The High Wall Reconsidered

18 januari 2006 1.

Some seventeen years ago, in the last days of the senile ‘real socialism’ that, at the time, seemed to be everlasting, especially after the crackdown on Solidarity and placing of Poland under martial law, a prominent Polish writer, Adam Zagajewski, articulated a question that looked like pure rhetoric, with little if any relevance to the immediate reality.

“What would happen,” Zagajewski wrote, “if one day – one fine day – Poland regained its political freedom? Would that wonderful spiritual tension that characterizes Poland’s quite numerous and democratic elite simply disappear? Would the churches become empty? Would poetry become the staple of none but a bored handful of experts, as it has in happy Western countries? Would film become just another branch of the entertainment industry? Would all the things that have emerged in Poland as a response to the dangerous challenge of totalitarianism – things that have been protected from flood, rescued from destruction, and even raised above danger, as if upon a high wall – cease to exist the very day that challenge disappeared?”

In 1984 (what a nice year!) – when Zagajewski produced his essay, very few writers in Eastern Europe expected probably that they would have to answer this question within their life-span, in the very nearest future. By and large, the answer came to be ‘yes’. Freedom has a price, as do ‘democracy’, ‘normalization’, ‘the return to Europe’ and many other nice things that East European intellectuals dreamed about in their kitchens and studios for decades.

Still, as a Ukrainian writer, I cannot answer ‘yes’ to this question unequivocally. Not only because the ‘challenges of totalitarianism’ are still quite feasible in my country, and the way to ‘democracy’, ‘Europe’, and ‘normalization’ is quite remote. There is something else that makes my own and my colleagues’ position with regard to ‘literature and life’ highly ambivalent and ambiguous, if not schizophrenic.

On the one hand, we have always praised ‘art for art’s sake’ and stressed the writer’s independence from any social and political duties, that is from the propagandist role imposed on writers by the Communist party. We were quite simply fed up with that and strove to escape from the dubious requirement of ‘public service’ on behalf of the mythical ‘working class’ and notorious ‘world revolution’. Yet, on the other hand, we have never been able to completely ignore the social context and to find a refuge in an ivory tower. Not only because the Party did not tolerate such a stance (“Whoever is not with us, is against us” – you know this way of the reasoning), but also because we wrote in Ukrainian – a language that, for decades, had been forbidden, despised, marginalized, and brought eventually to the edge of extinction. There was at least one social/political duty the Ukrainian writer had to accept, however a-social and a-political he or she might have been: to rescue an endangered language whose eventual disappearance would have certainly made the whole writer’s life meaningless. And there was at least one, very important, part of the world the Ukrainian writer had to care for – his or her language.

This engagement still has multiple implications. Would it suffice to write good books to rescue the language? Can one’s endangered language be rescued if other endangered languages (species, human beings, the whole world) are not?

I don’t know whether literature can rescue the world or whatever. I’m not so sure whether it can be rescued at all. But we should certainly try to do what we can – to build a “high wall”, as Zagajewski put it, or just to build something rather than to destroy.


2.

I happened to be born in the same city as Adam Zagajewski, although we live now in different countries and write in different languages. The city is called Lviv in Ukrainian, Lvov in Russian, Lwow in Polish, and Lemberg in German. On the medieval maps it’s called Leopolis – Leo, or Lev, was a beloved son of the Ukrainian duke, Daniel, who founded the city some 800 years ago.

In 1940s the Russians came with their favourite business – liberating their neighbours – and Zagajewski, then a minor, escaped with his parents further westward. I was born a bit later and was allowed to go to the West only in the 1990s, when the Russians withdrew, and escape ceased to be my priority.

In 1984, maybe the same day as Zagajewski was writing his “High Wall”, I was sitting with friends in Stary Lviv, one of many nice cafés in the old town, and talking gloomily about the new authorities’ crackdown on ‘Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists’ – a generic term for everybody who dared to expose any sort of commitment to things Ukrainian. The atmosphere was suffocating, Russification loomed large, no light at the end of the tunnel was foreseeable. One of us, a bit older than the others (and therefore respected as a ‘guru’), turned his face to the large, wall-size window and brought our mournful complaints to an end with a brief question: “Do you think, folks, that this city can be Sovietized? Look at this architecture, these streets – can they ever become Soviet?”

Right, the Soviets had to destroy Lviv, and Tallinn, and Riga completely, like Koenigsberg. Only then would the thousands of migrants brought from Russia feel unchallenged in the new places – as in the capital of Belarus, Minsk, or the capital of Crimea, Simferopol.

It was hardly anything new for me because much earlier, as a teenager, I had read The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, and I remembered what can happen to people who come from remote places to a completely new environment.


3.

My guru died a few years before the Soviet Union collapsed and, curiously, as time passes his face merges in my memory with the bearded face of Adam Zagajewski – despite the fact that I met the latter only once, very briefly. Zagajewski, I feel, has completed the wall laid by my friend. In the early 70s he gave me an old-fashioned book by somebody called Albert Camus, entitled The Plague. It was the Polish translation – because the Ukrainian one appeared only two decades later. I read it carefully, in order to understand the language I was not quite fluent in, and found an excellent explanation for everything we were doing.

“I don’t know where this plague comes from and where it takes off to,” the novel’s hero, Dr Rieux, says. “I don’t know whether my healing helps anybody, whether it matters at all. But I’m a doctor and I must do what I’m supposed to do.”

I wonder if there is any better answer.


This article was written in 2001.