The constant noise coming from the other side of the walls is a daily nightmare. Their flat is sandwiched between a lift and a rubbish chute: on one side the lift doors keep crashing shut, and then the lift thunders up or down; on the other is the chute, producing yet more clatter. On top of that, the chute is connected to the kitchen by a ventilator, in order to provide ventilation for the kitchen, but usually it is the stink from the chute that invades the kitchen. Alicja seals up the ventilator, but it doesn’t help.
Rysiek is infuriated. He can’t bear being disturbed while he’s writing. He needs peace and quiet. If he doesn’t have it, everything irritates him.
So when Alicja sees Rysiek starting to twitch and pace nervously, she and Zojka sit quietly in the corner to avoid further antagonizing the lion. She knows him well enough to understand when to keep out of the way and not respond to provocation. Never does she strike her fist against the table; never does she say she’s had enough. (‘Of course not! That was my Rysio! Whatever do you mean?’)
Once the writing starts to go smoothly, he solemnly announces that now he’s making progress, that now he has the wind in his sails. He reads out the first sentence, and Alicja jumps for joy. And so on . . . to the next paragraph. He always writes slowly and barely meets the standard editorial quotas. His concern is with the quality of his writing, not the quantity, and so he earns a pittance.
Alicja’s father helps them. Both her parents are working, and although teachers’ salaries are not high, they offer to assist. Only in 1959, when Alicja finishes her medical studies and receives her first salary, does she write to her father to say that they are grateful for his support but from now on will manage on their own.
11
’56: Revolution All Over Again
Every revolution is preceded by a state of general exhaustion, and takes place against a background of unleashed aggressiveness. Authority cannot put up with a nation that gets on its nerves; the nation cannot tolerate an authority it has come to hate . . . A climate of tension and increasing oppressiveness prevails. We start to fall into a psychosis of terror. The discharge is coming. We feel it.
Ryszard Kapuściński, Shah of Shahs1
‘This will never get through,’ snaps the editor-in-chief of Sztandar Młodych. She can tell that the report about Nowa Huta that has just landed on her desk will get the newspaper into trouble.
Irena Tarłowska is not a timid boss. At thirty-seven, she is quite a bit older than the twenty-somethings who form the main core of her staff. (‘Irena Tarłowska was a strapping, handsome woman with thick blond hair parted to one side’, Kapuściński would write about her years later.2) A left-wing woman who radiated French culture, she had been in the communist youth movement during the inter-war years and in the PPR (Polish Worker’s Party) and the underground People’s Army during the war. She had personal connections with high-ranking officials of the post-war regime. Her appointment in 1954 as the editor-in-chief at Sztandar Młodych was interpreted by the journalists as a harbinger of approaching change.
‘There’s no question – the censor won’t let this through,’ she repeats firmly, leaving no hope for the poet and history graduate upon his return to work.
For the past three years, Kapuściński has been writing for Sztandar Młodych sporadically – an occasional review, a short report or a poem in praise of socialism, but no more than a few items a year. He has been fully occupied by his studies and his ZMP activities at college, and a revolution has occurred in his family life as well.
Now he returns to the newspaper, where the ice of Stalinism is starting to melt. ‘Ilya Ehrenburg’s novel The Thaw had just appeared, its title lending itself to the new epoch just beginning’,3 he will write half a century from now.
Ehrenburg’s novel is the subject of heated debate at gatherings in smoke-filled cafés and in newspaper columns. Men of letters, critics and students are all discussing it.4 Some see the book as ‘a superb moral polemic with the image of man tailored to meet the demands of ideology’. Others criticize it for ‘losing the pathos of the struggle to build socialism’ and falsely contrasting these ideas with ‘an apology for everyday life’. Both the former and the latter can feel that something is changing, that something new is coming.
The writers have been noticing something which earlier they could not, or would not, see. In a thaw-era poem, Mieczysław Jastrun, who is the bard of socialism, describes looking through one window at prisoners building garages for the security service, and through another at free bricklayers no longer building the bright future of socialism, but now rather ‘the wall of a lunatic asylum, or House of the Dead’.5
Tone and language, aesthetics and subject matter are changing.
The main characters in stories by emerging novelist Marek Hłasko, cult writer of the thaw and of October ’56, are still workers, but they are not heroes erecting the great edifice of socialism; instead they are frustrated individuals who cannot see the future, sometimes ordinary down-and-outs whose dreams go no further than a bottle of vodka after the end of the day’s work. A lyrical note appears – alien to the spirit of socialism.
From the West comes ‘putrid imperialist literature’ – the weekly Życie Literackie (Literary Life) publishes The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway.
An exhibition entitled ‘Arsenal’ overturns Stalinist notions of aesthetics and the aims of the fine arts; abstraction makes its appearance, having previously been abhorred as ‘the degenerate art of the bourgeoisie’. The same sort of revolution is triggered in the world of music by the Warsaw Autumn festival, whose inception coincides with the peak of the political watershed of October ’56. The idea for the event is born a year earlier, on the rising tide of the thaw. Jazz, too, is rehabilitated – after formerly being banned as ‘the music of American imperialism’.
From its distant place of exile, there is also a comeback for laughter. At last people are allowed to laugh at the ‘distortions of socialism’: shows performed at the Student Satirical Theatre, which opens in Warsaw, attract crowds of intellectuals and prompt fiery debates in the youth press.
One daring bard of the era wrote:
Comrades, you may find this question
much too bold and even rude:
Comrades, is it my impression
you lack red cells in your blood?6
One of the most profound changes brought about by the thaw is, in the words of Jacek Kuroń, ‘the rehabilitation of private life’. Only a year or two earlier, a public debate at the university on the subject of sex was unimaginable. ‘A public meeting on the topic “May One Have Sex Before Marriage?” broke all the conventions, because until then there had only ever been meetings about the war in Korea, the Colorado beetle and German militarists, but the gradually advancing political changes were also overtaken at lightning speed by a revolution in the arts. The young people who played jazz tracks were dressing in “gear” that more distinctly and plainly rebelled against official life.’7
Thanks to the youth and student festival, in which almost two hundred thousand young people take part, including thirty thousand from abroad, including the West, smiling faces and bright colours pervade the streets of Warsaw, fresh air wafts in, and a different kind of music is heard. Originally conceived as a propaganda event on behalf of the socialist cause, the festival becomes an opportunity for Polish youth to encounter the Western culture abhorred by propaganda, and also to meet some of their contemporaries from behind the Iron Curtain. The festival, said Kuroń, ‘exposed the entire hypocrisy and falsehood of a lifestyle which had been promoted as progressive. It turned out that you could be progressive, but at the same time enjoy life, wear colourful clothes, listen to jazz, have fun and make love.’8