SOURCE: "The Polish Complex," in The Polish Review, Vol. XXV, No. 1, 1980, pp. 98-110.

Tadeusz Konwicki, whose works only recently entered the American book market, hardly needs an introduction to his Polish readers but a few words about his literary career might be helpful to those who have not read his novels in the original language. As the author of many contemporary novels, producer and director of well-known movies, a winner of many international prizes and readers' plebiscites in Poland, Konwicki was among those writers whose names had been mentioned often enough to make him well known to many readers, viewers, and radio-listeners. He had been—and the past perfect tense used here is fully justified, since he had been in the limelight until 1976 but in the last three years his name has appeared in the Polish press only casually or only in some critical contexts such as Wlodzimierz Sokorski's press conference in March, 1978 meant to discredit the literary opposition in Poland. The reason for that "conspiracy of silence" was the publication of Konwicki's novel, The Polish Complex, which appeared in Zapis 3 of July, 1977, and subsequently a zapis, i.e., a black mark by the official censorship banning Konwicki's name from the Polish literary press. And since the novel has been reprinted in the West, in a series "Index on Censorship," and hopefully will appear in English translation, there seems to be a need to discuss it in some detail, to look at it from the historical and literary perspective, to devote some thought to its symptomatic features reflecting both Konwicki's own work and contemporary Polish literature at large.

It should be noted, however, that The Polish Complex is neither surprising nor exceptional, in certain aspects, when read as a part of Konwicki's work. It appears to be a logical consequence of the author's thirty years of creative work, a summary of many of his experiences and thoughts, a conclusion of many premises toward which Konwicki has gradually moved ever since 1948. Hence, it seems only proper first to discuss his novels, scenarios, and movies before The Polish Complex, and only later to elaborate the contents and significance of that particular novel.

The period of thirty years just mentioned began in 1948 when Konwicki wrote his first novel Rojsty (The Marshes) which was to wait another eight years, until October 1956, when the Polish thaw created an atmosphere more conducive to the publication of his novel. And although it was in the early 1950s when his name was first officially introduced with the publication of his unfinished novel Wladza (The Power), his actual work deserving a critical discussion has developed from Rojsty to The Polish Complex, leaving aside his works of the socialist-realist period as insignificant. They represented the results of all sorts of pressures hardly related to literature, and they should remain in bibliographical notes and in the sad history of the Stalinist period, together with hundreds of books written by young writers between 1949 and 1955. As much as they may interest a historian or a sociologist of literary movements, those books represent a testimony to the period of "mistakes and vitiations"—as Stalinism is officially called in Poland—although that particular term better applies to literature than to politics which was neither mistaken nor vitiated anything; quite to the contrary, it consistently followed the Stalinist program of pressure and terror.

The place Rojsty occupies in Konwicki's work is as important as its place in the history of contemporary Polish literature. Presenting a complex image of the experiences of a boy who joins the Polish guerrillas fighting against the Soviet occupation of the Wilno region in 1944, Konwicki has not only placed a firm foundation for the autobiographical character of all his later novels but also introduced in it all the basic motifs which would find their climax in The Polish Complex. One can find there, then, the problem of an overwhelming power of history over the fate of an individual, the guilt complex, the feeling of alienation, erotic frustrations, ideological misgivings, a lyrical image of the land of the childhood and the realization of a final loss of that land, irony and humor, satire and bitterness; all those motifs surfaced in that early novel. Its significance in the history of contemporary Polish fiction, on the other hand, lies in the fact that Rojsty represents the first, and so far the only artistic document of the anti-Soviet resistance in the eastern Polish territories in 1944–45, passed over in silence by official Polish history. Instead of depicting "the reactionary underground," Konwicki succeeded in presenting the tragedy and heroism of the young men who fought their forgotten war without any hope for either a victory, or even recognition, motivated by a deep patriotic duty to defend their country against the Russian invasion. One might parenthetically mention here that a novel, Graves Without Crosses, published by an Estonian writer, Arved Viirlaid, in Canada in 1972, has become an international bestseller thanks to an almost identical topic of resistance and fight against the Soviets in the Baltic states.

