Eastern approaches

Ex-communist Europe

Eastern approaches

Essential reading: Jacek Dukaj's "Crow"

Jul 11th 2010, 16:34 by J.P. AND E.L. | LONDON

THE imposition of martial law in Poland on December 13th 1981 remains a thorny issue. Was it a heavy-handed attempt to snuff out the Solidarity movement (as critics would have it) or the only way to prevent the Red Army from entering Poland in order to wield its own, heavier hand (as defenders, including some dissidents, claim)? For anyone old enough to have been politically aware at the time, any memories are inevitably coloured by moral evaluations.

This blog's weekly book pick is "Wroniec" ("The Crow") by Jacek Dukaj, a Polish science-fiction writer born in 1974. It depicts the events as seen through the innocent eyes of a seven-year-old boy. These memories too are coloured, though not so much by any high-falutin' moral assessment, as with an all-pervading grey. And rather than recollections of real-life events, they are their fantastical reconstruction.

The result is a grim and gory tale of Adaś, a boy in search of his father taken away by the title "Wroniec", a frightening crow-like creature, and a double play on words. Wroniec is the augmentative of "wrona"—Polish for hooded crow and an allusion to the Military Council of National Salvation, the junta responsible for the martial law known by its Polish acronym WRON.

Along the way, he encounters a slew of double-entendres, including dreadful dog-like contraptions called "suki" (Polish for "bitch" and a derogatory communist era term for "squad car"); sly "bubeki", an infantile sounding version of "ubek", the expletive for members of UB, Poland's communist-era secret police; or dissident "positionists", otherwise know as "resistors".

Mr Dukaj's ample use of linguistic innovation is an undisguised tribute to Lewis Carroll. So too is the book's core conceit: a child's desperate attempt to force the grey adult world into the black and white of fairy tales. The upshot is a poignant caricature of the Manichean worldview espoused by the most dogged critics Poland's authoritarian past. And like any caricature, it serves both to affirm and ridicule.

As with Alice, the overall effect is enhanced by beautiful illustrations. Far removed from the at times lurid prose it accompanies, Jakub Jabłoński's wonderfully drab artwork almost gives the impression of being meant for a young audience. Still, parents would be ill-advised to regale their loved ones with this dark read. But they certainly ought to pick it up for themselves, assuming they can read Polish, that is. Annoyingly, only Mr Dukaj's debut work Golden Galley has been translated into English, as part of an anthology. In theory it is available on Amazon, but the only copy showing at the moment is a pricey second-hand one, at $177. It is also available in German, and some of his other work has been translated into Russian and Czech. If readers of this blog know any publishers, they are politely invited to pester them.

Readers' comments

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wtf is pen name

Jasiek w Japonii: i don't know if jaruzelski really believed Russians will enter Poland in 81, but i also can't believe in his good intentions.

there is a document signed by him, in which he ordered to shoot down a Polish plane escaping to the West. It was already over Czechoslovakia, some pole in civilian plane escaping to freedom, and he could just let him go, delay his decision a little delay and innocent man would live. If general was so good, why he did signed that document?

Jaruzelski ordered to shoot him down. This isn't maybe important from political POV, but it shows that Jaruzelski only really cared about power, not about Poland, or Polish people. I can't believe murderer to have good intentions, sorry.

