Publishing in Poland

...Literary prizes—sort of underground Pulitzers—are also awarded...

...Below ground, at clandestine publishing houses, a two- to three-month lead time is the rule, not the exception...

...The underground press, it should perhaps be noted, is a separate field of independent activity...

...For Interrogation NOWA has prepared Hungarian and Czech soundtracks...

...The accompanying reviews were hardly what one would call "fair," triggering polemics in clandestine literary papers...

...Kon-spira (or "Plotters")—a series of interviews with Solidarity leaders in hiding— had one printing in Poland, then a second the next year by an emigre publisher in Paris that was in turn reproduced by five underground houses...

...A master copy has to be smuggled in, the recording has to be adapted, and translators have to prepare the Polish-language text...

...For instance, the Solidity publishing house recently issued another edition of a "must" for underground readers, The Small Plotter, a "how to" manual on dealing with the Security police...

...related to activity in some form of independent publishing...

...Polish underground publishers, in heeding that warning, have accorded Orwell's work the attention it deserves...

...It works as well, or better, than the book publishing sphere...

...Lenin's Collected Works...

...Imagine what it would do to our skyline if everyone wanted to install his own antenna,'' he is reported to have said...

...Movies produced by State-controlled studios that were then banned, such as Lonely Woman by Agnieszka Holland and The Interrogation by Ryszard Bu-gajski, have been copied on video and are very popular...

...Its dense four pages focus on the "other Poland...

...Underground technicians are, in fact, looking forward to the day when they will be able to pull in a Polish-language program via satellite patterned after Voice of America, BBC or Radio Free Europe broadcasts—all of which are extensively listened to...

...As usual, there is no dearth of ingenuity among underground logisticians, who especially enjoy matching wits with the authorities when it comes to finding ways of getting around their regulations...

...Above ground, at the State publishing houses, the "normal" production cycle for a book remains six to eight years from the date a manuscript is accepted...

...The person lucky enough to meet these requirements will have to install the satellite antenna at his officially registered residence and—since the permits are being issued on an individual basis—must watch the beamed broadcasts alone...

...Generally, the first issue of a cassette consists of 1,000 copies, and the price is double that of a blank...

...A PC found in a flat occupied by a clandestine leader was shown on Polish television recently with the comment, "This is typical spying equipment...

...But better late than never...

...Their great advantage is that it is easier to protect data on a magnetic disk than to hide a pile of stencils in the event of a police search...

...Audiocassettes are proliferating on the independent market, mostly because they are easy to reproduce: Two cassette recorders and a connecting wire are a "chamber music" alternative to a vast orchestration of huge machines consuming reams of paper conducted by an ink-stained printer...

...Underground books are 30-40 per cent more expensive than those brought out by the State-controlled houses, in part because the price has to include a margin for insurance...

...Nadezhda Mandelstam, Joseph Conrad, Simone Weil, Karl Popper, Mikhail Voslensky, Mikhail Bulgakov, Bohumil Hrabal, Vaclav Havel, Adam Michnik, and Leszek Kolakow-ski are all Krag authors, too...

...Both productions were awarded Solidarity cultural prizes in 1985...

...This usually noisy process must take place in dry cellars, remote houses, or with round-the-clock work shifts on hand to reduce the danger of discovery...

...Independent publications range from weekly one-page news sheets produced by workers at the Lenin Steelworks in No wa Huta to a 100-page quarterly collection of literary essays...

...Opinion polls are conducted that rate the popularity of books...

...Special permits will be granted only to those who can both explain why they need them and obtain police clearance...

...The underground quickly recognized the importance of the phenomenon, and by making it possible to rent VCRs together with cassettes has multiplied the number of actual users...

...The names or pseudonyms of its columnists are widely known, and discussing important articles is considered chic by the intellectual elite of Warsaw or Cracow...

...Stefan Bratkowski, president of the disbanded Union of Polish Journalists, has launched a one-man enterprise— Audio Newspaper, with commentaries on domestic and foreign affairs...

...Moreover, as we shall see later, the introduction of modern technology has been greatly expanding its capabilities...

...Originally volunteers, most collaborators are now paid...

...In addition, the foundation coordinates editorial policies and the distribution of donations that help the smaller publishers survive...

...Especially popular are the recorded accounts of Pope John Paul II's 1983 pilgrimage to his native Poland, andofboththe 1984 assassination of Father Jerzy Popieluszko and the subsequent trial of his murderers...

...Audiocassettes came into use as soon as General Wojciech Jaruzelski declared war on his own nation...

...A literary agent from the West might be a little puzzled about how to obtain "written permission from the publisher," but it is easy to do so, and certainly much easier than dealing with the Polish bureaucracy...

