by Marci Shore
When she and her husband returned home, Janina said to them: “Kids, this is a provocation, these are jousting matches inside the Party. Don’t let yourselves be so foolishly exploited.”
“Of course,” Pani Ewa wrote, “we didn’t want to listen.”
On behalf of her unborn child, Ewa was more cautious after that. Her young husband, though, continued to take an active part in the student demonstrations. They continued to live with Ewa’s grandmother, who did not interfere. Janina Broniewska believed they were adults and had a right to decide. She did more than that, though. She also took in her granddaughter’s friend, a student of Polish literature with a three-month-old daughter. The young woman’s husband was among the arrested university students, and she and her baby found themselves homeless. Ewa gave birth as well, and for some time they all lived together. Pani Ewa believed her grandmother—a former teacher and the author of children’s books—enjoyed having the two infants at home. She had always liked children.
I wanted to know: How did Janina Broniewska—who had so many Jewish friends—come to terms with March 1968?
Pani Ewa had no answer. She knew only that those were no longer her grandmother’s times, that her grandmother’s times had “ended together with Stalinism.”
Her grandfather, on the other hand, had he still been alive, would have certainly been in the university courtyard, demonstrating with the students. Władysław Broniewski was an incorrigible romantic. Pani Ewa had no doubts: “Had he lived to see Solidarity, he would have been in the front row, bolting to the shipyard—and perhaps would have even ended up in prison yet again.”
Later, in the 1970s, when as a young woman Ewa joined the opposition, her grandmother looked on with concealed affection. She told her granddaughter that what Ewa was doing now reminded her of her own youth. Yet Janina Broniewska remained, until the very end, on the “other side of the barricade.”
All her life Pani Ewa fled from the awareness of what Wanda Wasilewska and her grandmother had done. All of her life she tried to separate what was private—her grandmother’s care and wisdom, her love and their bond—from the role her grandmother had played in Poland’s history.
Wanda Wasilewska knew Stalin. She had to have known that this man was a monster. She knew about the crimes. It was true that she did pull people out of prisons and camps. She helped individuals, but she remained in a system where political crime was the daily bread.… This is the distant past, but for me it remains on the frontier of horror or socio-psychological science fiction. Why did Wanda and my grandmother, knowing about the monstrosities, not recoil? Perhaps, as in the Mafia, past a certain degree of involvement there was no turning back?
Pani Ewa never spoke to her grandmother about Jakub Berman. She avoided conversations about the war and the Stalinist years that followed. She never read the books her grandmother wrote during her years as a war correspondent in the Soviet Union. She never read her grandfather’s famous poem about Stalin. She avoided reading about Wanda Wasilewska. So many times people had attacked her for her grandparents’ past—as if grandchildren could somehow go back in time and undo the sins of their grandparents. Of course she herself bore responsibility for nothing. Everything had happened either before her birth, or when she was too young to have taken part. She knew that. And yet it was difficult to escape the guilt.
PANI EWA SENT me the letters Wanda Wasilewska had written to her grandmother. I learned to decipher the handwriting; it became familiar. By then I could also distinguish Adolf Berman’s handwriting from that of his brother. I knew that Wanda Wasilewska chain-smoked, that Aleksander Wat’s wife, Ola, mixed chocolate into her coffee, that in the interwar years the editor of the best literary weekly brought his two small dogs with him to Café Ziemiańska.
I read Władysław Broniewski’s letters and those of his friends and sometimes wondered: Did they need to be so harsh? Sometimes I became irritated at their pretensions, their condescension, their graphomania. At other times I was overwhelmed with sympathy for their angst, their suffering, their guilt—the whole enormity of their drama. For after all, how could one be dispassionate about revolution? The question I asked during my lecture at the Władysław Broniewski Museum I continued to ask to the futurist-turned-communist Aleksander Wat, when later in his life he descended into despair at his unbearable guilt: But tell me, who managed to escape from those times with clean hands?
Yet there were others, like Adolf Berman’s younger friend, the Catholic resistance activist Władysław Bartoszewski. His moral clarity. He never agonized, never vacillated, what was right was illuminated for him.
