Seeds Beneath the Snow
Coser, Lewis
THE BROKEN MIRROR, A COLLECTION OF WRITINGS FROM CONTEMPORARY POLAND, Ed. by Pawel Mayewski; Introduction by Lionel Trilling. Random House. New York, 1958. 209 pp. $3.50. This competent...
...The Gomulka regime is not likely to reinstate the cultural terror which prevailed during the Stalinist period, yet the very logic of his rule forces Gomulka to suppress the voices of dissent...
...THE BROKEN MIRROR, A COLLECTION OF WRITINGS FROM CONTEMPORARY POLAND, Ed...
...LEWIS COSER...
...Some of the writers here translated were once enthusiastic Communists, some seem to have been critical from the beginning, others apparently maintained a somewhat detached stance...
...When Strzelecki writes, "Participation in public and political life may become an instrument of dehumanization," or "Thus we spread over people and the world the opaque dome of our superstructure...
...This competent translation of some of the writings of the younger Polish intellectuals in the forefront of the recent revolt against Stalinist orthodoxy serves to remind us that those who assumed that totalitarian dominance would extinguish intellectual life were profoundly mistaken...
...But God sees all, so I think that Stalin is safe...
...Several of these writers had taken an active part in laying the foundations of the very system they now abhorred...
...Living in what philosophers call extreme situations, they were enabled to transcend the immediacy of the topical and to gain access to layers of meaning where the eternal problems of responsibility and guilt, of action and inaction could be confronted in a new light...
...For many of them this rejection was clearly painful...
...the conscious effort not to be duped seems to have become a peculiar stimulus for the development of a critical imagination...
...but all converged in their passionate rejection of the system of thought control...
...contribution to our own quest for self-understanding...
...Recent reports from Poland indicate that the freedom briefly enjoyed by the Polish intellectuals is coming to an end...
...And that is why this collection should not only be read as a document on the spiritual evolution of men whose experiences were so different from ours...
...It should also and at the same time be read as a Another Burden for God The "red" Dean of Canterbury recently wrote: "Stalin was a rough and stern man because he had a dirty job to do...
...A number of "revisionist" writers have been censored, a number of their publications have been suppressed...
...It was simply not true, as so many believed, that in totalitarian societies there flourish only opportunists and dupes...
...But we know, now, that there always will be seeds beneath the snow...
...Introduction by Lionel Trilling...
...These men are concerned with problems which, beyond the difference of setting and concrete historical experience, are our problems as much as theirs...
...It may be that another ice age will follow the thaw...
...When Strzelecki writes, "We have become ascetics of the geometry of organized life," we realize that he has penetrated the innermost layers of the totalitarian ethos...
...There are no experiences but those we allow the people to have," there is a shock of recognition: these men know as deeply as an Orwell the inner mechanism of totalitarian dominance...
...But the painfulness of their experience, as the editor reminds us, led them, in the process of self-questioning, to pose issues wider and more fundamental than the immediate political problems at hand...
...In Jan Strzelecki's Notes 1950-1953, written, though of course not published, at the high point of Stalinist terror, the insight into the mechanism of totalitarian domination is as at least as penetrating as that of the Western observers who attempted to describe the phenomenon "from the outside...
Vol. 6 • April 1959 • No. 2
