Andrzejewski, Jerzy
Polish prose writer (1909-83)
"Taken from the forthcoming Censorship: A World Encyclopedia, edited by Derek Jones, to be published by Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, London, in May 2000"
Andrzejewski made a name for himself as a writer in the 1930s, winning a prestigious literary prize with his first published novel Harmony of the Heart (1938). During World War II, he played an active role in underground Polish cultural life in Warsaw. The stories he wrote often explored issues somewhat at odds with patriotic requirements: his story Before the Court (1941), which examined the motivation of traitors was condemned by some as justifying such treachery, whilst Easter Week, his long tale set in the Warsaw ghetto, was criticized for exploiting the Jewish tragedy for purely literary purposes. This kind of controversy also beset many of his postwar works.
Probably the best-known of these is Ashes and Diamonds (1948), awarded the literary prize of the journal Odrodzenie (Renaissance), which became a school set-text after 1956. This novel depicted the last days of the war in a Poland plunged into the national tragedy of an internecine and fratricidal struggle between Polish Communists and the remnants of the non-Communist Home Army (Armia Krajowa, or AK). A young AK soldier, Maciej Chelmicki, despite his reservations about the sense of his mission, carries out the assassination of a local Party Secretary, Szczuka, and is himself shot by mistake. The novel misrepresented the current political conditions to the extent that the Red Army appears as an entirely benevolent force, whereas in reality its actions gave the Home Army little choice but to fight on. Fragments of the novel first appeared at the time of the January 1947 elections, and were therefore immediately viewed as propaganda for the new state. Officially, however, Marxist critics expressed dissatisfaction with Andrzejewski's "essentialist" treatment of the Communist characters, who were presented as good but were not seen in action. Nonetheless, the authorities considered the work to be basically sympathetic to their cause and indicative of the author's political development. When Andrzejewski came to revise the work in 1954, under the more relaxed conditions of the "Thaw", he chose in fact to emphasize its pro-Communist slant, rewriting key passages according to Socialist Realist dictates. This hyper-Stalinist version continued to appear on an almost annual basis during the remaining years of Communist rule.
The Communist authorities' strategy of persuasion towards writers-the so-called "gentle revolution"-adopted in the early postwar years gave way to a more decisive approach in 1949, when Socialist Realism became the obligatory artistic method. Andrzejewski was one of the first to express his overt commitment to the new régime by offering self-criticism of his past literary and political "immaturity", before he joined the Party in April 1950. Despite his demonstration of faith, Andrzejewski produced little of artistic note in the next few years, concentrating mainly on publicistic work and on occupying key positions in the new cultural and political establishment: On Soviet Man (1951) and especially The Party and the Writer's Creative Work (1952) provided standard expositions of the Party's outlook.
Although his satirical tales An Effective War (1952) caused some problems for the censor since they satirized the obligatory positive hero, Andrzejewski's growing disquiet about Stalinism found clearer expression in the banned story The Great Lament of a Paper Head (1953). This parable details a nightmare, in which, despite having nothing to say at a mass meeting, a man finds the everyday Stalinist jargon so pervasive that it causes both himself and his audience to wrap their heads in newspapers. Over the next few years, Andrzejewski chose to employ such parables and "Aesopian language" in analysing the failure of the Stalinist system. His short tale The Golden Fox (1955), whose young hero is eventually persuaded by others that the creature he claimed to see was merely a delusion, provided a general critique of conformity in a totalitarian society but was viewed - perhaps in order to mislead the censors - merely as a children's story. The intention of later works could not be thus misinterpreted, and came under the "retributionary trend" which radically criticized Stalinism and was censured by the Party leadership at the end of the 1950s.The novel And Darkness Covered the Earth (also translated as The Inquisitors, 1957) and the novella The Gates of Paradise (1960) used historical analogy as a means of exploring the recent past. In the first, the activities of the Spanish Inquisition in the 14th-century provide the historical background: the chief inquisitor Torquemada recruits a young idealistic monk Diego, ostensibly to purify Spanish society, but in truth to establish a reign of terror in which the sole aim is the acquisition and retention of power. The Gates of Paradise consists of a series of confessions given to an unnamed priest accompanying the Children's Crusade of 1212, who realizes that the vision inspiring the crusade is in fact false and that what binds the key figures together are sexual machinations. In each case, ideology proves to be a swindle and the individual is powerless to intervene. Sensitive to these implications, the Censorship Office withheld permission for several months.
