Marek Nowakowski: Everyday Life under Communism

Marek Nowakowski: Everyday Life under Communism ANTONI LIBERA Marek Nowakowski, born in 1935, is one ofthe most popular writers in Poland. He began his writing career early: his first work, a collection of short stories, appeared in 1958; and he has published over twenty books since. Mainly a prose writer, Nowakowski has authored both short and long stories; he has written about 300 ofthese so far. His works carry significant dramatic power, a quality resulting in frequent adaptations for stage plays and film scripts. But Nowakowski also channels his dramatic talent and ambition directly into radio plays. He has written about twenty of these, most of them performed in West Germany. In all of his works, as a skilful observer of people's lives, a master portraitist of various national characters and situations, he presents the reality of contemporary Poland. The theme of Nowakowski's stories has undergone change from the very beginning until most recently. At first, taking an interest in the margins of· society, he depicted people and events from the criminal world in narratives set in Warsaw, devastated after the Second World War, and its suburbs. His protagonists were petty thieves, loafers, derelicts. Nowakowski's interest in this social group stemmed from his resistance not only to Communist propaganda, but also to the socialist realism that was a compulsive trend in literature of the 1950s. The propaganda sketched the country's situation as a peaceful idyll, and socialist realist literature painted a similarpicture. Ofcourse the image, largely false, clashed with reality; and Nowakowski, wishing to remain faithful to the truth, would not produce fabrications. Yet it was not easy to tell the whole truth about post-war Poland: censorshipwas inJull control, and a breach could result in imprisonment. Under the circumstances, ifone wanted to speak the truth, one was restricted to subjects which the state authorities regarded with indifference. Until 1956, such subjects simply did not exist: the Stalin regime offered no choice. Either one wrote untruthful pieces, ridiculous 60 ANTONI LIBERA in their naIvety, works which praised Communism and the current state authorities, or one had to give up writing completely. This situation underwent some change after the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Party, in the so-called "thaw times," when the state authorities stopped interfering in some fields of life and left a small margin of freedom to writers. Some writers made use of this opportunity by producing works critical of the recent past. Nowakowski did notjoin this group, because he was convinced that as long as Poland lived under Communism imposed by the Soviet Union, an honest account of the period - labelled by official propaganda as a time of "mistakes and distortions" - was impossible. He believed that works critical of Stalinist times continued to be false: they failed to show the evil and absurdity of Communism. Instead, they depicted the inappropriate implementation of Communist principles, thus suggesting that the idea itself was good and beautiful. Nowakowski chose another way. He addressed himself to small groups, distant from politics, whom the state authorities considered nonrepresentative of the socialist country's landscape. The choice turned out to be rewarding. A detailed description of life and mentality at the margins of society, even in the criminal world, can say a great deal about contemporary Poland. In the course of time, Nowakowski's horizons broadened as he took an interest in almost all social groups: clerks, intelligentsia, tradesmen, small businessmen, country folk. With spot insights, he created general images. By inventing small and apparently innocent images oflife, he escaped suspicion of criticizing the system. State authorities regarded Nowakowski as a specialist in second-rate social phenomena, the folklore of the suburbs, and people who did not create history. Consequently, Nowakowski was classified as a representative of so-called "small-scale realism." Both the evaluation and the classification reveal a paradox typical ofthe Communist authorities: on the one hand, the authorities claim to represent the working masses, i.e., workers and peasants; but on the other hand, they treat the experiences and problems of those people with contempt, finding them of insignificant importance, marginal, even bizarre. Operating in a fictitious world of their own creation, the Communist authorities place...