Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West (23 page)

3.5 Portrait Company of Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz at your service. A Mr and Ms Nawroccy in the full paraphernalia.

Since the authorities, not even necessarily totalitarian, discovered the political usefulness of references to nationalist ideologies of “blood and soil”, the uncanny was capable of becoming a functional part of ideology. We could turn our attention to the Polish phenomenon of building mounds – by “the hand of the nation” – to great national heroes (like Kościuszko or Piłsudski). A certain culmination of the discussion of the national style between the two World Wars was the competition for the monument to Józef Piłsudski in Warsaw, announced just after the
Marshal’s death in 1935 (Szukalski sent in his design of Duchtynia from America). This death and the competition, whose winner faced an opportunity to be recorded for posterity, resulted in an extraordinary activation of national solemnity, Slavic myth, and symbolic and phantasmic representations of Polishness among the designers. Examined today, the designs dazzle with their bombastic nature, and as designs, they simply seem bizarre. The sublime was imagined in the typically Germanic, classicist style: “All of Poland is a pyramid rising from his (i.e. Piłsudski’s) life,” said General Wieniawa-Długoszowski on the occasion of the competition

Polish Romanticism would also inevitably run into its antithesis, namely positivism and the Galician myth, being the reverse of the mystic Zakopane style. Among the advocates of this other side of the coin was certainly Stanisław Brzozowski, although his attitude is among the more complex. One of Poland’s few European-class intellectuals, in his
Legenda Młodej Polski
(Legend of Young Poland (1910)) he attacked Polish writers for yielding to pseudo-mysti-cisms. Young Poland was a movement where fin de siecle decadence mixed with mystical nationalism. As Brzozowski says, Poles want “to keep for ourselves the possibility of internal life outside the law, to outlaw the entire world. The logic of life and the logic of thought become outlawed and make every poorly fledged Polish ‘self’ gain over them Caesarial power in their own eyes. The cognitive infertility, inactivity in life and economy are always false even though they were to be found ‘at the source of the Polish soul.” Following a deeply traumatic experience in his youth (black-mailed by Tsarist police, he was forced to testify and incriminate his colleagues, and throughout the rest of his brief life was haunted by a sense of guilt), Brzozowski had an obsession with guilt and with struggling out from the gutter. In his philosophy, he would equally obsessively seek power in the place of the traditional Polish genealogy of defeat and weakness. As Cezary Michalski aptly
noticed in his foreword to his
Głosy wśród nocy
(Voices in the Night) reissued after a nearly hundred years: “A reflection on individual subjectivity has always been weaker in Poland, when compared to the reflection over the collective subjectivity: as shallow as ritualised, as omnipresent and cornering.” With all his work, Brzozowski aspired to restore a proper economy of Polish subjectivity, and fought for liberation from immaturity and impotence - for their “reworking”. Initially, he saw the reasons for such a state of affairs in the cheap decadence of Polish aesthetics.

In his
Legend of Young Poland
, he charges this milieu with weakness and lassitude of will. But even Brzozowski’s naturalism, positivism, his ‘philosophy of work’, and the called for intellectual fortitude were not free from a specifically Polish mysticism bearing fruition in the extraordinary mix of Bergson’s vitalism, Sorel’s philosophy of power, and the symbolism of the soil and the nation. Brzozowski was inspired at the same time by Nietzsche, Darwin, and Marx, and wanted to reconcile his fascination between Catholicism and Marxism, and cultural nationalism with literary modernism. The fact that, after his untimely death, he was read both by communists and nationalists with fascist inklings is a testimony to the ambiguity of his project. Michalski, for example, points at the person of Andrzej Trzebiński, the leader of Sztuka i Naród (Art and Nation) who would become engrossed in reading Brzozowski in occupied Warsaw, building at the same time grotesque dystopias in the style of Witkacy and Gombrowicz. As we shall see, Witkacy (Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, 1885-1939) and Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969) actually undertook the same subjects of spectral and pompous Polishness, yet in an entirely new, grotesque manner.

