If I only could put my numb fingers

into the wounds of Man. These truly do not heal.

Ever:

The rest is silence.
—Aleksander Wat, “On Good Friday”

These lines conclude a poem written by the dissident Polish poet and essayist Aleksander Wat less than two months before his suicide in 1967. They capture the central concerns of Wat’s life and art: the tension between a deep need for faith and an instinctive, pervasive doubt; the senselessness of most human suffering; and the failure of language. After the horrors of this century—many of which Wat experienced firsthand—he found belief in God all but impossible and the devil’s existence undeniable. For Wat, the devil’s incarnation at this moment in history was Communism, and Stalinism his purest manifestation.

In the West, Wat is best known for his spoken memoir My Century. Compiled from over twenty interviews recorded in 1964 by Czeslaw Milosz, it provides a detailed, intimate portrait of Poland between the wars, the battles within literary and Communist circles, and an intricate account of the Soviet prison system and the human microcosm within it. Wat’s illness and early death cut these memoirs short, bringing the reader only to the end of his exile in Soviet Asia in 1946. Aside from two collections of his poetry, Mediterranean Poems (1977) and With the Skin (1989), and his short-story collection Lucifer Unemployed (1988), Wat’s writing remains untranslated. In addition, little about him has been available in English. Tomas Venclova’s critical biography, Aleksander Wat: Life and Art of an Iconoclast, remedies this to a great extent.

Venclova, a Lithuanian poet and former dissident, now a professor of Russian and Eastern European Literatures at Yale University, is particularly well suited to illuminating Wat’s work. With a discerning feel for the philosophical complexities and the linguistic intricacies of Wat’s writing, Venclova fills in the gaps of Wat’s life story, weaving biographical facts with literary criticism. Yet Venclova’s account remains curiously two-dimensional. Wat’s intellectual and political lives are well delineated, but his spiritual life remains elusive. It is perhaps impossible to do justice to a religious identity as complex and contradictory as Wat’s, but it is, arguably, the most important aspect of his life.

An active and enthusiastic fellow traveler, Wat brought religious fervor to the Party without officially becoming a member. Yet his irreverence and obstinate opinions soon landed him in a series of Gulags. It was in 1941 in the bowels of the Saratov prison, 450 miles southeast of Moscow, that Wat came face to face with the devil. Nearly dead of starvation, suffering from dysentery and a raging fever, Wat, the unabashed atheist, heard a vulgar, operatic laugh approaching and receding. Then the devil himself appeared, complete with hooves and smelling of brimstone, only to be followed by a vision of God. While the laughter turned out to have been the anti-aircraft alarm of a patrol boat on the Volga river (Hitler had recently launched Operation Barbarosa against the Soviet Union), the vision of God and the experience of an overarching unity transformed Wat’s spiritual outlook. After this awakening, he no longer indulged in the atheistic bravado of his youth. Still, like many fervently religious men and women, he never fully overcame his religious ambivalence. This was perhaps in part due to the inevitable and disastrous spiritual overtones of his early politics. Like many of his generation, Wat was drawn to the secular faith of Communism by his inability to bear the rampant nihilism and disillusion that followed the First World War. Out of sheer metaphysical hunger, he turned a blind eye to the hollowness and hypocrisy of the Communists’ political idealism. After his spiritual awakening, this moral lapse weighed on his conscience for the rest of his life, unsettling even his deepest beliefs.

Wat formally converted to Catholicism in 1953 but remained plagued with doubts about the authenticity of his conversion. He never received the Eucharist and never abandoned his Jewish roots. In fact, his religious thought remained, in the words of his biographer, an idiosyncratic amalgam of Judaism and Christianity coupled with an obvious failure to reconcile the two faiths. For the most part, Wat wrote of his religious faith most directly, and ambiguously, in his late poetry, devoting much of his prose to literature, his past, and to analyzing and exposing Communism. The roots of all three faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Communism—were entwined in his earliest origins.

Wat was born on May Day in 1900 to a Warsaw Jewish family that counted famous Kabbalists, rabbis, converts, even a priest, among its ancestors. Although his father was observant and an expert on the Kabbalah, and his mother was from an Orthodox household, Wat and his six brothers and sisters received classical, rather than religious, educations. One of his fondest childhood memories was of the Catholic Masses to which the family nurse had taken him in secret. The aestheticism of the liturgy and the symbolism of the crucifix gained a lasting hold on his imagination. Wat was an intellectual child prodigy, quickly mastering several languages, even reading Kierkegaard’s Either/Or in German at the age of ten. He read voraciously in other branches of philosophy and was well versed in the works of Kant and Nietzsche. While still an undergraduate, he talked his way into a graduate seminar by impressing the professor with his knowledge of Schopenhauer.

Wat soon developed a strong rebellious streak. At nineteen he was notorious in Warsaw literary circles as one of the founders of Polish Futurism. He and his colleagues staged rather adolescent Surrealist happenings and took up Marinetti’s call to liberate language. Wat’s most concerted effort to free the word from conventional meanings culminated in 1919 with ME from One Side and ME from the Other Side of My Pug Iron Stove, a volume of parody and blasphemy written in the white heat of écriture automatique. Although much of it is unreadable, Pug Iron Stove nonetheless betrays an impressive, if unpolished, literary talent. Wat came to understand the extreme consequences of unmooring language only much later when he witnessed the psychological damage wrought upon Russians and Eastern Europeans by the Stalinists’ linguistic corruptions. But after this debut, Wat’s poetic muse was stifled for almost four decades.