...In Poland, they note, the top floors of apartment buildings are usually used for drying clothes, and they are confident they can situate satellite dishes on roofs in a manner that will make them as anonymous as a pair of panties hanging on a clothesline...

...In addition, NOWA receives an independent video news service from emigre groups in the West...

...Nevertheless, the Krag publishing house of Warsaw has put out 60 titles over the past five years...

...In place of a price, it carries the following legend: "This copy is free: The cost was covered by some organization...

...James Bond films, The Killing Fields, Star Wars, or 1984 are not likely to be shown on any Polish State-controlled screen...

...This enables them to devote full time to their underground jobs, improving the pace and quality of production...

...Interestingly, the Ministry of Interior did its own edition of300 copies for internal circulation...

...In 1948 George Orwell, writing in The New Leader about State patronage of the arts, warned: "If we find ourselves in 10 years' time cringing before somebody like Zhdanov, it will probably be because that is what we deserved...

...In any event, while single copies of video cassettes have been confiscated, no one has been arrested (yet...

...They include Witold Gombrowicz' three-volume Diary, works by the blacklisted novelist Tadeusz Konwicki, Louis-Ferdinand Celine's Voyageau boutdelanuit, William Styron's Sophie's Choice, Nikita S. Khrushchev's Memoirs, and a study of the Stalinist terror by Helene Carrere d'Encausse...

...It is sad to think how lonely this obedient citizen will feel as he sits in front of his television set watching a news broadcast from the Soviet Union, knowing that a dozen of his less obedient friends are having themselves a blast viewing From Russia with Love...

...Earlyin 1986, six of the largest clandestine houses formed the Foundation for Independent Publishing and set up a fund patterned after Western insurance companies...

...According to an official from the Communications Ministry, the strict rules concerning access to satellite TV supposedly stem from esthetic concerns...

...What infuriates Zhdanov's Polish pupils is not simply that books are being published outside State control...

...When 10 -20 workers gather around on a weekend for a home video screening of two or three films, it is at once an orgy of dissidence, an instructive form of recreation, and a means of fund-raising for the underground...

...Later the NOWA underground publishing house, or rather its branch, NOWA-Kaseta, began issuing cassettes of political songs, of excerpts from banned books, and of independent theater performances...

...apreviousNLcontrib-ulorwho has also writtenforLe Monde and the Spectator, is the translator <>/ Essays by George Orwell into Polish...

...Currently an estimated 700 newspapers, bulletins and journals are available...

...Officials estimate that there are already over 350,000 video cassette recorders in private hands...

...The latest underground hit is Squaring the Circle, a British-made film based on the history of Solidarity...

...The most delicate operation is, in fact, the actual printing...

...But lo protect the darlings of the regime from such discouraging deadlines, and enable them to speedily praise their masters' actions, a "quick printing path" has been introduced...

...Other publishers have in recent months offered translations of Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory...

...In the interim, they are keeping their skills sharpened by using both visual and audio Solidarity messages to interfere with State television...

...Distribution is handled by the clandestine press network...

...Meanwhile, back at the State publishing houses, typesetters sitting at creaking old linotype machines are slowly but surely preparing the unlikely hit of 1987: the 20th volume of V.I...

...Proven to be extremely efficient, this network is also merchandising a relatively new and highly popular product: video cassettes...

...Printing techniques vary, going from silk-screen to photo-offset—and when friendly printers from unfriendly official printing houses provide access, government equipment is used...

...It costs 3,000 zlotys to rent a video film from an independent distributor...

...That May film director Marian Terlecki, who recorded a performance of the Poznan Theater of the Eighth Day with a camera borrowed from the Church, was imprisoned on a trumped-up robbery charge...

...The initial recordings were songs from internment camps, where Solidarity members and dissidents were imprisoned following the military coup in December 1981...

...The best-known paper, TygodnikMazowsze, is a biweekly, with a print-run of 60,00080,000 copies nationwide...

...Among the recipients for 1985 was Teresa To-ranska for Oni, a book of interviews with the ousted Polish Communist leaders of the 1950s (which Harper & Row will publish here next March under the title Them...

...Western films are in great demand in the independent network, although it takes some time for them to become available...

...Last May, Interior Minister Czeslaw Kiszczak told the Polish Parliament that since December 1981 1,200 underground presses were confiscated, and that the groups running them were disbanded...

...The minimum press run for a title is 2,000 copies, theaverage is around4,000, and some titles have several editions...

...It is that a quasi-normal literary life exists...

...They, in turn, distribute Polish-made underground films abroad...

