The unusual intensity of political life in Poland during the last eight or ten years has had an impact on literature and created a new sense of social obligation among writers and intellectuals. I use the word “obligation” rather than the romantic but worn-out term “mission,” or the more contemporary terms “commitment” or “engagement” that have become suspect since their use by Jean-Paul Sartre. The sense of social obligation was shown in direct political activity, and the best example was the creation in 1976 of the well-known Committee for the Defense of the Workers (KOR). It also resulted—and this bears directly on the subject of the present essay—in the awareness that literature has to and should perform a new role, that a writer is not only an artist but also a witness. The act of writing came to be conceived as an act of recording or registering facts. This awareness has become particularly intense since the declaration of the state of war or “martial law.” In a country where official communications are permeated with propaganda and lies, literature has a new function to fulfill, a function that is normally reserved for history and the media—to provide information, and to give an undistorted account of a situation or of events. It is interesting to compare the titles of some literary works with those of the unofficial periodicals. They indicate the proximity, if not the identity, of their goals and intentions—periodicals such as Zapis (The Record), Puls (Pulse), and books such as Marek Nowakowski's Raport ze stanu wojennego (Report from the State of Martial Law) or Notatki z codzienności (Notes from Everyday Life).

Yet the scope, language, and manner of presentation by journalism and history on the one hand and by literature on the other differ fundamentally. Consequently, in adopting a new role literature had to create new conventions and a new language. While it is possible to see the emphasis on recording events as a general trend in Polish literature during the late nineteen-seventies and early-eighties, individual writers differ considerably in the way they realize the concept artistically. Zbigniew Herbert's poetry, and in particular his last volume, Report from the Besieged City (1983), provides the most distinguished example of poetry conceived as testimony.¹ At the same time the breadth of Herbert's vision of history, the originality of his interpretation of historical reality as well as his polemical attitude toward history as a discipline, make the Report from the Besieged City more philosophically and artistically complex, and more accomplished, than other literary “reports” mentioned earlier. Although not all the poems in the volume can be included within the framework of a “report,” the title as well as the arrangement of the poems indicate the author's intentions and overriding concept. In the title poem which concludes the volume, Herbert refers to his narrator as a chronicler:

Too old to carry arms and fight like the others—
they graciously gave me the inferior role of chronicler I record—
I don't know for whom—the history of the siege

(“Report from the Besieged City”)

Considering the date and circumstances of publication, the volume—especially the title poem, and a few others—can be read as an account of the political and social situation in Poland preceding and under martial law. Yet neither Poland nor martial law are specifically mentioned by name in these poems, and this sets Herbert's work apart from most other attempts of what could be called the “literature of recording.” Even if it seems justifiable to assume that many of the poems in the collection are political allegories, that the word “City” designates contemporary Poland, and the adjective “besieged” refers to the state of martial law, such a one-to-one equation poses serious problems of interpretation. The volume opens with two poems written in 1956 that contain specific references to Stalinism and the period exmediately following Stalinism known as the “Thaw.” Their presence extends the temporal framework of Herbert's “report” to a period of at least thirty years, making the siege coincide with Communist rule in Poland. However, repeated references to other events in Polish history make it necessary to extend this framework even further—in fact, as we shall soon see, so far as to cover the entirety of Polish history. What is, therefore, the precise subject of Herbert's “report”? What is the identity of the “City,” and which siege is he writing about?

The answer to these questions bears not only on Herbert's poetics but also on his view of history, and his approach to it. We must observe at this point that most if not all of Herbert's views on history have been shaped by his experience with Communism; the other major formative influence was his experience of the Second World War. In Report from the Besieged City, Communism remains the most immediate point of reference in the majority of the poems, as well as the main target of Herbert's polemics. At the same time, his concept of history is not limited to Communism, and has a considerably broader application. In my discussion, therefore, I will try as much as possible to consider both the political and philosophical aspects of Herbert's recent poems together, to combine both the topicality and universality of their message.

