult circumstances during the immediate postwar years, but he was surprisingly productive in fiction writing. Apart from the stories we have discussed, he published the novels Adjátok vissza a hegyeimet! (Return me my Mountains!), Ember az országút szélén (Man at the Roadside), and Tizenhárom almafa (Thirteen Apple Trees). He also wrote Rézkígyó (Copper Snake), which was published posthumously. In the first two of these novels, Wass abandons his traditional external narrator to allow a protagonist to tell his story. No doubt, he was motivated by a desire to convey more intensely and personally the tragic life stories, but he probably wanted also to prevent this way that controversial narratorial statements and observations are attributed to himself.

Adjátok vissza a hegyeimet! (Return me My Mountains!) The novel opens with an address to the President of the Association of Human Rights, Eleanor Roosevelt, and all members of the UN Assembly: the narrator claims that his human rights were violated in a war that was fought “with the slogan of ‘human rights.’” The book is conspicuously silent about the atrocities that were committed against the human rights of Poles, Czechs, Russians, Jews, Gypsies, and many others. The Székely narrator has two important childhood encounters up in the Transylvanian mountains: Anikó, whom he marries after a shy and lengthy friendship, and Dudurkás, “a well-intentioned fat Romanian boy,” son of a smith who came “from somewhere behind the mountains, still before the war” (73). Dudurkás helps the boy to acquire a gun (forbidden for Hungarians, a major infringement on a person’s “human rights” according to Wass), but the boy’s father is killed by a boar and the boy is jailed for illegal gun possession. Upon his release, the orphan (his mother had died earlier) settles with his sister and brother in the woods, supporting the three by burning coal and selling the meat of the beasts he shoots with another gun acquired with the help of Dudurkás. After Northern Transylvania’s re-annexation to Hungary, the Dudurkás family fears Hungarian retribution, but the young narrator assures his friend: “We do not harm anybody […] in Hungary things like this [suppression] never existed. I know it from my father. There will not be any either. In Hungary, all human beings are equal” (89–90). To be on the safe side, father Dudurkás takes the Hungarian orphans into his house, and claims he too is Hun-

Albert Wass (John Neubauer)

557

garian (93–94). The narrator’s sister marries the Dudurkás boy, though this is unacceptable to their brother, who wants a war so that some people disappear. To the question what if he will be one of them, he answers, “the world here will belong then to the Jews, the lords, and the Dudurkás” (112). The protagonist reluctantly obeys the draft notice for it is a law of the country that made a free person of him (120). In spite of his doubts and his revulsion at violence, he shoots a Russian, for otherwise the Hungarians will be eliminated by others, “the Romanians, the Russians, and everybody who can step on us” (132). His unit is demolished but he joins other retreating Hungarian troops under the command of an ensign who thinks that the Hungarians and Germans win or perish together (155–57). The Soviets capture them, but he escapes and returns home, where now the communists rule. The rest of the plot consists of interlocking horror stories. The narrator’s house was burned down, his wife and child killed; Dudurkás did not intervene when the Soviet soldiers raped his wife. The Dudurkás family changes sides again, but is, nevertheless, deported (172–73). A communist smith, who led the Soviets through the narrator’s house and thus became unwittingly responsible for his wife death, witnesses how the communists massacre churchgoers. The new Commissar of his village, a Jew “imported” from Máramaros, tortures people by hammering nails under their fingernails and pouring salt in their wounds (198). The smith kills the Commissar for torturing his wife to death, but his children are deported to Russia and he loses one eye in the subsequent torture (206–207). He joins the narrator and his outlaws, and the two of them visit the Commissar of the narrator’s village, another “living devil” (211–18) who also comes from the Trans-Carpathian region. Disgusted with himself, the Commissar tells his life story and willingly accepts their death sentence by hanging himself. The narrator’s brother becomes a judge in the new system, but quickly loses his faith: he is arrested (174–75, 190) and becomes a neo-Nazi upon his release (234). A parish minister finally urges the narrator to escape in order to tell the world about the suffering Transylvanians. Then, the minister believes, “our brothers in blood who work in the West will come, like Prince Csaba, with the all-sweeping force of truth, morality, and love to save us from the claws of evil! Alleluia, alleluia, blessed be the Lord’s name” (226)! We see, the Prince Csaba legend has undergone another metamorphosis on its journey from Csaba to Adjátok vissza a hegyeimet!. János Kereszthegyi did not miss the opportunity to weave into his review of “Kicsi Anna sírkeresztje” a paragraph on Adjátok vissza a hegyeimet!, a novel that disturbed him on account of its anti-American, anti-democratic, hateful, and history-falsifying perspectives:

558

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

This novel slyly and dangerously wraps into the tearful sighs of a Transylvania nostalgia the writer’s deliberate distortions, and it presents things as if the Americans should be charged for the Russian invasion and brutalities, as well as for the airplane bombings, not the fact that there existed in the world an amok called Hitler, and that Hungary became a servant of this amuck-runner with its nation-betraying governments, and, especially, with a bandit called Szálasi. Not a word is said about them in the novel! This book is agitating between the lines even in its emigration section, against America, and against the International Refugee Organization that is supported with American money.

Ember az országút szélén (Man at the Roadside) The story is introduced by a roadside encounter between two men who flee the Russians troops. The younger one, the “man at the roadside,” tells his life story to the older one, an officer from the upper class. The recent reprint of the novel by Kráter Publishers (2000), which follows a 1993 Canadian edition, also contains an Epilogue (131–51), which narrates another encounter that takes place in Florida in 1977, between the writer and the grandson of the “roadside man.” I could not inspect the first European and US editions from 1950–53 (Balázs nos. 320–22), but I am all but certain that they do not contain the Epilogue. It pretends to be a “true” event, but contains enough historical references to date its writing beyond the 1950s. Neither Ildikó Balázs’s bibliography nor the Kráter edition notes that the Epilogue was added later. This bibliographical fact is of some importance, because the Epilogue redefines the novel’s ideological orientation. The main story shows some analogy to Adjátok vissza a hegyeimet (and other later novels), inasmuch as it shows how a young Hungarian struggles to survive in post-1919 Romanian Transylvania. In this novel, however, the social stratification of the Hungarian/Székely community plays a more important role. Trained as an engineer and employed until the changeover in the forest administration, the “roadside man” loses his job in 1919 and he too has to hand in his gun. Forced into the mountains with his family, he starts scorching wood, and builds up a flourishing business with logging and sawmills. He becomes dissatisfied with his successful business ventures and turns into a carpenter (79), which causes conflicts within the family rather than with the Romanian authorities. The heart of the protagonist’s narration concerns the snobbery of urban Hungarian society, and the discovery that this has infected even his wife and children. He sends his daughter Ilonka to a prestigious girls’ school in Budapest, where she get ostracized when she gives away that his father is a carpenter. Later she goes to medical school in Kolozsvár/Cluj, marries a Romanian surgeon, and goes with him to Trans-Carpathian Romania. They have commu-

Albert Wass (John Neubauer)

559

nist sympathies, but after the Soviet takeover, before dying, she sends a last message to her father that her creed was mistaken. Jancsi, the older son, studies engineering in Budapest, returns to Kolozsvár, and makes a lot of money. He joins the Arrow Cross movement, and calls his sister a traitor for marrying a Romanian (110). When he is called to Budapest in 1944 to manage the redistribution of Jewish property, his father disowns him in a violent confrontation (122–124). Not that he cares for the Jews, for he knows that they are “a great disease of this world” (122), but he opposes genocide and is disgusted with his son’s greedy robbery. Lajos, the other son, studies in Kolozsvár/Cluj and also settles and marries there, but he is drafted in military and perishes in the Ukraine, leaving a wife and a son behind. The “man at the roadside” is fleeing to the West only in order to save his only grandson, his hope and legacy for a better Transylvania. The pre-1945 experiences of this roadside man are comparable to those of the protagonist in Adjátok vissza a hegyeimet!, and both men are a-political. However, the patriotism of the “roadside man” is more skeptical and critical, and his outlook is somewhat more humane. He does not regard Hungary’s reannexation of Northern Transylvania as liberation, but as an invasion of an arrogant military and administrative power that has little understanding of the local conditions (99–104). The new regime shows him that the Hungarian ruling classes have not learned from the failure of their system in 1918–19: they lead the country into a second bankruptcy (105). These are his central preoccupations; conflicts with the Romanians do occur but do not dominate his life. Indeed, while nobody helps his daughter when she is socially rejected in the elite school, she is helped by her future Romanian husband when she is been beaten up by the Romanian fascists. All these liberal, humane, and non-patriotic sentiments evaporate, however, in the Epilogue, which stages a meeting in 1977 between the author Wass (alter ego of the conversation partner at the roadside) and the roadside-man’s grandson. The grandfather brought him up while working as a porter at the Munich railroad station. After finishing school, the boy and his grandfather return to Transylvania. The authorities send the grandfather to relatives in the mountains, while the grandson is drafted and is badly mistreated for being a Hungarian. Having served, he returns to his grandfather and wants to work near him, but his assignment is to work in Bucharest. When his grandfather tries to intervene, he is beaten to death. The young man works four years in Bucharest, but manages to escape, and continues to carry his grandfather’s belief that fear can never fully extinguish hope. It seems obvious that Wass added the hate-filled nationalistic Epilogue because of Ceaus¸escu.

560

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

Tizenhárom almafa (Thirteen Apple Trees) Wass’s last European book was also published in Buenos Aires (1952). Apparently it was never published in the US, though Wass published in Florida a sequel to it, The Red Star Wanes (1965). The protagonist of this story is Mózsi Tánczos Csuda, a “gobé,” a proverbial simple but clever and witty Székely type whom Áron Tamási made famous. The action spans the years between Northern Transylvania’s Hungarian re-annexation and the beginning of the communist rule in 1944. The re-annexation is portrayed here, as in Ember az országút szélén, with greater complexity than in Jönnek!, and not just because the new border cuts through Mózsi’s apple orchard. The liberating Hungarian soldiers find Mózsi’s “miserable hut” uncultured (24), and the imported Hungarian administration has little understanding of the Székely mentality. Mózsi listens skeptically when a Hungarian demagogue from the homeland tells his Székely “blood brothers”: “There will be no more Vlach villainy here! There will be no more Székely children mortally whipped, no more girls tortured to death! We, the Székely leaders who bled and suffered with you, guarantee that the road on which we now lead you will get you to true resurrection!” (63) Mózsi’s reservations about such rhetoric resemble the particularistic spirit of the interwar “Transylvanianist” movement that Wass actually did not join, though his sentiments were particularist and anti-Budapest. Mózsi resists when right-wing agitators try to sign him up for their cause (63–65), but he must enlist in the Hungarian army that invades the Soviet Union (82). In contrast to some of Wass’s other novels, service in the Hungarian army is shown here to be miserable, due in good part to the sadism of the officers. In one case, this leads even to an insubordination (115), which is brutally suppressed. The “Jewish question” emerges, as in Csaba and other Wass stories, on a train. Mózsi, on furlough, sits with an elderly Hungarian man, a super-nationalist young Romanian women, and a young man with a “Jewish complexion,” who makes jokes and ironic remarks about the Germans and the war. The woman finally runs out of the compartment shouting “Jewish jampec [smart aleck/ pimp]” (148). Shortly thereafter a group of better-dressed students penetrate the compartment, shouting “Out with the Moses people!” (149), but Mózsi and the elderly Hungarian defend the Jewish youth. At the next station, the Jew opens the window and shouts for help. When the police arrive, Mózsi and the old man refuse to testify; the old man is no friend of the Jews and saved the youth only because he does not want to get mixed up in murder cases. The Jewish youngster quickly leaves at the next station. The gist of this rather mild Jew anecdote is: do not think we like you, even if we defend you. As in “Kicsi Anna,” the Jew is loud and ungrateful.

Albert Wass (John Neubauer)

561

5. Fiction, Academia, Publishing: Florida 1957–98 In 1957, Wass moved from Ohio to Florida, where he received a teaching position at a cadet school. According to his short c.v., he was subsequently asked to teach in the Foreign Language Department at the University of Florida, Gainesville, and remained in that post until his retirement (alternately dated as 1970 and 1972: Tucsány, élete 20 and 22). He continued to live in Astor, Florida until his suicide in 1998.

A funtineli boszorkány (The Witch of Funtinel) During his four-decade stay in the US, Wass wrote a plethora of newspaper articles, novels, poems, and fairy tales for children, though with little success. Many regard the three-volume novel cycle A funtineli boszorkány (The Witch of Funtinel) as his best work, a judgment to which he himself occasionally lent credence. Published in 1959, simultaneously in Buenos Aires and Cleveland, it differs from most of Wass’s later works in that ethnic conflict and anti-Semitism appear here only on the margin. “The Witch” is actually a little Romanian orphan, raised for a number of years by her grandfather in the mountainous woods. When he is arrested and jailed, she manages to support herself alone. In spite of, or rather because of, her unity with nature and mysterious supernatural power, she repeatedly gets into conflict with the village societies below and the technological civilization (railroad, lumber mills) that encroaches on pristine nature. She is regarded as a witch because she can often predict the future and because she is cursed with the destructive power of a femme fatale: all men who fall in love with her must die. The novel confronts civilization with nature and rationalism with irrational passion, and since Wass regards Jews as the symbols of urban capitalism it inevitably mobilizes also his anti-Semitism, as the following brief discussion of two scenes from the third volume shows. The first scene of the third volume portrays the misfired inauguration of a new railroad line in the Maros valley: those in power prepare a feast but the villagers and mountain people perceive the approaching loc is an emissary of hell: It came smoking and black, a big construction, a godless machine; it spat black smoke, and its rattling slowly filled the valley, filled the air, filled the world, filled the ears and brain of the people, and it was truly as if the devil himself came on wheels up the Maros. All of them saw it, and nobody had a word to say. There was terrible stillness among the people. Only the ugly black carriage grew ever bigger, it alone thundered, and rattled,

562

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

puffed and belched that merciless, filthy, black smoke towards the clean-scrubbed summer sky. As it approached in the sparklingly beautiful sunshine, gradually grew and approached, it was as if a big grimy worm would keep rattling into the beautiful and neatly-carved mountains; some obscene and dangerous worm, some frightening devilbeast that devours everything that is beautiful and uglifies everything that is pure. (3: 7)

Assisted by the priests and popas, the Baron extols all the benefits the railroad is going to bring, but when the people are invited to eat and drink they politely refuse and get on their way homeward. The representatives of the old order (nobility and clergy) are accompanied by the real movers of the new order, the officials of the railroad, and, above all, the representative of the new capitalist order, the Jewish Mr. Schwarz, a former grocer but now the owner of the sawmill, who will profit most from the railroad. The greedy and belligerent workers of his mill have also been imported from somewhere. Mr. Schwarz, tiny and potbellied, runs around unsuccessfully to save the feast: the reddened “little fat grocer” nervously wipes the fatty sweat on his forehead with his pudgy white hands (9). Capitalism and industrialization, led by a reprehensive Jew and tolerated by the old order, tragically defile here nature’s purity. The confrontation is replayed a few pages later, but now in a comic-erotic key that allows a reversal of the power relations. Just when the beautiful, natural, and young “witch” of Funtinel stretches herself naked on a hot stone next to a cool brook (32), a man on the other side of the brook disturbes her. He is “a round headed fat little man wearing gentleman’s suit, wide trousers, striped shirt, halters, and a coat on his arm. His stomach protrudes, his head is adorned with a strange, round straw hat. A vile smirk spreads over his face (32). Our Schwarz, for it is him, shouts to her something she doesn’t understand because of the spalshing water, and when she crosses over to him (naked, of course), he repeatedly pinches her “with the same fatty disgusting smirk.” She ignores his sexual advances and prepares to return to the other side. Scared by the prospect of losing his prey, he offers her a forint, breathing heavily, reddened, and with a slimy mouth. She giggles that his paunch makes him look pregnant, but he aggressively grabs her arm and reminds her that he owns the woods. She coyly invites him to undress and lay his clothes next to hers on the other banks, which he follows with his usual “disgusting smirk.” She grabs both piles of clothes, jumps over the rocks and disappears, teasing, laughing, and ridiculing the man left behind. Our Transylvanian Rhine maided fooled the shivering and naked Mr. Schwarz/Alberich, who must finally be fetched by the gendarmes. Wagner’s allegorical anti-Semitism is made explicit here by means of the man’s name.

Albert Wass (John Neubauer)

563

Publishing Ventures After his move to Florida, Wass undertook a number of publishing ventures and became deeply involved in Hungarian exile/émigré politics, among other things as President of the Transylvanian World Society (Erdélyi Világszövetség), Vice President of the Hungarian American Society (Amerikai Magyar Szövetség), and President of the Kossuth-Kiadó, a Cleveland publishing house. He supported the ill-famed Senator Joseph McCarthy and the mentioned Senator Robert A. Taft ( Józan 1: 24; Turcsány, élete 84), and later he pinned his hope on the conservative republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, who lost against Lyndon Johnson ( Józan 1: 68–70). What exactly was the duty of Wass at the University of Florida, and what, if any, relation did his foundation and his publishing activities have with the university? As of early 2008, the “contested” English version of the Wikipedia internet article on Wass claimed that he “became professor of German, French, European literature and history at the University of Florida in Gainesville,” whereas the corresponding Hungarian version soberly noted merely that “he was engaged in the language laboratory of the University of Florida.” Both articles are in a constant process of revision: at the end of 2007 the Hungarian Wikipedia text still added to the text just quoted: “(he handled the magnetic tapes)”! Since no serious university would have employed anybody in as many and divergent fields as listed in the English version, the Hungarian version may come closer to the truth. From the mid-1960s onward, Wass’s main concern was to set up journals, publishing houses, and a “Research Institute,” in order to cultivate a Hungarian tradition among the Hungarian-Americans, and, more importantly, to reveal to the American readers and politicians what he regarded as “the historical truth” about Transylvania and the plight of Transylvanian Hungarians. He conspicuously failed on both accounts, and became increasingly frustrated with the passage of time. Wass’s first, and perhaps most important venture was the publishing house Amerikai Magyar Szépmíves Céh (American Hungarian Guild of the Arts), which he launched in May 1964 with the primary aim of providing books in English for the American public ( Józan 1: 82–84, 131). The imprint of the Guild publications listed sometimes Toronto, sometimes Gainesville, and at other times Astor, FL (Wass’s home) as the place of publication. According to an article of September 3, 1966, the Guild had published by then five studies and two novels ( Józan 1: 166–67, 195; Ildikó Balázs’s bibliography includes a longer list [55–56]). Gyula Zathureczky’s book on Transylvania was sent to all US Congressmen and Senators, and Wass repeatedly claimed that as a result

564

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

(of a print-run of five-hundred copies!) discussions on Transylvania in Congress, at universities, and elsewhere came to use reliable information ( Józan 98). As to fiction, the Guild planned to publish only novels “that would acquaint American readers with the Hungarian problems, with the Hungarian way of life, and, above all, with the Hungarian sufferings […] Our aim is simple and clear: we bring the Hungarian problems to the general consciousness of the American public” ( Józan 1: 99). However, the Guild published only two novels (Damnation Row and The Red Star Wanes), both by Wass himself in both Hungarian and English, contrary to the announced policy. Indeed, Wass announced in September 1978 that the Guild would publish henceforth mostly books in Hungarian, for it would be unjust and inappropriate if “fivehundred old, pensioned Hungarians continued to carry on their shoulders the burden and the responsibility of enlightening the Anglo-Saxon public” ( Józan 2: 284). The Guild was related to two further institutions led by Wass: the Danubian Press ( Józan 2: 17), launched in 1967, and the Danubian Research and Information Center (Dunatáji Kutatási és Információs Központ). The aim of the latter was “to provide the press, the politicians, and the universities with information concerning the past, the geography, the geology, the cultural and political situation of the Danube Basin,” and “to search for and to work out the feasible road that leads towards the reconciliation and harmonious cooperation of the people in the Danube Basin” ( Józan 1: 93; cf. also 121–22). Unfortunately, for both internal and external reasons, the actual work at the Center did not further this noble conciliatory aim. Wass consistently blamed the world, above all the disinterested Hungarian-Americans, for the center’s difficulties. The Hungarian American Society rejected the project from its very start, and the sources for potential American subsidies thus dried up ( Józan 1: 93). Many doubted that Wass had the temper and vision to carry out such a conciliatory work – and the Center’s actual activities confirmed this skepticism. Wass announced the launching of the Center in November 1965, though the actual starting date seems to have been spring 1966 ( Józan 1: 113–15 vs. 165). What exactly the Center researched, what ties it had with the Guild, and, above all, what its relation was to the University of Florida remain unclear to this date. The central project seems to have been the five-volume “Hungarian Package” with accounts of Hungary’s geography, history, and culture, as well as the legends, tales, dances, folklore, and literature of the Hungarian people. Scheduled for an October 1966 appearance (anniversary of the Revolution) in five-thousand, and possibly ten-thousand copies ( Józan 1: 127), it finally ap-

Albert Wass (John Neubauer)

565

peared in four volumes between 1969 and 1972 under the title Hungarian Heritage Series, with a print run of two-thousand. The Heritage Series included Ildikó Jobbágy’s volume on folk dances (1969); Béla Várdy’s history of Hungary (1969), a reworking of publications by the doyen of the Hungarian historians, Domokos Kosáry; and two collections by Wass himself, one of Hungarian folk tales (1972), the other of Hungarian legends (1971). The volumes have various degrees of merit, but one may ask how much they have furthered the announced aim to further the cooperation between the people in the Danube basin. Take, for instance, Wass’s own introductory remarks to the volumes he edited. Had he genuinely looked for the common elements in the folk traditions of the Danube basin, he could have profited from Béla Bartók, who found early in the century that folklore in this region was something of a common good, for it circulated throughout the ages over the borders and among various people. But Wass did not know, or perhaps did not want to know, about this. For him, folk tales spoke the soul of the nation, and each nation had a unique way of expressing itself via such tales (76–78). Wass proudly announced on April 23, 1966 ( Józan 153–54) that the Center had received a donation of $ 10,000 from a certain André Toma for a similar “Romanian Package.” I could find no evidence that the “Romanian Package” was ever published. Although the President of the University apparently acknowledged Mr. Toma’s donation, and the Center’s postal address was given as Anderson Hall, University of Florida, (or, at times as “Hungarian Package” Renaissance Publishing 3837 SW 1st Ave.), the University of Florida probably never recognized officially the Center as part of the university. Nevertheless, Wass frequently signed as professor at the university or at the university’s research center (e.g. Józan 1: 109, 138). Wass explicitly pleaded for a Hungarian Chair at an American university, and he wanted to attach his Danubian Center to a university. It seems likely that he approached the University of Florida with these requests, but no evidence on that is available. The Center, the Guild, and the Danubian Press also published The Transylvanian Quarterly (1979–85), The Hungarian Quarterly (1985–90), and the Central European Forum (1988–?). Whatever one thinks of Wass’s politics and ideology, it must be admitted that he had the right strategy: in order to carry political and cultural weight in America, the Hungarian exile and emigrant community would have had to be united, and concerted efforts would have been needed to reach the American public, especially the politicians and the academic community. Wass did, indeed, relentlessly work towards these goals, but he was temperamentally and ideologically the wrong person for the task. He perceived the world in terms of black-and-white schemas that allowed for no discriminations and compro-

