¹ In addition to the 15,000 prisoners massacred at Katyń, in June 1990 the USSR ‘found’ the bodies of a further 13,000 Poles, buried at various locations mainly in the Ukraine. Gorbachev ordered a full-scale investigation in November 1990, but it was blocked by the KGB. Only in October 1991, with the arrest of powerful KGB officials after the failed coup, did the Soviets admit that orders for the execution of the Poles came directly from Stalin. N. Bethell, ‘Soviet agent reveals terrible truth of Polish massacres’, Observer, 6 Oct. 1991, 1–23; C. Moorhead, ‘Out of the Darkness’, Independent Magazine, 26 Jan. 1991; Fitzgibbon, L., Katyń Massacre (London: Corgi, 1976).Google Scholar Also: Carr, E. H., The Twilight of the Comintern 1930–35 (London: Macmillan 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Conquest, R., The Great Terror (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968)Google Scholar; Porajska, B., From the Steppes to the Savannah (London: Coronet, 1990)Google Scholar; Sagajllo, W., The Man in the Middle: A Story of the Polish Resistance 1940–45 (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1984)Google Scholar; Zajdlerova, Z., The Dark Side of the Moon (London: Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1989)Google Scholar; Herling, G., A World Apart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Wat, A., My Century: The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual (thereafter Wat, My Century) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Karol, K. S., Solik: Life in the Soviet Union 1939–46 (London: Pluto, 1986)Google Scholar; Czaykowski, B., ‘Soviet Policies in the Literary Sphere: Their Effects and Implications’, in:Sword, K., ed., The Soviet Takeover of the Polish Eastern Provinces: 1939–41 (London: Macmillan, 1991).Google Scholar On Nazi attempts to destroy Polish culture: Korboński, S., The Polish Underground State: 1939–45 (New York: Hippocrene, 1978).Google Scholar

² During the Partitions Poland's civil society came to reside in the institution of the family, gentry values, the Catholic Church and in Polish language and literature – all of vital importance in resisting pressures on Polish identity. Writers, philosophers, anyone who managed to obtain an education and who still remained Polish, acquired a national purpose. Creative intellectuals substituted for the absent political state. Z. Najder said: –Talking about Polish literature and culture in general, one has constantly to repeat that it is almost devoid of the so called bourgeois element. It is traditionally a gentry culture. The origins of this phenomenon are very, very complex …. When you talk about culture and culture values in Poland, these values are always connected with the typical gentry code of behaviour: a code of honour, in which the most important notions are those of duty, of honour, of loyalty to your nation, loyalty to your group. Much less important, sometimes virtually non-existent, are the notions of maintaining an economic standard, of preserving life for the sake of preserving life itself Alvarez, A., Under Pressure. The Writer in Society: Eastern Europe and the USA (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), 20.Google ScholarKultura szlachecka (noble ethos), with its sometimes contradictory ideals of equality, exclusivity, unanimity, unwavering individualism, resistance and hospitality, was to become a key feature in modern Polish style and identity. It was during the Partitions that the Polish word wieszcz came to mean not only an inspired seer but also, through the works of the Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz, came to assume the meaning of national poet – a poet whose prime responsibility was to write for the nation, who lived as he wrote, for the life of the nation. Throughout the Partitions those Poles who wrote, wrote about Poland. But they did so under the guise of other subjects, and this was the specifically Polish model of political and literary endeavour: ‘Things which elsewhere were arranged in parliament, here, because of the lack of Polish national institutions and the great weight of the partitioning authorities, were arranged in journals and pushed their way into literature – particularly poetry.’ Hertz, P., ‘RozwaŻanie na marginesie lektury’, Twórczość (1959), 90–5.Google Scholar

³ Peterkiewicz, J. and Singer, B., eds, Five Centuries of Polish Poetry: 1450–1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 106.Google Scholar

