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Jerzy Andrzejewski (1909-1983) |
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Polish novelist, short-story writer, and political dissident, whose most famous work is Popiol i diament (1948, Ashes and Diamonds). It dealt with the conflict between two visions of the world in Poland, some years before "a people's republic" was established in 1947. Jerzy Andrzejewski's novel was translated into more than 20 languages and adapted for screen in 1958 by the director Andrzej Wajda. Two of Andrzejewski's contemporaries, Czesław Miłosz (1911-2004), his close friend, and Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012), received the Nobel Prize for Literature. "What lay ahead, what sort of life, what future? The worst years had passed but now, at the beginning of a new day, it looked as if so much had been destroyed, so much laid waste, so much crushed down and afflicted, that the destructive force, as though yet unappeased, was encroaching upon the present, poisoning even the future, in which she placed her hopes during the worst periods." (in Ashes and Diamonds, translated by David J. Welsh, 1965, p. 23) Jerzy Andrzejewski was born in Warsaw into a middle-class
family. His father was a grocer and mother the daughter of a provincial
doctor. Andrzejevski studied Polish literature at the University of
Warsaw, without taking a degree, and contributed to the right-wing literary weekly
Prosto z mostu. He had started to write in his early
boyhood. Andrzejewski's Drogi nieuniknione (1936), a
volume of short stories, and Lad secra (1938, Order of the Heart), published in Prosto
z mostu, showed the influence of such French Catholic writers as François Mauriac and Georges
Bernanos.
At that time, he was tall, thin young man with horn-rimmed glasses,
whose stories appeared in a right-wing weekly, held in low esteem in
the radical literary circles. Lad secra (Order of the Heart) received the award of the Polish
Academy of Literature. Andzejewski was called the most gifted Catholic
writer of his country, a "Polish Mauriac." ('Andrzeyevski, George [Jerzy],' in World Authors 1950-1970, ed. by
John Wakeman, 1975, p. 60) During WW II Andrzejewski was a member of the Resistance movement, becoming a moral leader of the Warsaw writers. With Czesław Miłos, he worked on the underground publication of Milosz's Poems (Wiersze). This handmade book came out under the pseudonym Jan Syruc. Noc (1945, Night), Andrzejewski's collection of short stories, dealt with the war and occupation. The collection contained the novella 'Wielki tydzien'
(Holy Week), written in the spring of 1943 and adapted for the screen
by Andrzej Wajda some fifty decades later. "There is probably no way Andrzejewski's
work could be changed to make it politically correct enough to appeal
to a general Polish viewership. This was a film that invited itself to
be made but, at the same time, a film for which there was no natural
audience, a contradiction that led to its inevitably disappointing
performance at the box office." (Holy Week: A Novel of the Warsaw
Ghetto Uprising, introduction and commentary by Oscar E. Swan, foreword
by Jan Gross, 2007, p. 144) Structured around the plight
of a young Jewish woman, Irena Lilien, the novella dealt with emotional
and moral
responses towards the Jews and saving her as the Warsaw Ghetto burns.
