A Question of Reality:

...Brandys's hero remarks at one point that many of his compatriots behave "as if the individual in Poland had no psychology of his own, as if there were only a national psychology...

...Perhaps he thought that everything divine and humane is thriving and healthy on Polish soil, while beyond stretches the unhealthy land of psychological and philosophical considerations...

...he may wonder, for instance, about the mysterious qualities that make a work written in Warsaw or Cracow "typically Polish'' or "intensely Polish...

...In this sense A Question of Reality is an engaging example of a novel of ideas...

...In his responses to the survey he alludes to the subtle and not so subtle ways in which he compromised his principles during his rise to fame...

...As it is, the novel is not likely to appeal to those who still believe that an intellectual must always rise above local prides and prejudices, who consider "the question of reality" to be, of necessity, a larger, more universal question...

...Nationalism impedes freedom, it fosters conformity...

...I really joined the Resistance so as to fight against the Devil," he says...

...Marxism has lost its appeal for him, but nothing has taken its place...

...He does this not because he has found something better to believe in, not even because he is convinced that the system he lives under is that corrupt...

...William Harmon Pushcart Prize, V. away with, politics...

...Despite his less than impeccable background, the narrator becomes a well-known stage director, a university professor, and for a time, a member of the new cultural establishment...

...The narrator knows only too well how useful, how comforting, how indispensable this overriding ethnic sensibility has always been to his people...

...A Question of Reality is not an easy, nor always satisfying, book...

...He tries hard to understand his own father's myopic patriotism...

...a country which, at a time when Western societies were achieving unity, had only one goal, to survive...

...By the 1970s Brandys's hero is a disenchanted, though not quite desperate, man...

...In 1966 Brandys resigned from the Communist party, which he joined twenty years earlier...

...That's a crock...

...He simply values intellectual freedom...

...Ultimately, the narrator breaks with the establishment, gives up his position and privileges, and opts for the life of a dissident, an outcast...

...In his new "novel of Poland," which, incidentally, could not be published there, Kazimierz Brandys becomes acutely aware of this supercharged national consciousness...

...and then quickly adds: "But that kind of explanation was not readily accepted, after the war...

...As a young man the narrator was perplexed and affronted by his father's narrowmind-edness, but now he muses, only half-facetiously, "perhaps he thought that God and Man were Polish, after all...

...The critic John Ald-ridge has written that the great strength of the modern European novel is that "in it ideas are as important as physical sensations and may even be experienced with all the force and acuteness of physical sensations...

...During the war political commitment came easy...

...His hero, a Polish intellectual responding to a neatly professional, earnest, and under the circumstances, woefully inadequate questionnaire prepared by a Polish-born American sociologist, admits ruefully toward the end of his meandering comments that he has been dealing with "local problems, Polish problems...

...A man under a cloud begins to see more clearly," he says...

...the works he wrote after the Thaw, on the other hand [e.g., The Defense of Granada, The Mother of Kings], are painful reappraisals of the Stalinist years...

...An outsider may be put off by the vagueness, the parochialism of these terms...

...He reminds us, for example, that the present "internationalist" Communist leadership is just as fond of romantic idealizations of the Polish past as were the discredited, chauvinist regimes of the pre-war era...

...indeed he apologizes for it...

...But he also points out that he lives in a country "which for two hundred years has been compelled to adopt the reflex of self-defense, in a country which has only survived by means of prayers, of secret universities, and of banned books...

...To be Polish, and to be free, is the greatest challenge faced by Brandys's hero...

...He finds it oddly revealing that "the perpetuation of Marx's social ideas is now the work of the developed capitalist countries, while we, instead of building our socialist superstructures as Marxists, are the ones who yearn for metaphysics...

...Ivan Sanders THE WORD Polish, as a qualitative adjective, probably figures more importantly in the literature of that West-Slavic nation than similar ethnic labels do in other national literatures...

...If Brandys's book were only an eloquent albeit constricted apologia for a Polish thinker's excessive preoccupation with Polishness, it would be of limited interest to non-Polish readers...

...Yet, the obsession with national identity does make more sense if one knows something about the checkered history of the country, or even the general region, in question...

...If Homer, Dante, and Milton have anything in common, it is that they seem, fitfully, to have entertained beliefs that nobody could share...

...Though its hero makes repeated references to his relationship with friends and family members, there is no plot to speak of...

...But he knows, too, that there is a price to pay for illusions of national greatness - and the price is individual freedom...

...the work is not so much a novel as a long essay, a monologue...

...It's worth noting that in the early fifties Kazimierz Brandys himself published a number of novels which contain every cliched requisite of socialist realism...

...He is fully aware now that there are ills which have nothing to do with, cannot be explained There persists an article of faith that supposes that we have somehow lost a paradise, that Homer or Dante or Milton could write tremendous poems because the poet and his audience in illo tempore, in that spell of magic and an organic oral tradition, shared a whole complex qfbe-liefs capable of organizing and running an epic poem...

...The whole matter of political engagement has become much more complex...

...A respectable professor who handed down to his son the nineteenth century, he could be touched only by Polish misfortune, Polish suffering...

...But fortunately the author has much to say about the drawbacks of a fixedly national point of view, thereby illuminating the dilemma of an independent-minded intellectual who is thwarted in his efforts to remain his own man not only by an authoritarian state, but by his own deepest impulses as well by a collective unconscious that colors his every response to the world...

...What it lacks is sustained narrative interest, and that, it seems, is somethings not even the most sophisticated practitioners of the form can do completely without.ely without...