Internal and external circumstances contributed to this long abstinence from poetry. Wat was increasingly prey to the ideological rootlessness of the prewar years. The pervasiveness of his nihilism is evident in the short stories he published in 1927. Lucifer Unemployed is a collection of mocking parables that cleverly overturn such basic humanistic cornerstones as religion, morality, and, paradoxically, even love, for he married the great love of his life, Ola Wat, that same year. In his ideological despair, Wat turned to Communism. Too much an individualist to join the ranks, he contented himself with promoting the cause and editing the most important Communist journal in Poland, The Literary Monthly, from 1929 to 1932. His editorship bought him several weeks in the relatively benign Warsaw Central Prison, the first of the fourteen prisons he would endure.

When Stalin invaded Poland seven years later, after charging the Polish Communist Party with treason and imprisoning or executing most of its functionaries, Wat’s political past proved a serious liability. While Wat began an indefinite sentence in Soviet prisons in 1940, on accusations ranging from Zionism to being an agent of the Vatican, Ola and their nine-year-old son Andrzej were deported to a kolkhoz in Kazakhstan. Hitler’s breach of the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact brought about a general amnesty for imprisoned Poles and Wat was freed late in 1941. Yet his Soviet ordeal was far from finished. After months of searching throughout Soviet Asia, Wat was finally reunited with Ola and Andrzej. Wat and his family were then exiled to Ili, a desolate mountain village near the Chinese border. He was imprisoned once again when he organized resistance to the Stalinist NKVD’s forced “passportization” of exiled Poles. Although soon released, Wat could not return to Poland until 1946.

Despite Wat’s suspect past, his editorship of the prestigious Literary Monthly brought him some protection from the hard-line Stalinists in postwar Poland. Wat considered his term at the magazine, his most active collaboration with the Party, to have been the greatest sin of his life, yet it enabled him to eke out a living by editing and translating. He continued to write, but as a hostile element, was unable to publish. Wat felt it his basic duty to atone for those two or three years of “moral insanity,” and launched a speech campaign against Stalinism. Beginning with a denunciation of Socialist Realism in 1948, he spoke out against the regime at every opportunity. Life became increasingly difficult, but Wat did not recant. Stalinism in Poland was at the height of its power in 1952, and signs of an impending arrest were accumulating. Former friends and acquaintances began to avoid Wat. Those he suspected were secret agents became increasingly friendly. The tension became too great. In early January 1953, Wat suffered a severe stroke. He was left with Wallenburg’s syndrome, permanent neurological damage that caused him sporadic but unbearable pain for the next fourteen years of his life. The pain finally became more than he could bear, and he committed suicide in 1967.

“The devil behind my illness is the devil of communism,” he declared in his memoirs. Although a true physical disability, his illness was in part psychosomatic, flaring up at times of tension, especially during discussions of Communism or in moments of creative frustration. The pain prevented him from realizing many literary projects but also seems to have been a catalyst for his mature poetry. After the political thaw of 1956, Wat was once again allowed to publish. Poems, his first volume of poetry in thirty-eight years, appeared to great acclaim in 1957, followed by Mediterranean Poems in 1962. A final volume of new and collected poems, Dark Light, was published posthumously in 1968.

Wat’s late verse bears little resemblance to his Futurist creations. Baroque opulence alternates with deceptive spareness in these highly autobiographical poems that relentlessly examine the political and spiritual cataclysms of our century. Venclova’s painstakingly exact analysis of his verse reveals how much of its macabre humor and rhythmic and syntactical complexity is lost in translation. Although he professed to distrust metaphors, Wat tended to think metaphorically, especially in equating the personal with the historical. In much of his late poetry, his physical suffering, imprisonment, and spiritual despair mirror not only the suffering of totalitarianism’s victims, but the human condition in general.

Wat developed the theme of totalitarianism more explicitly, if fragmentarily, in the prose of his later years. His illness prevented any sustained writing, but he did compose three volumes of self-analysis, literary and philosophical notes, and aphorisms and meditations. In numerous essays he examined the distorted behavior that had developed in the Soviet Union and its satellites, showing himself, according to Venclova, an ethnographer and anthropologist of Communism. Wat often returned to the destructive mechanism of Socialist Realism as symbolic of the system’s modus operandi, and located the source of the system’s power in its linguistic corruptions. By disrupting the basic semantic values of language, and thus disturbing the fundamental relation between truth and falsehood, Stalinists were able to manipulate their subjects’ very consciousness. Stalin’s genius, according to Wat, lay in establishing himself as the ultimate arbiter of reality by legislating meaning. While such analyses have proliferated in the recent past, Wat’s remains one of the most discerning, enriched by his poetic sensibility and the immediacy of personal experience.

Until more of Wat’s work is translated, English speakers must rely on Venclova’s biography for a sense of his intellectual subtlety and poetic gifts. Venclova could have provided more evidence of Wat’s influence on later generations of Polish poets and could also have dealt at greater length with Wat’s spiritual struggles. Nonetheless, Venclova amply supports his claims for Wat’s intellectual powers and vividly portrays the man’s relentless honesty and moral courage. What finally emerges from this biography is a portrait of that rare creature, a twentieth-century poet and intellectual who refused the compromises made by so many of his contemporaries.

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

1. Aleksander Wat: Life and Art of an Iconoclast, by Tomas Venclova; Yale University Press, 369 pages, $35. Go back to the text.