Irena understands that she is doomed, but she also prophesies that the
Poles will soon be killing each other for ideological reasons. This
controversial work was one of the earliest Polish literary attempts to
approach the Holocaust. In occupied Poland helping Jews was punished by death. In addition, the predominat attitude towards Jews was hostile; for a long period they had been the main targets of nationalists. Andrzejewski himself helped Jews in hiding at the risk of his own life. Later, during the communist period, the 1968 purge drove more than half the Jews then living in Poland out of the country. After decades silence, in the 1980s, writers began to examine Polish-Jewish relations. With Popiól i diament (Ashes and Diamonds) Andrzejewski captured the agony of the war-torn generation. Its title and motto, how a new society can be created, was taken from Cyprian Norwid's (1821-1883) drama Za kulisami. The novel covers three days in May 1945 in the district city of Ostrowiec, where old ideals collide with the rise of a new government. Wajda's celebrated film version from 1958 completed the director's informal trio begun with A Generation (Pokolonie, 1955) and Sewer / They Loved Life (Kanal, 1957). One of the characters says: "But nowadays I've met so many people who broke down and failed this or that test that I don't attach much importance to what a man thinks of himself. Until a man faces the test he can deceive himself endlessly." Fragments of the novel appeared in 1947. When Andrzejewski revised the work in 1954, he wrote key passages according to the rules of socialist realism. The protagonist is a young Polish nationalist and partisan, Maciek Chelmicki, a member of the anticommunist underground Home Army (Armia Krajowa). His acts of terrorism bring him in conflict with the new social order. Maciek is assigned to assassinate a new Communist district secretary, Szczuka, who has returned from Russia. Maciek and Szczuka, both sympathetically portrayed, form a contrasting pair – the young man representing the past and cynicism, the old man the future and purposefulness. As Maciek waits in a hotel, he meets a young woman, Krystyna. She works at the bar, where people celebrate the end of the war and drown bad memories in liquor. Maciek and Krystyna both like violets, and they spend some time together. Maciek shoots Szczuka in the street, but in the morning he is in turn fatally wounded by soldiers. Maciek dies on a giant scrap-heap – an obvious symbol. Highly dramatic, realistic in detail, and full of memorable scenes, such as Maciek setting fire to liquor in glasses, and Maciek and Krystyna conversing in a ruined church building, where a figure of Christ hangs upside down. After the war Andrzejewski joined the Writers' Union. The
fairly liberal cultural atmosphere did not last long. Early in 1949 the
Union of Polish Writers adopted the Soviet model for socialist realism.
In 1949 Andrzejewski was elected president of the Polish Writers'
Union. He produced some books in the Socialist Realist vein, and
defended in his journalism the Communist rule in Poland. Andrzejewski left his first wife soon after their wedding in
1934. His companion from 1941 to 1943 was Wanda
Wertenstein, who gained prominence as a film critic and screenwriter;
she was partly the model for Irena Lilien in Holy Week.
Another
model was Janina Askenazy, the daughter of Simon Askenazy (1866-1935),
a historian. In 1945 Andrzejewski married his second wife, Maria
Abgarowicz. They occupied an apartment on Nowiniarska Street, which
looked out on the walls of the ghetto. Later they moved to a house in
the Northern Warsaw suburb of Bielany. From 1952 to 1954 Andrzejewski was editor of a leading cultural
weekly, Przeglad kulturalny, and from 1952 to 1957 he was a
member of the Polish parliament. Wojna skuteczna (1952), which satirized the positive hero of the Socialist realism, atytracted the attention of censors. The
banned short story 'Wielki lament papierowej glowy' (1956, Great Lament
of the Paper Head), which satirized the emptiness of speeches at mass
meetings, circulated in mimeographic form until it appeared in print. Andrzejewski (as "Alpha, the Moralist") was portrayed by Czeslaw Milosz in The Captive Mind (1953), which revealed the problems of intellectuals living under Stalinism. Milosz described his colleague as a man with a "barometer-like sensitivity to the moral opinion of his environment . . . But like the majority of his friends, he was anxious for far-reaching social reforms and for a people's government." (The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz, translated from the Polish by Jane Zielonko, 1981, pp. 89-90) In protest against censorship (it was not so all‐encompassing as in the
Soviet Union) Andrzejewski
resigned in 1957 from the party. As a result he lost his job. In the 1970s he had a weekly column in the literary journal Literatura. Disillusioned in the policy of the General Secretary Władysław Gomułka, Andrzejewski moved towards more
or less open criticism of the Communist regime, starting from the novel The