But the theme of resistance, presented by Konwicki in a satirical vain for psychological as well as historical reasons, gave way to some other problems probed by the author in his next novels. And although the motifs of the Soviet menace reappear in Sennik wspólczesny (1963, English tr.: A Dreambook for Our Time, 1970) and in Konwicki's movies, the land of his childhood, the Wilno region, will replace them in sharp contrast with the infernal images of life in central Poland after the war. Those contrasts are particularly strong in Wniebowstapienie (1967, The Ascension) and in Jak daleko stad, jak blisko (1972, How Far It Is From Here, How Near); a pure lyricism of Kronika wypadków milosnych (1974, A Chronicle of Love Affairs) and a nostalgic happy valley in Dziura w niebie (1959, A Hole in the Sky) are juxtaposed with a bitter, tragic overtone in Kalendarz i klepsydra (1976, A Calendar and an Hourglass) indicating a deep gap between those two worlds between which Konwicki's fiction has been stretched. Such a phenomenon is not entirely unique in contemporary Polish literature. Suffice it to list here the names of Kusniewicz, Stojowski, Auderska, or Buczkowski, Stryjkowski, and Iwaszkiewicz among the authors living in Poland, or Milosz, Odojewski, and Haupt among the writers in exile to see that contrast ever emerging and making it into a chapter in a "Great Book of Kresy" yet to be written. But none of those authors makes those problems as contrasting and as consequent as Tadeusz Konwicki.

Those problems, of course, reach much farther than literature alone. In spite of the official reports published in the Polish press about all sorts of "Polish Days" in Lithuania, Byelorussia, and Ukraine, the question of the Polish population there remains as tragic and painful as it has ever been. Cut off from Poland, forgotten, and exposed to the ever increasing Russification, the Poles left east of the river Bug represent one of the most tragic chapters in the post-war Polish history. And although Konwicki and the rest of the authors mentioned above keep returning to those territories in their fiction and memoirs, the official silence still prevails. The Communist authorities, having abandoned their countrymen thirty-five years ago, do not want to re-open the case once and for all solved by the Russians. Needless to say that Konwicki, who in the concluding scenes of Kalendarz i klepsydra presents such a process of Russification almost openly, has become quite an embarrassing author for the authorities, and their watchful eye has begun to scrutinize his work more and more closely. "The lost valley of childhood," writes a young Polish critic Jan Walc, "when seen from a distance seems to appear as a happy and bucolic one, and the protagonists return there, but then the causes which made them leave it before begin to appear with extreme harshness." And from there there is just one step to pass a judgment on those causes, a step made in The Polish Complex.

Another set of problems, perhaps less controversial for the censorship but certainly no less delicate to handle, is Konwicki's realism in presenting the realities of life in contemporary Poland. His realism, often hidden in a satirical form, often heightened to a symbolic vision, particularly evident in his scenarios and movies, leaves little doubt that Poland today is a police state, a country on the brink of moral collapse, a country populated with people in a desperate search for some valid set of values, for something permanent, or even a hope for the better future. Such a presentation of daily life in Poland is particularly striking when seen from a distance, e.g., by a foreign reader, but it seems almost certain that a reader in Poland who, after all, experiences those problems every day must also be painfully aware of the acuteness of Konwicki's image. And that fact, perhaps, accounts for voting Wniebowstapienie a book-of-the-year in a readers' plebiscite, while A Dreambook for Our Time enjoys an international reputation in many translations. And if Andrzejewski's novel Ashes and Diamonds remains the most dramatic literary document of the Communist seizure of power, the novels written by Konwicki represent a similarly important document of the 1960s and 1970s in Poland.

Ever since he created his metaphoric valley doomed to damnation and populated by a group of wrecks in A Dreambook for Our Time, through the bitter realism in Wniebowstapienie and Nic albo nic (1971, Nothing or Nothing), up to an open polemic with contemporary times in Kalendarz i kelpsydra, Konwicki has become more and more vocal in his dialogue with life in contemporary Poland, more and more openly and in an ever more aggressive manner asking questions about the sense of our life in the existing conditions. At the same time he comes closer and closer to a perfection in his means of artistic expression, develops his own poetics, entirely individual and quite different from the style and forms prevailing in contemporary Polish fiction. It was only logical then, that all those features listed above have led to a logical climax which would create a coherent image of the past and the present, of history and politics, of tragedy and satire, a modern novel and a philosophical essay, disclosing, at the same time, the roots of national complexes together with those personal ones tormenting the author for the last thirty years. Such an image resulted in a novel entitled The Polish Complex.