Herbert's ability to relate recent events to a broad historical framework gives his last volume unusual depth and scope. Every described fact or event has historical reverberations and is associated with other events in the past, all of them carrying similar moral and philosophical implications. As if in a hall of mirrors the events of 1981 and 1982 reflect the events of 1956, 1939, 1863, 1795, and so on. In this hall of mirrors the past and the present send each other familiar images, and also the message that the nation cannot escape its destiny, that history keeps returning under a familiar guise. As he writes in the title poem: “I don't know when the invasion began / two hundred years ago in December in September perhaps yesterday at dawn.” The poem entitled “September 17” draws a parallel between 1981 and the attack on eastern Poland by the Soviet Union on September 17th, 1939. Historical reflections reach further back to the times of the Swedish invasions and the wars with Muscovy in the seventeenth century, to the Tartar invasion in the thirteenth century, and all the way back to the invasions by the Goths in prehistoric times:

the siege has lasted a long time the enemies must take turns nothing unites them except the desire for our extermination Goths the Tartars Swedes troops of the Emperor regiments of the Transfiguration who can count them

The “chronicler” of today's Poland thus grows in stature to become the chronicler of the whole of Polish history, and the siege he describes is of much longer duration than General Jaruzelski's state of martial law.

The concept of the “City,” although it includes all of contemporary Poland, has a similarly broad frame of reference. It functions on two different levels, referring both to Poland's physical reality and to its spiritual reality. At first it is identified with a concrete geographical location:

all we have left is the place the attachment to the place

But the physical solidity of this reality is immediately undercut by the statement that follows, which describes it as ruins and specters:

we still rule over the ruins of temples specters of gardens and houses

When the poet adds that “if we lose the ruins nothing will be left,” it becomes clear that he is no longer speaking of Poland's physical reality, but instead of its spiritual heritage. The “City” he describes, a twin to the mythological Troy, acquires thus a symbolical meaning. The notion of the “City” had appeared earlier in Herbert's poetry, most notably in “Prologue”² whose protagonist wants to be loyal to the “city” even though he is told by the Chorus that it no longer exists. It was also referred to at the end of “The Envoy of Mr Cogito,” where Herbert speaks of “the defenders of the city of ashes.”³ In both poems the city denotes something that has physically ceased to exist. Compared to the concept of patria or fatherland, the concept of the city embodies a more spiritual and less physical reality. It is the depository of the values of the nation that have accumulated over time; it includes history, tradition, and culture. Although it continues to be associated with a definite location, its survival depends not on its physical indestructibility or immunity but on human memory. Poland-the-country can be invaded, occupied, and destroyed, but as long as its people's loyalty to the past and its values is preserved, Poland-the-city will survive:

and if the City falls but a single man escapes
he will carry the City within himself on the roads of exile
he will be the City

Herbert's words here not only echo those of the Polish national anthem (“Poland has not perished yet as long as we live”) and of Polish Romantic poetry, but they also establish, once again, the analogy between the past and the present—for what is here referred to with the future tense as a prophecy has already happened in the past.

Herbert sees Polish history as cyclical, constantly repeating iself. It is like a play, the last act being the reality we are experiencing at the present moment:

is this the last act
of the play by Anonymous

(—“What I Saw”)

The question is rhetorical, for it is clear from his vision of Polish history that the play has more acts in store. According to Herbert's vision, different historical moments not only echo each other but they unite to form a single image of Poland as “the treasure-house of all misfortunes.” Polish history follows a pattern, and its most characteristic features are heroic but hopeless struggle, isolation, and defeat:

And then as always—glows and explosions
boys like children sleepless commanders
knapsacks filled with defeat crimson fields of glory
the strengthening knowledge—we are alone

(—“September 17”)

The image of Polish history that emerges from Herbert's poetry is dark, and does not offer any hope.

