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Chapter four The Guilty Afterlife of the Soma And who among you, the living, Has seen death without feeling guilty? —Tadeusz Borowski One of the particularly intensive periods of hermeneutic and artistic preoccupation with apocalypticism, intermingled with forebodings of the looming historical catastrophe, occurred in the 1930s, when diverse forms of cultural and historical pessimism came to the fore across various disciplines. In 1930, D. H. Lawrence wrote his last book, Apocalypse (published posthumously in 1931), which underscored St. John’s desire for revenge and power in his Revelation. Albert Schweitzer’s study, Die Mystik des Apostels Paulus (The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, 1930), triggered a new interest in apocalyptic eschatology. Also in the 1930s in Poland, Bruno Schulz worked on his only novel, Mesjasz (The Messiah), while Szymon Aszkenazy, a prominent professor of Polish history, made strikingly accurate prophecies of World War II’s destruction.1 In those years, Walter Benjamin pondered over his messianic– materialist theses for what became known as “Über den Begriff der Geschichte ” (On the Concept of History), a text he completed in the early months of 1940. These simultaneous but unrelated, independently conceived ideas within theology, literature, and philosophy of history, which expressed more than mere apprehensions born from Zeitgeist, came to an end, at least in Eastern Europe, in 1939. By then, the future had become the present. In the 1930s, the sense of looming catastrophe also became a major concern for the young poet, Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004), and his colleagues from the poetic group Żagary in Wilno.2 When the German army invaded and occupied Poland, it was as if this scenario of annihilation were unfolding according to the apocalyptic vision imagined in both Miłosz’s Poemat o czasie zastygłym (The Poem on Frozen Time)3 and other poems written before the war. Miłosz, who spent most of the war years in Warsaw, did not join the underground army; he nonetheless 72 on waste and matter remained active in both the underground publishing scene and in organizing and participating in cultural events.4 This in no way implies that he was spared the trials and tribulations of the city’s civil population during the war. In 1944, as the Warsaw uprising was taking place,5 Miłosz and his family left the city. To Touch the Poem A steady stream of poetry volumes, essays, novels, correspondence, and interviews marked Miłosz’s laborious life. In one such volume of interviews, entitled Rozmowy polskie 1979–1998 (Polish Conversations 1979–1998), he reminisced about leaving Warsaw during the uprising. Besides the fact that it engaged yet another variation on the theme of manuscripts’ precarium, his tale about exit from Warsaw is worth noting here. It bears the classic characteristics of a war tale triggered by a chance development, and is permeated by the lasting shock of an unknown. Miłosz (2006, 782) recalls as follows: The uprising caught us unaware not at home, but in the streets. Everything was being shelled. We went not far away from the apartment house on Kielecka Street, where we lived and, during one of the pauses in the shelling my wife Janka went to the house for her mother who lived with us. She returned with her mother and brought the manuscripts of my poems. We exited only with what we had on us.6 The peculiarity of this understated narrative of the exodus of the extended Miłosz family has to do with its unsung heroine, the poet’s wife. The story raises questions destined to remain unanswered. Why didn’t the couple go together to pick up his mother-in-law and his manuscripts? Why did the poet entrust this mission to his wife? Among the manuscripts that Janina Miłosz took from their flat were some of the best lyrics the poet ever wrote: his wartime artistic contribution , including his poetic commentary on the annihilation of Jews. Later on, Miłosz recalled that he kept all his poems in a briefcase; undoubtedly among them were such implicating poems as “Campo dei Fiori” and “A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto.” Thus, during the family’s departure, the manuscripts were always with him, exposing him to huge personal risk.7 The poet’s return to Warsaw in the spring of 1945 forced him to confront the totality of the city’s destruction.8 Miłosz himself had not experienced this, although he did witness fighting in the ghetto...

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