II

The Polish Complex is a contemporary novel in every sense of that word. The action takes place at a jewelry store "Jubiler" in Warsaw, "at a huge circular plaza on the intersection of large avenues," near the dominating structure of The Palace of Culture; its time—a Christmas Eve in the mid-seventies; the time duration—11 A.M. till midnight. The narrator's name is Tadeusz Konwicki, he is a writer, was born near Wilno, in short, the identification of the narrator with the author is almost complete, adding to the novel's realism. Those who know the society circles in Warsaw could easily recognize some characters as portraits of some well-known personalities in the same way as they could recognize them in the previous novels by Konwicki who has been coming closer and closer to an authentic presentation of authentic people and events, as, for instance, in Kalendarz i klepsydra where full names of his friends and colleagues were given. In other words, realism, authenticity, and contemporariness make The Polish Complex almost a documentary, a fact which in turn gives the novel its specific character. Because if it takes place at a given moment, and in a given place, if it is told by a given narrator, one could hardly doubt the fictitious character of the matters discussed in it—on the contrary, they should be as real and authentic as the factors anyone can prove really exist.

These matters which taken all together create a complete image of a phenomenon called "the Polish complex" are so many that one must assume they are not merely authentic but symptomatic, key problems of life in contemporary Poland. Beginning with the opening scene of a patient waiting in a line for goods, and ending with a collection for the Committee to Defend the Workers (KOR), the novel about a usual—and yet quite unusual—Christmas Eve in Warsaw sums up and points to all basic problems existing in Poland in a deceptively simple way. Deceptive, for it proves to be deeper, more probing, and more open than any other contemporary Polish novel so far.

Let us discuss first the most obvious, realistic features in the novel. And so, there is that commonplace line in front of a closed jewelry store in Warsaw. The narrator stands there, he is the twenty-third person in line; he warms himself up in his sheepskin coat, he stamps his feet, he looks around in a snow-covered street. "Large crowds of passers-by move along the walls without interruption. Once in a while someone runs into someone else and moves further without saying 'sorry,' immersed in his thoughts. Once in a while someone hits someone else with a Christmas-tree stand and curses with a bad word, once in a while someone tipsy slips onto the pavement, but he gets up and goes his way. A common Christmas Eve day".

But at this point, in the third paragraph on the first page of the novel, there occurs a digression, the first among many which will interrupt and supplement the realistic plot. Such digressions, largely implemented before in Kalendarz i klepsydra, let the narrator leave the Warsaw street for a while, and look at the problems from above, as it were, from a distant and universal perspective; at the same time they provide some sort of conclusions, generalizations, and climactic points, thus, in the course of the novel, creating a second, higher level of discussion with contemporary times. What's more important, perhaps, they seem to be intended for a foreign reader who might not be entirely familiar with life in Poland, and thus become signals desperately sent to the wide world outside of the borders of the country. "I expect," writes Konwicki, "that a copy of this book which I have been painstakingly writing will reach the hands, the antennae, or the computers of another kind of rational creatures who by chance will enter our galaxy, those rational creatures from the central regions of the universe, from the elegant quarters of God's metropolises, creatures wiser and better than us, noble supermen thought-out and dreamt-up by man." This image, only slightly camouflaged, of creatures from another planet who might bring hope and a change for the better, will once more appear in the novel as a spaceship "levitating above the avenue and looking at an incomprehensible city in the middle of Europe." This "space probe or an American balloon" hovering over the red lights of The Palace of Culture—"Why American?", asks a lady in an over-size coat. "And what else?"—lightening the Warsaw night on the last pages of the novel is sharply contrasted with another, more realistic sight: "A new light hits my eyes. Those are the headlights of an invisible truck. A militiaman emerges from under a tarpaulin: 'Shut up, or else I'll come down to you.'" Generalizing digressions, symbolic visions, and gloomy realism merge into one tight entity of the external features of the Polish complex.

But so far that common Christmas Eve day has only begun, and the narrator, still stamping his frozen feet, has plenty of time to look at his companions patiently waiting for the opening of the jewelry store. From among some forty people he chooses those who are standing near him, and who will remain in the center of his attention throughout the day and the night. There is a fellow countryman from Wilno, Kojran, who is just about to leave for the United States, there is a former secret policeman, Duszek, there is Grzesio, an agent-provocateur, a Christ-like looking student with his French friend, an anarchist, and there are some women, too: a lady in an over-sized coat, a pseudo-farmer lady wearing a Persian lamb coat, and an old lady who eventually turns out to be not old at all. And from behind the display window glass there looks at the waiting crowd "a dark-haired girl with a slightly indecent mouth," and "sepia-like eyes." And, for the time being, "the snowy wind hurts a huge spruce made into a Christmas tree at the great circular plaza on the intersection of large avenues. The forest tree jerks in all directions as if bowing to the four comers of the world, as if trying to break off from its confinement, from this stony captivity." Some snow, red from neon signs, falls down. And the narrator concludes: "Yes … I am waiting for a miracle."