566

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

mises. His highly charged and often grotesque attacks against his alleged enemies separated him not only from them but also from those that would have been willing to accompany him part of the way. Within the Hungarian community, his activity was divisive rather than conciliatory. The problems of Wass’s Danubian Basin projects were particularly serious. Wass may have wanted cooperation, perhaps even a federation, between the nations of the region, but he would have accepted it only on his terms, i.e. Hungarian historical, cultural, and political supremacy. Starting from this premise, he recognized only injustices done to the Hungarians, none that were inflicted by the Hungarians on the others. The Trianon Peace Treaty after World War I was, of course, horrendously unjust to Hungary, but by the time Wass had reached the US it became evident that irredentist demands to return to the old borders were a pipedream. Wass’s own writing was equivocal on this issue. At times, as in the first of the following passages, he claimed that only a return of the lost territories could resolve the issue, at other times, as in the second passage, he would slightly modify his radical standpoint by leaving a small opening for regional autonomy for minorities: There is no other way out but to re-annex Transylvania to Hungary, within whose millennial frame the infiltrated or relocated folk groups – among them the Vlachs – could develop freely for centuries, could maintain their language, develop their culture, and could enjoy equal rights with the original inhabitants. (Magyar Élet, February 5, 1977; qtd. in Borbándi életrajz 2: 272–73, but not included in the Kráter editions of Wass’s works) We do not wish to deprive the neighboring nations of their rights, but we insist that what is Hungarian should remain Hungarian and should return to the nation’s thousand-year possession, from the Székely villages to the Burgenland ones, from the Bácska [Vojvodina] to Upper Hungary [Slovakia], under just regional self-governance, where it is needed. ( Józan 2: 215–16; published in Kanadai Magyarság on May 31, 1969)

The Romanians, the Slovaks, and the Serbs would not recognize the claim that their territories were Hungary’s “thousand-year possession,” and all of them would contest the assertion that the minorities used to have equal rights under Hungarian rule. Wass’s irredentism, and his insistence on Hungarian superiority and historical rights, is so radically incompatible with his theory of a Danubian-Basin reconciliation that one cannot help but suspect that the various Danubian projects merely served to camouflage a Hungarian chauvinist agenda. No wonder that the “Romanian Package” and all the others that should have followed never materialized. For a brief moment in the 1960s, Wass, like everybody else, admired Ceaus¸escu for his independence from Moscow and for his economic development program. As soon as it became evident, however, that Ceaus¸escu’s nationalism involved a ruthless suppression of the minorities, Wass joined others in

Albert Wass (John Neubauer)

567

righteous protest. However, Wass’s disdain for the Romanians went much deeper. Under the title “Dracula Rides Again!” he published on March 10, 1966 a poorly-written article in English, which outlined his alternative Romanian history for North-American readers as follows: Roumanian nationalism became a political factor in the first half of the nineteenth century, and it did not originate in Roumania proper but was artificially created in Transylvania under the well-known Habsburg slogan […] ‘divide and conquer.’ From that time on it has never ceased to exist and to menace the non-Roumanian population of South-Eastern Europe, whether it took the cloack (sic) of a ‘democratic kingdom,’ or hid under the red paint of communism […] single national goal – to exterminate all the other ethnic groups within his (sic) reach, and to build on their graves a single-colored Great Roumenia. The Roumanians entered the Eastern part of Hungary, called Transylvania, in the 14th, 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries, in small groups, escaping the brutalities of their own landlords across the Carpathians, and asking for asylum. […] These Roumanian settlements enjoyed the privileges of local administrative autonomy, of free cultural development under their own churches, and the use of their own language. ( Józan 1: 138–39)

In another article, dated March 25, 1967, Wass alleged that the communists forced very few Romanian writers into exile, that only two were jailed briefly at home, and that nobody was silenced – not, of course, because Ceaus¸escu was so liberal, but because Romanian writers towed the Party line. As to the Romanian exiles, they helped publishing the works of their colleagues at home, which proved to Wass that although the Romanian anti-communist emigration regarded the communist government at home as a political and ideological enemy, it nevertheless considered as its duty to maintain cultural contacts in service of a national future ( Józan 1: 265). Going one step further, Wass disliked and distrusted the Romanian exiles, including the Romanian contributors to Radio Free Europe ( Józan 1: 102), because he was convinced that they were in collusion with the regime at home. On such premises, no self-respecting Romanian would have been willing to work on his “Romanian Package.” That Wass’s prejudices were not limited to Jews and Transylvanian Romanians is evident from remarks he published in the Kanadai Magyarság on September 7, 1968, slightly more than two weeks after the Warsaw Pact forces invaded Czechoslovakia. These words must surely have been the most absurd ones of the Prague Spring: We have no reason to assume that the spiritual temper of the Czech communist should be different from the typically Slavic spiritual disposition of the Czech communists twenty years earlier, who found pleasure in the screaming of tortured women, the dying cries of ministers nailed to church doors, and the gunning down of unprotected rural inhabitants. We suspect that today’s double-sided Czech propaganda actually serves to give new foundations to a Czech priority in the center of Europe ( Józan 2: 136)

568

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

Wass’s indiscriminate generalization makes it actually quite difficult to decide what precisely he means. One could see the invasion as typical of communist violence – which, incidentally, Wass had never witnessed personally. This would have fitted Wass’s image of communism, though not his alleged “typically Slavic spiritual disposition” since Hungarians participated in the atrocities no less. However, the passage speaks of Czech rather than Russian communists. The preposterous suggestion that the Prague Spring intended to renew a Czech hegemony in Central Europe shows only that Wass compulsively forced new events into a old right-wing rhetoric, according to which Slavs have a brutal spiritual disposition, and the Czechs are always out to dominate the Hungarians. Obviously, “reform Communism” or “Communism with a Human Face” were inherently contradictory phrases for Wass, for whom communists were by definition barbaric. Horrendous scenes of torture and killing have, as we have seen, a fixed repertoire in Wass’s fiction. The historical “Liberators” were, indeed, raping, robbing and drinking, though usually not quite as beastly as in Wass’s stories. The quoted passage exploits, however, fictional visions for demagogic purposes.

6. Legacy, Resurrection, and Apotheosis Wass lived to see as a nonagenarian the political changeover in Hungary and Romania, but he could no longer return for a visit, and he had little pleasure with the new regimes, even the Hungarian one, which awarded him in the end a minor medal in 1994, but, as Wass saw it, was reluctant to grant him a passport (he was mistaken: see Ablonczy’s “Mítoszgyár”). For a while it seemed that his name and his oeuvre would fall into oblivion, but by the late 1990s new editions of his works started to appear in the Transylvanian Marosvásárhely/ Târgu Mures¸ and Pomáz, a village just north of Budapest. The rival publications emerged from factions feuding about the legacy he left behind at his death in 1998. His sons, who have in possession the manuscripts he left behind in his house, started the Czegei Wass Alapítvány (Czegei Wass Foundation) to keep his works alive with publications at Marosvásárhely. Wass, who was in dire financial need in the last years of his life, had signed, however, an agreement in 1989 with Lóránt Zas (Szász), a California engineer and poet, to publish his works. This led to the more grandiosely named foundation “Dr. Gróf Czegei Wass Albert Alapítvány” (Dr. Count Czegei Wass Albert Foundation), which has been behind the highly fruitful publications of the Kráter Mu˝hely Egyesület, founded in 1991 at Pomáz, and presided by Péter Turcsány. The foundation of the sons initiated a lawsuit, and the High Court of California

Albert Wass (John Neubauer)

569

ruled after a long litigation on June 4, 2008 that Zas broke the contract by not paying royalties to the heirs, and ordered him to pay more than $ 170 000 in reparation. According to Kráter’s bookkeeping (statement June 1, 2006), it earned in the period 2001–2005 the equivalent of about e 1 000 000 with the publication of Wass’s works! (http://www.demokrata.hu/napi-hir/elutasitottak-a-perujrafelvetelt-wass-albert-ugyeben2008-05-2316:40) Within ten years, the works of Wass have experienced an incredible boom, whose Hungarian repercussions far exceed the better-known resurrection of Sándor Márai’s writings. As of December 2007, the catalogue of the Hungarian National Library (Országos Széchényi Könyvtár) lists 242 holdings for Albert Wass against 469 for Sándor Márai. However, more than a third of the works in Márai’s list are foreign translations, whereas Wass’s list contains only very few, and most those were commissioned, published, and very likely paid, by himself. In any case, these translations were produced in small runs. Serious critical and historical studies are now emerging on Márai, both in Hungary and abroad, but in Wass’s case the scene has been dominated by the panegyrics of disciples, admirers, and right-wingers, who often shamelessly close their eyes to embarrassing things in their masters’ texts. The historian Erno˝ Raffay, would, for instance state in all seriousness: “one can find no antiJewishness in his novels and other writings. […] in the available articles, writings, and stories published in newspapers one cannot find anti-Semitic trends and content” (190). The fact of the matter is that, apart from some frail vanishing old men, all of Wass’s fictional Jews are repellent, be they beastly communists or greedy capitalists. A handful of journalists and intellectuals have written on Wass’s life and ideology, but, until very recently, literary critics and scholars have conspicuously avoided his work. In the new, three-volume literary history edited by Mihály Szegedy-Maszák (Történetei), Wass is mentioned in passing only (3: 703, 704, 713, 790). Apart from Vilmos Ágoston’s convincing and highly critical monograph on him (2007), only a few scholarly articles (Gyimesi, Kunstár, Ablonczy, Márkus) have appeared on Wass in respectable literary journals, and these tend to deal more with his controversial life than with his literary works. Serious Hungarian literary critics and scholars belittle Wass’s oeuvre as boring, of low quality, and irritating. They find the writer’s enormous popularity an embarrassement. It rests, they believe, almost exclusively on political foundations. Indeed, Wass has become the darling, something of an emblem, of rightwing chauvinists and anti-Semites. Witness the testimony of Katalin Kondor, who headed the Hungarian Radio in the years 2001–2005: “one can learn a tremendous amount from him, about nature, about man, about history, about

570

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

decency, about loyalty, about love for your country, and it was due to his influence that I came to see clearly a good many historical facts and events that were until now kept in deliberate obscurity” (Turcsány, emlékezetére 643). The panegyric of poet Péter Turcsány, Wass’s chief apostle, tops this considerably: “Since Shakespeare, no writer has created, no human being has thought over, so many dramatic situations […] He is more Orphic than any Homer […] He is the Prince, but he could not assume his throne while he lived. He is the writer chieftain of the Magyars, but it is only after his death that we have come to hear his call to take possession of our country” (Turcsány emlékezetére 642). For Turcsány and his likeminded admirers, Wass’s standard title has become “írófejedelem” (writer chieftain or Prince of the Writers). Wass’s admirers claim, in all seriousness, that he won a gold medal at the 1936 Olympics, but was deprived of it because the Romanians claimed he was not a Hungarian citizen (documents shows that he was not member of the Hungarian team); another story holds that he was seriously considered for the Nobel Prize in literature but was finally dropped because of dilly-dallying at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. A number of events in Wass’s biography remain highly doubtful, either because they are not documented, or, more frequently, because of deliberate self-stylization, obfuscation, and mystifications by Wass and his admirers. To these belong his alleged opposition to the Nazis, founding membership in the Transylvanian Szépmives Céh in 1924 (at age 16?), membership in the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (he is not listed in Beck’s official list of members since its foundation), various Securitate murder attacks on him, strenuous attempts to exonerate him of suicide, and misleading claims concerning his non-existent US and international reputation. Such gems in the treasure house of “Wassiana” are ironically questioned by Béla Márkus (“Hozsanna”), who often relies on the Hungarian-American historian Béla Várdy, and, somewhat less rigorously, by Bálint Ablonczy. Against all such imaginary and vastly exaggerated claims there is an incontrovertible fact, whose background should but probably never will be clarified: the death sentence in absentia pronounced on Albert and his father by a Romanian court on March 13, 1946. A Hungarian translation of the verdict is printed in Turcsány’s Wass Albert élete (52–56), together with a 1979 testimony by Wass’s wife in 1940, Éva Wass (102–103). At issue here is not only to what extent Albert Wass was involved in the two murder cases committed by the Hungarian troops in 1940, but also the Romanian court’s composition, legitimacy, and manner of proceeding. We know that the conceptual trials that swept the Soviet-ruled regimes after the war falsified evidence and cared little about legality. That knowledge (and not Wass’s proven innocence) was very likely behind the decision of the US authorities in the 1970s to refuse the Ro-

Albert Wass (John Neubauer)

571

manian government’s request to extradite Wass. Doubts about the Romanian trials is also behind the Romanian rehabilitation proceedings of Vintila˘ Horia (see the introductory essay of this volume) and of other Romanian writers who sympathized with the Iron Guard or the fascist Antonescu regime. However, in Wass’s case, the Romanian courts seem to have confidence in the original court and its decision, for they are willing to reopen the case only if new evidence turns up. Hungarian requests to reconsider Wass’s Romanian death sentence have, therefore, been rejected by the Romanian courts. The recent decision of the Highest Appeal Court, on May 2008, not to reconsider the Wass case for lack of new evidence (www.demokrata.hu/napi-hir/elutasitottak-a-perujrafelvetelt-wass-albert-ugyeben) seems to put the matter at rest. Meanwhile, innumerable articles appeared on the case in Hungarian dailies and journals, but the overwhelming majority of these are unreliable rhetorical arguments, whether pro or con. There is a second incontrovertible fact in the Wass case, which has not been sufficiently studied, his recently emerged enormous popularity. According to a 1998 survey, Wass’s works are second most popular among Transylvanian-Hungarian readers, after the novels of Mór Jókai but before the bible (Márkus, “Hozsanna” 114). In a more recent television voting, Hungarian readers have included three of Wass’s novels (A funtineli boszorkány, Adjátok vissza a hegyeimet!, and Kard és kasza) among the top hundred of all times (see http://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Nagy_K%C3%B6nyv and http://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magyar_reg%C3%A9nyek_list%C3%A1ja# A_legn.C3.A9pszer.C5.B1bb_magyar_reg.C3.A9nyek). Hence, Bálint Ablonczy rightly speaks in an interview with Márkus of a “Wass-korszak” (Iron/Wass Age) that starts with the startling survey. Indeed, lieux de mémoires on Wass are sprouting all over Hungary, though not in Romanian Transylvania, where they are forbidden in public spaces. What is behind this enormous and sudden popularity? Why have Hungarian literary critics and scholars not dealt with it until quite recently, and why do they tend to shun it even today? Answers to these interlocking questions are not easy. We offer a few tentative reflections, for they belong to the core issues of this final section in our volume: the “homecoming” of exiles and their work. One clue to Wass’s popularity may be found in the fact that readers rank Mór Jókai, the romantic nineteenth-century raconteur, still higher. Simple, readable style and smooth narrative typifies both. Jókai’s plots and characterizations are more original, and his spectrum of characters is both wider and more balanced, but Wass’s singular preoccupation with the woods, mountains, and rural people of Transylvania adds a dimension that is absent from

572

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

Jókai’s more urban settings. In Jókai, nature is dramatic rather than lyrical. In narrative mode, Wass has simply missed the modernist turn to inwardness and inner complexity, for his characters tend to be one-dimensional and unreflective. Many of Wass’s readers seem to respond to his lengthy and mostly lyrical nature descriptions that slow down the plot, and they seem to be charmed by the religious and nationalist platitudes of his poetry. These and similar aspects of Wass’s writing make him popular, but displease most literary critics and intellectuals. Most of them don’t read Wass, or stop reading him after a few pages, declaring him to be dull, or irritating precisely because he is so popular. Most Hungarian critics self-assuredly claim to know who is a good writer and who is not; though they have come to accept that literary reputations take roller-coaster rides through the ages, they refuse to recognize popular culture as a legitimate, even necessary, subject of literary studies. I suggest that the key aesthetic question concerning Wass is not what he wrote (and what aesthetic value this possesses), but why he is read. And this question – in contrast to the aesthetic one – is simpler to answer by means of sociological approaches. Did the survey ask why people ranked Wass so high? Probably not. And if not, why don’t critics take the issue further? Whether we think of Wass as a minor or major writer, he is a major “phenomenon” on Hungary’s literary, social, and political stage today. This brings us to the heart of the matter, which is political rather than aesthetic (pace my colleagues in Hungary). Of course, there should be more studies on Wass’s works and cultural activities, and continued attention ought to be given to his life and his ideology. These have been important subjects of my present article too. But if I intended to set some matters straight, if I wanted to separate myths from “how it really happened,” it was not just to shed light on the historical Wass and his oeuvre, but for what he and his work have come to mean after 1989 in Hungary for an obviously very large readership. In the absence of good studies on Wass-reading and -readers, I can only guess, though with a strong hunch, that most of his attraction lies not in the aesthetic qualities (or their absence) discussed above, but in the political appeal of his chauvinism and anti-Semitism. Most readers would probably deny this, as Wass himself did. Yet the nature of his political attraction is evident from the way in which he has been celebrated by the surprisingly large rightwing public in today’s Hungary. Wass has become a political icon and something of a national novelist. And the literati, whose political views tend to be to the left of Wass, now look with alarm at this social and political (rather than aesthetic) phenomenon; many of them get intimidated by the violent tone of the Wass adulators and prefer to remain silent. It may be asked whether this is not a certain trahison des clerks, an evasion of responsibility that is frequently

Albert Wass (John Neubauer)

573

couched in the commonplace that Wass is still “too close” to us, that time will tell whether his fame and popularity will be permanent. But evading the present political and aesthetic issues by saying we do not and cannot know yet whether he will become a “classic” leads to silence. What literary scholars, critics, historians, and sociologists should ask in all cases of East-Central European “homecomings” –which Wass exemplifies, even if in an extreme form – is what forces and currents in the present-day societies glorifies one and rejects the other prodigal exiled writer. Studies on Wass cannot limit themselves merely to the controversial data of his life, or to the close reading of his fiction. Elements of these ought to be woven into sociologically and psychologically oriented approaches to his reception, as part of an analysis of Hungary’s social and political life today. The Wass case, unique as it is, exemplifies how the heritage of exile authors continues to shape the present, not only in Hungary, but also in other EastCentral European countries. Dracula is not the only ghost that haunts the region.

Works Cited Ablonczy, Bálint. “Mítoszgyár.” Reakció (February 2008): 8–10. http://www.reakcio.hu/ content/kozelet_20080221_mitoszgyar?page_nr=1 (consulted on October 13, 2008). Ablonczy, Bálint. “Wass-korszak” (Iron Age) [interview with Béla Márkus] Hetiválasz 5.21 (May 26, 2005). www.hetivalasz.hu/cikk/0505/11474 Ágoston, Vilmos. A kisajátított tér irodalma. A nemzeti képzelet Doru Munteanu és Wass Albert mûveiben (Literature of the Expropriated Space. The National Conception in the Works of Doru Munteanu and Albert Wass). Budapest: EÖKIK, 2007. Balázs, Ildikó. Wass Albert életmû-bibliográfia, 1923–2003 (Bibliography of Albert Wass’s Oeuvre, 1923–2003). Pref. Mrs. László Bajnok. Pomáz: Kráter, 2004. Beck, Mihály et al, ed. A Magyar Tudományos Akadémia tagjai 1825–2003 (Members of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences). 3 vols. Budapest: MTA Társadalomkutató Központ Tudománytár, 2003. Bobula, Ida. Origin of the Hungarian Nation. Astor, FL: Danubian P, 1982. Borbándi, Gyula. A magyar emigráció életrajza (Biography of the Hungarian Emigration). 2 vols. Budapest: Európa, 1989. Gyimesi, Éva Cs. “Talpazat és diadalív.” Élet és Irodalom (July 20, 2007). Havas, Emil. “‘Tiltakozom az Ellen, hogy engem antiszemitának nevezzenek.’ Véletlen beszélgetés Gróf Vass [sic] Alberttal az íróval” (“I Protest against Being Called an anti-Semite”; An Accidental Conversation with Count Albert Wass, the Writer). Antibolseviki Fórum (November 1952): 5. [p. 13 in folder W1/c of the Vasváry-Collection, in the Somogyi Public Library of Szeged]. Jobbágy, Ilona, and István Kutny. Hungarian folk dances, by Graphic Designs. Ill. Julius Hargittay. Astor Park, FL: Danubian P, 1969. Hungarian Heritage Books, vol. 1. Kádár, Erzsébet: “Csaba.” Nyugat 33.11 (1940): 516.