Inquisitors (tr. 1960), a philosophical parable on the autocratic
rule of a totalitarian ideology. Primarily following the thoughts of a
young Dominican, it documents how his personality is changing as he
adopts the mind of his teacher, Torquemada. Between 1968 and 1971, Andrzejewski was reportedly denied publication in his own country. He protested against the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the closure of a production of Adam Mickiewicz's play Dziady (Forefathers) at the National Theatre in Warsaw as "anti-Soviet." Originally it was intended to be a part of the celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution. Andrzejewski's characters are often defeated by circumstances, or forces outside of the control of themselves. The Appeal (1968) attacked directly the police state; it was not published in Poland. The protagonist is Jan Konieczy, a middle-aged paranoiac and faithful supporter of the United Workers Party. He is too conscientious and uncorrupted in his work and is shut up in an institution, where he appeals to the First Secretary, whom he trusts. Andrzejewski seems to say that sometimes paranoiacs are actually persecuted, but only an insane person can truly believe in the totalitarian system. "I consider myself a very Polish product in many ways, i.e. a – and simplifying it a little – a person generally more immune to great hardships than to the petty troubles of everyday life. Two periods in my life I consider the most intense: the second World War and the period preceding the so-called 'Polish October.' I lived through two great spiritual adventures: in my youth, the Roman Catholic Church; and in my middle age the experience of Marxism." (Jerzy Andrzejewski, in World Authors 1950-1970, edited John Wakeman, 1975, p. 60) In general, Andrzejewski's career reflected the typical
development of an eastern European intellectual after World War II,
from the initial support of the Communist policies to the later more or
less openly expressed disappointment. The widening gulf between reality
and official truths led Andrzjeweski to such explorations of mass
movements and culture as Bramy raju (1960, The Gates of
Paradise), focusing on the Children's Crusade of 1212, and the
satirical Idzie skaczac po górach
(1963, A Sitter for a Satyr),
in which Andrzejewski used a stream-of-consciousness style. The
Picasso-like protagonist is Antonio Ortiz, a celebrated artist and
genius (an "old fox, clever goat"), who is surrounded by women, art
dealers, and sycophants. He
thinks he has lost his creativity, but returns to painting after the
stimulation of young love and energy. Reviewers noted that the novel,
lacking dots, commas and capital letters resembled the natural flow of
thoughts. Andrzejewski's ambiguous and experimental use of language was
a problem for the authorities, and
several of his works were left unpublished. Miazga
(1969), Andrzejewski's most important novel
from late 1960s, is a portrait of modern Polish
intelligentsia; it did not appear officially until 1981. An internal
report described the novel as "descending in many places to the level
of tawdry anti-Soviet and anti-Communist lampoon and trivial
scandal-mongering". Moreover, this was an indication of the author's
"creative decline and psychological imbalance." ('Jerzy Andrzejewski: Polish novelist, 1909-1983' by John Michael Bates, in Censorship: A World Encyclopedia, edited by Derek Jones, Volume 1-4, 2001, p. 57) Andrzejewski, Kazimierz Brandys, Tadeuz Konwicki, Wlodzimierz Odojewski, and several other authors printed their works in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the literary quarterly Zapis (1979-82), or in the emigré publishers. In 1979 Andrzejewski helped found the workers' defence committee (KOR) to aid families of striking workers, who were jailed or dismissed from their jobs. Andrzejewski died on April 19/20, 1983, in Warsaw. His novel on the homosexual Roman emperor Heliogabalus was left unfinished. For further reading: The Captive Mind by C. Milosz (1953); Portraits of Contemporary Polish Writers by Mutuszewski (1959); 'On the Evils of Fanatic Belief' by S.L. Shneiderman in Eastern Europe, Oct (1960); The History of Polish Literature by Czeslaw Milosz (1969, 2nd edition 1983); 'On the History of Ashes and Diamonds' by J.Krzyzanowski , in Slavic and East European Journal, 15 (1971); Andrzejewski by Waclaw Sadkowski (1973); 'Andrzeyevski, George [Jerzy],' in World Authors 1950-1970, edited by John Wakeman (1975); A History of Polish Literature by Julian Krzyzanowski (1978); Modernist Trends in Twentieth-Century Polish Fiction by Stanislaw Eile (1996); 'Jerzy Andrzejewski: Polish novelist, 1909-1983' by John Michael Bates, in Censorship: A World Encyclopedia, edited by Derek Jones, Volume 1-4 (2001); Jerzy Andrzejewski: Przyczynek do biografii prywatnej by Anna Synoradzka-Demadre (2017); Polish Literature and the Holocaust: Eyewitness Testimonies, 1942-1947 by Rachel Feldhay Brenner (2019) Selected works:
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