Perhaps Herbert's sense of hopelessness derives more than anything else from his total lack of illusions about the Communist system. It is not a matter of the disillusion that has been experienced by many Polish intellectuals, but a lack of any faith in Communism from the very beginning. Herbert dates it back all the way to 1939, when as a boy of fifteen he first encountered the Soviets in Lwów. He has stated in a recent interview: “I cannot stop wondering at certain intellectuals. I had my revelations ab oculos. And not through Marx or Lenin. The city was changed within a few days into a concentration camp. This system attacks a European through smells and tastes.”⁴

The poem “The Power of Taste” also treats this theme:

It didn't require great character at all
our refusal disagreement and resistance
we had a shred of necessary courage
but fundamentally it was a matter of taste

However it was not, as Herbert suggests, simple aesthetic sensitivity that made him reject Communist reality. The Communist ideology, based on Marxist dialectical materialism, was philosophically and morally incompatible with his beliefs. In attributing his rejection of Communism to taste rather than philosophical arguments, Herbert's intentions are polemical. He is questioning the sincerity and good faith of the Polish intellectuals' supposed infatuation with Marxist dialectics, described so convincingly by Czesław Miłosz in The Captive Mind. In this book Miłosz speaks of “the inequality between the weapons of the dialectician and those of his adversary”; he compares this match to a “duel between a foot soldier and a tank.”⁵ Herbert, who has always been impervious to the power of dialectics, opposes it to the power of factual evidence based on sight, hearing, touch, and smell. Were we to look at Miłosz's metaphor of a foot soldier and a tank from Herbert's point of view, the tank's superiority derives from its sheer power of destruction and not from the sophistication of its equipment or from its greater ability to appraise reality. On the philosophical plane the weakness of dialectics lies precisely in the abstract nature of its speculations, its lack of contact with the concrete, palpable reality of people and objects, and its unwillingness to distinguish between the “reality of the world” and of “appearances,” between “the substance” and “the specter” (“Mr. Cogito on the Need for Precision”). Herbert opposes the blurred quality of philosophical dialectics with the clarity of tautologies, “explanations idem per idem” whereby “slavery means slavery / a knife is a knife / death remains death.” To the sinuous and labyrinthine nature of dialectical thinking—“its devilish net”—he opposes

the flat horizon
a straight line
the gravity of the earth

(—“Mr. Cogito and the Imagination”)

What is more serious, the philosophical vagueness of dialectics has become a cover-up for moral nihilism. The poet has compared it to a sheepskin that serves as a disguise for butchers, the playing on a block flute—its music—intended to mislead the public. Herbert sees the history of Communism in Poland as a game of acting and pretending. It is a make-believe in which those in power play the role of theater managers; their main concern is to convince the audience that what takes place on the stage is the only reality. Yet the genuine tragedy takes place behind the stage. It is neither shown nor told, but disguised behind euphemisms and words with no meaning:

someone spoke incessantly about deviations
I though of his deviated mouth

(—“What I Saw”)

Herbert's play on the word “deviation” lays bare the deceptiveness of dialectics. Used to explain the crimes and atrocities committed during the Stalinist period, it is an empty cliché. The true meaning of the word is restored only when it describes concrete reality, the mouth of a man tortured in a Stalinist prison, a mouth so disfigured it resembles “two bramble twigs stripped of bark.” The language of official propaganda conceals and falsifies reality instead of revealing it.

An additional problem is that the victims themselves take part in this process of camouflage either out of self-defense or fear, and they are silent about their suffering:

I saw a man who had been tortured
he now sat safely in the family circle
cracked jokes ate soup

(—“What I Saw”)

The expression “deviated mouth” thus acquires still another meaning, that of deviation from truth. The speaker of the poem does not condemn the man's behavior. He is compassionate, and understands that both on the biological plane (“ate soup”) and on the psychological plane (“cracked jokes”) the instinct of life requires the annihilation of memory. However, in a situation where the victims lose memory in order to continue living, and the oppressors are busy effacing the traces of their crimes, the truth is in danger of completely falling into oblivion. In such a situation the rescue operation falls to poetry—the poet's responsibility is to preserve the memory of events, and to restore to words their true meaning, to unravel the human truth from the tissue of official lies.

