Dogma and Despotism
PTAKOWSKI, JERZY
Dogma and Despotism The Inquisitors. By Jerzy Andrzejewski. Knopf. 158 pp. $3.50. Reviewed by Jerzy Ptakowski Associate Editor, "East Europe" Poland is a country where literature has always...
...Andrzejewski's prewar literary debut was as a Catholic writer...
...Reviewed by Jerzy Ptakowski Associate Editor, "East Europe" Poland is a country where literature has always been closely connected with the historical experiences of the nation...
...Its first chapter was published in 1956—the answer is in that date— by the Warsaw literary weekly, Prze-glad Kulturalny, when the "thaw" was at its peak in the Soviet bloc and Poland was approaching its crucial "October Revolution...
...After the war, when the old system crashed into rubble and the Communists seized power, many of these young writers divorced themselves from the past and became fervent adherents of the new faith...
...In one of his best short stories, "The Appeal" (1942), dealing with concentration camps and written in the wake of his initial wartime experiences, Andrzejewski sketches the portrait of a man who, on seeing evil triumphant, has no other choice but to remain true to himself...
...In his novel Harmony of Heart (1938), God is the creator and support of all moral principles...
...Andrzejewski belongs to those writers whose chief literary concern seems to be the discovery of the essence of evil, and in this book his search leads him to 15th-century Spain of the Inquisition as the analogue for present-day Poland...
...There, Andrzejewski draws a picture of man in a world where all efforts to think honestly are absolutely condemned...
...The generation of contemporary Polish writers—to which Jerzy Andrzejewski belongs— was born during World War I and matured during the Nazi Occupation and during World War II...
...Andrzejewski unmasks the evil beneath the idealistic benevolent guise of Communism, condemns its practice and declares his belief that a system dependent on terror cannot endure...
...And it was perhaps for that October uprising and for all men that Andrzejewski, through the lips of the dying Torquemada, called for an end to man's persecution of man: "From today there shall be no more fear on earth...
...Though the action of the book takes place in a country supposedly remote from Poland and in times far removed from ours, there can be no doubt that the author's intention is to describe contemporary Communist-dominated Poland...
...But not for long...
...More disenchantment awaited them, a disenchantment that was transformed into rebellion when they confronted the paper-thin slogans of Communism with the practices of the Stalin era...
...During that "thaw" a critical role was played by Polish writers and journalists, many of them disenchanted Marxists and former Communist sympathizers...
...Within this system created by Chief Inquisitor Tomas de Torquemada people are forced to confess to imaginary crimes and inform upon their closest friends without the use of torture and without a single cry of protest...
...The latest of Andrzejewski's works, The Inquisitors, written 10 years later, brings us the author's mature evaluation of the "new faith...
...And few peoples' history abounds with such dramatic events as the Poles...
...How did a work so critical of Communism appear in Communist-ruled Poland, and from the pen of a writer who has run the literary gamut from Catholicism to Marxism...
...In his novel Ashes and Diamonds (1948), known to the Western world in its film version (which won the Prix International de Critique at the 1959 Venice Festival), he describes the conflicts brought about by the change from a "state of war" to a "state of peace," when old values must be subjected to revision while new values are not yet familiar enough...
...It was educated in labor camps and prisons and witnessed deportations and mass murders...
...However strong their resistance, it is always destroyed by psychological methods which give new names to old concepts and convince the victims that any form of opposition will be pointless...
...The effectiveness of these methods is attested to by the fact that only one of the book's many characters is able to oppose the despot actively...
...Now, these writers are still searching for new concepts of truth, goodness and justice, and echoes of these soul-searing experiences are found in their literary creations...
...what remains is only total subservience to dogma...
...It came to know the bitterness of defeat, fratricidal struggles and the treachery of friends...
...Andrzejewski speaks of the circumstances which render it extremely difficult to choose ideals when these are proclaimed from both sides of a barricade, and he leaves one with the question: "Will only ashes and chaos remain to be then swept into an abyss by the storm...
Vol. 43 • November 1960 • No. 46
