Art is rarely one of the early fruits of revolution. Today Polish artists, who demanded freedom at the Round Table not so long ago, talk chiefly about money. Culture is costly, and new economic order, with its suppression of inflation, has brought recession and growing unemployment, so it can hardly be expected that the government will zealously try to save art rather than health services, housing, or industry. Film production has dropped from a few dozen films annually to merely a few. Movie theatres survive thanks to commercial American productions like Batman, and they are being closed down more and more frequently, unless someone manages to change them into currency exchange offices. The theatre repertoire looks rather like the bookstore windows, where naked bottoms and guns advertising gutter literature appear beside memoirs of the camps, and dreambooks compete with anti-communist propaganda, science fiction, and the confidences of witches. Plays with small casts and song concerts promising financial profits have ousted productions of national literary masterpieces or Shakespeare, which used to be a kind of specialty of the Polish theatre. Eminent actors had used the language of universal literature to wrestle with Fate, God, History, inscribing into the works of the classics contemporary experiences, ranging from the existential to the political. Thanks to them the public imagination gained new perspectives.

Now economic dangers dominate most discussions of art, though chaos in the domain of values seems much more important than financial chaos. The ethos of Solidarity, founded with the significant participation of artists around the idea of a common enemy, has fallen apart, and a few dozen parties have come into being, from Social Democrat to Christian Democrat. It is no longer enough for artists, nor for politicians, to declare themselves against communists. Choosing values has become a much more subtle matter than it was last year, and few can cope with the new situation.

The broadcast of Tadeusz Różewicz's play Do piachu … (Bite the Dust), prepared by the TV theatre seen by millions every Monday, was the most important artistic event of the last few months. No production has shocked public opinion as much for a long time. The protests of indignant viewers even reached parliament, and prompted violent polemics in the press. The attack was on both the author and our TV, which “dared to show such dirty rubbish using state funds.” Both the substance of the play and its extremely naturalistic aesthetics offended audience members. This is nothing new, since before being accepted, each of Różewicz's plays had met with resistance from both the actors who were to play in them and from the public. But the sharpest attacks were made on Do piachu … ; after the première at Warsaw's Teatr Na Woli in 1979, the author was accused of betraying his nation and of desecrating its values; he withdrew the play and forbade its further production and translation.

Do piachu … is a provocative text concerning matters most important to Poles, namely the national mythos and its fundamental concepts of bravery, heroism, the romantic struggle for freedom, and military honor, deeply rooted in the national mentality. On the one hand, this is understandable as the ideology of a country deprived of freedom for centuries; Polish soldiers fought for the freedom of their country on all world fronts and in many abortive uprisings. On the other hand, patriotic heroism became a permanent stereotype effectively obscuring any other truth about war. A dozen or so years ago, when history was still a domain under the absolute rule of politics, it was the defenders of stereotypes who protested against Różewicz's play. They continue to do so today when emerging democracy is freeing life of the dominance of ideology, but has also set free the old specters of intolerance, chauvinism and my-God-and-my-homeland type incantations.

The TV play's director, Kazimierz Kutz, a well-known Polish movie director, presented the author's text as faithfully as possible. In ten filmed sequences reminiscent of a Brechtian morality play, and alluding to the drama of the stations of the Passion of Christ, he presented the moving story of Walus, a private in the army. A farmhand who found himself in a peasant partisan unit, he came to know there the charm of heroic legend: patriotic songs and vivid tales of heroic deeds. Sometimes that meant “getting infected on a whore” who had to be shot afterward because she had been “having a lay with gendarmes.” Walus, not a very clever boy, fascinated by the theatre of war played out by his companions from the unit, went off with them to pillage. They escaped, while Walus was caught by partisans from the Home Army (AK). In accordance with the soldiers' code of honor he must take the consequences of robbery and the rape of the priest's housekeeper, which he probably didn't commit.

A simple and rather banal story; a naive simpleton outsmarted by more clever men finds himself in a situation with no way out. He is incapable of defending himself, and there is nobody who would want to defend this illiterate boy. War in the forests is not a time for subtle moral judgments. The law of war which allows one to kill the enemy and ensures that the code of battle is also respected in one's own ranks is stronger than anything else, even if it is unclear to the individual. A bullet from a compatriot's gun will end the life of Walus.

It is no accident that this play originating directly from Różewicz's autobiographical experience—he spent nearly two years among the partisans—took so long to write: 1955–72. “Many years had to pass,” Różewicz will say, “before I understood that a writer only has the right to love, and not to contempt.” Many years of effort in writing, a dozen or so poetical volumes, and struggle with the difficult drama form had to pass before this extraordinary human experience of war could find equally extraordinary artistic expression.