Such a metaphoric imagery not only gives Konwicki's novel some specific style but it also slowly unveils a second, basic meaning of daily existence in Warsaw to its most minute details. The goods people in line have been waiting for turn out to be golden wedding rings imported from Russia, and the narrator will eventually call them "the symbol of shackles," but when the people finally enter the store after a long period of waiting, and the manager brings in the first cartons, instead of rings they contain "electric Soviet samovars" which, incidentally, will once more reappear in the novel "covered with Grzesio's or the student's blood" as a result of a scuffle between the provocateur and the student who represents KOR, a young man "unscathed by the roughness of life."

The waiting line represents, of course, yet another pretext to expose the roots of the Polish complex. When the customers reach the counter "there pushes into the salon a crowd of people wearing fur hats," and disregarding the local customers takes places in front of them. Once more, it is worth noticing "the double bottom" of Konwicki's prose: he manages to create images which instantly result in far-reaching implications. The obviousness of the situation, and its generalizing meaning—a crowd of savages entering—a salon"—do not leave any doubts as to the real meaning of the metaphor, even before the newcomers will be identified as "better customers." "Those are better customers," explains the manager to enraged Kojran. "Those are our guests from the Soviet Union." The Polish version emphasizes that contrast on its linguistic level too, using an emotional differentiation between two terms denoting anything Soviet, the adjectives sowiecki, usually employed by anti-Soviet speakers, and radziecki, an officially approved term. The Polish customers have to reconcile, and Kojran concludes: "Well, if the Soviets (sowieci) are waiting, it means the goods will arrive for sure." "And indeed," adds the narrator, "the Soviet tourists (radzieccy) made themselves at home in the salon for good."

As it turns out, there is even a link between the two groups: among the newcomers there is the narrator's relative, Kaziuk, who "smells with a home-grown tobacco and a sheepskin coat," while the narrator, as we remember, wears an identical coat but he smells "probably with an aftershave Green Water" (English in the original). The relative from Wilno, one of the many doubles of the narrator in this novel, does not complain. "Money there is plenty but there is no life," he says in a complacent mood, although this "positive hero," or "polozhitel'nyj geroj" as the narrator calls him using Russian words to underscore the ironic meaning of that cliché, does not appear to be a resigned man. "I sit near Oszmiana," he says, "and watch over our land, our forests, our prayers. And I don't know about anything else. Everything else is just a jerunda" (Russian for nonsense). And on this note a meeting with the past suddenly resurrected in a Warsaw street ends. The narrator has a heart attack, he falls down and becomes unconscious, and when he wakes up he finds himself in the arms of a strange girl from the store, Iwona or Basia, who represents the new generation without complexes whatsoever as proven by the scene of a hasty love-making in a room behind the store, on a crumbled bed lighted with a naked lightbulb covered only with a piece of newspaper. Clearly, she is a girl liberated from any ties with the past as demonstrated by her sexual liberation.

But even this sex scene does not liberate the narrator from the problems making the Polish complex. Looking for a cigarette he finds in his pocket a letter from a friend from the good old days, a letter representing one more digression in the novel. The letter was sent from a fictitious country "on another continent," a country which "might resemble my lost homeland just a little bit." In fact, the country run by a totalitarian monoparty is nothing else but a true picture of contemporary Poland. We shall return to all those digressions later on, for the time being following the contemporary plot line, although the structure of The Polish Complex is based on a constant intertwining of the current events with such digressions.

The Christmas Eve day passes away, they close the store and seal it with "a beer bottle cap filled with a modeling clay and a piece of string" but people in the line do not give up their hope for the transport of wedding rings. They move to the staircase of a nearby apartment house, and only there, at the lights of an incidental Christmas tree, the characters become better acquainted with each other, and some mutual ties are established. And more and more often there intervenes the ever-present militia, the Warsaw landscape is threatened with a vision of a new holocaust, the student who collects money "for those who fight for freedom" is juxtaposed with a picture of banners announcing "the Moscow days in Warsaw," whereupon the narrator comments: "Well, Moscow is going to visit us, too?" And then, on the last page of that strange story about a common Christmas Eve in Warsaw, he adds a concluding comment, paraphrasing a saying used by one of the characters throughout the novel: "When a Pole gets mad, beware you blind, lazy, corrupted Europe." On this ominous note pronounced against an image of a red glow resembling "an open abyss of hell" over the city one should end the discussion of the realistic level of the novel.

