Topics of coins
Zbigniew Herbert known and unknown
In spite of all the attention Herbert has attracted in Poland
and around the world, there remains an air of mystery to him.
For many years he had taken great care not to write directly
about himself or parade his personal experiences or feelings. It is only in his last volume of poems entitled Epilogue to
a Storm that we can discover some more personal remarks
about his long illness, frailty and suffering, along with some
more straight-forward allusions to his childhood. Literary
scholars go to great lengths trying to decipher biographical
references in his work carefully concealed from the sight of
his readers. For instance, hints at his lost home city of Lviv
can be identified in his early work, notably in the poem My
City (published in the volume Hermes, Dog and Star, 1957)
talking about the locked gate of his city, even though the
name of the city is only mentioned at the end of his life. This
may indicate that the Poet, exiled from his little homeland,
was struggling with this tragedy, both national and personal,
for many bitter years.
Herbert was a man with a complex personality. In
everyday life he might have been a sociable and cheerful
person, prone to jokes, yet in his writing he was preoccupied
with fundamental questions and, at times, even resorted to
pathos, as in The Envoy of Mr. Cogito. He was a genuine
European, successor to the Mediterranean cultural legacy,
free of any nationalistic inhibitions or prejudice, yet, at the
same time he was truly patriotic. As an author aware of his
civic duties to the Nation, he felt a guardian of the memory
of the Poles fighting in the Home Army and the Warsaw
Uprising, the generation which was condemned to official
oblivion in communist Poland. Writing about his killed or
murdered comrades (Prologue, volume Inscription, 1969) he
said that they implacably returned his stare.
The public perception of Herbert evolved with time. In the
1960s he was deemed a 'classic' and 'aesthete' - a poet
who referred to the Antiquity in order to defy the intellectual,
aesthetic and moral mediocrity of communism. After he
wrote Mr. Cogito (1974), he became the hero of anticommunist
resistance and when the Marshall Law was declared in 1981
he came to be perceived as the 'national banner' - his poems
from the volume Report from a Besieged City (published in
Paris and printed underground in Poland) were recited at
illegal literary meetings held secretly at private homes or in
churches. For the Solidarity generation Herbert was someone
who taught them how to be brave and courageously stand up
for dignity of each person and rights of the community.
The uncompromising civil stance he displayed after 1989
led the Poet to a violent clash with some of his erstwhile
allies. It started with a famous interview with Jacek
Trznadel for the book Hańba domowa (Dishonour to the
Nation) (1986) where Herbert condemned opportunistic
attitude of writers involved in Stalinist propaganda. His
vehement political commentaries of the 1990s expressing
outrage at blurring the moral distinction between former
communist apparatchiks and unyielding patriots exposed
the Poet to ostracism from his fellow dissidents. Ironically,
even communists in the time of the Polish People's Republic
did not dare attack the Poet as ferociously as some former
members of the opposition who took over power in the reborn
country. Making a bitter reference to the Stalinist past of
some of the Poet's adversaries, he wrote that from then on he
would not be in any group picture and went on sarcastically
that he was ostracized as though he were 'an enemy of the
revolution' and a follower of 'the leader'.
After his demise in 1998 the superficial and simplified
political reception of his poetry lost its timeliness as did
his political journalism dubbed 'Mr. Cogito's Duels' in one
press interview. Instead, the existential and metaphysical
component of his writing came to the fore. Herbert's poetry
is permeated with compassion for the fragility of the world:
people, animals and objects alike. It reflects joy rooted
in the eternal charm of art and nature and admiration
for the ethical virtue and the effort to multiply goodness
and beauty.
On the other hand, there is melancholy in Herbert's
works that finds its source in the transitoriness of life and
fundamental loneliness of a human being, as expressed in
the poem Lament (written in the memory of his mother). In
his poetry, man does not suffer but rather, as ancient Greeks
believed, man is nothing but suffering. The only way to come
into terms with the tragedy of human existence is through
art, which has the power to defy the verdicts of history.
History is the record of evil and violence, hence Herbert's
poems abound in the existential and historical pessimism.
In the Poet's opinion, history is the struggle between the
thugs at the head of addled crowds and the righteous and
reasonable. The outcome is a foregone conclusion as there
are just a handful of the latter ones.
Human beings are the victims of history, yet if they
can face up bravely to their fate, they stand a chance of
accomplishing greatness. This is as much true about the
Philosopher Emperor in the poem To Marcus Aurelius, thus
an outstanding personality who came to be remembered by
his posterity, as it is about the unknown soldier in Nike Who
Hesitates. This difficult optimism of Herbert assumes that
we are capable of saving our own humanity, and also that
of other people, in spite of the whole evil of the world, on
the condition that we take responsibility for our neighbours.
This attitude of solidarity - teaches Zbigniew Herbert - does
surpass the existential solitude of a human being. Everyone
is capable of achieving greatness. Although we have no
influence on what happens to us, whether we can rise to
the challenge or not depends exclusively on us. It is this
decision, this conscious act that turns an accidental event
into fate and creates the human being.
Józef Maria Ruszar