Diary 1954

Preface

7 Preface The facts are as follows: – I wrote this diary over the first three months of 1954. – For twelve years, the handwritten notebooks lay at the bottoms of rarely opened drawers. – In 1956 (it’s obvious at what moment) the Universal Weekly1 published an excerpt from the diary—the only one that has appeared in print in Poland. – In 1965, after years of futile applications for a passport, I was finally going to the West in an oldish Opel. I hadn’t decided to emigrate, but I took the manuscript of the diary with me, hiding it, with the help of a trusted mechanic, near the differential. It was an unnecessary precaution; what the customs officials at the border crossing wanted to know was whether my novel Zły was going to be reprinted. After that, their attention was drawn to an antique candlestick on top in the first suitcase they opened. They kept the candlestick and wished me a good journey. – A few months later the notebooks were deposited at the editorial office of the Parisian Culture,2 in Maisons-Lafitte, where they gathered dust for another four years. – In 1968, when I chose freedom, the diary crossed the Atlantic and traveled with me from place to place for five years. Having settled down in New Canaan , Connecticut, I typed up the manuscript and prepared it for possible publication as a book. 1. In Polish: Tygodnik Powszechny, a lay Catholic journal of much importance. See a footnote for January 2. 2. In Polish: Kultura, a Polish émigré monthly published in Paris (except the first issue). 8 ˆ Diary 1954 – In 1974, the London News3 began to publish the diary in installments; the last one came out in 1978. Around half of the full text saw the light of day in emigration in this way. – The present book represents the entire diary, unchanged for editorial reasons , moral quandaries, political requirements, or concessions to friends and acquaintances. While I was working on the diary in Connecticut my main problem was: what to do with my judgments about people? Judgments of that sort become dated and no longer current, which doesn’t mean that they lose their aptness or inaptness . “If you live long enough, you’ll see everything,” as the Scandinavian saying goes, which means you just have to wait a while to come to ever newer and sometimes astonishing opinions. It’s obvious that the recording of daily news, moods, rumors, and information picked up on the fly is liable to misrepresentations and substantive factual errors—sometimes big ones, even distortions of the truth. Grappling with this problem, I decided not to change anything in the text—let it go on the historical record together with my poor vision, ignorance, carelessness, mistakes. However, judgments on individuals are another matter. This diary was written in relatively simple times. Communism was then a complex, but unequivocal, phenomenon; its apostles and practitioners were no more homogeneous mentally than anyone else, but fully understandable and sometimes crude. Already under Gomułka,4 communism lost its definition; it blurred into ambivalence and schism, camouflage, refinement, and perversion. Today in Europe, it’s far from obvious how to disarm and defeat a communist, especially a Polish one. While I was still in the country, during the decade after I wrote the diary, I’d occasionally open it and find something about someone about whom I had changed my mind, and thought differently. It troubled me that I had perhaps been judging ruthlessly, even savagely, people who over the years turned out to be different from what they had appeared to be, morally and mentally, in 1954. But these concerns were misleading, too: it was enough to wait a few more years, and it would all change again, as the knave who had been remolded by History into a sensitive and decent personality lapsed anew into the old sins of nature and character. Because life goes on until the end, as the ancient Greeks knew so well when they conceived of tragedy. They knew 3. In Polish: Wiadomości, an émigré weekly published in London from 1946 to 1981. 4. Władysław Gomułka (1905–1982) became in 1943 the leader of the Polish Workers’ Party (the communist party). From 1945 he was de facto leader of Poland until 1948, when he was replaced by B. Bierut and imprisoned from 1951 to the end of 1954. Brought back to power in October 1956, he persuaded Khrushchev...