After 1956, Andrzejewski emerged as a leading critic of the Party as it moved away from a liberal line. Gomulka's personal prohibition of the monthly Europa in autumn 1957 encouraged Andrzejewski and several other writers to leave the Party. The leadership viewed the criticism of the death penalty in Andrzejewski's weekly Polityka column as a direct attack on its own stance regarding the punishment of economic crimes, which led him to lose his post and to suffer a ban lasting several months. The "Letter of the 34" of 1964, which marked the first intellectual protest at state cultural policy, was signed by Andrzejewski, who also experienced official sanctions. His stance in 1968 against the closure of Forefathers' Eve and defence of the students who had been thrown out of university for participating in protest marches was equally forthright. He was the only major "domestic" Polish writer to condemn the invasion of Czechoslovakia by writing a letter of support to Eduard Goldstucker, chairman of the Czech Writers' Union, and was savaged in the Polish press. During the short-lived relaxation of political controls at the beginning of the 1970s, Andrzejewski was given a weekly column in the new literary journal Literatura. His involvement with campaigns against changes to the Constitution in 1975-6, membership of KOR and patronage of underground publishing led, however, to further sanctions and attacks.
Andrzejewski's oppositionist activities invariably influenced the official reception of his literary works. The novel He Cometh Leaping upon the Mountains (1963), whose sex scenes were sharply reduced in number and toned down for publication, was the last work he published in Poland for a decade. The final twenty years of his life can be seen largely as his struggle to have two politically contentious novels - The Appeal (Paris, 1968; Warsaw, 1983) and Pulp ("second circulation", 1979; London, 1981; Warsaw, 1982) published within Poland. The censor removed the former from the February 1968 number of Twórczosc (Creativity), and in the autumn of 1968 Andrzejewski decided to publish the work abroad. It appeared under his own name in the émigré publishing house, Instytut Literacki, which constituted an unprecedented challenge to the Communist authorities, but the only sanction they applied was to deny him a passport to attend the PEN-Club Congress in Scandinavia in 1969.
Quite apart from these activities, it is fair to say that the very content of each novel made their publication in Poland impossible. The Appeal concerns the corruption rife in socialist Poland: a former police chief and utter conformist, Jan Konieczny, who is undergoing treatment in a psychiatric hospital, drafts an appeal to the First Secretary in which he pleads for an end his (imaginary) persecution by the security forces. His paranoia is presented as an inevitable consequence of Polish socialist reality.
Pulp, whose crux is the wedding of a working-class dancer from the "Mazowsze" troupe and the son of a senior state dignitary which does not take place, is set in contemporary Poland (circa 1968-70). The wedding in Polish literature - as Wyspianski's 1901 play showed - is a key motif symbolizing the reconciliation of social groups within Polish society. In Andrzejewski's novel, by contrast, society had been reduced to pulp after 25 years of Communist rule and appeared incapable of any such act. The author's diary and other documents, which counterpoint the novel's creation and also comment on current political events, especially in the USSR, proved more contentious for the censors. An internal report from 1970 described the novel as "descending in many places to the level of a tawdry anti-Soviet and anti-communist lampoon and trivial scandal-mongering ... [indicative of] the author's creative decline and psychological imbalance." The leadership strove to justify its ban on artistic grounds by encouraging leading critics to demolish the novel, but the great majority supported its publication. After Gomulka was ousted due to the December 1970 crisis, the novel was again considered for publication, only to be turned down by the publisher - officially due to a "shortage of paper". Andrzejewski's own subsequent actions appear rather bizarre, in that he stipulated to the Instytut Literacki that it adopt the cuts imposed by the Polish censors, which it refused to do. The novel eventually saw the light of day only in a three-volume underground edition in 1979.
It was the period of Martial Law, however, which saw the publication of his long-banned The Appeal and Pulp "above ground", albeit in an abridged and censored form. At the end of Andrzejewski's life as it had done at the beginning of People's Poland, the Party leadership showed itself keen to employ him as proof of its good intentions towards writers. The Jaruzelski regime's apparent tolerance of works critical of the regime was a fairly transparent attempt to improve its public profile. The works themselves, meanwhile, had lost their social relevance owing to the radical changes which Polish society had undergone in the intervening fifteen years. In this respect, their appearance in the "official circulation" was proof of the censor's success in emasculating literary works.
Further Reading
Eile, Stanislaw, "The Prisoner of Self: Moral Dilemmas in Andrzejewski's Fiction" in New Perspectives in Twentieth-Century Polish Literature, pp. 68-86. Basingstoke and London: The MacMillan Press Ltd, 1992
Milosz, Czeslaw, "Alfa, the Moralist" in The Captive Mind, pp. 82-110. Harmondsworth & New York: Penguin Books, 1980
Synoradzka, Anna, Andrzejewski, Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1997
Trznadel, Jacek, Hanba domowa, Lublin: Wydawnictwo "Test", 1990
J M Bates, 13 April 1999