574

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

Kereszthegyi, János. “Kiss Anna sirkeresztje avagy: Wass Albert antiszemita izgatása” (The Cross on Little Anna’s Grave, or Albert Wass’s anti-Semitic Agitation). Az Ember (New York), May 3, 1952. Kunstár, Csaba. “Szimpátia a sötétséggel” (Sympathy with Darkness). Élet és Irodalom 49 (2005) 5: 5–6 & 26: 10. Magyar Életrajzi Lexikon 1000–1990 (Hungarian Biographical Lexicon 1000–1990). 3rd, rev. ed. Ágnes Kenyeres. 3 vols. Budapest: Akadémiai, 1981–82. Márkus, Béla. “Hozsanna néked, Wass Albert? Két dokumentumkötet margójára” (Hosanna to you Albert Wass? Marginalia for two Documentary Volumes). Kortárs 49.3 (2005): 114–28. Márkus, Béla. “Monográfiából elsõ” (Top Grade for Monograph). Tiszatáj 59.7 (2005): 94–98. Raffay, Ernõ, Mihály Takaró, and Károly Vekov, ed. A Gróf emigrált, az író otthon maradt. Wass Albert igazsága (The Count Emigrated, the Writer stayed at Home. The Truth of Albert Wass). Budapest: Szabad Tér, 2004. Schöpflin, Aladár. “Erdélyi irodalom” (Transylvanian Literature). Nyugat 28.7 (1935):1–5. Szegedy-Maszák, Mihály, and András Veres, ed. A magyar irodalom történetei (Histories of Hungarian Literature). 3 vols. Budapest: Gondolat, 2007. Turcsány, Péter, ed. Wass Albert élete; Töretlen hittel ember és magyar; a sajtó tükrében (Albert Wass’s Life. Human Being and Hungarian with unbroken Faith. In the Mirror of the Press). Pomáz: Kráter, 2004. Turcsány, Péter, ed. Wass Albert emlékezetére. A kõ marad … (To the Memory of Albert Wass. The Stone Remains …). Pomáz: Kráter, 2004. Várdy, Béla. History of the Hungarian Nation 830–1919 A.D. Based on the works and former publications of D. G. Kosáry, updated and re-evaluated by S. B. Várdy. Astor Park, FL: Danubian P, 1969. Hungarian Heritage Books, vol. 2. Wass, Albert, ed. Selected Hungarian Folk Tales. Trans. Elizabeth M. Wass de Czege. Ed. Mrs. Leonoir Boner. Illus. Béla Petry. Astor Park, FL: Danubian P, 1972. Hungarian Heritage Books, vol. 4. Wass, Albert, ed. Selected Hungarian Legends. Compiled from the collection of Freda B. Kovács, by Albert Wass. Trans. Elizabeth M. Wass de Czege. Ed. Mrs. Leonoir Boner. Ill. Joseph Mór. Astor Park, FL: Danubian P, 1971. Hungarian Heritage Books, vol. 3. Wass, Albert. A funtineli boszorkány (The Funtineli Witch). 3 vols. 1959. Pomáz: Kráter, 2003. Wass, Albert. A kastély árnyékában (In the Shadow of the Castle). 1943. Marosvásárhely: Mentor, 1998. Wass, Albert. A titokzatos õzbak (The Mysterious Roe-Buck). 1941. Pomáz: Kráter, 2001. Wass, Albert. Adjátok vissza a hegyeimet! (Return me My Mountains!). 1949. Jönnek! Adjátok vissza a hegyeimet. Pomáz: Kráter, 2002. 61–235. Wass, Albert. Csaba. 1940. Pomáz: Kráter, 2003. Wass, Albert. Egyedül a világ ellen (Alone against the World). 1943. Wass Vérben és Viharban. 2002: 109–63. Wass, Albert. “Egy el nem mondott beszéd, s ami mögötte van.” Katolikus Magyarok Vasárnapja (December 20–27, 1992). Turcsány, élete 121–23. Wass, Albert. Elvész a nyom (The Trace Disappears). 1952. Pomáz: Kráter, 2003. Wass, Albert. Ember az országút szélén (Man at the Roadside). Munich: Kossuth, 1950. Toronto: Vörösváry, 1993. Pomáz: Kráter, 2003. Wass, Albert. Farkasverem (Wolf Pit). 1935. Pomáz: Kráter, 2002.

Albert Wass (John Neubauer)

575

Wass, Albert. “How I became an anti-Semite.” 1993. http://www.halas.net/modules.php? name=News&file=article&sid=4341 Wass, Albert. Jönnek! (They Come!). 1942. Jönnek! Adjátok vissza a hegyeimet. Pomáz: Kráter, 2002. 6–60. Wass, Albert. Józan Magyar szemmel. Közéleti írások (With a Sober Hungarian Eye. Writings on Public Life). 2 vols. Pomáz: Kráter, 2002. Wass, Albert. “Kicsi Anna sírkeresztje” (The Cross on Little Anna’s Grave). 1949. Valaki tévedett (Somebody Made a Mistake). Pomáz: Kráter, 2003. 25–31. Wass, Albert. Mire a fák megnõnek (By the Time the Trees Grow up). 1940. Pomáz: Kráter, 2002. Wass, Albert. Tavaszi szél (Spring Wind). Tavaszi szél és más színmûvek (Spring Wind and other Plays. Pomáz: Kráter, 2004. 1–79. Wass, Albert. The Red Star Wanes. Toronto: Literary Guild, 1965. Wass, Albert. Tizenhárom almafa (Thirteen Apple Trees). 1951. Pomáz: Kráter, 2002. Wass, Albert. Vérben és viharban (In Blood and Storm). 1942. Pomáz: Kráter, 2002. Vérben és viharban 5–108. Wilder, Thornton. The Bridge of San Luis Rey. 1928. New York: Harper Collins, 2004. Zathureczky, Gyula. Transylvania; Citadel of the West. Problems behind the Iron Curtain series, no. 1. Trans. & ed. A. Wass de Czege. Gainsville, FL: A.H.L.G. [American Hungarian Literary Guild] Research Center, 1965.

576

Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles

Chapter VI

Instead of Conclusion (Borbála Zsuzsanna Török)

579

Instead of Conclusion: East Central Literary Exile and its Representation Borbála Zsuzsanna Török

This essay attempts to highlight the main interpretative frameworks of our volume. I thank with gratitude to Darko Suvin and Marcel Cornis-Pope, whose talks at the Collegium Budapest contributed greatly to the development of my own standpoint. Yet I am most indebted to the inspiring comments and rigorous criticism of John Neubauer, without whom the project would not have been possible.

Arrows into the Playfield Exile is a socially and historically conditioned term, similar to other notions describing political entities as nation, nationalism, public sphere, or civil society. Originating from the legal-political practices of antiquity, it refers to the forced departure from one’s home country, mostly for political reasons. Although the word had lost its semantic sharpness by the twentieth-century – as we saw it in the introduction to the present volume – it did not disappear from use, but has been kept, above all to refer to intellectuals, especially individual opponents of oppressive regimes. Despite the emergence of a new terminology in the social sciences to designate transnational migration and displacement, the field of literature has been one of the areas where “exile” is still used today. The complexity of its phenomenology, which challenges simplistic formulations, might be a reason why so little has been done for its more coherent understanding in a regional and comparative perspective. Nevertheless, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, the countries of the former Eastern Bloc have been engaged in revising their literary canons, and here the exilic oeuvres had to be reinterpreted. Further West and North, the influx of immigrants – especially during the Yugoslav wars – also created academic interest in the theme of exile and forced migration. Nowadays all parts of the continent are affected by the major trends of globalization, whose effect is, among others, the loosening of the previously dominant national perspectives and the search

580

Chapter VI

for trans-national phenomena. Thus exile has become methodologically interesting too. Surprisingly little is known about the international circulation of twentiethcentury East-Central European intellectuals. Except for important but isolated case studies on academic migration, mostly carried out in Western countries, mostly France and the United States (see for instance Christoph Charle or Laura Fermi), the phenomenon has remained on the periphery of scholarly attention. Sociologists focused on all too large-scale mass phenomena to accommodate such specific and complex cases as the transplantation of the sciences, the humanities, art, or literature. On the other hand, literary histories in the former Eastern Bloc provide no overviews of the theme. The overwhelming majority of existing scholarship produced in the homelands of exile focuses on individual cases, contextualizing them within their home or host milieu. The complexity of the term has been common knowledge: “the meaning of exile, and of home, varies not least as a function of age and generation, of biography and history, of self and circumstance” (Rubén D. & Rubén G. Rumbaut 331). This has prompted some literary scholars to draw time-resistant definitions, arriving at untenable generalizations. Such conceptualizations often emerged in a pre-set emotional-ideological field, and were accompanied by a narrow range of case studies that support the particular approach chosen. Despite repeated warnings that exile should not be described in moral-political terms, literary historians have found it difficult to detach themselves emotionally and ideologically from their object of study. Obviously, fiction writers in exile are a difficult case, because they belong to the species with the highest “urge of self-narration,” and the enforced distance from home invites techniques for “seeing one’s life as a story” (Konrád 57). The myth-making memory of authors in exile is a commonplace, but even ordinary people are tempted by the “situational nostalgia” of writing, as literary historian Orm Øverland claims: the act of writing welcomes, but also overemphasizes and distorts the importance of memory and nostalgia in the daily life of immigrants” (Øverland 9). But while the identification of literary authors with their life stories should not be surprising, few critics have found the tools to engage critically with the discursive self-fashioning. Beyond the consensus that exile means ostracizing for, opposition to, or deviance from, prevailing political institutions (whether these were right-wing interwar governments that pushed communist writers eastward, or postwar communist regimes that punished their opponents by ejecting them westward), we know still too little about the circumstances of expulsion, or about the social, cultural, and institutional context of the host countries.

Instead of Conclusion (Borbála Zsuzsanna Török)

581

Until recently, exile also tended to be celebrated as a metaphor for heroic modern alienation and psychic “difference,” which occasionally provoked the contrary reaction among critical spirits, the latter trying “to puncture the myth of the suffering author-in-exile.” Evoking the successful integration into host countries of some famous East-European male exiles – ranging from the members of the Polish “great emigration” (Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słovacki and Kamil Norwid) to the pre- and postwar generation of Czesław Miłos, Josef Sˇkvorecky´ and Milan Kundera – Ewa Thomson maintains, for example, that the actual literary success in the most creative and productive cities and cultures of the world stands in stark contrast with the “postures which the exiled writer may assume.” According to her, literary scholars dealing with exiles from East-Central Europe should also consider the “advantages of exile” instead of reiterating ad nauseam the romantic topos of the lonely writer bereft of homeland support and facing an indifferent foreign audience. A major mistake among critics is, so Thompson, to identify with the tragic “imaginative projection” of the “exilic imagination,” because the exiles from the peripheries of Europe gained access to “some of the most creative and productive cities and cultures on earth,” which is exactly the opposite of the case of Ovid, banished from the metropolis to the barbaric fringes (Thompson 500–501). Thompson reminds us that the oeuvre of these Eastern European writers reached much greater depth, thanks to the intellectual and artistic effervescence of their new surroundings in the west and in the major US American cities – they simply wrote their best works there, which questions their stereotype of an “alienated” and “powerless” writer. Writers of the twentieth century were enabled to speak to a global audience and make an unprecedented impact. Thus “for the first time in the history of the region, writers exiled from Eastern Europe have begun to forge a definition of that part of the world that has become comprehensible to the home audience and to the audiences of the host countries. They have helped to create an understanding of the unity of “the other Europe” which had not existed in the West before, and they have begun to position “the other Europe” vis-à-vis its Western audience” (505). Thompson emphasizes the intellectual and emotional skills of the successful twentieth-century authors, who, in contrast to their earlier predecessors, were much better integrated into the host environment, and tried to be understood by both old and new audiences (506). Successful integration may exist side by side with cases of tragic psychological alienation that have been a common fact in the biographies of even famous exiles, for instance the Romanian-born surrealist, Ghérasim Luca, Paul Celan from Czernowitz, or the Hungarian exile Sándor Márai. Thompson’s careful selection of the handful happily integrated exiles supports the vali-

582

Chapter VI

dity of her argument, although the more one investigates the social psychological aspects, the more obvious the psychological damage of uprooting shows itself in the mechanisms of coping with the new environment (Tabori 29–30). Yet Thompson rightly draws attention to the necessity to consider exile in a larger perspective, in which analyses of texts must be inserted into the social context. Scholars grappling with the semantic complexity of the notion face the difficulty that it incorporates both timeless and historically bound components of meaning. Forced departure for political reasons, but continued ties to the home culture in spite of physical absence – these are salient aspects that feature also in the biographies of our case studies. Exile is unimaginable without political differences. The ousting regime, the exiled person, and the media, recognize, and in a sense create, the figure of exile as a political opponent. Darko Suvin referred to this supra-individual aspect (incorporating the historically changing political, social and institutional-infrastructural context), as the sociological feature of exile. Next to the macro-level there are individual features – each biography and its related literary oeuvre, is a unique case. These psychological, intellectual, and moral aspects build up the axiological level, according to Suvin, and “can be grouped (and should be) into genres and modalities etc., but they centrally deal with imaginary transpositions of people’s mutual relationships, whose description therefore cannot exclude the critic’s (and the original author’s) subject-position, values, desires, fears” (Suvin 1). The exiles’ attitudes change over time, as Paul Tabori reminds us: “The status of exile, both materially and psychologically, is a dynamic one – it changes from exile to emigrant or emigrant to exile. These changes can be the results both of circumstances altering him in his homeland and of the assimilation process in his new country. An essential element in this process is the attitude of the exile to the circumstances prevailing in his homeland which are bound to influence him psychologically” (37). This triadic interdependence is best illustrated by Jerzy Jarze˛bski’s contribution to our volume on the zig-zag career of Witold Gombrowicz’s fame. The slowly emerging international acknowledgement of Gombrowicz did not result from a successful career in the European metropolises. Rather, the contrary was true: his inclusion in the international literary canon went hand in hand with the recognition that these revered cultural centers were now becoming increasingly provincial. The discursive aspects of exile seem to belong to its most salient features. The status of an exile is permanently reinforced by the person’s actual public presence, which is particularly true for the revolutionary changes in the twentiethcentury media – an aspect studied mainly in the social sciences, less in lit-

Instead of Conclusion (Borbála Zsuzsanna Török)

583

erary scholarship. Since the emergence of radio broadcasts – see the chapter by Camelia Cra˘ciun on Monika Lovinescu, head of the Romanian unit of Radio Free Europe – physical absence has been counterbalanced, in part, by media presence. In view of such improvements in communication, one may ask how the new technologies have affected the meaning and forms of twentieth-century exile. Looking at Romanian postwar exile groups of various political backgrounds, social historian Mihai Dinu Gheorghiu noted the rapprochement of political languages, relevant topics, and rhetoric, arriving at the conclusion that radio broadcasts significantly reshaped the political landscape of exiles, leading to a consolidation of voices in more uniform oppositions against the communist regimes (Behring, Rumänische Exilliteratur 55–60). His study invites further questions on the revolutionary role of internet communication in the 1990s, which not only has an unprecedented potential to create new audiences, but compensates in new ways the corporeal absence of exiles. The emergence of internet in the late 1990s contributed to entirely new opportunities of contact between people abroad and at home. As Dragan Klaic´’s essay on the Post-Yugoslav theater exile illustrates in the present volume, the new exiles could easily access audiences at home via the World Wide Web. We live in an age of information flow and increased international mobility, and intellectual nomadism has become the norm. Yet, as Klaic´ also reminds us, locally rooted artifacts may become extremely vulnerable if they do not fit the larger trends in the globalization of the arts and literature, and are not safely protected by sponsors and supporters. The circulation of people and books resumed after the changeovers in 1989. It also “brought home” the oeuvres of many émigré authors, accompanied occasionally by heavily politicized debates. Their reintegration has been taking place parallel with the renegotiation of the home literary canons (as illustrated by the article on Albert Wass by John Neubauer and on the integration of émigré literature in the Hungary of the ‘90s by Sándor Hites in this volume), which have become simultaneously more fragmented and more integrative as to genres, languages, and political attitudes. However, while the social sciences have explored exile (and related notions) in broad comparative geographical perspectives, there have been so far few similar attempts in the literary field. It may be symptomatic that the Grundbegriffe und Autoren ostmitteleuropäischer Exilliteraturen 1945–1989 (Basic Concepts and Authors of the East-Central European Exile Literatures, 1945–1989) is the only publication comparable to ours in scope.

584

Chapter VI

Transnational Perspectives East-Central European exile had received some attention in postwar Western academia, especially among US American scholars of immigrant background. But it was in the 1990s that studies on collective identity, inspired first by Edward Said’s perspective on the “willed homelessness” of the post-colonial immigrant intellectuals, then by the War refugees from ex-Yugoslavia, brought the topic to the fore. Susan Suleiman evokes these aspects in Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances, a collection of essays on famous European exiles, several among them from East Central Europe and further East (Victor Shklovsky, Joseph Brodsky, György Lukács, Mikhail Bakhtin, and others). Following Angelica Bammer, Suleiman suggests that exile appears not only as a major historical phenomenon of our century, but also as a subject of reflections about individual and cultural identity – notions that are intimately bound up with problems of nationalism, racism and war (2). We could add, with problems of forced migration, refugees, and displaced persons as well. All this is also closely bound to such psycho-social manifestations as “modern restlessness and uprootedness,” and to the symbolic or de facto identification with the Jewish Diaspora. Indeed, the “interior experience” of exile proved to be the special focus of interest for literary scholars, and a salient question has been whether departure enhances creativity or dampens it (see Suleiman). The question is difficult to answer and deserves a second look. Indeed, literary authors’ language is not merely a means of expression, but is anchored to deeper epistemological, and historical reflection, and to psychological and moral layers of identification and creation. Eva Hoffman’s autobiographical essay-novel Lost in Translation: a Life in a New Language eloquently illustrates how departure from post-Holocaust Poland to Canada and the United States affected the cognitive layers of adaptation to the new environment, leading to the utter transformation of her personality. Suleiman’s approach to the study of exile is in line with recent interest in transnational, international, and global phenomena, accompanied by a critical attitude towards national perspectives in the humanities. Pascale Casanova, for instance, made a case for a history of a global “literary space,” a “process by which literary freedom is invented slowly, painfully, and with great difficulty, through endless struggles and rivalries, and against all the extrinsic limitations – political, national, linguistic, commercial, and diplomatic – that are imposed on it” (350). She outlines a new history of literature that takes account of the internationalization of literary production that had emerged and acted simultaneously with its nationalization. Such a history would uncover

Instead of Conclusion (Borbála Zsuzsanna Török)

585

the transnational aspects of “literary space” (a term inspired by Bourdieu’s notion of the field), and shift the vantage point towards the global republic of letters, in which literary authors from peripheries compete for recognition in the metropolises. Casanova is deeply concerned with the literary agency of these “foreigners” from the “small nations of Europe,” and she attributes them the capacity to challenge the dominance of the world cities, alter the balance of literary power, and ultimately rearrange existing hierarchies in the literary world. In this work, which focuses on immigrants in the major European capitals (such as Paris at the turn of the twentieth-century), famous exiles from Eastern Europe, like Cioran, Kundera, and Danilo Kisˇ figure prominently. Marcel Cornis-Pope goes even further in emphasizing the importance of diasporic and exile literature. According to him, the latter played a central role in East-Central Europe throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He considers the role of emerging national centers from the perspective of modernization theories, where the new regional clusters are formed in dialog and emulation with the major cultural metropolises of Europe. Exiles are seen as internationally mobile intellectuals who mediate between the host and home environments. Cornis-Pope argues that the “expansive movements of creativity through exile, transplantation, and participation in transnational projects have played a defining role in East-Central European literature and art. “The literary cultures of East-Central Europe have needed their Diasporic expansions to continually reaffirm themselves, retracing their boundaries and reimagining their identity” (Cornis-Pope 6). Even if one disagrees with such a dichotomous distinction between an allegedly progressive “westernized” diaspora and backwards nationalists at home (Cornis-Pope’s focus on the post-1948 generation and the classical Romanian avant-garde reinforces this view), Cornis-Pope rightly claims that “the interplay between national and Diasporic, local and global paradigms, calls into question any organic or totalizing concept of East-Central European literary and cultural evolution. The contours of this cultural region remain variable; always open to revision, to alternative mappings” (9). Such interplays may occur many decades after the writing of the crucial works, and are affected by political conjunctures. This process is difficult and by no means straightforward, as John Neubauer’s study in our volume on the post-89 Hungarian reception of the right-wing populist Albert Wass illustrates. This case study also draws attention to the obvious although most overlooked fact that exile does not necessarily means cosmopolitan openness and artistic experimentation. The History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Conjunctures and Disjunctures in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century is a recent outstanding work en-

586

Chapter VI

gaged with the analysis of literary fiction as a transnational phenomenon. A concerted undertaking of several dozen authors from Europe and the US, the History regards the writing and use of fiction in the social space and political context. The choice of an East-Central European geographical framework represents an alternative to the older national historiographies, for it problematizes the national heritage in a larger continental (or narrower, micro-social) perspective. The History asks for literature’s use in various social locales and realms, from the urban spaces through the micro-regions until the larger regional units. Although it deals with exile only tangentially (by looking for instance at the significance of the cultural metropolises as Paris for the region’s literary creation), the methodology and the broad chronological and geo-cultural scope provide an ideal background for the study of literary exile itself. In search of such broad and historically reflective accounts, one reads with great interest the Grundbegriffe. This synthetic approach, the result of a threeyear collective project at the Geistewissenschaftliches Zentrum für die Geschichte und Kultur Osteuropas (Center of Humanities for the Study of the History and Culture of Eastern Europe) in Leipzig, is the first regional approach to post-war East-Central European literary exile. As I will show below, the handbook integrates textual and institutional analysis, and approaches exile as a transnational phenomenon across the politically separated Western and Eastern halves of Europe. That it was a German research institute that initiated the first significant account of East-Central European issues is hardly accidental; the precedent had been set by the previous systematic survey of the German-speaking exiles fleeing Hitler’s regime. After the upheavals of World War II, the topic figured prominently on the agenda of West German literary historians, and academic interest in exile intensified in the decade of the 1980s. For instance, a recently published handbook on German emigration in 1933–1945 (Krohn et al) focuses not only on literature, but also on the sciences and the political field. Obviously, such a work does not have to struggle with the formidable diversity of linguistic and cultural contexts as our volume does, nor does it scrutinize such a long period.