Jasiek w japonii

@jasiekmarc

The Kuklinski reports have still not convinced me. I might have some problem in reading indeed. Otherwise, although the Soviet troops had in fact not been ready by then, you seem to be downplaying the secret Brest meeting in April 1981 between Andropov-Ustinov and Jaruzelski-Kania, where the Soviets expressed their Polish counterparts their “impatience” followed by their more importunate demands for Poles’ “urgent and decisive measures against the counterrevolution”, of both of which in his autobiography Jaruzelski for himself also gives an explanation consistent with the reports. Seemingly, what divided between Jaruzelski and Kania was over the perception whether the Soviets would move in or cut the economic support for Poland if the martial law was either not introduced or failed. Kania still had a hope for some miracle whereas Jaruzelski was more realistic, because in his autobiography Jaruzelski describes his agony, solely as the national leader, of reaching the quota of coal to barter with the Soviets for foods and other necessities including gas and oil for his own people’s lives, by which Gromyko and Baibakov actually pressed Jaruzelski and Kania in July and the then Soviet ambassador in Poland threatened Poles in November after East Germany halted its financial support to Poland in September. These are really frightening even just to imagine. As the Soviet leaders were actually talking about using the fears that they would send their troops into Poland as a “deterrent to counterrevolution” with Andropov raising his strong objection to actually sending the troops into Poland even if their Polish counterparts would have asked for it, my interpretation is that the Polish leaders concluded in mind that they would have to ask for the Soviet troops as the last choice (as what we may today call a peace keeping operation) to avoid a total anarchy of the hopelessly enclosed state beyond the then nicely rigid iron curtain, where they could have easily imagined killing among the Poles desperate for extremely limited food and other stuff without an administration to deliver them, if the martial law was disrupted by an extreme social unrest uncontrollable any more. As their mobilisation would have been pretty quick, it does not seem to matter anyway if the Politburo even had not decided to mobilise the troops by December 1981. The argument, therefore, should not be only Soviet-military-wise, let alone the effects of Soyuz 81 and Zapad 81, but also economy-wise; thus life-wise. What else can you imagine you could have done if you had been Jaruzelski? This question tells why I could never be simple-minded to call him a traitor to the Polish nation. Moreover, he was cunningly successful in receiving new financial aids from the Western bloc then. I might as well conclude that he fought for Poland’s utmost credibility possible by dumping some from the Soviets and Polish workers.

I still suspect that to most of the then Polish people the Solidarity movement was more an industrial dispute than a democratisation movement, where they hoped that a democracy would provide them with more meat and other stuff to consume. I suspect that they were fighting rather for goods than democracy and that only did they believe that a democracy would directly give them the wealth that they either saw on television or heard from their relatives in Chicago. Actually, the people murmured against the Balcerowicz plan of cutting the bad assets and budget deficits in the 1990s to eventually choose again the former communist party, which was still too immature to complete the full metamorphosis into a group of modern centre-left social democrats, at elections to let corruption run rampant as a result. As industrial disputes are commonly seen in any country, the Solidarity movement was one of such against the state, the sole employer of the nearly 40 million people, because each communist state is one big and sole business enterprise by itself, where bureaucracy and corpocracy are equivalent with each other – a suffocating society where there is only one company for which you can work that is called “the state”. The above question now turns to: What else can you imagine you could have done if you had been the then Director General of the Polish People’s Republic General Partnership Company?

I know that the Polish people do not like this logic, especially either when they recall some bloody members of UB who had run wild, probably out of the hands of the then state leaders, or simply when they are reading Wroniec. They certainly have the right to loathe this logic, but I still think that you might as well spare a little bit of compassion, whether good Christian or not, for the then Polish leaders such as Mr Jaruzelski who had to make the ultimate decision with great agony.

cegorach

Jacek Dukaj is my favourite Polish writer who is alive.
I'd hope that one day more of his works is transalted and published, but it requires a special kind of man to do the job.
He is widely perceived as a "new Stanisław Lem" thanks to his work touching so many subjects.

Anyway - currently the best way to read something he wrote is to visit his website and try the passages from some of his best works.

http://www.dukaj.pl/English/ReadingRoom

jasiekmarc

It's not the main subject of the article above, but I wanted to say that discussions about reasons and motivations of martial law imposition are today pointless and no longer so common. After CIA has published Kukliński's reports, we now know well, that there was no real danger of soviet intervention in December '81.

About Eastern approaches

Eastern approaches deals with the economic, political, security and cultural aspects of the eastern half of the European continent. It incorporates the long-running "Europe.view" weekly column. The blog is named after the wartime memoirs of the British soldier Sir Fitzroy Maclean.

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