III

The realistic plot in The Polish Complex is written in the present tense in a manner well known from Konwicki's previous novels and scenarios. Such a method has a certain advantage thanks to some specific features of Polish grammar: there is no distinction between the simple present and the continuous present tenses. Thus the opening sentence stojê w ogonku can actually mean either "I am standing in line" or "I stand in line," implying that the situation presented can be occurring right now as well as be a permanent, everyday occurrence. Those implications are far-reaching for they tend to generalize certain situations and states, showing them not only as phenomena present in today's Poland but also as conditions existing permanently and contributing to the development of "the Polish complex" in its various stages.

It would be erroneous to assume that those conditions have been in existence only for the last thirty-five years, i.e., since The July Manifesto of 1944, ranging from a seizure of power by the Communist Party up to the apocalyptic vision at the end of Konwicki's novel. For the Polish complex is not merely an anti-Soviet complex but the deepest—two hundred years old at least—anti-Russian complex. Its roots as well as its present manifestations are shown in Konwicki's novel in the contemporary plot and in the two large historical digressions which make a basic structural element of that thoroughly contemporary novel. They should be discussed here in the context of the contemporary plot.

Tired with waiting in the line, three characters whose fates have been closely intertwined—the narrator, one of his doubles Tadeusz Kojran, and his former tormentor from the Security Police named Duszek (a Polish term indicating either an elf or a diminutive of the word duch, a ghost)—decide to "make the Christmas Eve fish swim a little" in "a helping of a transparent narcotic made out of the mild Mazovian potatoes." The alcohol, Christmas carols played by a street band, some memories from the Wilno region and from the post-war years blur over the present time when even a TV set "joyfully blinking with distortions" works without electric current—"such an obnoxious machine." And suddenly, into that world blurred with memories, vodka, and an all-covering snow storm there comes a story addressed to a man who lived more than a hundred years ago, a nineteen-year-old freedom fighter from Oszmiana, Zygmunt Mineyko.

The Mineyko story which makes a forty-page-long digression in a hundred-and-sixty-page-long novel we may call an addressed story for it is written in a form different from the contemporary plot: while the latter uses the first person narrative and the present tense, the former employs second person form and the past tense thus creating the effect of a direct address to its protagonist. And yet it maintains a close relationship to the narrator's own fate: throughout the story he interjects personal reminiscences or remarks such as "and I remember that kitchen, too," or "and that Wanda resembled very much our liaison girl, Jaskólka, who was arrested in 1944." Here the past and the present become one, perhaps even more than in Konwicki's previous novels, with all the consequences of that continuity affecting a contemporary citizen of Poland.

The name of Zygmunt Mineyko was hard to find in Polish historiography until 1971 when his memoir Z tajgi pod Akropol (From the Taiga to Acropolis) was published in Warsaw. Out of this colorful story of an insurgent in 1863, an exile to Siberia, and finally a member of the Greek General Staff, Konwicki took just one short episode and developed it in an independent story of idealism, fight, and treason. The episode which in Mineyko's own memoir occupies some 30 pages out of a five hundred pages long book comes alive under Konwicki's pen with complete and dramatic characters, and having a bearing on the historical past on the one hand, and the narrator's future on the other hand. Because in the structure of The Polish Complex the Mineyko story appears right after a short reminiscence of the narrator's trip to the United States completed a few years before. In a conversation with Kojran he tells him about his meeting with "an elderly gentleman, extremely emaciated, invalid man with sorrowful eyes." He had been, as it turns out, the commander of "a guerrilla unit in the first months of 1945," to whom the narrator reports after all those years about his "war nobody remembers anymore, nobody remembers so much that perhaps it had never existed." From some other sources we know that Tadeusz Konwicki, while visiting in the United States in 1975, indeed met with Captain Stanislaw Szabunia, the former commander of the 2nd Company 77 Infantry Regiment, so ironically depicted in Rojsty, and that fact adds to The Polish Complex some more authentic features. But it is less important than the sequence of the two episodes which culminate in a question Mineyko sees in the eyes of the traitor who gave him up to the Russians, "a question always familiar to us: was it worth it?"