Times and Themes of Literary Exile The language and outlook of the studies on literary exile have been particularly strongly bound to their historical context. Such surveys – usually edited volumes – range from documentary investigation of the circumstances that led to exile (mostly from the Nazis) to Saidian approaches to estrangement and marginality of exile. There are also attempts to consider exile in a more

Instead of Conclusion (Borbála Zsuzsanna Török)

587

optimistic fashion as the postmodern embodiment of our day’s ‘traveler’ and ‘modern nomad.’ The Dispossessed: an Anatomy of Exile – a volume edited by Peter I. Rose, whose title harks back at Paul Tabori’s monograph – merely touches on EastCentral Europe, but it provides a survey of major themes, ranging from the problems of integration to the host environment through the sites and infrastructure that absorbed them. The volume deals with World War II European refugees, with the “vulnerable minorities,” and the authors identify with the plight of the refugees by focusing on the loss and suffering caused by displacement (Rose 3). Obviously, the book does not deal with the former persecutors fleeing Communist retribution; it discusses only the fate of the victims of fascist and Nazi regimes, mostly Holocaust survivors. Writing on the successor generation, of exiles leaving after World War II, Domnica Radulescu’s volume, Realms of Exile: Nomadism, Diasporas, and Eastern European Voices, deals with East-Central and Eastern-European authors. Similar to the works mentioned before, the volume regards exile as an aspect of the moral and human loss caused by war and ethnic cleansing. Yet the focus here is on questions of identity and integration into the Western (here: American) society – or the lack of it, manifest in Radulescu’s semantic linkage of exile to “Diaspora” and “nomadism.” The latter is understood both literally but also figuratively, as self-marginalization in the Saidian (and Deleuzeian and Guattarrian) fashion: “The modern exile, who often is a self-styled ‘gypsy’ and the actual gypsies, both ultimate nomads and exiles, are defined equally by a longing for rootedness and uprootedness” (Radulescu 4). The book was written for a generic Northern American student audience with didactic purposes, specifically, how to make them understand “the aspects that are directly tied with exile, such as ethnic diversity, social oppression and prejudice, racism and censorship, freedom and democracy” (6). The case studies focus on the (self-) management of exile cum immigrant identity in the host context, best illustrated by the example of Andrei Codrescu, exile Romanian turned US reporter star. The purpose of the case study on him is to show how the two separate cultural components of his self are bridged in his narratives, “defying chronological time and single cultural existence” (9). How much an optimistic or pessimistic evaluation of exile depends on the perspective of the observer – mind Thomson’s equally contestable and selective approach – may be illustrated by Ksenia Polouektova’s subchapter on Codrescu in this volume. Poluektova arrives at the opposite conclusion. Her reading of Codrescu’s travelogue to his native land, The Hole in the Flag, explores the schizophrenic feeling overcoming the former exile at his first visit to the post-communist homeland. Not only is such an encounter an aching

588

Chapter VI

reminder of one’s own losses, but there is a deeper sense of crisis when facing the nationalism and anti-Semitism of his native surroundings. The contrast between such opposing interpretations reminds us that the integration of exiles into home and host cultures may remain forever incomplete. It is definitely easier to regard Eastern European immigrants from the perspective of the host countries – provided the integration is accomplished successfully. This is visible also in Radulescu’s selection of the prominent postwar writers and artists, including Milan Kundera and Czesław Miłosz, Codrescu and Krzystof Kieslowski, who look at their national identity with critical-ironical detachment. Indeed, the volume suggests that the chief impact of exile fiction from the Eastern European region was the relativizing interpretation of national identity (and the embracement of multiple ones) in the postmodern era: “the image of Eastern European countries constructed in the West by exile writers and artists influence not only the western consciousness but also the very national identities and cultural constructs of the countries of these exiles” (10). Such optimistic speculations on the multicultural transformation of social identities have been contradicted by sociological studies on migrants and exiles in today’s Europe. After 1989, both the former communist countries and members of the European Union have been struggling with mentalities and institutional practices designed for the nation-state and thus inapt for dealing with the influx of newcomers. In Writing New Identities: Gender, Nation, and Immigration in Contemporary Europe, the editors Sidonie Smith and Gisela Brinker-Gabler focus on the tension between the Western societies with an increasing number of immigrants, migrant workers and refugees, and the still largely conservative and discriminating national and gender norms of the host countries: “European nations have not understood themselves as countries of immigration, immigrants are represented as ‘foreigners’” (7). The main concern of the volume is in the fate of the women, the most vulnerable actors in this process: This survey is also meant to map out the ideological and material environment that affects the everyday lives of the millions of immigrants in Europe who are women. These women are variously subjects within discourses of nationalism, rights, and citizenship, discourses through which their otherness within comes to signify and to materialize the allocation of rights, privileges, and resources in their new nation. For instance, their sexual, racial, ethnic, and class positioning conjoin in the assignment of a particular status. They may be migrant or immigrant, foreign national, ethnic or racial minority, guest worker, or resident alien. These assignments of identities have material and cultural effects. (17)

The gender perspective has emerged only recently in European scholarship on exile. German research may serve again as an instructive comparative

Instead of Conclusion (Borbála Zsuzsanna Török)

589

background; the Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration 1933–1945 discusses the participation of women in the émigré elite. According to the Handbuch, scholarly bias in favor of men has been proportional with the prominence of exiles (tending to ignore or downgrade equal achievements of women), while research is more balanced when it comes to the more numerous lower social categories (Häntzschel 101). Similar is the conclusion of Orm Øverland, who maintains that “until recently, the immigrant of immigration history has been male” (11). Preliminary findings suggest that in the literary exile from EastCentral- and South-Eastern Europe women first became visible in the 1970s, and gained prominence in the 90s. As suggested earlier in our volume, the gendered nature of literary exile from East-Central Europe is both a sociological fact and a matter of perception. The field is just emerging within a terrain nearly exclusively dominated by paternalist discourses (see also Kliems). Yet the picture is rapidly changing thanks to the ‘westernization’ of the home literary canons after 1989, and the ensuing emergence of feminist perspectives in research and attention in the oeuvre of women authors. One “discovers” independent female intellectuals from the region, who were no longer “just” spouses or mothers of famous men – such as Agota Kristof leaving Hungary in 1956 or Libusˇe Moníková leaving Czechoslovakia in 1968. Recent monographs about the latter two authors, published in the 2000s, investigate the narrative formulation of gendered identity in the condition of war and forced displacement form a quasi-totalitarian home context (Kliems, Petitpierre, and Riboni-Edme). Best known today is perhaps the writer-journalist-scholar Dubravka Ugresic´, who went into voluntary exile in 1993 after a violent media attack on her and other women colleagues during the Croatian war of independence. The main accusation against Ugresic´ and her peers was their refusal to identify with the new nation-state, with her expected role as a woman patriot, and with the war waged in Croatia’s name (Lukic, Witches). Indeed, what distinguishes Dubravka Ugresic´ is her ironic distance from all the prescribed roles, should they come from the home media or the international literary award committees: Some ten years ago I had an elegant Yugoslav passport with a soft, flexible, dark red cover. I was a Yugoslav writer. Then the war came and – without asking me – the Croats thrust into my hand a blue Croatian passport (it had resolutely rejected red, the Communist color, but the hardness of its cover reminded one of the old Soviet pass for the Lenin Library). The new Croatian authorities expected from their citizens a prompt transformation of identity, as though the passport itself was a magic pill. Since in my case it did not work well, they excluded me from their literary, and other, ranks. With my Croatian passport I abandoned my newly acquired “homeland” and set off into the world. Out there, with the gaiety of Eurovision Contest fans, I was immediately ident-

590

Chapter VI

ified as a Croatian writer. I became the literary representative of a milieu that did not want me any more and which I did not want any more either. But still the label Croatian writer remained with me, like a permanent tattoo. (Ugresic´, European Literature 330)

According to the editors of the volume Writing New Identities, sensitivity towards the fate of unprivileged ordinary women shapes the literary writing of today’s female authors, arriving at new representations of gendered subjectivity, which may affect on the long run, “the construction and deconstruction of national identities in the New Europe (Smith and Brinker-Gabler 15–17).” This is particularly relevant to the oeuvre of Ugresic´. One thinks of In the Jaws of Life and The Museum of Unconditional Surrender that reinvent the image of the “woman” by uncovering the archeology of her local representations. Investigating the ways in which women intellectuals intervene in “patriarchal and nationalist inventions of woman,” literary historian Svetlana Slapsˇak even concludes that ex-Yugoslav war “has offered feminists and women writers new narratives, new politics of writing and publishing, and new patterns of self-definition” (24). Studies occasionally touch on the theme of “internal exile” or, alternatively on “internal emigration.” The German roots and political disrepute of the term have been mentioned in chapter I; suffice it here a hint at the semantic afterlife of the term in post-war literature both in Germany (Grimm 47) and further east. Indeed, “internal emigration” has not managed to strip its political and semantic obscurity. Was it the German precedent that still echoed in our region and turned “inner emigration” into a notion associated with a politically questionable stance? In the Grundbegriffe, Alfrun Kliems notes the prevailing inconsistency of its usage among literary scholars. The latter may have played a role in the preference of the authors of Grundbegriffe for less equivocal notions like “home opposition” and “dissent,” which by the sixties and seventies grew either into political protest movements or/and into the genres of samizdat, tamizdat, and underground culture. Such terminology may prove correct from the bird’s eye’s perspective, yet the micro-analysis brings out the anomalies. According to this logic both the Hungarian-Jewish Imre Kertész and the Romanian Paul Goma would both be regarded as dissenters (only the latter is mentioned in the handbook, see Grundbegriffe 226), without however being able to make further distinctions in regard with the political stance of individual authors. After all, as John Neubauer sums up in the introductory chapter, despite the conceptual fuzziness, the internal émigré/exile will be distinguished from the dissident by his or her abstinence from active political involvement.

Instead of Conclusion (Borbála Zsuzsanna Török)

591

Grundbegriffe und Autoren ostmitteleuropäischer Exilliteraturen 1945–1989 The volume defines its topic as a “countermovement” (Gegenbewegung) that was “partly in opposition” to the official cultural production in the communist regimes. What distinguishes this corpus from the German anti-fascist literature is its greater complexity and longer duration. As the editors contend, postwar exile literature from the region had to absorb during its almost five decades abroad the continuous arrival of newcomers, and integrate two or even three generations, each of which arrived with different values regarding the meaning of home literary heritage, cultural identity, and identification. Different was also its reception and integration into the home canons, into textbooks, literary histories and handbooks – a process that was present, according to the editors, throughout these decades, in marked difference to German history (21). The approach of the authors of Grundbegriffe is admittedly pragmatic, and the main topics, each constituting the thematic core of a chapter, emerge along the key themes of international immigrant literature (these include terminology, the target countries, the institutions of exile literary production, cultural resistance at home and its infrastructure, adaptation into the new milieus, the problem of language shift, and questions whether there is a poetics specific to exile, consisting of particular topics and typical genres). A central theme of the volume is the literary expression of identity patterns, and the specificities of integration into host cultures held dominant over the native one – an argument familiar from Ewa Thompson (294–95). The reactions – and the corresponding literary expressions – are manifold and complex, and, especially in the first postwar decades, replete with minority complexes and self-hatred. The authors search for region-specific characteristics, and locate it in the pronounced awareness of the history of the homeland, documented by the presence of shared themes in the literary identification. Accordingly, exiles tended to turn to the national traditions of their home milieus, sometimes even to the larger regional Slavic or Romance heritage, and to the legacy of regional political thought centering on the East-European “underdevelopment” in comparison to the West. With the new wave after 1968, these patterns seem to have been gradually replaced by thoughts on multi-culturalism and transnationalism, rather than a homogenous national belonging, or even the embracing of global rather than narrower national identity (11). Such a conclusion rhymes with theorizings about the literary space in the fashion of Casanova, Thompson, or Cornis-Pope mentioned earlier, and is linked to a view that exiles advocate cosmopolitanism and democ-

592

Chapter VI

racy. Yet attention to the new popularity of right-wing and chauvinist exiles makes one more cautious – let me allude once more to the case study on Albert Wass in our volume. The Grundbegriffe mentions the obsessive home-bound thinking of EastEuropean intellectuals as a fairly distinguishing feature of their works. Yet such heightened political and historical sensitivity as a reaction to the exile status is not restricted to East-European writers only but is a general characteristic of immigrant literatures. The oeuvres of Naipaul and Rushdie and their numerous followers illustrate immigrant literature’s heightened sensitivity (often at the expense of the host context) towards the homeland, its ontology, tradition, and the normative subjectivities based on them. Naipaul, Rushdie, and other important postcolonial writers tend to assume sharply critical positions against the homeland, and in this sense East-Central European literary exiles are no exceptions. An important question posed on the very first pages of Grundbegriffe is about the interaction between exile literature and the home canon, especially relevant in the Polish and Romanian cases (in contrast to the less pronounced Hungarian, Slovak, and Czech ones). Not only is the inquiry important for the editors seeking defining parameters of the fiction in exile, but also for today’s scholars in search for the transnational aspects of the literary traditions in the region. Particularly important is the legacy of the Polish and Romanian 1848-ers in exile that was later integrated into the national canons. It also represented a usable knowledge for the next century’s “newcomers” and their writings abroad (24–26). One needs to add though that the incorporation of this tradition increasingly becomes problematic, as Jerzy Jarze˛bski’s analysis of the irreverent stance of Gombrowicz illustrates in our volume. The Grundbegriffe does not deal with authors of ethnic and religious minority background, – except for Jewish literary exile to which it dedicates a subchapter – although even prior to 1989 there was considerable minority emigration further west – or east. Discussing the identification pattern of the East-Central European émigré Jews both in the United States and in Israel, the Grundbegriffe mentions the sense of discomfort of assimilated and non-observant Jewish authors who could not identify with the life in the new home. (307–308). Sociologists have long pointed out the paradoxes of identification in the case of such complicated triadic relationships between the ethno-linguistic (or ethno-religious) minorities from the region, their “nationalizing countries” as well as the “external homeland” (Brubaker, see also Kymlicka). Being “caught” between two countries, the dilemmas of identifying ethnic and religious minorities become comparable. It is not surprising thus that the disappointments and the pangs of failed integration of a Marek Hłasko in Is-

Instead of Conclusion (Borbála Zsuzsanna Török)

593

rael are not far in their cultural-psychological nature from those of a Herta Müller analyzed in our volume by Thomas Cooper. Yet they are separated by the tragic historical legacy of World War II. While the Banat-Swabian writer has to come to terms with the family past of perpetrators, her Jewish counterparts were struggling with the paralyzing burden of the Holocaust (see also Hoffman, After such Knowledge). The handbook is thus an unprecedented effort to embed the individual stories in a vast cultural panorama, mediating between the realm of psychology, poetics, sociology and politics. By processing an impressive number of biographies, literary texts, periodicals, and secondary literature, the authors attempt to establish inductively the main structural traits of exile from EastCentral Europe between 1945 and 1989. Because of the range, the material inevitably remains somewhat scattered, lacking a single narrative binding the separate bits. The primary attempt remains to categorize and systematize a large corpus of sources, and indeed, the book is a thematically organized handbook, rather than an encompassing historical analysis. Reading through the Grundbegriffe (747 pp.), one finds a certain interpretive deficit. The effort to create a systematic survey often leads to descriptive and factual narratives rather than raising problems. This is especially evident in the restrained treatment of politically sensitive topics, manifest already in the choice of time frame. By limiting the period to 1945–1989, the analysis inevitably lumps together writers from a variety of political factions into one counter-Communist pool. To be sure, the Grundbegriffe does not give an undifferentiated treatment to all exiles, be they fascists, social democrats, communists, anarchists, or conservatives. Yet its compartmentalized approach does not allow for identifying the political motors of the various waves of departure, and the resulting problematic relationship to home cultures, and their impact on the conflict-ridden integration into the home canons. One looks in vain for an explanation on the recent political recuperation of writers by populist nationalists – the silence on the posthumous success of the aesthetically second-rate Albert Wass is a case in point. Too great an emphasis on political and sociological matters overshadows the uniqueness of literary works. Indeed, literary exiles are the most individual species; they tend to be at odds even with the other exiles. The specificity of writers and literary texts does not fit seamlessly into the socio-historical models. However, some theorizing is necessary and inevitable in order to indicate how vastly different forced displacements have become in the twentieth century, and how this brought about a plethora of new studies with new perspectives.

594

Chapter VI

Works Cited Behring, Eva, ed. Rumänische Schriftsteller im Exil 1945–1989 (Romanian Writers in Exile 1945–1989). Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2002. Behring, Eva, ed. Rumänische Exilliteratur 1945 1989 und ihre Integration heute: Beiträge des deutsch-rumänischen Symposions der Südosteueropa-Gesellschaft und der Fundat¸ia Culturala˘ Româna˘ in Freiburg, 26./27. Oktober 1998 (Romanian Literature in Exile and its Integration today: Contributions of the German-Romanian Symposium of the South-Eastern European Society and the Romanian Cultural Foundation in Freiburg, October 26–27, 1998). Munich: Südosteuropa-Gesellschaft, 1999. Brandt, Juliane et al, ed. Grundbegriffe und Autoren ostmitteleuropäischer Exilliteraturen 1945–1989. Ein Beitrag zur Systematisierung und Typologisierung (Basic Concepts and Authors of the East-Central European Exile Literatures, 1945–1989. A Contribution to their Systematization and Typology). Stuttgart: Steiner, 2004. Brinker-Gabler, Gisela and Sidonie Smith, eds. Writing New Identities: Gender, Nation, and Immigration in Contemporary Europe. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. Brubaker, Rogers. Nationalism Reframed. Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge U.P, 1996. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Trans. M. B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2004. Charle, Christophe. Les intellectuelles en Europe au XIX siècle: essai d’historie comparé (The Intellectuals in Europe in the Nineteenth Century. An Essay in Comparative History). Paris: Seuil, 1996. Cornis-Pope, Marcel, and John Neubauer, ed. History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Conjunctures and Disjunctures in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Vol. 1, 2004; vol, 2, 2006; vol. 3, 2007. Cornis-Pope, Marcel. “National Literatures and Exilic Revisions: Towards a Polycentric Concept of ECE Literary Cultures.” Unpublished paper, given at the Collegium Budapest, on June 25, 2007. Dewhirst, Martin and Andrei Rogashevskii ed. East and Central European Émigré Literatures: Past, Present – and Future? In Memory of Dr Igor Hajek (1931–1995). Special issue of the Canadian-American Slavic Studies 33.2–4 (1999). Fermi, Laura. Illustrious Emigrants. The Intellectual Migration from Europe, 1930–1941. 2nd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1971. Goldgar, Anne. “Singing in a Strange Land: The Republic of Letters and the mentalité of Exile.” The Republic of Letters in the Age of Confessionalism. Ed Herbert Jaumann. Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 2001. 105–125. Grimm, Reinhold. “Innere Emigration als Lebensform” (Inner Emigration as a Way of Life). Exil und innere Emigration (Exile and Inner Emigration). Ed. Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand. Frankfurt/M.: Athenäum, 1972. 31–73. Häntzschel, Hiltrud. “Geschlechtsspezifische Aspekte” (Gender-Specific Aspects). Krohn et al. 101–117. Hoffman, Eva. Lost in Translation: a Life in a New Language. New York: Dutton, 1989. Hoffman, Eva. After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust. New York: Public Affairs, 2004. Kliems, Alfrum. Im Stummland. Zum Exilwerk von Libusˇe Moníková, Jirˇí Grusˇa und Ota Filip (In Mute-Land. On the Exile Work of Libusˇe Moníková, Jirˇí Grusˇa and Ota Filip). Frankfurt/M.: Lang, 2002.

Instead of Conclusion (Borbála Zsuzsanna Török)

595

Konrád, György. “A számu˝zetésro˝l” (On Exile). http://www.szochalo.hu/hireink/article/ 102045/ (accessed: 2009–03–02). Kramer, Lloyd S. Threshold of a New World: Intellectuals and the Exile Experience in Paris, 1830–1848. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988. Krohn, Claus-Dieter, Patrick zur Mühlen, Gerhard Paul, and Lutz Winckler, ed. Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration 1933–1945 (Handbook of the German-Speaking Emigration, 1933–1945). Darmstadt: Primus, 1998. Kymlicka, Will. Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1996. Jasmina Lukic, “Withches Fly High: The Sweeping Broom of Dubravka Ugresˇic´.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 7. 3(2000), Special issue Women in Transit: Between Tradition and Transformation 375–383. Manolescu, Florin. Enciclopedia exilului literar roma˘nesc. 1945–1989 (Encyclopaedia of Romanian Literary Exile, 1945–1989). Bucharest: Compania, 2003. Øverland, Orm. “Visions of Home: Exiles and Immigrants.” The Dispossessed. An Anatomy of Exile. Rose 7–26. Petitpierre, Valérie. D’un exil l’autre: les détours de l’écriture dans la trilogie romanesque d’Agota Kristof (From one Exile into Another. Detours of Écriture in the Agota Kristof ’s Novel Trilogy). Carouge-Genève: Zoé, 2000. Radulescu, Domnica, ed. Realms of exile: Nomadism, Diasporas, and Eastern European Voices. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001. Riboni-Edme, Marie-Noëlle. La trilogie d’Agota Kristof: écrire la division (Agota Kristof ’s Trilogy: to Write the Division). Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007. Richter, Ludwig, and Heinrich Olschowsky, ed. Im Dissens zur Macht. Samizdat und Exilliteratur der Länder Ostmittel- und Südosteuropas (Dissent from Power. Samizdat and Exile Literature of the East-Central- and South-Eastern European Countries). Berlin: Akademie, 1995. Rose, Peter I. ed. The Dispossessed: an Anatomy of Exile. Amherst, MA: U of Massachusetts P, 2005. Rumbaut, Rubén D. and Rubén G. Rumbaut, “Self and Circumstance: Journeys and Visions of Exile.” Rose 331–35. Said, Edward. “Reflections on Exile.” Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile. Ed. Marc Robinson. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1984. 137–49. Seidel, Michael. Exile and the Narrative Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1986. Suleiman, Susan Rubin, ed. Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances. Durham: Duke UP, 1998. Suvin, Darko. “A Typology and Terminology of Exile as Displacement.” Unpublished paper, given at the Collegium Budapest, on June 10, 2007. Tabori, Paul. The Anatomy of Exile. A Semantic and Historical Study. London: Harrap, 1972. Thompson, Ewa M. “The Writer in Exile: The Good Years.” Slavic and East European Journal 33.4 (Winter 1989): 499–515. von der Lühe, Irmela and Claus D. Krohn ed. “Fremdes Heimatland.” Remigration und literarisches Leben nach 1945 (“Foreign Homeland.” Remigration and Literary Life after 1945). Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005. Ugresic´, Dubravka. In the Jaws of Life. Trans. Celia Hakesworth and Michael Henry Heim. London: Virago Press, 1992. Ugresic´, Dubravka. The Museum of Unconditional Surrender. Trans. Celia Hakesworth, London: Phoenix House, 1998.