...The weekly Polityka—whose masthead is adorned with the slogan, "Workers of the world, unite"—even ran excerpts from On/and Konspira...

...for possessing video material...

...Anticipating another independent onslaught with the impending introduction of satellite TV, guardian angels from the censorship office last May issued a regulation to control its use...

...It is estimated that two thirds of all sentences for nonviolent crimes pronounced in 1984-85 Anna Husarska...

...And the deputy chief of propaganda for the Polish Army, (General and PhD) Leslaw Wojtasik, warned in an article that PCs are having dangerous "indoctrinal influence on the Socialist countries...

...Indeed, since 1977 when the first book came off an underground mimeograph machine—leaving behind the era of carbon-copy samizdat—independent publishing in Poland has proved to be a most efficient nationwide enterprise involving thousands of people, and producing thousands of titles...

...Polish authorities have been totally overwhelmed by this new means of corrupting the supposedly normalized society, and have no effective way of stopping it...

...There are regional and national newspapers, translations of Amnesty International bulletins, regular reports on ecology, papers devoted to health problems, and several directed to peasants...

...Although the demand for independent books invariably exceeds the supply, the boards have to establish priorities in allotting their limited resources...

...It presents a chronicle of illegal treatment of dissidents, statements of independent bodies, stories about actions taken outside official circles, and interviews with opposition leaders...

...For security reasons, logos are often not used or are frequently changed, and of course no addresses are provided beyond the occasional "printed in the deciduous forest...

...In 1985 alone they made available five editions of A nimal Farm (two of them comic strip versions and another with color illustrations), two editions of Nineteen Eighty-Four (one of these ran to 17,000 copies), and a collection of Orwell essays...

...At private screening sessions each guest usually pays the host 100 zlotys—or the equivalent of a normal cinema ticket— to help defray expenses...

...Another original film entitled There it is tells the story of a small village, Zbrosza Du-za, which fought for years to obtain State permission for the construction of a church...

...Delivery of sufficient paper, ink and bindery materials has to be guaranteed as well—not an easy matter in crisis-ridden, police-controlled Poland...

...Despite the harassment independent publishers suffer, their books are regularly reviewed in the official press, which nolens volens recognizes the existence of what it euphemistically refers to as the "second circuit...

...Polish filmmakers from abroad have supplied a cassette recounting the 40-year history of the most respected emigre publishing house, Kultura, based in Paris...

...At every stage—writing, translating, typesetting, printing, distribution—the risk to participants is high...

...Works reprinted from abroad duly carry the ISBN number...

...Recently, inarare public demonstration that some are more equal than others, officials announced the names of those eligible to thus have their work appear within a year...

...It covers losses resulting from the seizure of material and equipment, fines of individuals caught by the police in flagrante delicto (if spreading good literature can be called delicto), and support payments for the families of those who are jailed, among other options...

...Independent production started in 1985, and did not go too smoothly...

...underground...

...A necessarily incomplete underground bibliography for 1985, listing 363 titles, is believed to cover only 70 per cent of the total output...

...Lately word processors and computers have made their modest entry (or is it descent...

...Now audiocassettes cover virtually every subject censored or distorted in the official media...

...Secret boards of the secret publishing houses meet secretly to discuss editorial policy, and to set the wages of secret translators and proofreaders...

...Personal computers make the Reds see red...

...An accurate count is difficult...

...Even soccer fanatics were proud of "our boys" when they broke in with those messages during this year's World Championship...

...Eleven of his one-hour tapes are circulating at the moment...

...The selection of material is still limited...

...The Polish opposition's arsenal is no longer restricted merely to "paper ammunition...

...Premiums are determined actuarially, based on a subscriber's "safety record...

...Undaunted, thevideosectionofNOW A produced a lively interview with the dissident writer Tadeusz Konwicki...

...Poles enjoy seeing how others see them...

...But there is more to the mass media today than what Gutenberg invented (and IBM added...

...One publishing house has just concluded clandestine tests for literary works, research papers and art objects relating to the slogan "Time of probation.' The Grand Prize was 100,000 zlotys (half the average annual earnings in Poland), and the sponsor expressed the hope that "in the future, conditions will exist for the distribution of these works...

...There are at present a dozen major underground publishing organizations that issue one or two books monthly, plus several dozen smaller ones...

...Two journals are specially designed for children...

...Underground originals bear the international copyright mark and accompanying standard text (in English...

...Underground book parties are organized in private apartments...

...To hold a private viewing, all one needs is a color TV set (but not Soviet-made, since those cannot be connected to video recorders...

...Other tapes offer truthful reports of historical events: the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising, or the 1956 Hungarian Revolution (the latter was released on the 30th anniversary of that tragic event...