Konwicki does not answer that question directly but one can find it in the shortest biography of a Warsaw beggar introduced earlier in the novel. That invalid lost both his legs "just like that, simply. In forty four. Poetically minded girls used to kiss my stumps. I rose because of my downfall. To have no legs was like having four legs. Lovely time. Well, now it isn't bad either. But we won't change the world anymore." This motif of giving up the idea of "changing the world" appears both in the American episode and in Mineyko's story with a vision of the country which is "just, noble, rational, making an example for the whole Europe, born out of the blood of her best sons"; furthermore, it is ironically juxtaposed with the character of that invalid from the Warsaw Uprising, a man who "scares sensitive passers-by" with his artificial limbs right from the very first page of the novel. "I guess we are going to lose this set by a walkover," concludes the invalid as if answering the question asked by Mineyko. And yet when the student collecting for KOR approaches the narrator, he, instead of money gives him the most precious gift, just received from his relative, a malachite stamp with a Polish eagle, made by an exile to Siberia a hundred years ago. "For your freedom and ours," he whispers handing over this symbol of a freedom fight to a representative of a new generation who takes over without ever questioning whether it was worth it or not.

This particular scene in the novel is immediately followed by another historical digression, a ten-page-long episode on Romuald Traugutt on the eve of his dictatorship in the 1863 Uprising. And once more, in Traugutt's dialogue with his wife there returns the same question: "Was there any sense to rise against such a power?". "I don't know, whether there was any sense or not," he answers his wife, himself, and, at the same time giving an answer to Mineyko, the insurgent from Warsaw in '44, and to the student collecting for KOR. "I know it was a must."

Parenthetically, one wonders how incredibly little we know about that unusual man from literary works. Except for some half-forgotten stories in a collection Gloria victis (1910) by Eliza Orzeszkowa, and two contemporary historical novels by Jan Dobraczynski and Stanislaw Strumpf-Wojtkiewicz, there is no literary work which would depict that complicated road traveled by the tsarist lieutenant colonel and the hero of Sebastopol who ended up as a Polish national hero hanged by the Russians in front of the Warsaw citadel. Thus a little portrayal created by Konwicki in an episode which begins and ends with a phrase, "it could have been like that," becomes even more precious.

Actually the episode consists of just one scene, a meeting between Traugutt and his beloved wife in bed, in a casual hotel room, in a moment of weakness, both spiritual and purely physical. That last characteristic creates a jarring contrast with the sexual prowess of the narrator, demonstrated earlier in the novel when he met with a partner whose name he did not even know. The juxtaposition of both scenes is quite obvious: where a contemporary narrator succeeds in a dubious situation, the historic hero fails, but when the historic hero proves his greatness, a contemporary man covers up his emptiness with cosmological dialogues and fantasies concocted together with the casual partner of his sexual adventure. Critics who regard the historical digressions in the novel a nuisance have been clearly mistaken, because both fragments firmly belong in the structure of the novel, support it, develop, and enlarge.

In both digressions the Russians represent the main theme. While in the contemporary plot the Russian tourists "push forward to the counter like deaf-mutes, and only thick puffs of steam emerging from their mouths indicate how nervous they are," the Russians in the Mineyko story are shown as a group of volunteers joining the uprising, and as cruel henchmen torturing their Polish captive. In the original Mineyko's memoir a Russian, Major N., who had brought in ten volunteers, starts running away as soon as the shooting starts, but in Konwicki's novel thwe same major, called Nawalkiewicz, seems to be modeled on good-natured characters borrowed from Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tolstoy; most of all he resembles Major Woldemar Hawrylowicz in Fantazy by Juliusz Slowacki. And only in Traugutt's story do the Russian officers dining in an adjoining hotel room achieve terrifying dimension symbolizing a cruel, blind, and savage foreign power. Even though one of them begins to sing a forbidden song and the second stanza "has been picked up by several voices more boldly" the image of the Russians is horrifying, from the initial meeting with an officer of the gendarmes, through a brief encounter with a "fierce governor," up to a wild orgy of the drunken officers and a cry resounding in a deserted street "Karaul! Karaul!" (Police! Police!).

As an ironic supplement to that image there appears at the end of the novel a group of "tipsy tourists … waving to the sides like in a Tyrolian waltz," their yodeling mixed with a carol Heilige Nacht, stille Nacht in a Warsaw street. Comments the narrator: "They too have an appetite for us. Just waiting in line." Needless to say that the German tourists "move along to a nearby hotel erected on the place of executions." Without such a scene no image of a Polish complex could have been complete.

Thus the role of both historical digressions is obvious and carries some important weight in diagnosing the Polish complex. They point out the sources of all those problems which result in such a complex. Now it can be named: it is Russia.

