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