596

Chapter VI

Ugresic´, Dubravka. “European Literature as a Eurovision Song Contest.” Writing Europe: What is European about the Literatures of Europe? Essays from 33 European Countries. Ed Ursula Keller and Ilma Rakusˇa. Budapest: CEU P, 2004, 327–34.

A Timeline of Exile Movements, 1919–2000

597

A Timeline of Exile Movements, 1919–2000 Year

Individual

Where?

1919 Lajos Kassák Arthur Koestler Ferenc Göndör Béla Balázs Sándor Barta Erzsébet Újvári János Mácza József Lengyel Ervin Sinkó György Lukács József Révai Lajos Zilahy Karikás, Frigyes Mihály Károlyi Andor Németh György Bölöni Ignotus Lajos Hatvany Anna Lesznai Alexander Korda Lajos Bíró László Moholy-Nagy Róbert Berényi (artist) Sándor Bortnyik (artist) Béla Illés

Vienna Vienna; Palestine (26–); Germany (29–) etc. England (38–) Vienna; New York (26–) Vienna; Berlin (26–); Moscow (31–) Vienna; Moscow (25–) Vienna; Moscow (25–) Vienna; Moscow Vienna; Germany (27–), Soviet Union (30–) Vienna 1919; Paris; Moscow (35–); Paris (37–); Croatia Vienna; Moscow (29–); Berlin (31–); Moscow (33–) Vienna; Czechosl. (37–); Moscow (39–) Vienna (returned the same year) Vienna; Moscow (23–); France (28–); Moscow (31–) Vienna, etc. London and Paris (24–); Vence (49–) Vienna Vienna; France (23–); Netherlands (48–) Vienna Vienna; Berlin; Paris Vienna Vienna; Berlin; London Vienna; Berlin (24–); London Vienna; Berlin; US Berlin Vienna, Germany Ukraine; Czechoslakia (expelled); Vienna; Moscow (23–)

1920 Andor Gábor Tibor Déry Antal Hidas Aladár Komját Béla Uitz (artist) Lajos Barta

Vienna (expelled in 25); Berlin (25–); Moscow (33–) Vienna; Paris (23–); Perugia (26–) Czechoslovakia Vienna (via Italy); Berlin (23–33); Paris (33–) Vienna; France; (24–); Moscow (26–) Vienna; Bratislava (33–); London (39–)

1921 1922 Lányi Sarolta Erno˝ Czóbel

Moscow Moscow

1923 Benjamin Fondane Claude Sernet

Paris Paris

1924 Florian Czarnyszewicz

Argentina

1925 Bruno Jasien´ski Sándor Bortnyik Antal Hidas

Paris; Moscow (29–) Return from Germany to Hungary Return from Czechoslovakia to Hungary

598 Year

A Timeline of Exile Movements, 1919–2000 Individual

Where?

1926 Lajos Kassák Andor Németh Tibor Déry Róbert Berényi Antal Hidas

Return from Vienna to Hungary Return from Vienna to Hungary Return from Perugia to Hungary Return from Berlin to Hungary Moscow

1927 Lajos Hatvany

Return from Paris to Hungary

1928 1929 Witold Wandurski

Kiev

1930 Anna Lesznai

Return from Vienna to Hungary

1931 Sándor Gergely Ryszard Stande

Moscow Moscow

1932 1933 Ilarie Voronca

Paris

1934 1935 Gyula Háy

Soviet Union

1936 György Tábori

London

1937 Emil Cioran Pál Tábori

Paris London

1938 Bertalan Hatvany Lajos Hatvany Ignotus Pál Ignotus Ferenc Fejto˝ György Faludy Andor Németh Tibor Tardos Eugène Ionesco

Paris France; England (39–) New York London France Paris; Morocco; US; France France Paris

1939 Ferenc Molnár Andor Németh Anna Lesznai Havas, Endre Aleksander Wat Tadeusz Peiper Anatol Stern Julian Stryjkowski Adolf Rudnicki Adam Waz˙yk Wasilewska, Wanda Władisław Broniewski

Switzerland; USA France New York Paris; London Lwów etc. Lwów etc Lwów etc. Lwów; Soviet Union Lwów; Soviet Union Lwów; Soviet Union Lwów; Soviet Union Lwów etc. Moscow; with the Polish Army to Jerusalem (41–)

A Timeline of Exile Movements, 1919–2000 Year

Individual

599

Where?

1939 Czuchnowski, Marian Leo Lipski ˙ elen´ski Tadeusz Boy-Z Andrzej Bobkowski Stanisław Vincenz Zygmunt Haupt Józef Łobodowski Adam Bahdaj Tadeusz Fangrat Lew Kaltenberg Andrzej Stawar K. Iłłakowiczówna Antoni Słonimski Kazimierz Wierzyn´ski Julian Tuwim Jan Lechon´ Mieczysław Grydzewski Pietrkiewicz, Jerzy Jerzy Borejsza Jerzy Putrament Melchior Wan´kowicz Witold Gombrowicz Michał Choroman´ski Konstanty A. Jelen´ski Frantisˇek Langer Pavel Tigrid Vladimír Clementis Jirˇí Mucha Egon Hostovsky´ Viktor Fischl Zdeneˇk Nejedly´ Gejza Vámosˇ

Soviet labor camps (39–); with the Polish Army to London (41–) Lwów etc.; Beirut; Palestine/Israel (45–) Lwów Paris; Guatemala (48–) Hungary; Switzerland (45–) Hungary; England Hungary; Spain Hungary Hungary Hungary Hungary Hungary Kolozsvár/Cluj Romania; France; London Romania; France; Portugal; Brasil; Long Island (41–) Romania; France; Rio; New York (41–) Romania; France; Rio; New York (41–) Romania; France; London Romania; France, Great Britain Moscow Moscow Romania; Tel Aviv; Italy; US (49–) Buenos Aires; Berlin (63); France (64–) South America; Canada (41–) Paris Paris; London London London London France; US (41–) London Moscow China; Brasil

1940 Theo Florin Arthur Koestler Jovan Ducˇic´ Gus. Herling-Grudzinski Rastko Petrovic´

London (via Paris) Marseille; London Portugal; US Lwów; deported to Gulag camp; w. the Polish Army to Italy (42–) US

1941 Gy. Pálóczi-Horváth Milosˇ Crnjanski Horia Stamatu

Asia & Africa London (from Rome via Lisbon) Germany; interned at Buchenwald; Freiburg (48–); Madrid (51–); Freiburg (61–)

1942 1943 Milo Dor Viktor Vida

Austria Rome; Buenos Aires (48–)

1944 József Révai Jerzy Putrament Jerzy Borejsza Albert Wass Aron Cotrus¸ Pamfil S¸eicaru

Return from Moscow to Hungary Return from Moscow to Poland Return from Moscow to Poland Germany; USA (51–) Stayed in Madrid after the war; California (57–) Madrid

600 Year

A Timeline of Exile Movements, 1919–2000 Individual

Where?

1945 Vintila˘ Horia József Nyíro˝ Lajos Marschalkó Rudolf Dilong Mikulásˇ Sˇprinc Milo Urban Tido Jozef Gasˇpar Karol Strmenˇ ˇ arnov Andrej Z Stanislav Mecˇiar Ján E. Bor Ján Okál’ Koloman K. Geraldini Ján Doránsky Jozef Cíger-Hronsky´ Wacław Iwaniuk Elie Wiesel Virgil Gheorghiu Isidore Isou Frantisˇek Langer Vladimír Clementis Viktor Fischl Pavel Tigrid Adam Bahdaj Tadeusz Fangrat Lew Kaltenberg Andrzej Stawar K. Iłłakowiczówna Zdeneˇk Nejedly´ Julian Stryjkowski Adolf Rudnicki Adam Waz˙yk Béla Balázs Béla Illés György Lukács Gyula Háy Andor Gábor Sándor Gergely Lajos Barta

Italy; Buenos Aires (48–); Madrid (53–) Madrid Germany Austria; Italy; Argentina (47–); Pittsburgh, US (65–) Austria; Italy; US (46–) Returned by the US but allowed to leave for Croatia Returned by the US to Czechoslovakia Austria; Italy; Cleveland, US (49–) Returned by the US to Czechoslovakia Italy; Buenos Aires Italy; Argentina (48–) US (52–) Argentina Canada Austria; Italy; Argentina (48–) England; Toronto France, US (55–) Germany, France (46–) Paris Return from London to Czechoslovakia Return from London to Czechoslovakia Return from London to Czechoslovakia Return from London to Czechoslovakia Return from Hungary to Poland Return from Hungary to Poland Return from Hungary to Poland Return from Hungary to Poland Return from Hungary to Poland Return from Moscow to Czechoslovakia Return from the Soviet Union to Poland Return from the Soviet Union to Poland Return from the Soviet Union to Poland Return from Moscow to Hungary Return from Moscow to Hungary Return from Moscow to Hungary Return from Moscow to Hungary Return from Moscow to Hungary Return from Moscow to Hungary Return from London to Hungary

1946 Sarolta Lányi Erno˝ Czóbel György Faludy Władysław Broniewski Julian Tuwim Stanisław Vincenz Jerzy Giedroyc

Return from Moscow to Hungary Return from Moscow to Hungary Return from the US to Hungary Return from Palestine to Poland Return from the US to Poland From Hungary to France; Switzerland Rome; Paris (47–)

1947 Gy. Pálóczi-Horváth Lajos Hatvany Andor Németh Tibor Tardos Jirˇí Mucha Egon Hostovsky´ Lajos Zilahy

Return from London to Hungary Return from Oxford to Hungary Return from France to Hungary Return from France to Hungary Return from London to Czechoslovakia Return from the US to Czechoslovakia US

A Timeline of Exile Movements, 1919–2000 Year

Individual

601

Where?

1947 József Bakucz Péter Halász Gyula Zathurecky Traian Popescu Virgil Ierunca Monica Lovinescu Alexandru Ciora˘nescu Isidore Isou Miron Butariu Czesław Bednarczyk

New York New York Germany Madrid (from a detention camp) Paris Paris Paris, Tenerife Paris Austria; Paris; New York (51–); Los Angeles (74–) England

1948 Ignotus Roman Brandstaetter Sándor Márai Miksa Fenyo˝ László Cs. Szabó Paul Celan Jan Drabek Pavel Tigrid Milada Soucˇková Jan Cˇep Ivan Blatny´ Ivan Jelínek Ferdinand Peroutka Viktor Fischl Wacław Iwaniuk Jerzy Sito

Return from New York to Hungary Return from Israel to Poland Posillipo; New York (52–); Salerno (67–); SanDiego (80–) Rome; Paris; New York (53–); Vienna (70–) Italy; London (51–) Paris Canada Paris Resigns from diplomatic service in New York France; Munich (51–); Paris (55–) London England London; New York (50–) Israel Toronto India; England

1949 S¸tefan Baciu Zoltán Szabó Leopold Lahola Ephraim Kishon Imrich Kruzˇliak

Rio de Janeiro; Seattle (62–); Honolulu (64–) Resigns from dipl. service in France; London (51–); Israel Israel Austria; Munich (51–)

1950 Havas, Endre György Schöpflin Egon Hostovsky

Recalled from diplomatic serv. by the Hungarian governm. Resigns as Hungarian Ambassador in Stockholm; London US

1951 Czesław Miłosz Antoni Słonimski György Bölöni

Paris; Berkeley (60–) Return from London to Poland Return from the Netherlands to Hungary

ˇ arnov 1952 Andrej Z Gherasim Luca

Austria; Italy Israel; France

1953 1954 1955 József Lengyel

Return from the Soviet Union to Hungary

1956 György Faludy Pál Ignotus Gyo˝zo˝ Határ Gy. Pálóczi-Horváth Ágota Kristof György Ferdinandy

London; Toronto (67–) London London London Switzerland Paris; Puerto Rico (64–)

602 Year

A Timeline of Exile Movements, 1919–2000 Individual

Where?

1957 Tibor Méray Tamás Aczél Ida Fink Jerzy Kosin´ski Michał Choroman´ski

Paris London, Amherst, MA (66–) Israel US; U of Massachusetts Amherst Return to Poland

1958 Marek Hłasko

Paris etc.

1959 Antal Hidas Jerzy Sito

Return from Moscow to Hungary Return from England to Poland

1960 Petru Dumitriu Boris Maruna

Germany and France Argentinia; US

1961 Andrzej Stawar Tadeusz Chabrowski

Paris US

1962 Melchior Wan´kowicz

Return from the US to Poland

1963 Sławomir Mroz˙ek Jirˇina Fuchsová Tibor Tardos

Italy; Paris (68–); US; Germany; Mexico (87–97) Los Angeles Paris

1964 1965 Gyula Háy Andrei Codrescu

Switzerland Italy; US (66–)

1966 Jan Kott Leopold Tyrmand

US France; US

1967 Ladislav Mnˇacˇko Teodor Parnicki Henrik Grynberg

Israel Return from Mexico City to Poland New York

1968 Zygmunt Bauman Ladislav Mnˇacˇko Jan Novák Jaroslava Blazˇková Ve˘ra Linhartová Arnosˇt Lustig Dusˇan Sˇimko

Israel; England Return to Czechoslovakia; new exit to Austria Vienna, Canada Canada Paris Israel; US (73–) Basel

1969 Josef Sˇkvorecky´ Zdena Salivarová Ion Ioanid Antonín Brousek Ivan Divisˇ Anna Frajlich

Toronto via US Canada Germany Germany Munich Rome; US (70–)

1970 Leszek Kolakowski Béla Uitz

Canada etc.; Oxford Return from Moscow to Hungary

1971 Nicolae Breban Gheorghe Astalos¸ Libusˇe Moníková Witold Wirpsza

Paris Paris Germany Berlin

1972 Włodzimierz Odojewski Ioan Petru Culianu

Germany Italy; Netherlands; Chicago

A Timeline of Exile Movements, 1919–2000 Year

Individual

Where?

1973 1974 Ota Filip Milo Urban

Munich Return from Croatia to Slovakia

1975 Milan Kundera Dumitru T¸epeneag Gabriela Melinescu

France Paris Sweden

1976 Virgil Ta˘nase Péter Halász & Squat Th.

Paris Paris; Rotterdam; New York (77–)

1977 Petru Popescu Paul Goma

Los Angeles Paris

1978 Pavel Kohout

Deprived of his citizenship while in Vienna

1979 1980 1981 Ion Caraion Nicolae Balota˘ Stanisław Baran´czak

Lausanne Paris Cambridge, MA

1982 Janusz Głowacki Adam Zagajewski Kazimierz Brandys Jirˇí Grusˇa

New York Paris Paris Germany

1983 Ion Negoit¸escu

Germany

1984 1985 Nina Cassian Dorin Tudoran

US US

1986 Lucian Raicu Norman Manea

Paris New York

1987 Herta Müller Richard Wagner William Totok Johann Lippet Bujor Nedelcovici Matei Vis¸niec

Germany Germany Germany Germany Paris Paris

1988 1989 Mircea Iorgulescu Dinu Fla˘mând Liviu Cangeopol

Paris Paris US

1990 Alexandru Sever Dorin Tudoran Pavel Tigrid Ladislav Mnˇacˇko Boris Maruna

Israel Return from the US to Bucharest as US diplomat Return from Paris to Prague Return to Prague (instead of Bratislava) Return from the US to Yugoslavia

603

604 Year

A Timeline of Exile Movements, 1919–2000 Individual

Where?

1991 Jirˇí Mucha Predrag Matvejevic´ Dubravka Ugresic´ Slobodan Blagojevic´ Hamdija Demirovic´ Aleksandar Hemon Mirko Kovacˇ

Return from Paris to Prague (From Zagreb) Paris; Rome (94–) (From Zagreb) Berlin, US, Amsterdam (From Belgrade) Amsterdam (From Belgrade) The Hague (From Sarajevo) US; Chicago (From Belgrade) Rovinj; Istria; Croatia

1992 Ovid Crohma˘lniceanu Franz Hodjak Slavenka Drakulic´ Bogdan Bogdanovic´ Igor Sˇtiks Adam Zagajewski

Berlin Germany Sweden (From Belgrade) Vienna (From Sarajevo) Zagreb; Paris; Chicago Return from Paris to Poland

ˇ alica 1993 Antonije Z

Amsterdam

1994 David Albahari

Calgari, Canada

1995 Semezdin Mehmedinovic´

(From Sarajevo) US

1996 Sławomir Mroz˙ek

Return from Mexico to Cracow

1997 1998 1999 2000 Czesław Miłos Ovid Crohma˘lniceanu

Return from the US to Cracow (after years of shuttling) Return from Berlin to Romania

List of Contributors

605

List of Contributors Włodzimierz Bolecki is Professor at the Polish Academy of Sciences and Humanities. An expert in literary criticism and history, he is interested primarily in modern and postmodern fiction. Włodzimierz Bolecki’s books (titles in English) include A Poetic Model of Fiction in Poland 1918–1939 (1982, 1996); Pre-texts and Texts. Studies in the Intertextuality of 20th-Century Polish Literature (1991,1998); Hunting for Postmodernists (in Poland) (1999); Conversations with Gustaw Herling (1997, 2000), Dark Love. Essays On Gustaw Herling (2004), The Bird-Catcher from Vilnius. On Joseph Mackiewicz (1991; 2007); and A ‘World Apart’ by Gustaw Herling (1994,1997, 2007 rev. ed.). See www.Bolecki.eu Thomas Cooper following completion of a dual-doctorate in Comparative Literature and Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University, Thomas Cooper taught Central European literature in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of North Carolina. He held research fellowships at the University of Vienna and the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. He also held a research fellowship at the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, and served as its Assistant Director. Following a research year at the Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Studies in Hungary, Thomas Cooper is currently teaching as Associate Professor at the Károly Eszterházy University in Hungary. Marcel Cornis-Pope is Professor of English and Director of the Interdisciplinary Program in Media, Art, and Text at Virginia Commonwealth University. His publications include Anatomy of the White Whale: A Poetics of the American Symbolic Romance (1982), Hermeneutic Desire and Critical Rewriting: Narrative Interpretation in the Wake of Poststructuralism (1992), and Narrative Innovation and Cultural Rewriting in the Cold War Era and After (2001). He has also published numerous articles on contemporary fiction, narrative studies, and critical theory. His current project is co-editing with John Neubauer the four-volume History of the Literary Cultures of East Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Cen-

606

List of Contributors

tury. Vol. 1 (2004), vol. 2 (2006), and vol. 3 (2007) have so far been published. The fourth volume is slated to appear in 2009. He recently received VCU’s Distinguished Faculty Award. Camelia Cra˘ciun studied literature and history at Bras¸ov, Bucharest, Budapest, and Oxford. She worked as Associate Lecturer of Literature at Transylvania University in Bras¸ov and as a cultural journalist for various Romanian publications. She is currently finishing her Ph.D. thesis at the Central European University, Budapest on Jewish Romanian intellectual history in the interwar period. She worked as researcher in several international projects and was Junior Fellow at the Collegium Budapest (2007), the New Europe College in Bucharest (2008), and the Center for Advanced Study in Sofia (2008). She has contributed to Jeffrey Edelstein’s and Gershon David Hundert’s The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (2009) and published several articles in collected volumes and refereed journals on Eastern European literary exile and Jewish Romanian literature. She teaches currently at the Faculty of Letters, University of Bucharest. Éva Forgács is art historian, critic, and curator. A former curator at the Hungarian Museum of Decorative Arts and Professor at the László Moholy-Nagy University in Budapest, she has published a number of essays and monographs on the Hungarian avant-garde, Modernism in Central and Eastern Europe, and contemporary art in various edited volumes and journals. Éva Forgács is Adjunct Professor of Art History at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, teaches at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, and is Senior Curator of the Nancy G. Brinker Collection. Her books include The Bauhaus Idea and Bauhaus Politics (1991, 1995), El Kazovsky (1996), László Fehér (1998), and Between Worlds: A Sourcebook of Central European Avant-Gardes (co-edited with T. O. Benson, 2002). Sándor Hites studied Hungarian literature and linguistics, and philosophy at the Eötvös Lóránd University, Budapest, and has been a Research Fellow at the Institute for Literary Studies of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences since 2003. He wrote his Ph.D. thesis on historiography and the nineteenth-century historical novel (2005), and has published the books (in Hungarian) The Well of the Past. Studies on Historical Narratives (2004), as well as ‘Others Were Still Faltering When He Started to Speak’: Miklós Jósika and the Historical Novel (2007). His

List of Contributors

607

study on the Hungarian émigré writer and scholar André Karátson is currently in press. Jerzy Jarze˛bski has been in Cracow since 1949, where he is now Professor at the Faculty of Polish Studies, Jagiellonian University, and Board Member of the Polish PEN Club. His interests are focused on twentieth-century Polish literature, on the oeuvres of Witold Gombrowicz, Bruno Schulz, and Stanisław Lem, on the émigré writers, and the most recent Polish prose. Jerzy Jarze˛bski was Visiting Professor at Harvard University (1997) and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2000–2001). He published more than 500 articles and 14 books, among them Gra w Gombrowicza (1982); Powies´´c jako autokreacja (1984); W Polsce czyli wsze˛dzie. Szkice o polskiej prozie współczesnej, (1992); Apetyt na Przemiane˛. Notatki o prozie współczesnej (1997); Poz˙egnanie z emigracja˛. O powojennej prozie polskiej (1998); Podgla˛danie Gombrowicza (2001); Wszechs´wiat Lema (2003); Prowincja Centrum. Przypisy do Schulza (2005); and Natura i teatr. 16 tekstów o Gombrowiczu (2007). His works have been translated into seventeen languages. Katarzyna Jerzak was born in Poland and has studied English Philology at the Adam Mickiewicz University (Poznan´), as well as Comparative Literature at Brown University and Princeton University (Ph.D., 1995). Katarzyna Jerzak is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia (USA). Her publications include articles on Witold Gombrowicz, Giorgio de Chirico, E.M. Cioran, Norman Manea, and Henryk Grynberg. Her book manuscript, “Modern Exilic Imagination,” is currently under review, as is her translation of “Polish-Jewish Monologue,” a collection of Henryk Grynberg’s essays. Áron Kibédi Varga was born in Szeged, Hungary. He lived more than fifty years in Amsterdam, and is now residing in Freburg, Germany as Professor Emeritus of French Literature and Interart studies at the Free University, Amsterdam. His publications include numerous books and articles on French classicism, rhetorical theory, and modern art, as well as several volumes of poetry. He is member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA)