⁴ Szczypiorski, A., The Polish Ordeal (London: Croom Helm, 1982), 55.Google Scholar In reaction to the rise of Nazism and the continuing power of the interwar military régime, many Polish writers had turned to the ‘new faith’ and joined the KPP. Aleksander Wat, one of these, who was arrested by the NKVD, exiled and marked for life by the experience, said: ‘My malice from that time, that terrible obstinate malice, came from a sort of intellectual hoodlumism. From a feeling that though the outward forms had been preserved, inside everything had been eroded, removed, cleaned out. It turned out that this was more than I could bear. I closed my eyes to it. I locked up all my ideas, everything … I threw myself into the only faith that existed then. There was only one alternative, only one global answer to negation. The entire illness stemmed from the need, that hunger for something all-embracing. In fact communism arose to satisfy certain hungers. The phenomenon was inevitable in so far as powerful hungers had arisen in modern societies, even in those of the nineteenth century. One of those hungers was for a catechism, a simple catechism. That sort of hunger burns in refined intellectuals much more than it does in the man on the street.’ Wat, , My Century, 21Google Scholar. Also Milosz, C., Native Realm (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), 126–7.Google Scholar

⁵ Interview with J. Zulawski, Warsaw, 29 May 1990.

⁶ Rzqdowy raport o stanie gospodarki, Warsaw, July 1981, 126. Izabella Cywińska, Minister for Arts and Culture, said that after the withdrawal of most of the major state subsidy, the state arts budget still stood at 1.55 per cent of the national budget. Duskov, M., –I don't have the soul of an anarchist’, Euromaske: The European Theatre Quarterly, no. 1, (1990), 23–4.Google Scholar In comparison, British subsidy to the arts, which lagged behind most West European states, in 1995 stood at less than one quarter of one per cent of the national budget. The Writers’ Guild of Great Britain calls this ‘peanuts’. ‘Letter on Arts Funding to MP’, Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, Nov. 1993; ‘Arts Council Grants’, Writers’ Guild of Great Britain News Letter, Vol. 11, no. 1 (1995), 19.

⁷ ‘Apparatus Power: The Nomenklatura: Three Central Committee directives: October 1972’, Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, Vol. 4, nos 4–6 (1981), 55–6. On censorship see Curry, J. L., The Black Book of Polish Censorship (New York: Vintage Books, 1984)Google Scholar; and Schöpflin, G., ed., Censorship and Political Communication in Eastern Europe (London: Frances Pinter, 1983).Google Scholar

⁸ Krzystek, Z., ‘Kim Jesteśmy?’, Prasa Polska, Aug. 1977, 30.Google Scholar

⁹ Other important state literary journals were: Twórczość, Miesiecznik Literacki, Kultura, Nowa Kultura, Literatura, Poezja, Dialog, Przeglqd Kulturalny, Źycie Literackie, Literatura na Świecie, Nowe KsiqŻki, Rocznik Literacki, Pamietnik Literacki, Ruch Literacki, Nowy Wyraz, Poglqdy, Odra, Kamiena, Pismo, Magazyn Kulturalny, Kuźnica, Polityka, Forum, Trybuna Ludu, Odrodzenie, Perspektywy, Panorama, Tydzień, Glos Pracy, Polska. There were also twenty-one Pax journals including Slowo Powszechne (daily 100,000–180,000 copies), and Kierunki (20,000 copies weekly); ODISS, Caritas and the other official religious publishers produced journals totalling over 70,000 copies per week. Ruch wydawniczy w liczbach. XXXIII: 1987 (Warsaw: Biblioteka Narodowa – Instytut Bibliograficzny, 1989), tables 30, 36.

¹⁰ The most important state literary publishing houses were: Spóldzielnia Wydawnicza KsiqŻki i Wiedza; Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy; Biblioteka Narodowa; Biuro Wystaw Artystycznych; Wydawnictwo Arkady; Wydawnictwa Artystyczne i Filmowe; Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne; Ludowa Spóldzielnia Wydawnicza; Wydawnictwa Literackie; Wydawnictwo Ministerstwa Obrony Narodowej; Spóldzielnia Wydawnicza Czytelnik; Wydawnictwo Zrzeszenie Ksiegarzy. There were also eight major regional and ‘youth’ publishing houses which occasionally produced literature. Belles lettres accounted for 18 per cent of Pax publications: their most popular Polish Catholic authors were Zofia Kossak and Jan Dobraczyński, their favourite foreign writers were François Mauriac, G. K. Chesterton and Graham Greene. Pax also offered the annual Wlodzimierz Pietrzak Prize for the best achievement in the literary field.

