Aleksander Wat (1900–1967)

Recommended only for readers interested in the subject: the experience of a Polish Jewish intellectual dealing with the nightmare of his country overrun from the west by Hitler, then from east by Stalin. Wat headed east and, in Soviet hands, by luck and pluck escaped death and torture (except for near-starvation) but not some brutal incarcerations and separation from his wife and son, about whose circumstances he greatly feared but was generally unable to learn.

Wat gained interesting insights into Stalin's system. For example, he recognized that the significance of the millions in slave labor camps rested not so much in the unfortunate ones in the camps but rather in the masses not (yet) sent there: every citizen had a close relative or friend, probably innocent, inside a camp, and so was cowed by personal and daily reminders of Stalin's arbitrary and unlimited grip.

Wat is arrested about 1/3 of the way into the book and is in one or another prison for most of the rest. This part of the above blurb: "... artistic, sexual, and political experimentation --in which Wat was a major participant-- that followed the end of World War I: an explosion of talent and ideas which, he argues, in some ways helped to open the door to the destruction that the Nazis and Bolsheviks soon visited upon the world" smacks of sales pitch.

Wat's bravery and his intelligence, optimism and honesty in grave circumstances and in the telling of them, save his story from being oppressive.… (plus d'informations)

My Century is a memoir based on lengthy warts-and-all tape-recorded conversations between Aleksander Wat and Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish Poet, in Berkeley and Paris in 1964-1965 towards the end of Wat's life.

Wat was the founder of the communist leaning "Literary Journal" in Poland at the end of the 1920s. As Milosz says in his foreword, "there are many heroes in this book" and while talking about his own experiences Wat pays tribute to them all. Wat began life in a genteel assimilated, intellectual environment in Warsaw,the descendant of an old and distinguised Jewish family. In "My Century" he describes how many of his intellectual friends from Warsaw were ground down and destroyed by Stalinism. He tells the story of how the Polish communist party was eliminated, and why, and how he himself became an anti-communist and converted to Christianity, after a night in prison in which he was convinced he had seen the devil. The book contains some memorable, terrible descriptions of wartime prisons: Zamarstynow in Lwow, the Lubyanka in Moscow, Saratov... He also recounts his many meetings; with the "Old Communists" who had helped bring Lenin to power and who had fallen victim to the great purge in 1937; and the "Urks", the common criminals who could make life hell for the intellectuals and political prisoners. Wat never goes in for anti-Russian sentiment and in fact mentions the acts of kindness he received from ordinary Russian guards and even NKVD interrogators.

Wat, unfortunately, did not have the time to finish telling the story of his life to Milosz. The final chapter in the book is written by Wat's wife, Ola. In it she describes how Wat was befriended, and most probably saved, by an "Urk" into whose cell he was thrown when he was leading Polish (mostly exiled Polish-Jewish) resistance against the NKVD "passportization" campaign, in Kazakhstan in 1943, during which the aim was to force Poles to switch to Soviet Russian citizenship.

The last paragraph of Aleksander Wat's section of the book ends, "If it hadn't been for the kindness, the warmth that those people, those Orthodox Jews (in Kazakhstan), showed to me, a "meches", a converted Jew.... They didn't know whether I had been baptized or not. I never talked about it. But I wore a cross. Later on, when we were in revolt (against accepting Soviet passports) and were under arrest together, it was so hot that I took off my shirt. And yet I was the leader of those pious Jews in prison, me, a Jew with a cross around my neck."

In the years immediately after WWII, Wat's poetry became very influential among the younger Poles.

I place the book right up there, with Grossman's Life and Fate.… (plus d'informations)

Wat published this book of short stories in 1927. The Great War (not yet World War I) was over. Nazism had not yet started, and Stalin hadn't reached his murderous heights. Wat, according to his fascinating memoir, My Century, was a futurist and a dadaist, movements which, as far as I can tell, rejected traditional forms in an attempt to reflect the changes in the post-war world and distaste for bourgeois conceptions of art. In these stories, ideas play the central role, along with playfulness and satire, not character or plot.

For example, the title story, which is the last story in the volume, takes the idea that the devil has been put out of business by the modern world, and poor unemployed Lucifer goes around talking to people in various lines of work who illustrate for him why the devil is no longer needed. In the first story, "The Eternally Wandering Jew," Jews take over the Catholic church and start these new Catholics go on to oppress the now ex-Catholics in the same way the church and society formerly oppressed Jews. In "Kings in Exile," the former crowned heads of Europe are exiled to a remote island, where they attempt to recreate the world as they had known, and end up regressing through the stages of civilization. In one of my favorite stories, "The History of the Last Revolution in England," a soccer ball intrudes on a fight between the revolutionaries and the military, and they end up setting themselves up as soccer teams instead. In several of the stories, such as "Has Anyone Seen Pigeon Street?," Wat turns the idea of reality on its head -- with a trick at the end.

In some ways the stories are prescient. Although the worst horrors of the 20th century, horrors that ended up enveloping Wat, were yet to happen, a reader (or maybe only a reader now, who knows what happened next), can feel something ominous hanging over some of the stories. They can be playful, but they are serious, and they don't embrace the modernity they represent.

Wat musing on history and the future:

"Does it always have to be true in human history that the simple, safe, small, insignificant, worthless things excite more passion, kindle more courage, animosity, and heroism; arouse more interest and encourage greater effort than than the dangerous, harmful, great, dignified, deadly things? So be it -- we will say with great solemnity. If that is how things really are, we should be happy, for there are so many harmful and explosive and annihilating things that one should wish that humanity should devote as little attention to them as possible." From "The History of the Last Revolution in England," p. 37.