“The star of poetry shines by its own absence,” one can say about Do piachu. … The language of art freed of aestheticism, created out of words simple to the highest degree and expressing the elementary experiences of human existence through pure information, is more moving in its authenticity than all the poetical terms reserved for expressing pathos and loftiness. The original title of the drama, Song of the Love and Death of Private Walus, which is an ironic paraphrase of Rainer Maria Rilke's poem “The Song of the Life and Death of Cornet Christopher,” is a reference to the poet's actual intentions. The absolute should not be sought for in God, or any kind of higher idea; it can be found in a faulty body, a human rag, in the simplest words and elementary moral impulses. The phenomenon of biological life, of naked human existence, remains an absolute.

In this play lyricism is mixed with vulgarity, physiology with prayer, and ideology with prosaic life. Laughter and sadness, irony mixed with serious overtones, provide a strange balance of meanings and impressions. Every thought is countered by a situation from life: an ideological lecture for the soldiers is accompanied by the disemboweling of a pig, talks on the great politics of Churchill are held on the boards of a forest latrine. Discussions on the need to strengthen the authority of the commanders are held over a plate of fresh liver washed down with spirits. Dirty jokes and rough peasant language, with its specific accent and grammatical mistakes, disavow every platitude, every doubtful piece of thought. In roughly hewn sentences the heroes express ordinary human decency, manifested in a few normal impulses of pity.

Kazimierz Kutz has made the problem of law the main subject of his production. The tragedy of Walus's fate is the effect of opposition between various laws: the law of war which permits one to kill and bestows the moral right to kill, and where only individual conscience rules. At no moment do the real enemies of the partisans, the Germans, appear. Thus the war is only a background creating the coordinates for the story.

The war, always present in Różewicz's writing, comprising the structural axis of his works, is presented here as an extreme situation in which people live as if outside the law. And every evil, “the evil which is within us,” can be justified by the exceptionality of the times. War, but not only war—one can imagine a similar story of Walus the contemporary everyman in a different reality—creates situations in which law is suspended. No religious or moral codes can give changeable reality a form. The only ethic measure is one's own conscience, moral impulses, and the unending attempts at being human. The law of God set down in the past has been transformed, as Kafka put it, into a labyrinth of unknown laws. Modern man, especially people living in a region of the world through which the two most cruel totalitarianisms of the twentieth century have passed, is often ruled by laws which he neither knows nor understands. Then the only support can be found in an internal dictate, a “moral law inside me,” the foundation of modern humanism and the material of which the human church is built.

The most disturbing thing about the story of Walus is the fact that his fate is governed by a law he doesn't understand and which he finds incomprehensible. No judgment has been passed on him, his guilt remains pure conjecture, yet the penalty is carried out by those who lack any moments of doubt. One of the partisans expounded his philosophy in direct terms: “An order is an order. Father or no, brother or no … I'd finish you off too, if they told me to.” The rule that “the leaders do our thinking for us” has so often been justification for crime. This rule, adapted to quieter times in the phrase “because they told me to,” has frequently justified ordinary villainy and baseness. As literature has shown up to now, contemporary tragedy is not born of the opposition of the values of God and man, but of the opposition of quite earthly systems of values professed by ordinary people.

Różewicz never set his plays within the tame conventions of drama. On the contrary, he broke them and created new ones, so that the subject matter could become visible in the structure of images and language. In this way he provided replies to the important question of our times: how can art be possible after Auschwitz? His plays are usually peopled by anonymous heroes in everyday situations; the commonplace actually creates this world. The author is consistent in not beautifying anything, in not referring us to metaphysics; though he emphasizes the ugliness of the world, his plays nevertheless remain moving and lyrical. The anti-aesthetic, the carnal and brutal perspective in which reality is described, is a provocative consequence of the fact that only another human being can be a sanction in this world. A human condemned, like the writer, to his own body and a crippled awareness.

Since that is the case, the role of the writer in the world has to change. He no longer represents any transcendent spirit, nor is he a prophet, a great national poet, the conscience of his nation, being only a man like everybody else, an anonymous person. A writer differs from ordinary mortals only in the quality of his moral sensitivity, not even in his lifestyle and satanic superiority, as was the case, for instance, in the modernist conflict between artist and philistine.

Authors who dare to question stereotypes of thought are invariably misunderstood and attacked for their desecration of all that is sacred. One such sacred theme in Polish culture is the role of a writer who fortifies his countrymen's hearts and is a romantic ruler of souls. Różewicz has questioned this role of the writer who puts himself above society as a supplier of social, political, metaphysical ideas. He has given up any kind of public role and discourse in favor of defending the rights of individuals who do not represent any grand ideas, those who do not profess any ideology. He only defends humanism in the spirit of Montaigne, who said that no idea was worth killing a man for. The stand taken by Różewicz, one that is in opposition to patriotic and national mythology, destroys the order accepted for generations as right and founded on the triumvirate of God, Nation, Homeland. In a country as Catholic as Poland such a stand is difficult to forgive. That makes it all the more valuable.