With his vitalism and solemnity, Szukalski seemingly stands on the antipodes, and yet he becomes a part of the same decadence. Everything became mixed. His concepts were blatant contaminations without chronology or logic. His attacks on the academic system demanded a return to the spirit of the medieval guilds, and
only the art of the medieval Piast era or with a folk pedigree deserved the notion of “pure”. One cannot discuss Szukalski’s entanglements at the level of sign or form. They are perfectly legible, much like his ideological grounds. What distorts an unambiguous assessment of the artist is rather his instability between the professed love of things Slavic and European orderliness. Our Slavic character is situated on the emotional plane, which partially explains the incoherence of positions, both of the Young Poland and the more Europe-oriented avant-gardists of the period between the two World Wars. The notion of the ‘Slavic soul’ disturbs the pure “aesthetic course” of inspiration and its conceptualization, and remains a burden on the advocates of Europeanness. Yet there is no art that would bring back the contact with the past. The attempts to return to our very deep roots, undertaken by Szukalski, discloses a deeply buried complex.

Between the wars, Piłsudski’s superoptimistic and nationalist vision of Poland “from sea to sea” went alongside a catastrophism, whose most distinct preacher was definitely the polymath Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, known by the pen-name Witkacy. Known for his dislike of Russia after he had seen the aftermath of the October Revolution, he distanced himself from the Slavic, as he believed it annihilated individualism – the only reason behind the existence of the Individual Being. He believed that there is something in ‘eastern mentality’ that predestines it to totalitarianism. The plot of his
Nienasycenie
(Insatiability, 1932) takes us to a not-so-distant future. The protagonists are a gang of decadents and derelicts, representatives of the artistic Boheme, drowned in lethargy, drugs and mental illnesses. At the same time, there appears on the black market a pill created by the Mongolian philosopher, Murti Bing, which liberates the individual from any tormenting doubts of a metaphysical nature and turns him or her into a polite citizen devoid of any views. This takes place at the moment when the Chinese– Mongolian army that has already conquered the whole of Eastern Europe is just about to attack
Poland and complete its Orientalization, which is tantamount to the annihilation of all and any individualism. Torn between politeness and anarchism, Witkacy’s Poles confirm their schizophrenic condition.

The moral chaos that interwar society was plunging into was presented probably most insightfully by Bronisław Wojciech Linke, one of the most astonishing and original Polish artists of the first half of the twentieth century. An amalgam of the leftist politics and surreal imagination brought about a vision that was far closer to the delusions of symbolists, expressionism, Neue Sachlichkeit (New Realism), and Goya’s wartime cycles than to communist propaganda. The nervous line is what connects Linke to Witkacy. Linke’s world of small towns becomes inundated in an increasing chaos, yielding to the domination of capitalism, and its degenerations. It was not a coincidence that Linke’s favorite reading was symbolist Alfred Kubin’s
Po Tamtej Stronie
(On the other Side), in which the German Expressionist described the blueprint for the Land of Dream, perceived as an ideological escape from Europe, engulfed at the time in class struggle, capitalism, poverty, and the growing power of totalitarianism. This new version of Europe does not provide, however, any relief even in art. Following Kubin, Linke is a pessimist and catastrophist, which does not diminish in any way the horrors of his cycles on Silesia and the Jewish Holocaust during the Second World War.

3.6 Stach z Warty Szukalski is forging the new national art. Here posing at an exhibition in Cracow, 1936

The romantic transgression portrayed “pathological” sexuality, clairvoyance, psychological illnesses, lunatic states, magnetism,
doppelgangers, and vampires. This “dark side” has its geography: Count Dracula comes naturally from the East, which is the house of all evil, chaos, and unbridled lust. Gothicism was never present in Poland on a popular scale. A castle was the hero of many Gothic Romantic texts, enough to mention Poe’s
The Fall of the House of Usher.
The Gothic personified the horrors of Romanticism, and negative aesthetic experience or the sublime were impossible without the addition of atrocities.