608

List of Contributors

Dragan Klaic is himself part of the post-Yugoslav theater exile. Educated in Belgrade in dramaturgy and at Yale University, where he earned his doctorate in theater studies, he became Professor at the University of the Arts in Belgrade, a founding Co-Editor of the European theater quarterly Euromaske and a critic and dramaturg. He moved in 1991 from Belgrade to Amsterdam and became the Director of the Theater Instituut Nederland. Presently, he is a Permanent Fellow of the Felix Meritis Foundation in Amsterdam, and he teaches arts and cultural policy at Leiden University, the Central European University in Budapest, the University of Bologna and elsewhere. He is author of several books, most recently of Mobility of Imagination, a companion guide to international cultural cooperation (2007), of Europe as a Cultural Project (2005), and of the exilic memoir Exercises in Exile (2004). His articles appeared in journals and in more than fifty edited books. John Neubauer is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of Amsterdam and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy (FBA). He taught at Princeton University, Case Western University, and the University of Pittsburgh, and he was also visiting professor at Harvard, Princeton and other universities. Neubauer’s publications include Symbolismus und symbolische Logik (1978), Novalis (1980), The Emancipation of Music from Language (1986), and The Fin-desiècle Culture of Adolescence (1992), as well as substantial contributions to the Münchner (Hanser) edition of Goethe’s scientific works. He has edited with Peter de Voogd The Reception of Laurence Sterne in Europe (2004), and is presently editing with Marcel Cornis-Pope a four-volume History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe (three volumes to date). Vladimír Papousˇek is Professor of Literary History and Director of the Institute of Bohemian Studies at the South Bohemia University, Cˇeské Budeˇjovice. His main fields of professional interest are twentieth-century Czech literature, existential phenomena in literature, problems of exile literature, and the methodology of literary history. His professional stays and research fellowships include Columbia University (1994, 1996), New York University, and the University of London (2000). He has published about hundred studies in Czech and foreign journals and volumes, among them the recent “Representation of Being and Existence in an Epistemically Limited Fictional World” (Style 2006). His book publications include Trojí samota ve velké zemi, on Czech Exile Literature in the

List of Contributors

609

US (2001); Horizonty, on Z. Neˇmecˇek (2001); a study of Czech literature in Chicago (2002); Existencialisté (2004); and Gravitace avantgard (2007). With D. Turecˇek he published a volume on literary history (2005), and with A.Haman and J. Holy´ a volume on Western Criticism (2006). Ksenia Polouektova has studied comparative literature, Jewish studies, and history in Moscow, Budapest and Ann Arbor. Her doctoral dissertation (CEU) is on the history and theory of travel and travel writing in Russia. Her study on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Russian-Jewish history, 200 Years Together, was published in 2008 at the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antsemitism. She is currently a Lady Davis post-doctoral fellow at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Guido Snel is Assistant Professor of European Studies at the University of Amsterdam. His Ph.D. was a study of the East-Central European fictionalized autobiography and the idea of Central Europe. He has written studies on European literature and cultural history, he translated works by Milosˇ Crnjanski and Miroslav Krlezˇa, and he wrote three novels of his own. His interviews with and essays by prominent European thinkers, artists, and writers about their European experience, Alter Ego. Twenty Confronting Views on the European Experience, appeared with the Amsterdam UP in 2004. Neil Stewart is Assistant Professor at the Slavic Department of the University of Bonn, Germany. His interests include Comparative Literature, Literary Theory, and Media Studies. He has published monographs on the Russian postmodern writer Venedikt Erofeev (1999) and on the reception of Laurence Sterne in Russia (2005). He co-edited a volume on the representation of violence in post-1968 literature and film (1968) and is currently writing a book on the Czech fin-de-siècle journal Moderní revue. Susan Rubin Suleiman is C. Douglas Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Her most recent book is Crises of Memory and the Second World War (2006). Her other books include Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre (1983); Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (1990), Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature (1994), and the memoir Budapest Diary: In Search

610

List of Contributors

of the Motherbook (1996). She has edited several collective volumes, including Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances (1998) and Contemporary Jewish Writing in Hungary: An Anthology (co-edited with Éva Forgács, 2003). Galin Tihanov is Professor of Comparative Literature and Intellectual History and Co-Director of the Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Cultures at the University of Manchester. His publications include two books on Bulgarian literature (1994 and 1998), a book on Bakhtin, Lukács, and the ideas of their time (Oxford UP, 2000), co-edited volumes on Bakhtin and the Bakhtin Circle (2000 and 2004) and on Robert Musil (2007), a guest-edited special issue on Russian avant-garde photography and visual culture (2000), as well as numerous articles on German, Russian, and East-European intellectual and cultural history, and cultural and literary theory. He is on the Editorial/Advisory Board of Comparative Critical Studies, Slavonica, and Primerjalna knjizˇevnost and is Honorary President of the ICLA Committee on Literary Theory. He has held Research Fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt and the George Soros foundations. Borbála Zsuzsanna Török is a research fellow at the Zukunftkolleg, University of Konstanz. She finished her undergraduate studies in English and Hungarian philology at the Babes¸-Bolyai University in Cluj, Romania, and earned her doctoral degree in comparative history at the Central European University. Her research focuses on academic sociability, knowledge circulation, and the interrelation of the social sciences and literary fiction in East-Central Europe. She co-edited a volume with Victor Karády on the Cultural Dimensions of Elite Formation in Transylvania (1770–1950), and is currently preparing another one with Balázs Trencsényi and Dietmar Müller on comparative historiography in Europe, titled “Reframing the European Pasts: National Discourses and Regional Comparisons” (thematic issue of the journal East Central Europe, vol. 34, nr. 1–2 (2009). Bogusław Wróblewski graduated in Polish studies at the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University (Ph.D. 1986), where he currently is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Contemporary Polish Literature. He is founder and editor-in-chief of the literary quarterly Akcent (1980–). His publications include a collection of articles on Polish prose Wydziedziczenie i komleksy (1986), the treatise Die Problematik Ost-

List of Contributors

611

mitteleuropas in literarischen Zeitschriften in Polen (1996), as well as critical editions of poems by Zbigniew Chałko (1997) and Wacław Oszajca (2003). He edited the anthology Zaułek poetów (2005), and a volume on Isaac B. Singer (Biłgoraj, czyli raj …, 2005). He published about hundred articles in periodicals and edited volumes in Poland, Germany, the US, Ukraine, and Hungary. He translated poetry from German and Russian (Włodzimierz Wysocki’s songs). Recently he has compiled and introduced a volume about Ryszard Kapus´cin´ski’s writings, Z˙ycie jest z przenikania (2008)

612

List of Contributors

Index of East-Central European Names

613

Index of East-Central European Names Aczél, György (1917–1991) 233 Aczél, Tamás (1921–1994) 38, 88, 208, 210, 212, 228, 602 Ac´imovic´, Dragan (1914–1986) 309, 311, 321,323 Ady, Endre (1877–1919) 23, 24, 49, 63 Albahari, David (b. 1948) 44, 313, 323, 497, 604 Alecsandri, Vasile (1821–1890) 22 Alexandrescu, Sorin (b. 1937) 360 Anders, Władysław (1892–1970) 29, 145, 147 András, Sándor (b. 1934) 208, 210, 213,219, 220, 530, 535 Andric´, Ivo (1892–1975) 310, 313, 313 Andrzejewski, Jerzy (1909–1983) 222 Antonesei, Liviu (b. 1953) 343, 365 Aranyossi, [Aranyossy, Aranyosi] György (b. 1944) 225 Arcade, L. M. [Ma˘ma˘liga˘] (1921–2001) 287 Arghezi, Tudor (1880–1967) 287, 290 Arnóthy, Kriszta (b. 1930) 307, 524, 533 Aspazia [Elza Rosenberga] (1865–1943) 24 Astalos¸, Gheorghe (b. 1933) 42, 602 Babits, Mihály (1883–1941) 24, 109, 112, 121 Baciu, S¸tefan (1918–1993) 37, 95, 601 Baconsky, Anatol (1925–1977) 285, 301 Ba˘descu, Lucian (?-1979) 292 Bahdaj, Adam (1918–1985) 28, 599, 600 Bakal, Boris (b. 1959) 506 Bakucz, József (1929–1990) 88, 221, 529, 601 Ba˘la˘cioiu-Lovinescu, Ecaterina (1887–1960) 279, 281

Balázs, Béla (1884–1949) 6, 23, 24, 26, 35, 48–57, 60, 62–72, 97–98, 100–101, 103, 110–111, 113–15, 119, 121, 124, 126–29, 131–32, 136–37, 140–43, 397, 399, 597, 600 Balota˘, Nicolae (b. 1925) 363, 603 Baránszky, László (1930–1999) 530, 535 Baran´czak, Stanisław (b. 1946) 18, 42, 89, 162, 170, 172, 181, 603 Barbu, Eugen (1924–1993) 287–88, 291, 301 Barka, Vasyl’ (1908–2003) 346 Barta, Lajos (1878–1964) 597, 600 Barta, Sándor (1897–1938) 53, 60, 63–64, 66, 71–72, 110, 115–17, 119–21, 129, 133, 597 Bartók, Béla (1881–1945) 30, 64, 227, 565 Bask-Mostwin, Stanisław [Niedbal] (b. 1917) 199 Bata, Thomas J. (1914–2008) 91, 265 Bauman, Zygmunt (b. 1925) 7, 41, 97, 369, 382, 602 Bednárˇ, Petr (?-?) 264, 267, 272, 273 Bednarczyk, Czesław (1912–1994) 82, 601 Békés, Gellért (1915–1999) 231 Béládi, Miklós (1928–1983) 121, 122, 236, 528, 535 Bem, Józef (1794–1850) 22, 47, 49, 204 Benesˇ, Jan (1936–2007) 257, 270 Berényi, Róbert (1887–1953) 597, 598 Berindei, Mihnea (b. 1948) 293, 295, 297, 298 Bernard, Noël (1925–1981) 83, 293, 301 Bernáth, Aurél (1895–1982) 115 Bethlen, Gábor (1580–1629) 46 Białasiewicz, Józef (1912–1986) 195 Bibó, István (1911–1979) 38, 139, 209, 214, 218, 234 Bielecki, Czesław (b. 1948) 163, 177, 179

614

Index of East-Central European Names

Bíró, Ádám (?-?) 225 Bíró, Lajos (1880–1948) 51, 597 Blagojevic´, Slobodan (b. 1951) 512, 604 Blandiana, Ana [Otilia Coman] (b. 1942) 5, 343, 364 Blatny´, Ivan (1919–1990) 38, 601 Bobkowski, Andrzej (1913–1961) 74, 96, 98, 156, 168, 170, 171, 175, 181–83, 398, 400–401, 407–409, 411–13, 415, 492, 599 Bock, Ivo (b. 1944) 263 Bogdanovic´, Bogdan (b. 1922) 604 Bogdanovic´, Snezˇana (b. 1960) 510 Bogyai, Tamás (1909–1994) 226 Bölöni, György (1882–1959) 54, 63, 204, 597, 601 Bondy, Egon [Zbyneˇk Fisˇer] (1930–2007) 257 Bóné, Gyula (b. 1916) 239 ˇ atko-Bor] Bor, Ján E. ([Ernest Z (1907–1991) 94 Borbándi, Gyula (b. 1919) 46, 83, 84, 98, 205–209, 212, 214–16, 218–20, 224, 228, 231, 236, 241, 522–23. 531, 535–36, 540, 566, 573 Borejsza, Jerzy (1905–1952) 28, 599 Bori, Imre (b. 1929) 238 Borsody, István (1911–2000) 540 Borsos, Sándor (1920–1984) 205 Bortnyik, Sándor (1893–1976) 115, 597 Bossert, Rolf (1952–1986) 43, 485 Botez, Mihai (1927–1998) 294, ˙ elen´ski, Tadeusz (1874–1941) 29, Boy-Z 599 Brâncus¸i, Constantin (1876–1957) 77 Brandenstein, Béla (1901–1989) 231 Brandstaetter, Roman (1906–1987) 36, 96, 601 Brandys, Kazimierz (1916–2000) 42, 170, 223, 398, 400–407, 409–411, 413–415, 492, 603 Bra˘tianu, Ion C. (1821–1891) 22 Bra˘tianu, Maria (?-?) 290 Braun, Kazimierz (b. 1936) 499 Breban, Nicolae (b. 1934) 602 Bregovic´, Goran (b. 1950) 505 Breuer, Marcel (1902–1981) 110 Brod, Max (1884–1968) 96, 417

Broniewski, Władysław (1897–1962) 29, 59, 98, 598, 600 Brousek, Antonín (b. 1941) 40, 602 Brzezin´ski, Zbigniew (b. 1928) 179, 181 Brzêkowski, Jan (1903–1983) 82 Brzorád, Vilém (1911–1995) 246 Brzozowski, Stanisław (1878–1911) 169, 184 Bujdosó, Alpár (b. 1935) 236 Burhan, Rahim (b. 1949) 501–503 Busza, Andrzej (b. 1938) 82, 93, 170 Butariu, Miron (1905–1992) 38, 87, 601 Buzura, Augustin (b. 1938) 349, 361, 365 Calciu, Gheorghe (1925–2006) 296 Ca˘linescu, Alexandru (b. 1945) 294, 343 Ca˘linescu, George (1899–1965) 290, 301 Cangeopol, Liviu (b. 1954) 294, 343, 606 Caragiale, Ion Luca (1852–1912) 284 Caraion, Ion (1923–1986) 42, 68, 289, 301, 346, 603 Cˇarnojevic´, Arsenije III, (1633–1706) 10 Cassian, Nina (b. 1924) 42, 603 Cazaban, Theodor (b. 1921) 285 Ceaus¸escu, Nicolae (1918–1989) 16, 42, 43, 83, 90, 97, 224, 225, 240, 276, 285, 288, 290, 291, 197, 198, 342, 344, 345, 346, 347, 360, 361, 363, 365, 432, 454, 476, 478, 483, 484, 485, 486, 487, 495, 499, 559, 566. 567 Celan, Paul (1920–1970) 16, 77, 78, 79, 98, 380, 433, 457, 464, 581, 601 Cˇep, Jan (1902–1974) 38, 83, 246, 256, 389, 601 Cˇerny´, Václav (1905–1987) 256 Chabrowski, Tadeusz (b. 1934) 602 Chałko, Zbigniew (1921–1994) 192, 195, 196, 202 Cha˛dzyn´ska, Zofia (1912–2003) 332 Chciuk, Andrzej (1920–1978) 170 Chilecki, Andrzej (1935–1989) 173 Chmielowiec, Michał (1918–1974) 332 Chojecki, Mirosław (b. 1949) 179 Chopin, Fryderyk (1810–1849) 22, 330 Choroman´ski, Michał (1904–1972) 94, 599, 602 Chvatík, Kveˇtoslav (b. 1930) 263, 264

Index of East-Central European Names

Cíger-Hronsky´, Jozef (1896–1960) 32, 94, 95, 600 ˇ ivko (1935–1987) 501 Cˇingo, Z Cioculescu, S¸erban (1902–1988) 291 Cioran, Emil M. (1911–1995) 12, 16, 17, 27, 31, 73, 79, 98, 224, 280, 292, 329, 340, 341, 406, 457, 459, 585, 598 Ciora˘nescu, Alexandru (1911–1999) 37, 601 Cisma˘rescu, Mihai (1916–1983) 293 Ciulei, Liviu (b. 1923) 499 Clementis, Vladimír (1902–1952) 27, 36, 81, 82, 599, 600 Codreanu, Corneliu Zelea (1899–1938) 30 Codrescu, Andrei (b. 1946) 12, 39, 90, 92, 98, 398, 432–33, 437, 440, 449, 450, 452–54, 456, 466–68, 587–88, 602 Conrad, Joseph [J. T. N. Korzeniowski] (1857–1924) 23, 58, 81, 169, 389, 408, 410, Constante, Lena (1909–2005) 363 Coposu, Corneliu (1914–1995) 363 Cornea, Doina (b. 1929) 284, 296, 343 Cosma, Mihail [Claude Sernet] (1902–1968) 77 Costenco, Nicolae (1913–1993) 346 Cotrus¸, Aron (1891–1962) 32, 85, 599 Crnjanski, Milosˇ (1893–1977) 9, 30, 81, 98, 308–17, 319, 321–24, 599 Cseres, Tibor (1915–1993) 216, 228 Csicsery-Rónay, István (b. 1917) 231, 232 Csurka, István (b. 1934) 216, 447 Cugler, Grigore (1903–1972) 300, 302 Culcer, Dan (b. 1941) Culianu, Ioan Petru (1950–1991) 85, 90, 97–99, 457–58, 462, 602 Curtiz, Michael [Mihály Kertész] (1888–1962) 51, Cus¸a, Ioan (1925–1981) 85 Cvjetkovic´, Aleksandar (b. 1958) 516 Cyrankiewicz, Józef (1911–1989) 330 Czajkowski, Michał (1804–1886) 47, Czanyó, Adorján (b. 1919) 95 Czapska, Maria (1894–1981) 149, Czapski, Józef (1896–1993) 145–49, 158–59. 168, 170 Czarnyszewicz, Florian (1895–1964) 94, 99, 597

615

Czartorisky, Adam Jerzy (1770–1861) 21–22, 47 Czaykowski, Bogdan (b. 1932) 82, 93, 170 Czerniawski, Adam (b. 1934–2007) 82, 170 Czigány, Lóránt (1935–2008) 210, Czigány, Magda (b. 1935) 212, 214, 219, 527 Czóbel, Erno˝ (1885–1953) 60, 72, 597, 600 Czuchnowski, Marian (1909–1991) 29, 599 C´osic´, Bora (b. 1932) 497 Daneliuc, Mircea (b. 1943) 296 Danesˇ, Martin (b. 1962) 264–265, Danyi, Magdolna (b. 1950) 238 Darowski, Jan (b. 1926) 82 Darvas, József (1912–1974) 217, 228, 233 Da˛browska, Maria (1899–1965) 200 Dedijer, Vladimir (1914–1990) 16 Dedinszky, Erika (b. 1942) 239 Dejmek, Kazimierz (1924–2002) 223 Delavrancea, Cella (1887–1991) 292 Dembin´sky, Henryk (1791–1864) 47 Demirovic´, Hamdija (b. 1953) 512, 604 Déry, Tibor (1894–1977) 38, 113, 115, 119, 121, 204, 213, 218, 220, 288, 301, 597, 598 -Dilas, Milovan (1911–1995) 16, 18, 39, 161, 179, 183 Dilong, Rudolf (1905–1986) 32, 94, 95, 600 Dimov, Leonid (1926–1987) 358 Dinescu, Mircea (b. 1950) 240, 343, 363 Divisˇ, Ivan (1924–1999) 83, 602 Domahidy, András (b. 1920) 213, 527, 532, 536 Domahidy, Miklós (b. 1922) 213 Dor, Milo (1923–2005) 52, 599 Doránsky, Ján (1911–1973) 600 Dormándi, László (1898–1967) 526 Drakulic´, Slavenka (b. 1949) 44, 86, 452, 467, 497, 604 Dubcˇek, Alexander (1921–1992) 250, 251, 257, 274 Ducˇic´, Jovan (1871–1943) 30, 599 Dudintsev, Vladimir D. (1918–1998) 256 Dukovski, Dejan (b. 1969) 508 Dumitrescu-Za˘pada˘, Constantin (1912–?) 287, 301

616

Index of East-Central European Names

Dumitriu, Petru (1924–2002) 39, 224, 358, 602 Dyk, Viktor (1877–1931) 23 Dzˇadzˇic´, Petar (1929–1996) 316, 324 Eliade, Christinel (?-1998) 292 Eliade, Mircea (1907–1986) 3, 30–31, 75, 80, 89–90, 99, 280, 290, 292, 300, 302, 457, 464 Enczi, Endre (1902–1974) 208–09, 223, Eörsi, István (1931–2005) 19, 38, 101, 142, 234 Erdély, Miklós (1928–1986) 234, 237, 526 Erdélyi, József (1896–1978) 206 Esterházy, Péter (b. 1950) 219, 532 Fábry, Zoltán (1897–1970) 63 Faludy, György [George] (1910–2006) 30, 37–38, 74, 80, 83, 91, 99, 207–209, 211, 213, 225, 228, 370, 493, 527, 529, 533–34, 536, 598, 600–601 Fangrat, Tadeusz (1912–1993) 28, 599–600 Fehmiu, Uliks (b. 1958) 510 Féja, Géza (1900–1978) 63, 206, 215–16 Fejto˝, Ferenc (b. 1909–2008) 18, 30, 36–37, 74–75, 79, 99, 160, 183, 208, 211–13, 220, 223–25, 227, 232, 241, 524, 531, 598 Fenyo˝, Miksa (1877–1972) 38, 87, 205, 212, 215–16, 601 Fenyvessy, Jeromos (1915–1970) 231 Ferdinandy, György (b. 1935) 96, 211, 219, 529, 532, 533, 537, 601 Fiala, Ferenc (1906–1988) 232 Filip, Ota (b. 1930) 40, 83, 100, 594, 603 Fink, Ida (b. 1921) 97, 602 Fischer, Tibor (b. 1959) 376, 382, 533 Fischer-Fáy, Andor (1894–1974) 545 Fischl, Viktor [Avigdor Dagan] (1912–2006) 27, 36, 97, 599–601 Fleischman, Ivo (1921–1997) 267 Florczak, Zbigniew (1923–2005) 156, 177, 183 Florin, Theo (1908–1973) 27, 36, 81, 599 Fodor, András (1929–1997) 238 Fogarasi, Béla (1891–1959) 24, 51, 56