Slowly I began to see the arc of how their story unfolded.
IN AUTUMN OF 1922 the young poet Władysław Broniewski made the acquaintance of the “extreme futurist” Aleksander Wat. In December 1922 Broniewski noted in his diary that at Café Ziemiańska he had been meeting with a small group of writers, Wat among them: “All Yids. People of much intelligence and erudition.… I have benefited much from that—above all because I’ve become acquainted with the new Russian poetry.… Mayakovsky, the most important of them all, has revealed to me completely new worlds.”
At that time, in the new Polish capital there lived a small group of young futurist poets, Poles and cosmopolitans, often “non-Jewish Jews.” They lived in a city of cafés and cabarets, of rickshaws and streets paved with cobblestones; they dabbled in nihilism and catastrophism. They were the avant-garde of Milan Kundera’s imagination, possessed by the ambition to be in harmony with the future.
Soon the Krakowian Bruno Jasieński met the Warsaw futurists. Jasieński had returned home to Poland after having spent his teenage years in Russia; in Krakow he went to the university, where he soon became a futurist. He was the dandy, nineteenth-century elegance dressed in black with a top hat and a wide tie and a monocle on one eye. Girls fell for him.
Older writers accused the futurist poets of snobbism, of imitating foreign fashion. Yet this charge was not nearly the harshest. Later critics would accuse the avant-gardists of having been harbingers of Stalinist culture. For it was the avant-garde who had striven for transparency, who had sought to erase the boundary between art and life. Now art aspired no longer to represent life but rather to transform it—and it was the crossing of this boundary that was the fatal step.
One evening the futurist Aleksander Wat met the lovely young drama student Ola at a drama school ball. She was said to be among the most beautiful women in Warsaw: her dark features were exquisitely delicate, her eyebrows were tweezed into thin moons. Afterward he ran to a friend with the wonderful news: such a beautiful girl—and she wanted him! The girl who had aspired to become an actress gave up her dowry to marry the young futurist. Years after Aleksander Wat had swallowed many pills and left a note for Ola pleading with her not to save him, she wrote of how she would get goose bumps whenever she thought that she might not have been at that ball, she might never have met him, and her life would have been wasted.
I found photographs. It was true: Ola was very beautiful, dark hair and dark eyes against porcelain features.
They were all young when they met. It was a time of decadence, experimentation, carnival. None of them would escape with clean hands. All of them would die too young—beginning with their Russian futurist friend Vladimir Mayakovsky.
The futurists introduced Pani Ewa’s grandfather Władysław Broniewski to Mayakovsky’s poetry. Soon all of Café Ziemiańska, the waiters as well, were reciting Mayakovsky’s “Left March”—Left! Left! Left! resounded throughout the café. The mesmerizing Russian futurist—the rhythm of his words—seduced them with revolution. Radical nihilism and radical contingency proved unbearable; in the end they could not endure it. They fled. From nihilism and contingency to utopianism and determinism. It was in the air: the existential imperative to make a choice.
The choice itself, my professor Sepp said to me, was not as important as the act of choosing.
Sepp was of Pani Ewa’s generation: bo
rn in the years after the war, afflicted with a feeling of guilt by contiguity. When Sepp was a child it had been his grandfather whom he’d loved the most. And this grandfather, Sepp told me one day in his ebullient English that was always so fresh precisely because it was a little bit off, “was a big-ass Nazi,” a member of Hitler’s party since the 1920s. Sepp had been a talkative child, and it was from his grandfather that he’d learned to tell anti-Semitic jokes and repeat stories of Jewish conspiracies. He was only a boy of ten or so when his grandfather died, but later there was his Doktorvater, Hans-Robert Jauss, the famous literary theorist and—it eventually emerged—a former member of the SS.
“I began to become obsessed,” Sepp wrote, “with the famous question how I would have acted myself before 1945—if somebody like Jauss, by whose mind I felt so attracted, had been a Nazi until the apocalyptic end.”
Sepp, the very European intellectual from Bavaria, had decided to take American citizenship. It was his final act of atonement for a certain “shameful moral contiguity between my birth on the one hand and the Third Reich and the Holocaust on the other.”
