George Orwell and Communist Poland: Émigré, Official and Clandestine Receptions

Krystyna Wieszczek's George Orwell in Communist Poland: Émigré, Official and Clandestine Receptions is an exhaustive and impressive history of Orwell's impact on Polish culture from the mid-1940s until freedom. While Wieszczek's thesis is one that most readers would likely accept without a lot of proof—Orwell's influence in Poland was and is considerable—by offering us detailed and abundant evidence of the relationship between Poland and Orwell, and by drawing on many sources that have never been translated into English, this book uncovers surprising, striking details about that relationship. The result is a study that will intrigue Orwell scholars as well as those interested in postwar Polish history and culture.In chapter 1, on émigré responses, Wieszczek documents the extent to which émigré Poles read, wrote about, and lionized Orwell, who championed Polish causes, sided with Poland against the USSR, and even tried to publicize details of the Katyn massacre. Yet émigré response to him was not entirely positive; Isaac Deutscher's article, “1984—The Mysticism of Cruelty” (1955), for example, derides Nineteen Eighty-Four for being divisive and fear-mongering. Still, most Polish émigrés approved of Orwell's works and actions—he was “good for all” and formed friendships and connections with many in the émigré community, particularly with his first Polish translator, Teresa Jeleńska. This chapter also describes the “balloon war” of 1956, when about 100,000 balloons carrying copies of Animal Farm were sent into Poland, and while the CIA funded this, linking it to émigré response seems to me an imaginative leap at once reasonable and surprising.In her second chapter, Wieszczek examines “official response” and charts Orwell's notoriety in Poland in relation to the political thaws and crackdowns in the country. She notes that censors in Poland played a significant if inadvertent role: “Prefiguring and echoing the removal of the author envisioned in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the censor often became an invisible co-author. Readers in the know could only try to detect which parts were thus co-written by the censor” (p. 97). In this chapter, too, the author addresses the claim that the dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four could be construed as an attack on the West and capitalism. Such an idea was promoted by a number of writers both in Poland and elsewhere, but it seems fairly clear that Orwell was targeting communism, and the official response to him and his works was simple: an enemy of the state, Orwell had to be ignored or silenced; dissemination of his works had to be controlled.In her long last chapter, on “clandestine” reception, Wieszczek examines how “Orwell's texts were some of the revolutionaries’ most frequently used ‘ammunition’” (p. 171). Interestingly, many of the clandestine responses were well known to the authorities, but official condemnation of them was often only very muted. The journal Zapis, for example, “commonly regarded as the first underground journal” (p. 229n96), published sections of Animal Farm as well as articles that described Nineteen Eighty-Four, but “like many things in that doublethink system, the journal's clandestine status was somewhat ambiguous as the authorities became only too aware of the project and attempted to deter writers from proceeding with it” (p. 190). Wieszczek notes that a 1985 collection of essays about Orwell, I ślepy by spostrzegł And a blind man would notice, includes a foreword claiming that “Orwell was not necessarily an exceptional writer or thinker, but was often regarded as a moral force, the ‘conscience of a generation,’ and even a ‘secular saint’” (p. 199).Most importantly, what Wieszczek emphasizes in this chapter is how so many Poles saw Orwell's invented world of Nineteen Eighty-Four as all but replicating their own. A Warsaw-based Solidarity periodical enumerated the similarities: Ubiquitous, centrally controlled propaganda sustaining the myth of an external and internal enemy, attempting to enclose society in an unreal world where experience, knowledge, memory and common sense become meaningless . . . An expanded apparatus of surveillance and repression. Symptoms of social apathy, a sense of isolation and detachment from the outside world. The submission of nearly all areas of life to bureaucratic state control, from work and education to information and culture. (p. 211)Having lived in Poland during this time period, I agree that this describes what the country was like. Perhaps adventitiously, though, this chilling description also captures many elements of our current US illiberal democracy (a term offered by Jean Seaton in an excellent foreword to the book p. xii).Admittedly, George Orwell and Communist Poland is not an easy read. Wieszczek notes that it had “a previous life as a Ph.D. thesis” (p. xvii), and vestiges of that prior life are still evident. Many of the book's sentences are too long (I counted one of 143 words p. 14; there are others), and some of Wieszczek's paragraphs go on for more than a page of densely spaced text. There are some proofreading errors that detract (misuse of “compose” and “comprise”; confusion of “like” and “as”), as well as some awkward sentences that seem to be translations from the Polish (“Nevertheless, Jeleńska did not give up on this ‘how appropriate for us book’ easily” p. 37). But these are few and far between. What's not few, however, are the notes, which contain a wealth of information and would be fine in a PhD dissertation but which here, sadly, often tend to intrude. In 246 text pages, there are 889 notes. Most of them are in Polish and most, though not all, are bibliographic. There are some content notes included, so the notes cannot be ignored. On the other hand, the sixteen illustrations are extraordinary and genuinely striking, particularly those of Polish cover illustrations for Orwell's last two novels (pp. 40, 59, 193, 198, 202, and 207).While the amount of research that went into this book is impressive and laudable, I often found myself longing for more depth and less documented breadth. In her discussion of the reception of Nineteen Eighty-Four in Poland, for example, Wieszczek cites Stanisław Lem, who did not find Orwell's last novel especially relevant or convincing. He contends that Polish communism was characterized by a “flawed ordinariness” (p. 178)—it was a system that fell well short of the totalized, efficient machine that, in Orwell's novel, grinds everything to hamburger in its path. Lem makes a point well worth exploring and debating, yet Wieszczek gives him short shrift. It would probably be instructive to explore Lem's iconoclastic position, especially given his importance as a science fiction writer and critic.Just the same, there is much to admire in Wieszczek's work, which through its meticulous examination of hundreds of sources, finally contends that Orwell's reception in Poland “seems to provide a heartening testament to the power of literature to penetrate a place and people's minds, even if officially unwelcome, and to foster independent thought and mobilise readers for action that can pave the way for changes that were previously thought unachievable” (p. 245). In short, Wieszczek argues that Orwell's works not only had an uncanny prescience, but that the Poles’ embrace of them hastened their freedom, perhaps by helping them define their situation—bold claims, to be sure, but ones that her impressively researched and fascinating book goes a long way toward supporting.