Földes, Jolán [Yolanda Clarent] (1902–1963) 534 Frajlich, Anna (b. 1942) 602 Fricˇ, Josef Václav (1829–1890) 23 Fuchsová, Jirˇina (b. 1943) 39, 307, 602 Fundoianu, Benjamin [Fondane Barbu] (1898–1944) 9, 27, 77, 597 Furlan, Mira (b. 1955) 506, 516, 520 Gábor, Andor (1884–1953) 35, 51–54, 56–57, 61–66, 69, 99, 129, 131, 135, 597, 600 Galgóczy, Erzsébet (1930–1989) 233, 241 Gara, László (1904–1966) 79, 99, 208, 212, 229 Garai, Károly (?-1942) 66, 72 Garewicz, Jan (1921–2002) 403–404 Gáspár, Endre (1897–1955) 115 Gasˇpar, Tido Jozef (1893–1972) 94, 600 Georgescu Adriana (b. 1920) 285, 290, 301 Georgescu, Vlad (1937–1988) 83, 293, 298 Geraldini, Koloman, K. (1908–1994) 94, 600 Gergely, János (1924–2008) 212, 226–27 Gergely, Sándor (1896–1966) 63, 598, 600 Gergely, Tibor (1900–1978) 114 Gheorghiu, Mihai Dinu (b. 1953) 343, 363, 365, 366, 583 Gheorghiu, Virgil Constantin (1916–1992) 38, 76, 79, 99, 224, 285, 301, 600 Ghica, Ion (1816–1897) 22 Giedroyc, Henryk (b. 1922) 149 Giedroyc, Jerzy (1906–2000) 34, 80, 144–87, 265, 328, 336, 600 Giurchescu, Lucian (b. 1963) 499 Goetel, Ferdynand (1890–1960) 31 Goldmann, Lucien (1913–1970) 140, 227, Golovko, Goran (b. 1965) 506 Goma, Paul (b. 1935) 5, 7, 42–43, 224–25, 283–85, 289, 293, 295–98, 308, 342–49, 351–53, 356, 358–67, 590, 603 Gömbös, Gyula (1886–1936) 215 Gombos, Gyula (1913–2000) 213–15, 229, 231

Index of East-Central European Names

Gombrowicz, Witold (1904–1969) 12, 16, 21, 28, 79, 94–95, 99, 150, 168, 170–73, 175, 181, 183, 197, 202, 223, 227, 307, 325–41, 398–99, 404, 408, 410, 412–13, 423–31, 482, 592, 599 Gömöri, György (b. 1934) 208, 210, 213, 217, 222–23, 532, 536 Gomulka, Władisław (1905–1982) 39 Gorczyn´ska, Renata [Ewa Czarnecka] (b. 1943) 169, 173, 183–84, 202 Gosztonyi, Péter (1931–1999) 212 Górska, Halina (1898–1942) 29 Grabowski, Zbigniew (1903–1974) 331 Greimas, Algirdas Julien (1917–1992) 226 Gretkowska, Manuela (b. 1964) 172 Grocholski, Zygmunt (?-1989) 332 Grotowski, Jerzy (1933–1999) 223, 498–99 Grusˇa, Jirˇí (b. 1938) 7, 12, 40, 99, 100, 398, 594, 603 Grydzewski, Mieczysław (1894–1970) 27, 82, 191 Grynberg, Henryk (b. 1936) 91, 99, 170, 223, 404, 414–15, 449, 467, 602 Haiducu, Matei Pavel (1948–2003) 43, 346 Hajnóczy, Péter (1942–1981) 225 Halas, Frantisˇek (1901–1949) 242 Halász, Péter (b. 1922) 88, 99, 211, 225, 229, 601 Halász, Péter (1943–2006) 88, 498, 603 Hamvas, Béla (1897–1968) 233, 371 Hamvassy [Balázs], Anna (1875?-1958?) 24, 49 Hanák, Tibor (b. 1929) 212, 226–27 Haraszti, Miklós (b. 1945) 346–47, 366 Haraszty, István (b. 1934) 234 Hasˇek, Jaroslav (1883–1923) 58, 388 Határ, Gyo˝zo˝ (1914–2006) 38, 83, 210, 217, 219, 221, 225, 237, 238, 524, 529, 531–32, 536, 601 Hatvany, Bertalan (1900–1980) 30, 232, 241, 598 Hatvany, Lajos (1880–1961) 37, 597, 598, 600 Ha˘ulica, Dan (b. 1932) 294 Hauner, Milan (b. 1940) 260 Haupt, Zygmunt (1907–1975) 27, 170–71, 192, 194, 202, 599

617

Hauser, Arnold (1892–1978) 24 Havas, Emil (1893–1957) 543–45, 473 Havas, Endre (1909–1953) 30, 36–37, 598, 601 Havel, Václav (b. 1936) 93, 102, 246, 256, 257, 259–61, 342 Havlícˇek Borovsky´, Karel (1821–1856) 23, 99, 264 Háy, Gyula [Julius] (1900–1975) 26, 35, 38, 54, 56–57, 61–63, 66, 68–72, 99, 124, 126, 129, 133, 141, 142, 211, 397, 399, 431, 598, 600, 602 Heliade Ra˘dulescu, Ion (1802–1871) 22, 99 Heller, Ágnes (b. 1929) 88 Heller, Michał [Adam Kruczek] (1922–1997) 173 Hemon, Aleksandar (b. 1964) 604 Herbert, Zbigniew (1924–1998) 176, 223 Herling-Grudzin´ski, Gustaw (1919–2000) 29, 31, 34, 86, 99, 145–46, 149–51, 164–65, 167, 169–74, 181, 183–84, 397, 422–31, 599 Hertz, Aleksander (1895–1983) 167, 184 Hertz, Zofia (1911–2003) 145, 149, 182 Hertz, Zygmunt (1908–1979) 145, 149, 174, 184 Hevesi, András (?-?) 74 Hevesy, Iván (1893–1966) 119, 122 Heydenkorn, Benedykt (1906–1999) 150 Hidas, Antal (1899–1980) 60, 597, 598, 602 Hłasko, Marek (1934–1969) 39, 97, 170, 172, 175–76, 184, 592, 602 Hoffman, Eva (b. 1945) 15, 100, 398, 405, 415, 437, 440–44, 446–47, 449–53, 455–56, 459, 462, 466, 467–69, 492, 584, 593–94 Holban, Anton (1902–1937) 279 Holland, Agnieszka (b. 1948) 180, 184 Hora, Josef (1891–1945) 390, 393 Horák, Jirˇí (1924–2003) 246, 253, 274 Horia, Vintila˘ (1915–1992) 5, 31–32, 44, 79, 85, 94, 100, 224, 289, 571, 600 Horthy, Miklós (1868–1957) 30, 93, 110, 213, 215, 230 Horváth Elemér (b. 1933) 529 Horváth, Béla (1927–1981) 206–208

618

Index of East-Central European Names

Horváth, Ödön von (1901–1938) 54, 313 Hossu-Longin, Lucia (b. 1951) 363 Hostovsky´, Egon (1908–1973) 27, 36, 87, 256, 388, 599–601 Hrabal, Bohumil (1914–1997) 256 Hus, Jan (1369–1415) 56–57 Ibra˘ileanu, Garabet (1871–1936) 279 Ierunca, Virgil (1920–2006) 38, 75, 80, 84, 276–77, 280, 282, 285, 287, 289, 291–92, 296–97, 299, 366, 601 Ignotus [Hugo Veigelsberg] (1869–1949) 37, 597, 598, 601 Ignotus, Pál (1901–1978) 30, 37, 38, 81–83, 100, 206–209, 211–15, 229, 233, 598 Ihnatowicz, Janusz A. (b. 1929) 82 Ilies¸u, Petru (b. 1951) 343 Illés, Béla (1895–1974) 35, 57, 60–62, 66, 100, 597, 600 Illyés, Elemér (1919–1989) 225 Illyés, Gyula (1902–1983) 63, 204, 218, 521, 532 Iłłakowiczówna, Kazimiera (1892–1983) 28, 307, 599–600 Indries¸, Alexandra (1936–1993) 357 Ioanid, Ion (b. 1926) 39, 100, 363, 602 Ionesco, Eugène [Eugen Ionescu] (1909–1994) 9, 73, 75, 79, 100, 224, 280, 284, 292–93, 298, 300, 302, 399, 598 Ionesco, Marie France (b. 1944) 293, 295, 298–99 Ionescu, Nae (**) 458 Iorga, Nicolae (1871–1940) 279 Iorgulescu, Mircea (b. 1943) 360, 603 Isou, Isidore (1925–2007) 78–79, 100, 600–601 Istrati, Panaït (1884–1935) 59, 224 Iulian, Rodica (b. 1931) 293 Iwaniuk, Wacław (1912–2001) 91, 93, 170, 600–601 Iwaszkiewicz, Jarosław (1894–1980) 327–28 Jancsó, Miklós (b. 1921) 239 Jankovich, Imre (b. 1949) 218 Janta-Połczyn´ski, Aleksander (1908–1974) 157, 184

Jaruzelski, Vojczieh Witold (b. 1923) 39, 42, 164–65, 498 Jasien´ski, Bruno (1902–1939) 10, 27, 59–60, 100, 124, 126, 142, 597 Jastrun, Tomasz (b. 1950) 177 Jászi, Oszkár (1875–1957) 24–25, 51, 53–54, 110, 115, 205–206 Jela, Doina (b. 1951) 281, 301, 364, 366 Jelen´ski, Konstanty Aleksander (1922–1987) 79, 100, 146, 149–51, 159, 170–73, 177, 180–81, 183–84, 222, 298, 337, 599 Jezdinsky´, Karel (1939–1998) 250–51, 268, 272–74 Jirous, Ivan (b. 1944) 257 Jonásˇ, Josef (1920–2002) 246, 253 Jovanovic´, Dusˇan (b. 1939) 515, 517 Jósika, Miklós (1794–1865) 23 József, Attila (1905–1937) 30, 232, 526 Juhász, Ferenc (b. 1928) 225, 238 Juhász, Vilmos (1899–1967) 215 Jungmann, Milan (b. 1922) 255, 261–64 Kabdebó, Tamás (b. 1934) 211 Kádár, János (1912–1989) 35, 133, 137, 142, 204, 207, 213, 217, 224, 233–234, 237, 347, 373–374, 377–378, 521, 524, 527 Kadirova, Ruisˇ (b. ?) 502 Kafka, Franz (1883–1924) 41, 96, 131, 220, 256, 369, 377, 380–381, 417, 457, 460, 463 Kállai, Erno˝ [Ernst] (1890–1954) 55, 118–120, 122 Kaltenberg, Lew (1910–1989) 28, 599, 600 Kannás, Alajos (b. 1926) 231 Karadzˇic´, Vuk Stefanovic´ (1787–1864) 47 Karahasan, Dzˇevad (b. 1953) 509, 520 Karátson, Endre (b. 1933) 75, 100, 208, 211, 213, 236–237, 239, 241, 524–525, 529, 532, 536, 607 Karikás, Frigyes (1891–1938) 58, 72, 597 Karinthy, Ferenc (1921–1992) 218 Kárnet, Jirˇí (b. 1920) 246 Károlyi, Mihály (1875–1955) 25, 36–37, 54, 75, 109, 555, 597 Karpin´ski, Jakub (1940–2003) 162–163, 177, 184

Index of East-Central European Names

Karpin´ski, Wojciech (b. 1943) 172, 183 Karski, Jan (1914–2000) 191 Kassai, György (b. 1922) 226 Kassák, Lajos (1887–1967) 23–25, 53–54, 60, 71, 76, 100, 109–111, 113–120, 122, 218, 526, 597, 598 Katkov, Mikhail (1818–1887) 243 Kavan, Jan (b. 1946) 267 Kemenes-Géfin, László (b. 1937) 210, 529, 530, 532, 536 Kemény, Alfréd (1895–1945) 57, 118 Kemény, Tomaso (b. 1940) 533 Kende, Péter (b. 1927) 144, 223, 225 Kenessey, Miklós (b. 1933) 239 Kerecsendi Kiss, Márton (1917–1990) 95 Kerényi, Karl (1897–1973) 206, 237, 524 Kéri, Pál (1882–1961) 540 Kertész, Imre (b. 1929) 18, 51, 100, 216, 219, 308, 368–383, 397, 590 Kéthly, Anna (1889–1976) 211–212, 307 Kibédi Varga, Áron (b. 1930) 76, 85, 211, 225, 230, 241, 525, 527, 529, 532, 536, 607 Kijowski, Andrzej (1928–1985) 414 Király, István (1921–1989) 529 Kirsch, Roland (1960–1989) 485 Kisˇ, Danilo (1935–1989) 43, 313, 585 Kis, János (b. 1943) 260, 371 Kisielewski, Stefan (1911–1991) 163, 177 Kodály, Zoltán (1882–1967) 35, 100, 227 Koestler, Arthur (1905–1983) 26, 30, 96, 100, 151, 158–159, 179, 204, 206, 212, 397, 399, 523, 597, 599 Koga˘lniceanu, Mihail (1817–1891) 22, 362, 362 Kohout, Pavel (b. 1928) 7, 40, 55, 345, 498, 603 Kokotovic´, Nada (b. 1944) 506, 510 Kolakowski, Leszek (b. 1927) 7, 41, 100, 163, 184, 223, 324, 602 Kolár, Jan (1923–1978) 246, 253, 256 Kollár, Jan (1793–1852) 47 Komját, Aladár (1891–1937) 25, 115, 597 Konrád, György (b. 1933) 7, 19, 210, 218, 225, 342, 366, 371, 373, 383, 452, 580, 595 Konwicki, Tadeusz (b.1926) 223 Kopecky´, Václav (1897–1961) 244

619

Korda, Alexander (1893–1956) 48, 51, 55, 115, 597 Körmendi, Ferenc (1900–1972) 88, 534 Korniss, Dezso˝ (1908–1984) 110 Kosin´ski, Jerzy (1933–1991) 88, 602 Kosková, Helena (b. 1935) 257 Kossuth, Lajos (1802–1892) 47, 81, 117, 554 Kosztolányi, Ádám (1915–1980) 215 Kosztolányi, Dezso˝ (1885–1936) 215 Kos´ciuszko, Tadeusz (1746–1817) 145, 191 Kott, Jan (1914–2001) 7, 41, 88, 100, 340, 415, 602 Kovacˇ, Mirko (b. 1938) 604 Kovacˇevic´, Dusˇan (b. 1948) 514–515 Kovács, Imre (1913–1980) 93, 205, 207, 208, 215, 220, 232–233, 521, 536 Kovályová, Heda (b. 1919) 251 Kovtun, Jirˇí (b. 1927) 245–248, 251, 253, 256–257, 274 Kowalewski, Janusz (1910–1996) 331 Kowalik, Jan (1910–2001) 144, 185, 192–193, 195, 196, 202 Král, Petr (b. 1944) 263, 264 Krasin´ski, Zygmunt (1812–1859) 21, 325 Krassó, Miklós (1930–1986) 208, 213 Krejcˇa, Otomar (b. 1921) 498 Kridl, Manfred (1882–1957) 190 Kristeva, Julia (b. 1941) 226, 442, 466, 468 Kristof, Agota (b. 1935) 12, 38, 79, 86, 100, 210, 212, 307, 524, 589, 595, 601 Krlezˇa, Miroslav (1893–1981) 59, 100, 137, 313, 514 Krúdy, Gyula (1878–1933) 219, 239 Kruzˇliak, Imrich (b. 1914) 38, 83, 601 Kulcsár Szabó, Erno˝ (b. 1950) 373, 383, 532, 534, 536 Kun, Béla (1886–1938) 25, 48, 53, 58–62, 65–66, 71, 72, 100–101, 113, 122, 133, 143 Kuncewiczowa, Maria (1899–1989) 307, 332, 440 Kundera, Milan (b. 1929) 307, 332, 440 Kunesˇ, Ilja (b. 1956) 265 Kuron´, Jacek (b. 1934) 161, 342 Kusturica, Emir (b. 1954) 504–505, 507 Kutasi, Elemér (?-?) 112

620

Index of East-Central European Names

Kwas´niewski, Aleksander (b. 1954) 181, 618 Lakatos, Imre (1922–1974) 228 Landler, Jeno˝ (1875–1928) 53, 72, 115 Langer, Frantisˇek (1888–1965) 27, 81–82, 599–600 Lányi, Sarolta (1891–1975) 60, 72, 307, 597, 600 Larian, Sonia (b. 1931) 294 Lazin, Milosˇ (b. 1952) 510, 514–516, 519–520 Lechon´, Jan [Leszek Serafinowicz] (1899–1956) 27, 87, 95, 190–191, 331, 599 Lehotzky, Gergely (1930–1979) 226 Lengyel, Balázs (b. 1918–2007) 235, 535 Lengyel, József (1896–1975) 25–26, 35, 62, 69, 72, 100–101, 597, 601 Lengyel, Menyhért (1880–1974) 540 Lerski Jerzy (1917–1992) 191 Leszcza, Jan (1918–1992) 192–193, 195, 202 Lesznai, Anna (1885–1966) 24, 51–52, 54, 114, 307, 597, 598 Lévay, József (1825–1918) 235, 241 Liehm, Antonin (b. 1924) 298 Liiceanu, Gabriel (b. 1942) 299 Linhartová, Veˇra (b. 1938) 40, 307, 389, 602 Lipski, Leo (1917–1997) 29, 96, 101, 170, 175, 185, 599 Lovinescu, Eugen (1881–1943) 279–281, 301–302 Lovinescu, Horia (1917–1983) 279 Lovinescu, Monica [Saint Come, Monique; Pascal, Claude] (1923–2008) 5, 38, 42–43, 75, 80, 84, 99, 107, 276–302, 307, 351, 366, 397, 583, 601 Lovinescu, Vasile (1905–1984) 279 Lovric´, Ivan (1754–1777) 315 Luca, Gherasim [Salman Locker] (1913–1994) 38, 77–79, 97–98, 101–102, 581, 601 Lukács, György [Georg] (1885–1971) 6, 24–26, 35, 48–49, 51–54, 56–57, 60, 62–66, 69, 72, 99–101, 109–115, 121–143, 212, 227, 418, 584, 597, 600

Lupas¸cu, S¸tefan (1900–1988) 280, 290, 292, 300, 302 Lustig, Arnosˇt (b. 1926) 89, 97, 602 Luzˇa, Radomír (b. 1922) 274 Ławrynowicz, Zygmunt (1925–1987) 82 Łobodowski, Józef (1909–1988) 27, 86, 599 Łysek, Paweł (1914–1978) 88, 192, 194, 202 Mackiewicz Józef (1902–1985) 3, 33–34, 98, 101, 160, 164, 167, 170–172, 185, 331–332, 423–424, 429 Mackiewicz, Stanisław (1896–1966) 177–178 Mácza, János (1893–1974) 35, 53, 115–116, 122, 597 Madej, Bogdan (1934–2002) 170, 172 Mailat, Maria (b. 1953) 294 Makkai, Ádám (b. 1935) 215, 226, 531, 536 Makkai, Sándor (1890–1951) 15 Manchevski, Milcho (b. 1959) 506 Manea, Norman (b. 1936) 15, 42, 88, 101, 360, 434, 437, 440, 449, 456–468, 603 Mannheim, Karl (1893–1947) 24, 48, 52, 54, 192, 338 Manolescu, Nicolae (b. 1939) 283, 290, 302, 360–361, 367, 595 Márai, Sándor (1900–1989) 12, 16, 26, 35, 38, 44, 84, 86–87, 92–93, 101, 139, 205, 212, 229–232, 370, 381–383, 398–399, 402, 405, 415, 416–431, 488, 492, 524, 527, 529–530, 532, 534–537, 569, 581, 601 Margan´ski, Janusz (b. 1962) 337, 341 Marinat, Alexei (b. 1924) 346 Markov, Georgi (1929–1978) 348, 501, 514, 520 Markovic´, Milena (b. 1974) 514, 520 Markowski, Michał Paweł (b. 1962) 335, 341 Marschalkó, Lajos (1903–1968) 600 Martínek, Lubomír (b. 1954) 254 Márton, László (b. 1934) 208, 213–234, 236, 522–523, 537 Márton, László (b. 1959) 522 Maruna, Boris (1940–2007) 602–603

Index of East-Central European Names

Masaryk, Tomásˇ Garrigue (1850–1937) 248, 254, 258 Materic´, Mladen (b. 1953) 503–505, 507 Mattis-Teutsch, János (1884–1960) 114 Mazilescu, Virgil (1942–1984) 358 Mecˇiar, Stanislav (1910–1971) 32, 94, 600 Megyeri, Sári (1897–1984) 540 Mehmedinovic´, Semezdin (b. 1961) 44, 604 Melinescu, Gabriela (b. 1942) 86, 603 Méray, Tibor (b. 1924) 38, 80, 208–210, 217, 223, 228, 229, 531, 602 Méro˝, Ferenc (b. 1916) 231, 241 Mészöly, Miklós (1921–2001) 218, 238, 526 Michnik, Adam (b. 1946) 162, 223, 342 Mickiewicz, Adam (1798–1855) 21, 22, 58, 150, 184, 198, 223, 325, 330, 412, 581 Mieroszewski, Juliusz (1906–1976) 149, 154–155, 159–162, 166–167, 173–175, 178, 183, 185–187 Mihajlov, Mihajlo (b. 1934) 179 Mikes, György (1912–1987) 81, 97, 211–212, 225, 229, 235, 524, 540 Mikes, Kelemen (1690–1761) 12, 101, 235 Mikołajczyk, Stanisław (1901–1966) 200 Milosˇevic´, Slobodan (1941–2006) 501, 504, 509, 516 Miłosz, Czesław (1911–2004) 21, 27, 29, 34, 37, 44, 79, 82, 89, 100, 102–103, 150, 168, 170–176, 181, 183–184, 186–187, 190, 198, 222, 260, 312, 317, 324, 332, 431, 475, 588, 601, 604 Mindszenty, Cardinal József (1892–1975) 37, 75, 93, 540 ˇ anina (b. 1967) 514 Mircˇevska, Z Miron, Paul (1926–2008) 32, 48, 287 Mlynárik, Jan (b. 1933) 258–259 Mnˇacˇko, Ladislav (1919–1994) 97, 223, 229, 602, 603 Modrzejewska, Helena [Modjeska] (1840–1909) 192 Modzelewski, Karol (b. 1937) 161 Moholy-Nagy, László (1895–1946) 53, 55, 57, 110, 115, 118–120, 122, 597, 606 Molnár, Ferenc (1878–1952) 30, 87, 238, 598