“They’re all smoking, aren’t they?” Sepp asked me after he’d read the first chapter of my dissertation.
In the microfilm room I read the Literary Monthly, the Marxist journal Aleksander Wat edited between 1929 and 1931. The paper appeared for only twenty issues—two of which were confiscated. Aleksander Wat never joined the Communist Party, yet for the rest of his life he was unable to escape the guilt of having been that legendary paper’s editor.
On the pages of the Literary Monthly Wat recanted his decadent, anarchistic futurist youth: futurism was “the crooked mirror in which Caliban gazed at himself with a grimace of abomination.”
The saddest issue was the one dedicated to the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky.
It was neither Marx nor Lenin but rather the breathtakingly handsome Russian futurist who had brought the Polish avant-garde poets to the Revolution. In the spring of 1927, Mayakovsky had paid a visit to Warsaw. He was their most passionate love affair—a love affair that was, the Polish poets believed, the beginning of the future, of the new world.
Mayakovsky was an enormity, and at once tender, those large hands, but most moving of all was his voice. Rooms trembled when he read his poetry. “A superhuman of cosmic melancholy,” Aleksander Wat described him. In that colossal voice was the threshold of the new world.
“I assume,” Wat said of an evening that spring with Mayakovsky, “that chills went up the spines of quite a few of the people there, for that truly was an imperious power. That wasn’t a man, that wasn’t a poet; that was an empire, the coming world empire.”
Bruno Jasieński was not there. He was no longer in Warsaw; he met Mayakovsky in Paris, where he lived in the lower Montmartre, by the Impasse de la Poissonnière. There he wrote I Burn Paris, the wild apocalyptic tale of a deathly plague transmitted via contaminated water that destroyed the debauched, bourgeois European capital; only those in prison—the communists—were spared. For this the French deported him, and Jasieński forsook returning to Poland in favor of arriving as a hero in Leningrad.
When in Moscow in April 1930 Vladimir Mayakovsky took his own life, the first detail that reached the Polish poets who so loved him was the phrase from his suicide note “liubovnaia lodka / razbilas’ v byt’ ” (The love boat / crashed against the everyday).
My Russian friend Ksenia wrote to me from Moscow, enclosing a newspaper clipping: the last photograph of Mayakovsky’s lover and muse. In the photograph the incomparable Lilia Brik was already a very old woman with a gaunt face and thick eyebrows, her long hair pulled into a low ponytail, heavy necklaces resting beneath her throat. She wore dark clothing, and she sat with her arms on the armrests of a large chair, gazing not into the camera but elsewhere.
I fell in love with Mayakovsky from his 1910 photograph, in his black cape and cone-shaped hat. I imagined his deep, sonorous voice, the voice to move civilizations.
“Why are you American girls all in love with Mayakovsky?” the middle-aged Russian woman working at Mayakovsky’s archive in Moscow asked me.
I only smiled, embarrassed, and handed her my file requests. But I thought: How could one not fall in love with Mayakovsky?
In September 1931 the police interrupted a Literary Monthly editorial meeting and arrested the editorial staff. Now came their much-anticipated ritual baptism in prison. Ola Watowa sent care packages with notes for her husband tucked inside the head of a herring. Władysław Broniewski sat in the cell, translating Gogol and reciting his own poetry. He was that kind of poet, Aleksander Wat remembered, the best kind—poetry in any circumstance.
When they were released several months later, they began receiving invitations again to receptions at the Soviet embassy, where the Soviet diplomats fed them caviar.
When a Polish writer visited Moscow, the dandy Bruno Jasieński hosted an extravagant dinner party in his filthy apartment. A table set with silver and crystal and glasses bearing the insignia of the last emperor; the table strained from their weight. Beluga caviar and crystal. Spiderwebs covering the iron doors of the stove. There was no need to freeze the vodka; there was frost in the room.
Sepp wanted to know: What kind of caviar did Bruno Jasieński serve that night? Was it red or black?
How could I know? I didn’t.