A significant example here is Mściwy Karzeł i Masław, Książę mazowiecki (
The Vindictive Dwarf and Masław the Mazovian Prince
), a Gothic novel by Zygmunt Krasiński, whose plot transports us to the vicinity of the family estate of Opinogóra. The book presents in a grotesque manner a downright cruel figure of a sadistic local chieftain, and weaves elements of exotic Transylvanian vampire legends into the Polish landscape. The Slavic lands are portrayed here as cruel, where the uncanny is discovered in a very homely countryside. Interventions of the grotesque and Gothic into the rational world are not innocent: they are rather a testimony to fundamental doubt. The world is managed by an impersonal, ruthless force, which simply does not need to be the “chaos” destroying order, but rather a force that reveals the permanent chaos onto which an illusory order was imposed. One does not need to go far to seek this, as chaos is already triumphant in Mickiewicz’s
Forefathers’ Eve
, best described by literary scholar Ryszard Przybylski: “everything is unbelievable, mad, maddening. The living talk to the dead. In a cemetery chapel, the people together with the departed souls perform an opera for intellectuals. The frustrated specter falls into logomania and begins to talk as if he were paid for it. Clocks strike. Candles are extinguished. Existence caves in into the darkness. In prisons, between interrogations, the best of our youth exchange jokes and sing songs. An epileptic soars towards the stars. History shakes a fist at Transcendence. Waving his tail, the Devil takes pity over criminals. Forgetting about the crowd of victims, angels make fuss over a poet
filled with vainglory. A visionary babbles something about numbers. A filthy villain sneers at the mother of a son tortured-to-death. Blasphemies, prayers, and helplessness. Conspirators, traitors, and martyrs. Half-rotten informers choke on the smouldering soil of the graves. A glimpse of a cavalcade of kibitkas (carrying away prisoners) between cemetery trees at dawn. Philosophic perambulations of the streets of Kyrgyz– Kazakh Babylon. Looks as cold as dagger blades, and silences are pregnant with events. All this is Polish, arch-Polish - to tears. As becomes the national specter, the work has a shape as misshapen as mysterious.”

Poland can be neither parted nor unified. Our melancholic complex behaves as an open wound, drawing life energy from everywhere. The joy in self-flagellation means the satisfaction of sadistic and hateful tendencies, which have no-one to transfer themselves to. Poland is the ever-renewing wound, clotted into the state of melancholia and disallowing contact with the Real.

This is where we could place the activity of Tomasz Kozak, the contemporary artist who may be the most intensive in trying to come to terms with romanticism and its exorcisms. His diabolic– grotesque rephrasing of Artur Grottger’s prints is even too obvious a commentary on the Polish– Russian, or Polish– Eastern, relations. The January Rising of 1863 against Russia has been coded in the minds of successive generations of Poles in the form given to it by Grottger, becoming another link in the history of martyrdom. Kozak’s murals approach our Messianism as a murderous grotesque. The enemies that our demonic fellow nationals stand to fight are the eternal Jew and the Bolshevik. In turn, in his Yoga Lesson/Luciferian Lesson diptych, Kozak wanted to touch upon the most demonic and ambiguous elements of the Polish psyche. The artist comes straightforwardly to contemporary art engrossed in shamming a variety of activities
and art’s dumbness resulting from anti-intellectual positions. The relief comes unexpectedly from the past from the emanations of anachronism, which derailed from the grooves of history, reveals its subversive face. Kozak is interested in compromised ideologies, which cause only embarrassment in the days of political correctness. Yet this moment of shame is most precious for us: it is a legible trace left after the displaced dream of power. The task behind the prophet’s aureole and mysticism, as Kozak believed, was to transplant the Arian myth into Polish soil, combining it with the mysticism of the Tatras and with spiritual purism.

The ‘Young Poland’ writer Tadeusz Miciński’s mythology is, besides Szukalski and numerous others, another version of identity compensation disclosing a terse commentary upon the chaos of identity in the contemporary Pole, lost in stereotypes. In Kozak’s narration it becomes the elaborately edited shreds of a vision from which he still cannot awake. The avant-garde, and especially that of communist and revolutionary provenance tried to distance itself as much as possible from this infested discourse, as Kozak rightly noted. Our eternally unfulfilled longing finds expression in the elections won by the right wing. Again, we deal with a Nietzschean movement: Miciński fought against the dwarfing of culture, which disposes of its horror and tragic spirit appropriate for a bygone time. Kozak even uses Janion’s phrase: “phantasmic criticism” against the simple call for involvement of art in social life and “political criticism” (as heralded by Artur Żmijewski, more on which in
Chapter 4
). Inspired partly by Benjamin he used film as the final personification of phantasms, making use of the “modern” methods of manipulating images, as for example editing.