621

Molnár, József (b. 1918) 84, 205–206, 215, 229 Morawski, Dominik (b. 1921) 167 Mostwin, Danuta (b. 1921) 189, 191–194, 196–203, 307 Móricz, Zsigmond (1879–1942) 63, 206 Mroz˙ek, Sławomir (b. 1930) 39, 44, 170, 172, 176, 223, 399, 602, 604 Mucha, Jirˇí (1915–1991) 27, 36, 43, 599–600, 604 Müller, Herta (b. 1953) 12, 15, 43, 307, 397, 475–481, 483–496, 510, 593, 603 Mugur, Vlad (1927–2001) 457, 499 Muráti, Lili (1914–2003) 85 Nádas, Péter (b. 1942) 219, 532 Nagy, Imre (1896–1958) 36, 38, 63, 14, 210, 213, 233, 234 Nagy, László (1925–1978) 225, 238 Nagy, Pál (b. 1934) 76, 219, 234, 236, 238, 525 Nagy Péter (b. 1920) 527 Najder, Zdzisław (b. 1930) 163, 177, 186, 514–515, 520 Naschitz, Frigyes (1900–1989) 224 Nedelcovici, Bujor (b. 1936) 289, 293–295, 297, 302, 360, 603 Negoit¸escu, Ion (1921–1993) 342, 345, 347, 603 Nejedly´, Zdeneˇk (1878–1962) 27, 35, 599–600 Neˇmec, Jirˇí (1932–2001) 257 Nemes-Lampérth, József (1891–1924) 114–115 Németh, Andor (1891–1953) 30, 37, 54, 115, 122, 597–598, 600 Németh, László (1901–1975) 206, 213, 215–218, 234, 241, 532 Németh, Sándor (1931–1993) 239 Neumann, János (John) (1902–1957) 228 Nezval, Víteˇzslav (1900–1958) 256 Nivat, Georges (b. 1935) 260 Noica, Constantin (1909–1987) 289 Norwid, Cyprian Kamil (1821–1883) 21, 81, 325, 581 Novotny´, Antonín (1904–1975) 223, 250 Nowak-Jezioran´ski, Jan (1913–2005) 191 Nowakowski, Marek (b. 1935) 172, 177

622

Index of East-Central European Names

Nowakowski, Tadeusz (1917–1996) 31 Nusˇic´, Branislav (1864–1938) 514, 515 Nyíro˝, József (1889–1953) 33, 44, 85, 102, 212, 230–231, 448, 529, 534, 600 Obersovszky, Gyula (b. 1927–2001) 38 Odojewski, Włodzimierz (b. 1930) 15, 83, 172, 602 Oká, Ján (1915–1990) 32, 94, 600 Oláh, György (1902–1981) 95 Ora˘scu, S¸erban (b. 1925) 283 Oravecz, Imre (b. 1943) 532 Örkény, István (1912–1979) 218 Orlea, Oana (b. 1936) 293 Orłos´, Kazimierz (b. 1935) 170, 172, 177 Ornest, Ota (1913–2002) 272 Orzeszkowa, Eliza (1841–1910) 200 Osadczuk, Bohdan (b. 1920) 150, 184 Osman, Nedjo (b. 1958) 502, 506, 510 Ostojic´, Tanja (b. 1972) 512 Osvát, Erno˝ (1876–1929) 113 Ottlik, Géza (1912–1990) 217, 218 Ovechkin, Valentin (1904–1968) 256 Pacepa, Ion Mihai (b. 1928) 276, 285, 345–346, 367 Paderewski, Ignacy Jan (1860–1941) 199–200 Páger, Antal (1899–1986) 95, 230 Pálóczi-Horváth, György [George] (1908–1973) 37–38, 82–83, 206–208, 211, 599–601 Pandur, Tomazˇ (b. 1963) 505, 516 Pankowski, Marian (b. 1919) 31, 82, 170–171, 175, 186 Papánek, Ján (1896–1991) 265 Papilian, Alexandru (b. 1947) 289, 302 Papp, Tibor (b. 1936) 76, 234, 236–237, 240–241, 525 Paraschiv, Vasile (b. 1928) 296, 345, 364, 367 Parnicki, Teodor (1908–1988) 29, 95–96, 175, 186, 602 Paruit, Alain (b. 1939) 295, 365, 366 Pasek, Jan Chryzostom (1636–1701) 330 Pasˇovic´, Haris (b. 1962) 507 Pátkai, Ervin (1937–1985) 236 Patocˇka, Jan (1907–1977) 224

Pa˘unescu, Adrian (b. 1943) 290 Pejovic´, Katarina (b. 1962) 517 Pelevic´, Maja (b. 1981) 514 Pelikán, Jirˇí (1923–1999) 117, 251 Penciulescu, Radu (b. 1930) 499 Penescu, Nicolae (1896–1981) 283 Péri, László (1899–1967) 55, 110 Perneczky, Géza (b. 1936) 239 Peroutka, Ferdinand (1895–1978) 36, 83, 88, 245, 253, 269, 601 Petrescu, Camil (1894–1957) 284 Petrescu, Dan (b. 1949) 289, 294, 296, 343 Petrovici, Dus¸an (b. 1938) 360 Petrovic´, Rastko (1898–1949) 30, 599 Philippide, Alexandru (1900–1979) 288 Pietrkiewicz, Jerzy (1916–2007) 12, 27, 81–82, 599 Pijade, Mosˇa (1890–1957) 309–310 Pilát, Oldrˇich (1926–1988) 271, 274 Pilinszky, János (1921–1981) 233, 238 Piłsudski, Józef (1867–1935) 149, 187, 200 Pintilie, Lucian (b. 1933) 294, 296, 499 Pistorius, George (b. 1922) 389 Pithart, Petr (b. 1941) 257, 267 Pit¸u, Luca (b. 1947) 294, 343, 357, 360, 367 Polányi, Karl [Károly] (1886–1964) 24–25, 54, 524, 228 Polányi, Michael [Mihály] (1891–1976) 24, 205, 214, 228 Pomian, Krzysztof (b. 1934) 144, 150, 154–155, 163, 164, 167, 173, 180, 181, 183, 186–187 Pomian, Grazyna (b. 1934) 168, 178, 180, 186 Popescu, D[umitru] R[adu] (b. 1935) 287 Popescu, Petru (b. 1944) 42, 603 Popescu, Simona (b. 1965) 485 Popescu, Traian (1910–2003) 32, 85, 601 Popovic´, Aleksandar (1929–1996) 515 Popper, Jacob (1921–1996) 285 Porok, Leszek (1919–1984) 223 Pospieszalski, Antoni (1912–2008) 167, 186 Povolny´, Mojmír (b. 1921) 246 Prágay, Dezso˝ (b. 1921) 237 Prica, Srd-an (?-?) 310 Pruszyn´ski, Ksawery (1907–1950) 325, 341

Index of East-Central European Names

Przybyszewski, Stanisław (1868–1927) 24 Püski, Sándor (b. 1911) 231, 528 Pułaski, Kazimierz (1748–1779) 191 Pulszky, Ferenc (1814–1897) 47, 81 Purkyneˇ, Jan Evangelista (1787–1869) 41 Putrament, Jerzy (1910–1986) 28, 599 Radványi, László [Johann Schmidt] (1900–1978) 51, 56 Raicu, Lucian (1934–2006) 294, 603 Rainis, Ja¯nis (1865–1929) 24 Rákosi, Mátyás (1892–1971) 72, 133, 137, 140, 217, 233, 235, 238, 540 Rákóczy II, Ferenc (1676–1735) 12, 235 Ransdorf, Emil (1920–1974) 246, 253 Rat¸iu, Ion (1917–2000) 225 Rembek, Stanisław (1901–1985) 175, 186 Resˇic´, Haris (b. 1964) 504 Révai, József (1898–1959) 25, 35, 51, 54, 63, 115, 597, 599 Rewska, Hanna Szarzyn´ska- (b. 1916) 178 Ripka, Hubert (1895–1953?) 244 Ristic´, Ljubisˇa (b. 1947) 501, 506 Rosetti, C[onstantin] A. (1816–1885) 22 Rudnicki, Adolf (1912–1990) 28, 404, 413, 598, 600 Rudnicki, Janusz (b. 1956) 172 Russo, Alecu (1819–1859) 22, 102 Rússovich, Alejandro (b. 1925) 327 Rymkiewicz, Aleksander (1913–1983) 15, Rymkiewicz, Jarosław Marek (b. 1935) 167, 186 Sˇabata, Jaroslav (b. 1927) 384 Sajko, Ivana (b. 1975) 514 Sˇajtinac, Ugljesˇa (b. 1972) 514, 520 Salivarová, Zdena (b. 1993) 40, 92–93, 102, 307, 602 Sandauer, Artur (1913–1989) 336, 338, 341 Sa˘raru, Dinu (b. 1932) 287 Sárközi, Márta (1907–1966) 238 Sárközi, Mátyás [Fekete Márton] (b. 1937) 83, 211, 238, 529 Schadl, János (1892–1944) 114 Schaff, Adam (b. 1913) 223 Schlesak, Dieter (b. 1934) 360 Schöpflin, Aladár (1872–1950) 547, 574

623

Schöpflin, György [George] (b. 1939) 37, 100, 102, 215, 601 Schulz, Bruno (1892–1942) 403, 425 Schwarz-Cˇervinka, Josef (1915–2003) 244 Sebeok, Thomas (1920–2001) 226, 227 Sebo˝k, István (1901–1942) 110 Sˇeflová, Ludmila (b. 1928) 255 S¸eicaru, Pamfil (1894–1980) 32, 85, 599 Seifert, Jaroslav (1901–1986) 256, 434 Sever, Alexandru (b. 1921) 603 Sˇiklová, Jirˇina (b. 1935) 267 Sˇimecˇka, Milan (1930–1990) 260 Simion, Eugen (b. 1933) 361 Sˇimko, Dusˇan (b. 1945) 86, 602 Simon, Andor (1901–1986) 115 Simon, Jolán (1885–1938) 116 Simovic´, Ljubomir (b. 1936) 515 Sinkó, Ervin (1898–1967) 25–26, 48, 51–53, 57, 61, 67–73, 79, 102–103, 115, 124, 126, 131, 137, 141, 143, 397, 597 Sipos, Gyula [Albert Pál] (b. 1935) 211, 226 Sito, Jerzy Stanisław (b. 1934) 39, 82, 601, 602 Skalmowski, Wojciech (b. 1933) 169, 173, 186 Sˇkvorecky´, Josef (b. 1924) 4, 23, 40, 91–93, 103, 263–264, 267, 274, 384, 387, 389, 399, 581, 602 Słonimski, Antoni (1895–1976) 27, 36, 59, 81–82, 103, 404, 599, 601 Słowacki, Juliusz (1809–1849) 21, 198, 325, 330 Smolar, Aleksandar (b. 1940) 298 Sˇnajder, Slobodan (b. 1948) 514–515, 520 Sokolovic´, Zijah (b. 1950) 516 Solomon, Alexandru (b. 1966) 300, 303 Sorescu, Marin (1936–1996) 289, 360 Soros, George (b. 1930) 159, 511, 610 Soucˇková, Milada (1898–1983) 36, 89, 307, 393, 601 Sova, Antonín (1864–1928) 390, 393 Sˇovagovic´, Filip (b. 1966) 507 Sperber, Manès (1905–1984) 159, 293 Spiró, György (b. 1946) 373, 383 Sˇprinc, Mikulásˇ (1914–1986) 32, 94 Srbljanovic´, Biljana (b. 1970) 507, 515, 520 Stamatu, Horia (1912–1989) 31–32, 85, 599

624

Index of East-Central European Names

Stande, Stansław Ryszard (1897–1939) 27, 59–60, 98, 598 Stanisˇic´, Vesna (b. 1961) 510 Stawar, Andrzej (1900–1961) 28, 39, 175–176, 599–600, 602 Stefanovski, Goran (b. 1952) 501, 507–508, 513, 515, 520 Steinhardt, Nicu (1912–1989) 363, 457 Stelaru, Dimitrie (1917–1971) 289 Stempowski, Jerzy [Paweł Hostowiec] (1894–1969) 27, 82–83, 86, 150, 152, 156–157, 160, 168, 170–174, 181, 183, 186–187, 409, 415 Stern, Anatol (1899–1968) 28–29, 598 Stevanovic´, Vidosav (b. 1942) 514 Sˇtiks, Igor (b. 1977) 604 Stolojan, Sanda (b. 1919) 295, 298 Straszewicz, Czesław (1904–1963) 28, 95, 168, 170, 331 Streinu, Vladimir (1902–1970) 291 Strmenˇ, Karol (1921–1994) 94, 600 Strug, Andrzej (1871–1937) 169, 174 Sˇturc, L’udovít (1903–1976) 265 Suchanow, Klementyna (Czernicka Klementyna) (b. 1974) 326, 341 Sulyok, Vince (b. 1932) 210 Sułkowski, Tadeusz (1907–1960) 82 Surányi, Miklós (1882–1936) 230 Sutnar, Ladislav (1897–1976) 254 Sˇvestka, Oldrˇich (1922–1983) 251 Sviták, Ivan (1925–1994) 223, 287 Swinarski, Artur Marya (1900–1965) 408 Szabolcsi, Miklós (1921–2000) 100, 239 Szabó, Dezso˝ (1879–1945) 206, 213–216, 220, 229, 230 Szabó, László Cs. (1905–1984) 38, 82, 205, 207–208, 211, 214, 230, 232, 237–239, 521–522, 524–525, 527, 529, 601 Szabó, Lo˝rinc (1900–1957) 116, 117, 122 Szabó, Magda (1917–2007) 218 Szabó, Zoltán (1912–1984) 37, 82, 205–209, 211, 230, 232–233, 237–238, 241, 529, 601 Zas [Szász], Lóránt (b. 1910–1999) 568 Szczepan´ski, Maciej (b. 1928) 180, 187 Szekfu˝, Gyula (1883–1955) 215 Szelecky, Zita (1915–1999) 95 Szelényi, Iván (b. 1938) 218, 371

Szeli, István (b. 1921) 238 Szentgyörgyi, Albert (1893–1986) 228 Szentkuthy, Miklós (1908–1988) 234, 241, 526 Szenwald, Lucjan (1909–1944) Szilárd, Leó (1898–1964) 228 Szondi, Péter (1929–1971) 227 Szubska, Barbara (?-?) 331 Szymborska, Wisława (b. 1923) 223 S´mieja, Florian (b. 1925) 82, 93 Tábori, György [George] (1914–2007) 47, 598 Tábori, Pál (1908–1974) 540, 582, 587, 595, 598 Taborski, Bolesław (b. 1927) 82 Tamás, Aladár (1899–1997) 119, 122 Tamás, Gáspár Miklós (b. 1948) 535 Tamási, Áron (1897–1966) 15, 86, 212, 235, 560 Ta˘nase, Virgil (b. 1945) 42–43, 282, 284, 289, 295, 303, 603 Tardos, Tibor (1918–2004) 30, 37–38, 225, 598, 600, 602 Tarnawski, Wit (1894–1988) 332 Ta˘ta˘rescu, Gheorghe (1886–1957) 281 Teige, Karel (1900–1951) 256 Teller, Ede [Eduard] (1908–2003) 228 Teodoreanu, Lili [Stefana VelisarTeodoreanu] (1897–1955) 292 T¸epeneag, Dumitru (b. 1937) 7, 42, 80, 224–225, 228, 358, 603 Terlecki, Tymon (1905–2000) 82, 187 Thinsz, Géza (1934–1990) 86, 210, 529 Thomka, Beáta (b. 1949) 238 Tigrid, Pavel [Pavel Schönfeld] (1917–2003) 27, 36, 43, 80–83, 223, 242–255, 257–258, 261, 264–275, 599–601, 603 Tiso, Jozef (1887–1947) 32, 87, 94, 474 Titel, Sorin (1935–1985) 358 Tito [Josip Broz] (1892–1980) 73, 207, 138, 309, 310, 502, 516 Todic´, Suncˇican (b. ?) 502 Todorov, Tzvetan (b. 1939) 226, 514 Tolnai, Ottó (b. 1940) 238 Tomic´, Milica (b. 1960) 512 Totok, William (b. 1951) 43, 485, 603

Index of East-Central European Names

Tresˇtíková, Helena (b. 1949) 246 Trobozic´ Garfield, Milena (b. 1960) 510 Tud-man, Franjo (1922–1999) 506, 510 Tudor, Corneliu Vadim (b. 1949) 291 Tudoran, Dorin (b. 1945) 4, 42, 284, 289, 292–293, 296–299, 343, 603 Turcea, Daniel (1945–1979) 358 Tuwim, Julian (1894–1953) 27, 36, 87, 95, 404, 599, 600 Tu˝z, Tamás (1916–1992) 211, 231 Tyl, Josef Kajetán (1808–1856) 390, 393 Tyrmand, Leopold (1920–1985) 89, 170–171, 180, 187, 602 Tzara, Tristan (1896–1963) 77 Udovicˇki, Lenka (b. 1967) 516 Ugresˇic´, Dubravka (b. 1949) 11, 44, 85, 103, 313, 323, 497, 589–590, 595–596, 604 Uhde, Milan (b. 1936) 384 Uitz, Béla (1887–1972) 35, 60, 110, 114–115, 117, 120, 597, 602 Újvári, Erzsébet (1899–1955) 60, 307, 597 Újváry, Sándor (1904–1988) 84 Unger, Leopold (b. 1922) 150, 173 Urban, Milo (1904–1982) 32, 94, 139, 140, 600, 603 Urbánek, Zdeneˇk (b. 1913) 261 Urzidil, Johannes (1896–1970) 87 Usca˘tescu, George (1911–1995) 85 Vaculík, Ludvík (b. 1926) 256–257, 389, 393 Vámosˇ, Gejza (1901–1956) 599 Vámos, Imre (1928–1980) 205–208, 210, 213 Vancˇura, Vladislav (1891–1942) 388–389 Várdy, Péter (b. 1935) 216 Várdy, Steven Béla (b. 1935) 565, 570, 574 Vaszary, János (1899–1963) 85 Vatai, László (1914–1993) 231 Végel, László (b. 1941) 508–509, 520 Velmar-Jankovic´, Vladimir (1895–1976) 32 Vianu, Ion (b. 1934) 347 Vianu, Lidia (b. 1947) 347, 367 Vida, Viktor (1913–1960) 599 Vincenz, Stanisław (1888–1971) 28, 82, 86, 170–171, 599–600

625

Vis¸niec, Matei (b. 1956) 603 Vitéz, György (b. 1933) 529, 532 Vladislav, Jan (b. 1923) 257, 267, 275 Vnuk, Gordana (b. 1955) 510 Vogel, David (1891–1944) 48, 103 Volny´, Sláva (1928–1987) 267 Voronca, Ilarie (1903–1946) 27, 77, 598 Vörösváry, István (1913–?) 93, 95 Voskovec, Jirˇí [Jirˇí Wachsmann] (1905–1981) 256 Vucˇurovic´, Natasˇa (b. 1964) 514 Vujicˇic´, Borislav (1957–2005) 516 Wagner, Richard (b. 1952) 5, 43, 103, 477, 485, 562, 603 Wajda, Andrzej (b. 1926) 288, 303, 499 Wałêsa, Lech (b. 1943) 181 Wandurski, Witold (1891–1937) 27, 59, 98, 598 Wan´kowicz, Melchior (1892–1974) 27, 39, 103, 183, 187, 599, 602 Wass, Albert (1908–1998) 5, 33, 43–44, 84, 87, 93, 212, 224, 230, 397, 474, 534–535, 538–541, 543, 545–551, 553, 555–557, 559–561, 563–575, 583, 585, 592, 593, 599 Wat, Aleksander (1900–1967) 28–29, 34, 70, 77, 103, 124, 126, 141–143, 171, 175–176, 187, 397, 423–424, 428–429, 431, 447, 598 Waz˙yk, Adam (1905–1982) 28, 103, 204, 222, 598, 600 Weiner, Tibor (1906–1965) 110 Weininger, Andor (1899–1986) 110 Wellek, René (1903–1995) 256 Weöres, Sándor (1913–1989) 233–235, 238, 241, 526 Werich, Jan (1905–1980) 256 Wierzyn´ski, Kazimierz (1894–1969) 27, 87, 170, 190–191, 599 Wiesel, Elie (b. 1928) 89, 103, 372, 600 Wigner, Jeno˝ [Eugene] (1902–1995) 228 Wildstein, Bronisław (b. 1952) 172 Wirpsza, Witold (1918–1985) 602 Wittlin, Józef (1896–1976) 172, 190, 331–332, 400, 404, 406, 415 Wojtyła, Karol Józef [Pope John Paul II] (1920–2005) 79

626

Index of East-Central European Names

Wraga, Ryszard [Jerzy Niezbrzycki] (1902–1968) 156, 187 Wygodski, Stanisław (1907–1992) 97 Wyka, Kazimierz (1910–1975) 192, 203 Zaciu, Mircea (1928–2000) 289 Zagajewski, Adam (b. 1945) 42, 44, 170, 172, 603–604 Zalán, Magda (b. 1936) 225 ˇ alica, Antonije (b. 1959) 604 Z Zámecˇník, Karel [Karel Prokop] (b. 1942) 257

Zappia, Larry (b. 1965) 506 ˇ arnov, Andrej [Frantisˇek Sˇubík] Z (1903–1982) 32, 94, 600–601 Zathurecky, Gyula (1907–1987) 550, 601 ˙ eromski, Stefan (1864–1925) 169, 174, Z 174 Zilahy, Lajos (1891–1974) 38, 54, 87, 205–207, 214–215, 230, 232, 524, 527, 597, 600 Zilber, Belu [Herbert] (1901–1978) 363 Zinoviev, Aleksandr (1922–2000) 28