IV

We have discussed so far two levels of The Polish Complex: the level of contemporary plot, and the level of historical digressions both of which refer to the 1863 uprising. Both levels, intrinsically interrelated, supplement and enrich each other in the main motif of the Polish complex, and both of them create the basic fictional plot line in the novel. But there exists in it also a third level supplying a commentary with a series of essayistic digressions, generalizing and often abstract in character, seemingly related to the fictitious plot only in a loose manner, and yet representing a higher, perhaps the most important level of the novel's structure. For that particular reason those commentaries often take the form of an open, sometimes ruthless criticism of the political system existing in Poland, and deserve a close scrutiny here.

As it has already been mentioned, those comments appear from the very beginning of the novel, and are to be found in every key moment of the plot. So, for instance, a sentence closing the second paragraph of the first chapter "a common Christmas Eve day" is immediately followed by a broad, panoramic view of that day "creeping through a small planet in a tiny solar system"; having completed a cosmic circle it ends with a sober notion returning the reader to a realistic level with a statement: "on that day I am standing there, tucked in a warm sheepskin coat, in front of a jewelry store named, somewhat without a particular sophistication 'Jubiler.'" The development of the plot, however, and a gradual disclosure of the narrator's experiences and feelings lead to a more open character of the comments, referring to the reality seen not so much from a cosmic perspective as from the perspective of a man imprisoned in that reality. And not only in the existential sense of that term but also in a very real one. The narrator named Tadeusz Konwicki gives place to the author, a contemporary Polish writer Tadeusz Konwicki, who is deeply concerned for his country and its people.

Let us consider some of the most important comments dealing with the Polish complex as we have tried to diagnose it on the evidence discussed above. "I read a lot of historical studies," writes Konwicki, "I follow the lives of nations and single men. I wade through our history back and forth, one way or another. Sometimes I am subjected to the affections and exultant levitations, sometimes I hit the bottom of humiliations and despairs. Then I reach for the curriculum vi-tae of our great sister, Russia. She has really made it having an uninterrupted run of luck." And comparing the histories of both countries Konwicki goes on: "The whole social, economic, and cultural structure should have led, pushed, and brought the Russian state to an abyss of annihilation and non-existence. Dark, obscurant despotism, rowdiness of the higher social classes, the poverty of the population, the license of the stupid and corrupted officials, incredible indolence of the military leaders, the most reactionary laws and customs, barbarity in human relations—all those factors instead of sinking the state, instead of expelling the Russian nation from the European community, all those factors laboriously built up the power of old-time Russia, her supremacy, her greatness among the nations of the old continent. Our nobility of educated monarchs, the energy of wise ministers, good will of citizens, profession of the high ideas of humanity, all those positive, exemplary, text-book values suddenly depreciated. All of a sudden they whored and like a millstone pulled the venerable corpse of the Republic of Two Nations to the bottom."

"Do I have to be ashamed of loving freedom?" asks the author. "Even if it were a stupid, foolish, total, anarchic, provincial freedom, even if it were a freedom leading to destruction?" And he concludes: "Nobility will always be defeated by baseness for virtue will surrender to crime, and freedom will perish by the hand of captivity. But one may also say that the law will conquer sin, that the good will win over the evil, that freedom will triumph over captivity. Nonetheless let us remember that goodness is slow like a cloud in the sky while evil is as fast as lightning"

In a letter from a friend already mentioned, a letter written in an almost Orwellian tone, its author devotes his attention to the problems of a totalitarian system introduced "by a junta supplied by a categorical neighbor, brought in coffers, or rather in military trains." The character of a monoparty is quite explicit: "Our regime is being kept in its agonal movement by a magic neighborhood of a northern power." "We are forced to love officially our northern neighbor and our own country. But that love for our own country, this patriotism of ours, is a quality so far unknown to anybody that far, it is a discovery in the region of higher rank feelings. The main part, and as a part which comes first, of that patriotism of ours is a hysterical, debauched, and slightly perverted love for our northern neighbor, and only as a supplement, as it were, as a luxurious condiment, comes our attachment to our own country. And so both loves in the final result are very much alike for in both the cornerstone, or rather a coal consists of a bitchy lust for our unscrupulous neighbor." It should be explained here that in the last sentence Konwicki uses a play on words: "corner stone" in Polish is kamien wêgielny while "coal" means wêgiel kamienny; the reference to the Soviet exploitation of Polish coal supplies is quite obvious.