¹¹ Among the man RSW newspapers and journals were: Trybuna Ludu, Trybuna Robotnicza, Życie Warszawy, Dziennik Polski, Echo Krakowa, Przyjaciólka, Kobieta i Życie, Przekrój, Perspektywy, Panorama, Tydzień, Polityka, Kultura, Literatura, Życie Literackie, Tworczość, Poezja, Dialog, Literatura na Świecie, Magazyn Kulturalny, Poglqdy, Polska.

¹² Ruch wydawniczy w liczbach. XXXIII: 1987 (1989), table 47.

¹³ ‘Listy’, Polityka, 2/723/xv, 9 Jan. 1971. In 1956 Poland had 42,000 libraries, with an average of 8,164 readers each, a total of 116,200,000 borrowings per year and a library book stock of 89,300,000 volumes: by 1970 that had risen to 52,400 libraries, a book stock of 214,700,000 volumes, an average of 17,387 borrowers per library and 276,700,000 borrowings per year; by 1978 there were 37,600 libraries, 276,400,000 volumes in stock, an average of 18,239 borrowers per library and 271,100,000 borrowings per year. ‘The Dissemination of Culture’, VI. 1–1 (thereafter ‘Dissemination of Culture’), Facts About Poland (Warsaw: Interpress, 1980).

¹⁴ Rocznik Statistyczny: 1966 Vol. 26 (Warsaw: GUS, 1966), 34.

¹⁵ Staar, R. F., Poland: 1944–62: The Sovietization of a Captive People (New Orleans: Louisiana State University Press, 1962), 172.Google Scholar Some question whether ‘communist’ inteligencja is not a contradiction in terms. The distinguished poet Artur Miedzyrzecki said: ‘The fact is that always in Poland the inteligencja has practically not existed. It is a very, very tiny percentage of all Poles. A very small and politically powerless section of Polish society. Influential, maybe, but powerful, no. Also, for all practical purposes they practically ceased to exist after the war. Now we have a very different kind of intellectual, more a technical person. These people, the writers, the creative inteligencja, they now have the same training as the bureaucrats and the technocrats, and for that reason we can hardly say any more that we have a true inteligencja. The real difference lies in their family background – what their parents and grandparents were, and because of that in their education and their moral attitude. We don't any longer necessarily think of officials or bureaucrats as inteligencja. They have given all that up when they entered the Party or the machinery of state. They tend towards technical competence, eksperci – experts. No, we tend now to think of those who remain independent, the oppositionists, as real intellectuals.’ Interview with Artur Miedzyrzecki, Warsaw, 1 June 1990. See Davies, N., God's Playground, Vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 196, 406Google Scholar; Hirszowicz, M., ‘The Polish Intelligentsia’, in: Gomulka, S. and Polonsky, A., eds, Polish Paradoxes (London: Routledge, 1990), 156Google Scholar; idem. The Bureaucratic Leviathan (London: Robertson, 1980), 193Google Scholar; Szczepański, J. J., The Polish Intelligentsia: Past and Present, World Politics, Vol. 14, no. 3 (1962), 419CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, ‘Osobowość ludzka z processie powstania spoleczeństwa socjalistycznego’, Kultura i Spoleczeństwo, Vol. 8, no. 4, (1964), 3–25Google Scholar; idem, ‘Sociological Research on the Polish Intelligentsia’, Polish Sociological Bulletin, nos 1–2 (1961)Google Scholar; Gella, A., ‘The Life and Death of the Old Polish Intelligentsia’, Slavic Review, Vol. 30, no. 1 (March 1971), 17;CrossRefGoogle ScholarChalasiński, J., Kultura i naród (Warsaw: KiW, 1968)Google Scholar; idem, Przeszlość i przyslość inteligencji polskiej (Warsaw, Czytelnik, 1958); Żarnowski, J., O inteligencji polskiej lat miedzywojennych (Warsaw: WP, 1965).Google Scholar

