The Conquerors of Dreams
FRUMKIN, HAROLD
The Conquerors of Dreams The Graveyard. By Marek Hlasko. E. P. Dutton. 126 pp. $2.95. Reviewed by Harold Frumkin The Graveyard, Marek Hlasko's second book, is a vital and powerful tour de force...
...It seems I said a lot of things that night...
...He must go to the Party Secretary at the plant...
...His use of images of decay, disjointedness and incompleteness builds up into a total picture of Stalinist Poland as the graveyard of human love and man's individuality...
...Hlasko should particularly be read by every American who thinks that reality is reflected in the standard-of-living indexes or that freedom is only the right to choose television channels...
...He should be read by anyone who is conscious of the history being made behind the Iron Curtain, by the art-for-art's sakers who may be disturbed by his violence and intent but who will be rewarded by the unity and diversity of his book...
...At a meeting that is a biting satire of Party protocol, he is asked to turn in his Party card...
...Perhaps only the writer, the forger of the conscience of his race, has the right to judge and condemn those who take the easy way...
...The novel has depth because its subject is important...
...The Eighth Day of the Week, it is surprising that The Graveyard has slipped so quietly on to the Western literary scene...
...We'll get into every thought, every action, every corner of the human brain...
...The Graveyard is the story of a man who is forced to re-examine his life-long "faith" in Communism...
...That will be our task...
...And now sing.'" A few weeks later, on May Day, his last spiritual hope gone, Franciszek meets the policeman who had arrested him...
...Hlasko is a symbolist in the best sense of the term...
...He asks primary questions: What beliefs can a man embrace in an egocentric metaphysics...
...Hlasko is painting, through the particularized experiences of Franciszek Kowalski, a portrait of the defeated man—the unutterable horror of the loss of joy, spontaneity, freedom, choice and responsibility...
...Forty-eight-year-old Franciszek Kowalski, a model worker at the "For a Better Tomorrow" automotive factory and a loyal Party member, gets a little drunk one night while reminiscing with a war-time friend...
...It is total unconditional surrender—a last act of denial of hope...
...He has assimilated aspects of several writers and forged them into a highly individualistic style...
...Reviewed by Harold Frumkin The Graveyard, Marek Hlasko's second book, is a vital and powerful tour de force and a novel of high seriousness which merits more critical and public attention than it has received...
...He is arrested, interrogated, held over night and then released...
...After the furor caused by his first novel...
...In a highly comic scene during which Franciszek vainly attempts to explain what has happened, a worker tries to get him to join the local glee club and a young comrade enters several times to inform on factory workers...
...Only one thing is sure: The Party will always work the same way...
...He now submits willingly to the rearrest he provokes...
...Can the primordial human feelings be denied...
...His episodic, scenic technique is akin to dramatic method—each episode is multi-significant, carrying the simple plot-line inexorably onward with compression and tension, revealing the deepening spiritual and emotional changes in Franciszek, and finally painting a dismal picture of the physical setting, which is in itself symbolic of the emptiness in men's lives...
...When a man repudiates this dignity he becomes "the good Communist," Pinocchio in reverse—with his mind, passion and body turned into the perfect block of wood—slightly surpassing his production quota, spying constantly on his fellow puppets and blankly regurgitating the slogan of the day...
...On the way home he is accosted by two policemen and he shouts at them that they are the ones who are drunk, not he...
...Disturbance of the peace at night," retorts the policeman...
...Franciszek is incoherent during the interview because he does not recall exactly what he said to the police (although during the course of the novel he comes to believe that he has irreparably maligned the Party...
...Marek Hlasko is a 27-year-old Polish writer who went into self-imposed exile during a visit to West Berlin in 1058 and who is now living in Israel...
...If there is a moral to the story, it is stated by the sculptor: "'They've certainly made a mess of us...
...The plot is rather simple...
...He has, however, one final hope—Jerzy, the former leader of the men with whom he fought, a great believer and an inspiration to his men...
...You remember me, of course," he taunts...
...Can the sensibility be anaesthetized and extracted in the service of an idea...
...Stunned by this incredible turn of events, yet convinced that he must have done something terribly wrong, Franciszek sets out on a spiritual odyssey through Warsaw, seeking from his former comrades-in-arms a reaffirmation of the purity of the Communist ideal for which they had fought...
...The Great Teacher [Lenin] built a graveyard...
...Unlike the artist who had given rational testament to the dissolution of belief in the Communist cause, Jerzy is the final wordless image of what has happened to all these men...
...stupid dreams can lead to deviations...
...From now on, future generations will be born and live in graveyards...
...In his delusion he repeats the capitulation that he had uttered to save his life: '"I can be useful...
...What is the relation of action to ideology...
...A verbal skirmish ensues in which the police twist Franciszek's words until they resemble an indictment of the Government...
...Apparently people march toward life, toward the sun, through graves.'" Finding no answer in his quest, Franciszek begins to accept his fate as a natural consequence of his political betrayal...
...Nurtured on Nazi mass murders and Stalinist terrorism...
...He gets no satisfaction from the Secretary and demands that his case be brought before the local Party group for a vote of confidence...
...Many of his scenes are Kafkaesque, such as the opening scene where Franciszek is absurdly arrested and the visit to the sculptor reminds one of K's visit to Titorelli...
...Well conquer everything, even dreams...
...We must conquer dreams...
...Hlasko is the spokesman for a generation that knows neither hope nor joy but which cannot relinquish its love of freedom or its faith that, in some final way, the dignity of man is inviolable...
...Hlasko may have literary weaknesses, such as the heavy-handed irony of the final scene or the occasional triteness of an image, but he redirects attention to fundamental and human issues within the framework of a powerful, wonderfully wrought piece of fiction...
...But he never misuses his methods to get an effect of depth...
...Jerzy is now insane and he thinks Franciszek is another of the inquisitors who had tortured him during a two-year prison sentence...
...Franciszek cannot believe that, even in a drunken moment, he slandered the very cause that had been his raison d'etre...
...Hlasko's artistic achievement is fascinating and too many-faceted (as any satisfying novel is) to be detailed here...
...But the policeman does not remember, because Franciszek had said nothing, and as soon as he had been released, "the statement went in the wastebasket and that was that...
...He visits them one by one: The first lives in mortal fear of the authorities and won't even listen to Franciszek, the next is a high-ranking member of the secret police who has imprisoned his own son, another is a sculptor who produces nothing but identical busts of Lenin...
...Franciszek perceives the tragic fact that no individual faith is possible...
...He must clear his name...
Vol. 43 • March 1960 • No. 10