A quote I appreciated as an editor:

" 'Here I am to offer you my collaboration,' he said to the editor. 'I know all the secrets of creation, and I will reveal things to you no one else knows.'

'Why, that's impossible,' the editor replied. 'We know everything already. To know everything is our raison d'ȇtre. As it is, we have more contributors than subscribers. Maybe some other time.'" From "Lucifer Unemployed," p. 95.

Wat the poet making fun of poets and language:

"Poets and snobs congregated here: poets and snobbery go together as nicely as a thrown rock and ripples in water. This is the place where the wisemen who sucked wisdom out of the pacifier of words got together. What a shame! What a shame that for so long we have lacked a nurse of revelation! Words are tubercular, syphilitic, and preserve in their countless tissues swarming colonies of ambiguous microbes. By means of the same words some pave the way for European Buddhism, others propagate Orthodoxy and Catholicism. The latter are blood brothers to the inventors of deadly dynamite, all of course in the name of pacifism. And even if one finds healthy words in some out-of-the-way place, words securely fastened to the earth, even then poets would unchain them and punch them into the empty, vacant sky. What a shame! What a shame! And it's not as if they were mad dogs. They were only the colored bubbles of words." From "Lucifer Unemployed," pp. 105-106

I had mixed feelings about this book. I admired Wat's language, his wit, and his ideas, but I found it hard to get into the stories themselves.… (plus d'informations)

Part prison/internal exile memoir, part intellectual history, this compelling and moving book is most fundamentally an exploration of ethics, human dignity, and religious struggle in the face of the horrors of Stalinism, Nazism, and the second world war. Born in 1900, Wat was the son of assimilated, intellectual Warsaw Jews who first became a futurist/dadist poet in the 1920s and, starting at the end of the decade, flirted with communism as the editor of The Literary Monthly. Arrested by the Poles, he was jailed for the first time, but not for long. Later, he rejected communism, largely because of the people who were executed (although he continued to be called a "Jewish communist")." When the Nazis invaded Poland, he and his wife, Ola, and son fled to L'wow, but became separated, although they did eventually find each other. After some time in L'wow, Wat was arrested by the Soviets and began his journey through a variety of prisons, including Moscow's notorious Lubyanka, before winding up "free" in Alma-Ata and the neighboring town of Ili.

The book is based on a series of lengthy interviews with Wat conducted by fellow Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz in Berkeley and Paris in the mid-1960s, shortly before Wat's death; he was in extreme pain even during the interviews and ultimately chose to commit suicide. Thus, except for two chapters which Wat had the opportunity to edit and make more literary, the reader is hearing Wat's voice as he talked to Milosz. And what a voice it is -- perceptive, informed, rigorously honest about human strengths and failings (including his own), unsentimental, at times prejudiced (but aware of that prejudice, e.g., the idea that Poles are superior to Russians, especially "Asian" Russians), warm, and often poetic.

The early part of the book depicts the literary and political scene in Warsaw in the 1920s and 1930s and was filled with the names of Polish and other intellectuals; this was a little heavy going for someone unfamiliar with that scene (although there is a very helpful list of people mentioned at the end of my NYRB edition). But the story picked up as the war started and the Wats fled. Wat's descriptions of the people he met in various prisons, the horrific conditions in many of them, how to adapt to prison life, the different types of interrogators, how bedbugs behave, the different kinds of lice, and much more are both spare and detailed, fascinating and profoundly depressing. Wat was very acute at picking up signs from people and hypothesized that his interrogator in the Lubyanka was no longer interested in his "crime" but was instead picking his brain about the Polish literary and intellectual scene in anticipation of the Soviets taking over Poland in the future. In prison, he worried terribly about what had happened to his family, engaged in in-depth conversations with other intellectuals, pondered (as all do) who are the informers, and underwent a religious experience in which he saw "the devil in history" and converted to Catholocism. When the Germans approached Moscow, the Lubyanka was evacuated and Wat was sent to a variety of prisons further east. Ultimately released, although barely alive, he traveled to Alma-Ata (despite not having papers to go there) to try to find Ola and his son; after heroic efforts, he did.. Everyone was desperately hungry, struggling to find food. Through connections with the delegation of the Polish government (in exile in London) in Alma-Ata, Wat was able for a time to find some work and some access to supplies the delegation received from foreign sources, but it was a very hand-to-mouth existence both there and in the smaller town of Ili where they wind up. The book ends, because the interviews ended, but the NYRB edition includes an excerpt from Ola Wat's memoirs which describes Wat's role in resisting the Soviet government's efforts to force Soviet passports on Polish citizens in Ili, and both their experiences in prisons, hers more terrifying than his.

The best part of this book is Wat's voice, his warmth, his perception, and his ceaseless self-evaluation. But almost equally fascinating is the varied cast of characters who pass through Wat's life, from Warsaw intellectuals to urks (Russian criminals), from NKVD officers with aristocratic manners to people from poorer walks of life who help him (or despise him), from people going mad from imprisonment to people who somehow learn to live with it. One of the interesting aspects is that everyone is acutely aware not only of each other's social status within the community of the cell, but also of their ethnicity or national background. In prison and elsewhere, Jews gravitate to other Jews, Poles to other Poles, and so on, and Wat is quick to point out if someone has a Mongol-type face, or looks like a Kazakh. This makes the challenge of the Stalinist effort to make all the various nationalities "Soviet" come alive. Finally, I found Wat's thoughts about such varied topics as the similarities between communism and Nazism, how to talk to interrogators, nighttime conversations between a former Polish cavalry captain and an Ukrainian peasant based on their shared love of animals, literary works and people, religion and the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, endlessly fascinating.… (plus d'informations)