There were not many dinner parties remaining for Bruno Jasieński. Nineteen thirty-seven arrived, the year of the Great Terror. Bruno Jasieński was arrested. In prison they tortured him. In September he confessed to Polish nationalist sympathies and espionage on behalf of Polish counterintelligence. Several days later he recanted his testimony: in confessing to crimes he had not committed, he had hoped to buy himself a speedier death. In January 1938, in a prison cell awaiting execution, he wrote of his favorite poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, who had brought him to the October Revolution.
In the archives I found a crushed fly inside Bruno Jasieński’s NKVD file.
Interwar Warsaw came to an end. Occupied on one side by the Germans, on the other by the Soviets, Poland disappeared from the European map. Most of the once-futurist poets and their friends fled east, to the city of Polish Lwów, which quickly became Soviet Lvov. In the opulent Hotel George, in the center of the once-cosmopolitan Habsburg city of Lemberg, the Ukrainian playwright and apparatchik Oleksandr Korneichuk, charged with organizing cultural affairs, held court.
In now-Soviet Lvov a friend who was a stage designer invited the Polish poets to a dinner party at a fashionable restaurant. Aleksander Wat was curious: Perhaps it was his birthday? The scenographer refused to reveal the occasion: it was to be a surprise. That evening he was especially generous, ordering delicacies and vodka for everyone. Then someone provoked a brawl. Aleksander Wat was hit in the jaw. Blood poured from his face; he collapsed. Adam Ważyk, now the editor of a Stalinist newspaper, helped Ola to revive him. The scenographer fled the restaurant. Aleksander Wat and Władysław Broniewski were among those arrested, driven in a black limousine to prison. Having been communists in interwar Polish prison, now they were Polish nationalists, Jewish nationalists, Zionists, Trotskyites, spies, and provocateurs in Soviet prison.
The chain-smoking Wanda Wasilewska went to Stalin to try to help her friends the poets. It took, however, quite some time.
After Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, those not in prison fled still farther east, into the Soviet interior. A southern Russian city named Kuibyshev became a gathering point for the Polish communist intelligentsia: Janina Broniewska and Wanda Wasilewska went there, as did Adam Ważyk. Later they all moved to Moscow.
Jakub Berman, Aleksander Wat’s Communist Party tutor from the days of the Literary Monthly, grew close to Wanda Wasilewska during the war, at a time when both of them were close to Stalin. Wanda Wasilewska and Jakub Berman were, perhaps, lovers, although—as Jakub Berman said in his last interview—this was not the point. Jakub Berman and Janina Broniewska were not lovers, but they did—toget
her with Adam Ważyk—become postwar dictators of cultural policy during the harshest years of Stalinism in Poland.
In June 1941 Nazi Germany broke the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression treaty and attacked the Soviet Union. Now Stalin joined the Allies. That August the Polish government in exile and the Soviet Union concluded an agreement granting amnesty for Polish prisoners in the Soviet Union and permission for the creation of a Polish army. Aleksander Wat was released from prison. After his arrest at the restaurant in Lvov, Ola Watowa and her son had been among those deported from Lvov to a Soviet labor settlement in Central Asia. Eventually the three found one another in Kazakhstan.
When Władysław Broniewski was released from prison, he left for the Middle East with the newly formed Polish army. Soon Broniewski found himself in Jerusalem, surrounded by Polish-Jewish readers from Warsaw who adored him even more in Palestine.
On New Year’s Eve of 1954 a friend presented Aleksander Wat with a complete collection of the short-lived Literary Monthly and the dedication “In memory of the shared sins of our youth.”
In Paris, in the summer of 1967, Aleksander Wat swallowed some forty tablets of Nembutal. On the bed, by his feet, he’d left a note for Ola: “DO NOT SAVE ME.” In the archive I found the small piece of paper, the letters written all in capitals. It was 2001. The bequeather had stipulated that the files be closed until the twentieth century had come to an end.
Children of the Revolution
I arrived in New York during the first week of September 2001. A few days later, I was in my apartment on the Upper West Side when the phone rang. A few minutes later I turned on the computer and found a message from my Russian friend Ksenia. She was a world away in Moscow, watching CNN at her office, and knew everything I knew at exactly the same moment.