Making a comparison between ideology and religion Konwicki refers directly to the censorship: "We all live in state of a savage fear of the word. The word horrifies the Party and the ministries, the word awakes fears in the generals and the censors, the word haunts in the listening devices, and in the still insufficiently controlled dreams of the citizens. But the worst is the written word, the word made permanent in orthographic signs or phonetic signs on paper, on a celluloid tape, or in marble. And for that reason I am scribbling these sentences furtively, in this foggy lake of pain and misfortune, in this refuge of a second-long freedom before an annihilation." Next he directs his attack against the Party for which "our expression of gratitude is the goal of our life," the Party obsessed with power, "the cancer of power, an amok of power, an abyss of power. An abyss engulfing millions of consciences and millions of souls."

Equally explicit is the presentation of the relationship between the citizens and the authorities: "If they had only tortured us with their brash ever-presence, if they had only buried us in prisons, if they had only bothered us with their ideological nagging, if they had only dehumanized us with their everyday lies, treason and corruption, if they had only denationalized us making us an anonymous horde of a steppe cattle, but they bother us, bother to death, tire us, fool us, twaddle us, piss on us with a boring bore from tip to top. A boredom descends upon us from the skies, from the trees and country fields, from the seas and oceans, from the newspapers and theaters, from the laboratories and strip-teases, from the buildings and the official limousines, from entertainment and from the seriousness, from the school kids and from the faces of the dignitaries. The boredom is a secret elixir of our regime. The boredom is their mistress and mother. The boredom is their natural scent. The boredom evaporates from the administration brains and from the administration mugs. The boredom emanates from the military, the police, and the listening devices. The boredom oozes from prisons and torture chambers. The boredom is their own curse. They are ashamed of that boredom, they fear it, they choke with it, and they will never be free of it. The boredom is a boundless gulf in which they are drowning, and we are drowning together with them. The boredom is the satan in his worldly incarnation."

But the most dramatic and most outspoken among many such commentaries scattered throughout the novel appears to be the fragment which, as we have assumed, represents a message to "those rational creatures from the central regions of the universe … creatures wiser and better than us," to all those who could not comprehend the Polish complex or the Polish realities. This rather extensive fragment appears in the novel right after a scene of confession, i.e., after the moment of the deepest introspection, and deserves to be quoted here at some length:

Modern captivity resembles certain situations from the gangster movies: the telephone rings, and the gangster orders his blackmailed victim to pick up the receiver and with a normal, social tone of voice converse with the person calling about just anything. Or, somebody has entered a house taken over by the gangsters. The owner of the house with the bandits' pistol aimed at him, receives his guest as if nothing happened, offers him a drink, tries to behave normally and to get rid of the only man who could help him. Or, the gangsters escape from the bank leading in front of them a terrorized teller, under the cover of her body run to a car, and the woman begs of the custodians of justice not to shoot and give the gangsters a chance to escape safely.

The same happens to whole nations in the contemporary world. Where are the beautiful times of the old-fashioned captivity? Where is the lofty fight of the invader with the language of the captives, with their national emblems, where is the open and ceremonial pursuit of the patriots, where are the solemn executions of the heroes? That captivity in a retro style used to be open, theatrical, celebrated. And everybody knew who violated the weaker ones, and who would respond for such violations before the tribunal of history.

Today captivity has become invisible. Some poor nation seems to act naturally, listens to its anthem with reverence, elects a parliament, dispatches its envoys, takes its place in the Security Council, in a word behaves as any independent and sovereign state. And nobody sees that it has a revolver stuck at its back, a cocked revolver of its neighbor, or perhaps not even a neighbor. Such a nation pronounces words which are matter-of-fact, rational, deep, such and such, pronounces them with a poker face, and nobody can even guess that that nation would like to roar like a slaughtered animal, with all its might, from the bottom of its guts, to howl like a skinned rabbit, to yelp to God for help before the unavoidable doom.

In the old times a slave had the right to scream, today slaves are granted the right to be silent, mute. A scream brought about a relief, hardened the health like it is with the babies, hardened for the future. A silence, muteness degenerates, suffocates, kills. In the old days a slave, when freed, could join the great family of nations without any hindrance. Today, when freed by accident, he will not be fit for life. He will die from poisons he had accumulated during the black night of interdiction.

Rarely in world literature can one find a confession written with such a powerful expression, so moving and desperate. Perhaps only Solzhenitsyn, the bravest of the brave, can speak with such a courage, so movingly and accurately at the same time.

And even if Konwicki's novel might fade away with time, as often happens with contemporary novels, that single part of it will remain in the history of Polish literature as the most shocking and tragic document of the years of violence and oppression.