Herbert's rejection of the philosophical and moral implications of dialectics made him sceptical about the reformability of the Communist system, and once again this set him apart from many of his contemporaries. He did not share in the revolutionary euphoria of 1956, and dissociated himself from the rebels:

we aren't those
who clench their fists
brandish chains
talk and ask questions
in a fever of excitement
urging to rebel
incessantly talking and asking questions

(—“From the Top of the Stairs”)

These words contain a polemic with the revisionists who believed that the system could be reformed, and who subscribed to the later official version of Stalinism as a deviation from Marxist-Leninist ideology. Herbert disagreed with the revisionists and remained suspicious of an ideology that served as a justification for crimes. The theory of deviations was a tactical device, at the service of the officials. Its acceptance by the intellectuals allowed the authorities to “heave a sigh of relief / that again it has worked out / and after clearing away the props / slowly / raise / the blood-drenched curtain” (“What I Saw”). Herbert knew that the play would continue, that the chopped off heads would easily “grow back” and that “at the top there will always remain / one or three” (“From the Top of the Stairs”). The events of the last four years only confirmed the poet's sense of helplessness, and the feeling that the Polish tragedy is “without any ending” (“Messenger”).

Herbert's image of history as a hall of mirrors functions also on another level. The reflections occur not only along a temporal or vertical axis, but also along a geographical, horizontal axis. Although Herbert speaks first and foremost of Poland, he steps beyond national boundaries and establishes analogies between Polish history and that of other oppressed nations, “the defenders of the Dalai Lama the Kurds the Afghan mountaineers” (“Report from the Besieged City”). Of course the presence of other cultures, countries, and epochs has been a distinctive trait of Herbert's poetry ever since his first volume. The role they play in his poetry is both central and complex. Aside from instances when they serve as a disguise for the contemporary situation, such as “Utica” in the poem “Mr. Cogito on Upright Attitudes” which is a transparent reference to Poland in the nineteen seventies, their function has been confrontational, as Stanisław Barańczak suggests in his excellent study of Herbert's poetry.⁶ Without questioning the validity of this interpretation, I would only like to add that in Herbert's latest poetry the confrontations have often been replaced by a sense of identity, and a feeling of community. The axis of solidarity, unlike that of confrontations, is not defined by antinomies but by analogies—analogies of situations, and of goals.

The breadth of Herbert's historical vision can be seen on the level of language, which is intentionally symbolic, both specific and general at the same time. Each sentence, as well as entire poems, operate simultaneously on three levels: first, as a reference to the experience of the author's own times; second, as an allusion to analogous situations in the past and, by extension, to Polish history as a whole; and third, as a statement about an experience that is universal and transgresses the specifically Polish context. The following record of the siege can serve as an example:

I write as I can in the rhythm of interminable weeks
monday: empty storehouses a rat became the unit of currency
tuesday: the mayor murdered by unknown assailants
wednesday: negotiations for a cease-fire the enemy imprisoned our messengers
we don't know where they are held that is the place of torture
thursday: after a stormy meeting a majority of voices rejected
the motion of the spice merchants for unconditional surrender
friday: the beginning of the plague

(—“Report from the Besieged City”)

The text can be read on two levels: as an account of the situation in contemporary Poland and/or as a description of a state of siege in general, in any country, at any time. The choice of words diffuses the narrow topicality of the text. Terms such as siege, mayor, spice merchants, messengers, plague, can be applied only as metaphors to the contemporary situation in Poland. The function of Herbert's language is to broaden the scope of the poems, and to enlarge what could be called their referential reality. Thus the recent warning by Czesław Miłosz about the danger of politically engaged poetry—that it is liable to be narrow and closed off, unable to see “the phenomena on a broader scale”—cannot possibly apply to Herbert.⁷

Herbert's disabused view of history as a process has its counterpart in his disabused view of history as a discipline. He distrusts historical accounts because they tend to be records of politicians and political events, bypassing what is most important in any given historical situation—namely, its human content. Herbert makes a distinction between history as measured by the actions of politicians, and history seen in terms of the effects it has on the lives of ordinary men. When Mr. Cogito reads in a Los Angeles daily an obituary about the death of Maria Rasputin, daughter of the famous minister of the Russian tsar Nicolas II, the reflections it prompts have little to do with the tribulations of the Russian empire, the fate of its last tsar or even the career of Grigori Rasputin himself. Instead, the poem is entirely devoted to Maria Rasputin; it does not even mention the spectacular events she experienced and which determined the course of her life. What rivets Mr. Cogito's attention, tantalizing his imagination, is a leather case that Maria holds in her hand in a photograph. Its contents—whether a samovar from Tula, a tooth of Saint Cyril, or a congealed lump of earth—would reveal what interests Herbert the most in history, its human content. And this is also its ultimate truth.

