Diary 1954

Translators’ Introduction

vii Translators’ Introduction In 1954 a Polish writer, having survived World War II and finding himself and his country confronted by the Soviet-imposed regime in Poland, decided to write a diary to record and reflect on his daily life under communism. Thirty-three-year-old Leopold Tyrmand was already known in Poland as a provocative journalist, a wit, a member of Warsaw’s intellectual society, “spiritual father” of the bikiniarze (hipsters in colorful ties and socks), and the former president of the Warsaw Jazz Club. Alienated by communism, identified as an ideological enemy by the regime, and deprived of his livelihood, as well as of a voice in the affairs of the nation, he struggled to find a way to survive and, what’s more, to “be himself” when that was exactly what the regime would not allow. Tyrmand’s Diary, which covers just the first three months of 1954, provides a snapshot of life under communism less than a year after Stalin’s death and two years before the official launch in Moscow of de-Stalinization. Cleareyed , sharp-tongued, scathingly funny, occasionally despairing, Tyrmand deserves a place next to Czesław Miłosz, Arthur Koestler, Ryszard Kapuściński, and Václav Havel as an incisive analyst of the fantastical experiment that was Soviet communism. However, unlike Miłosz, Koestler, and Kapuściński, Tyrmand was never a supporter of communism. Quite to the contrary, he openly rejected it, and his account is unique for its uncompromising stance, highly personal point of view, and razor wit. Like Havel, but much earlier, the wellspring of his opposition was a Herculean personal effort to live his own truth while surrounded by lies. The many memoirs and diaries from the Nazi and Stalinist eras that were published from the 1950s to the 1970s typically came from those who survived the innermost circles of hell—Auschwitz and the Soviet Gulag. Eli Wiesel, Primo Levi, Varlam Shalamov, Evgenia Ginzburg, and Nadezhda Mandelstam come to mind. More recently, diaries and memoirs of those who survived on the margins of these great and terrible historic times are being published and provide different insights. Victor Klemperer’s diaries I Shall Bear Witness and To The Bitter End, covering the years 1933–1941 and 1942–1945 (published in English in 1998 and 1999), Jochen Hellbeck’s Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin (2006), Orlando Figes’s The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (2007), and Erica L. Tucker’s Remembering Occupied Warsaw: Polish Narratives of World War II (2011) all reflect and advance a more recent interest among historians in daily life, the construction of personal identity, and the history of emotion. Tyrmand does so as well, but once again his savage humor makes him stand out. Tyrmand’s strong revulsion to that filth and neglect which have “become a symbol of communism” for his generation (January 15) has led some to accuse the Diary of objecting to the system on merely aesthetic and civilizational grounds—a “hedonistic protest” in which “there is not a single word about the exiles, trials, Tito, Korea, spies, torture in prisons.”1 One must ask if those who have said so have read the book—since each of these issues does appear in it, and rather more than once. Of course there is no in-depth discussion of the Stalin-Tito conflict or an account of the Korean War, but then the Diary is a diary. Political trials of the regime’s opponents, great and small, famous and unknown, were written about as they, not infrequently, impinged on the author’s life and thoughts.2 As for the communist methods of persuading the unpersuaded, especially the “captive audience,” he did describe them in some detail.3 A memorable scene springs to mind when Tyrmand told his young girlfriend to stop whistling cheerfully as their bus passed by the ominous Ministry of Public Security (March 6). When Tyrmand says that “communism is just a Golem: sky-high, it’s true, but made of clay and filth,” it is not just the physical dirt that he refers to (January 16). The Diary offers other major insights into the nature and weaknesses of communism that have been borne out by later events. Tyrmand was quick to realize that the system was ossified and fundamentally unreformable, unable to “break free of its monolithic nature, and become what it is not” (January 15). He stuck to this view also after the 1956...