The Descendant of Rashi in the Lubyanka: The Metaphysical Identity Transformations of Aleksander Wat in Mój wiek

I believe today that the only verifiable criterion is the face of the poet, or his personality and destiny—a fact which, unfortunately, is alien to poetry. The only palpable guarantee is sincerity—thus, a moral quality. This is the price paid for poetry, a biographical question which, according to the critics, should not be of interest to anyone.

aleksander wat¹

Thanks above all to Mój wiek ('My Century'), the 'spoken memoirs' narrated to Czesław Miłosz at Berkeley, transcribed by Wat's wife Ola, and edited by Lidia Ciołkoszowa, Aleksander Wat was, and perhaps still is, one of the most widely read and most studied authors in Poland. In the 1980s Mój wiek achieved the sales of a true best-seller. As Małgorzata Baranowska wrote, 'the Polish public dreamt of the emergence of a powerful voice which would finally denounce how terrible communism and its poisoned conscience had been'.² Wat, a writer, translator, and poet, returned to Poland in 1946 from three and a half years of Soviet prisons followed by exile in Kazakhstan. He had been a communist, and had therefore known directly the totalitarian devil, but in Mój wiek he now presented himself to his readers as a zealous Catholic; moreover, he was not only a Jew but a descendant of the most noble lineage of rabbis in Europe. It is difficult to imagine anyone who could better describe the great tragedy of the twentieth century to his fellow patriots and the world. And he could not have found a better listener or vehicle than Czesław Miłosz, not only an internationally recognized poet but a man with a 'spontaneously theological' spirit, as Stefan Chwin has written,³ tormented just as much as his interlocutor by the question of the origins of evil.

The unexpected encounter of two such powerful personalities led to the birth of a totally unique work. Mój wiek is a true encyclopedia of the drama of the left-wing intellectual and an indispensable text for scholars of communism in Europe, as well as of Polish and Soviet literature in the inter-war period.⁴ Mój wiek is also the account of a passionate love story between the narrator and his wife Ola, bound together, despite distances of thousands of miles and unimaginable obstacles, by an absolute relationship, by a sort of 'shaman-like' connection, as Wat himself described it. Mój wiek is also, or perhaps first and foremost, a literary work of great scope and power. Several passages—such as the 'demoniacal story' of the arrest of Polish men of letters, Wat among them, in the Aronson restaurant in Lviv in January 1940; the music of Bach heard on the rooftops of the Lubyanka prison in Moscow in April the following year; and the laugh of the devil echoing in the prison at Saratov—are, in my opinion, some of the greatest pages of twentieth-century literature. Moreover, as Tomas Venclova has written, Mój wiek is 'one of the most important works of phenomenology and sociology of prison life ever written'.⁵

An autobiography, a novel, a history and critique of culture and politics, a sociological or phenomenological work: the difficulty of classifying Mój wiek is clearly felt also by Wat himself. In an oft-quoted passage, he wonders: 'What is it that I recount? Not an autobiography, because I do not even mention a series of questions that are very important in my life, or in the life of most people, namely eroticism or sex … Is it perhaps a memoir? If so, I would have to be not just a witness but also a much greater participant in historical events than I have been.'⁶

The answer to the narrator's question as to the object and form of his narrative is expressed implicitly just a few lines later, because Wat, after reiterating that he has not touched upon questions concerning eroticism, goes on immediately to...