If the life and person of Maria Rasputin should appear by contrast trivial and grotesque to a reader aware of the unusual historical context, the effect is fully intended by Herbert. For why should the political scandals of the famous father carry more weight than the human secrets of his unknown daughter? Maria Rasputin's fate, that of a displaced émigré, is closer to the lives of millions of her contemporaries than the fate of a tsar's minister. Like the author of the poem, Maria belongs among the victims of history. This is why Mr. Cogito feels “personally” moved by the obituary of her death, even though he finds nothing in her meager life that could be “unwound / into the carpet of a poem.” For Herbert history has two faces: one for the victims, and another for the oppressors. For the latter it means power, crimes, and lies, for the former its essence is suffering, humiliation, and death. According to Herbert, it is in matters concerning the victims, not the executioners, that history proves to be careless.

over the immensity of history
wheels a specter
the specter of indefiniteness

(—“Mr. Cogito on the Need for Precision”)

Although Herbert establishes the political context of his poem by paraphrasing the opening sentence of the Communist Manifesto, his criticism has a broad application. When recording the numbers and names of victims, history lacks precision:

how many Greeks were killed at Troy
—we don't know
to give the exact casualties
on both sides
in the battle at Gaugamela
at Agincourt
Leipzig
Kutno
and also the number of victims
of terror
of the white
the red
the brown
we don't know
truly we don't know

Even contemporary events evade an exact count, and the number of victims tortured and killed in “the struggle with the inhuman power” of Communist regimes—the main target of Herbert's charge—remains unknown. Without this knowledge, history turns into an abstraction; it loses its “human dimension.” It is like that history inscribed on a California redwood whose author did not know words expressing terror, and

therefore he counted added years and centuries as if to say there is nothing
beyond birth and death nothing only birth and death

(—“Sequoia”)

Herbert's attack against history is conducted on both political and moral grounds. Politically, carelessness about the victims is an act of compliance with those in power. It is also a moral failure, since we, as humans, have an obligation toward our fellow humans:

we are despite everything
the guardians of our brothers

(“Mr. Cogito on the Need for Precision”)

History's failure to fulfill its moral obligation to bear witness leaves the poet only one alternative, to assume it himself. And in fact, all of Herbert's poetry is marked by the desire to keep alive the memory of suffering, death, and injustice. To an extent even greater than in his earlier poems, Report from the Besieged City brings to fulfillment the task expressed with such force in the “Envoy of Mr. Cogito”:

you were saved not in order to live
you have little time you must give testimony

Notes

1. Zbigniew Herbert, Report from the Besieged City, translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter, New York: Ecco Press, 1985. All quotations are taken from this volume.

2. “Prologue” was included in the volume Napis (Inscription), published in Poland in 1969.

3. The “Envoy of Mr. Cogito” concludes the volume Pan Cogito (Mr. Cogito), published in Poland in 1974. The quotations from the poem are taken from the volume Selected Poems of Zbigniew Herbert, translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter, Oxford-London-New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

4. From an interview with the author of this article in The Manhattan Review, vol. 3, no. 2 (winter 1984-5), p. 5.

5. Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind, New York: Vintage Books, 1961, p. 13.

6. Stanisław Barańczak, Ucieczka z utopii. O poezji Zbigniewa Herberta, London: Polonia Book Fund, 1984. See in particular pp. 38-42.

7. Czesław Miłosz, “Szlachetność, niestety,” Kultura (Paris), no. 9/444 (September 1984), p. 13.