¹⁶ Paclawski, W., ‘Post-war Galicia. Stories in History’, in Michajlów, A. and Paclawski, W., eds, Literary Galicia: From Post-war to Post-Modern: A Local Guide to the Global Imagination (thereafter Micajlów and Paclawski, Literary Galicia) (Kraków: Oficyna Literacka, 1991), 28.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Torańska, T., Oni: Stalin's Polish Puppets (thereafter Torańska, Oni) (London: Collins Harvill, 1987), 268–9.Google Scholar Kersten points to a speech by Bierut, opening a Wroclaw radio station on 16 Nov. 1947, during the ZZLP Writers’ Congress in Wroclaw, as the start of direct attempts to control writers. Bierut complained that artists of all kinds, rather than lagging behind the ‘mighty current’ of important political and economic developments, should reflect the great changes the country was experiencing. He looked to artists to ‘popularize and socialize cultural production in all its fields and manifestations’, ‘to shape the culture of the entire nation for a new period in its history’. He made it clear that work to a plan was necessary along the ‘entire cultural front’, and called for an ‘artistic offensive’ to create the ‘culture of a people's democracy’. Kersten, K., The Establishment of Communist Rule in Poland: 1943–8 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 416–17Google Scholar; Topolski, J., An Outline History of Poland (thereafter Topolski, Outline History) (Warsaw: Interpress, 1986), 277.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Szczepański, J. J., Kadencja (Kraków, Znak, 1989), 5–7.Google Scholar Lem's novels Śledztwo (1959), Solaris (1961) and NiezwycieŻony (1964) were published by the publishing section of the Ministry of National Defence.

¹⁹ Brandys, K., A Warsaw Diary (London: Chatto & Windus, 1983), 72–3.Google Scholar

²⁰ Konwicki, T., Moonrise, Moonset (London: Faber, 1988), 167.Google Scholar

²¹ Budrewicz, O., Incredible Warsaw (Warsaw: Interpress, 1972), 147.Google Scholar

²² Torańska, Oni, 269–70.

²³ By the late 1960s, while socialism had brought about a great levelling of Polish society, occupations linked to the creative and semi-independent inteligencja, rather than to industry, finance, politics or the biurokracja, were still ranked first in social prestige. The three most highly regarded professions were professor, doctor and teacher; ministers and nurses were ranked eighth, priests seventh, the milicja fourteenth. Wesolowski, M. and Sarapata, A., ‘Hierarchie zawodów i stanowisk’, Studia Sociolgiczne, Vol. 2, no. 2 (1961), 104; see alsoGoogle ScholarSarapata, A., ‘Przemiany w hierarchii zawodów’, Studia Sociologiczne, no. 1 (1964).Google Scholar

²⁴ Kurowski, L., ‘Reforma podatkowa 1949r’, Państwo i Prawo 12 (1949), 377–8.Google Scholar

²⁵ Fejtö, F., A History of the People's Democracies (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 550.Google Scholar William Woods is surely mistaken in saying ‘a Polish novelist, while unlikely to make a living from novels alone, will probably earn about as much in purchasing power as will his western equivalent’. Certainly the Polish writing profession was much better off than in the interwar period; but for all the writer's enhanced earnings, finding something in the shops to buy was a real problem. Woods, W., Poland: Phoenix in the East (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 156.Google Scholar

²⁶ Ruch wydawniczy w liczbach. XXXIII: 1987 (1989), tables 44 and 45. Also Topolski, Outline History, 279; ‘Dissemination of Culture’.

²⁷ ‘Literature’ VI.7–1, Facts About Poland (V80).

²⁸ Rocznik statystyczny 1970 (Warsaw: GUS, 1970), 40. Wesolowski, W., ‘Changes in the Class Structure in Poland’, in Wiatr, J., ed., Studies in Polish Political System (thereafter Wiatr, Studies) (Wroclaw: Ossolineum, 1967), 79–80.Google Scholar In 1964–5 children of the inteligencja (43.1 per cent) constituted the largest group of students at Lyceum Ogólny (pre-university high school): children of the working class made up 26.3 per cent, those of the peasantry 18.3 per cent. At university (1965–6) the inteligencja made up 53.3 per cent of students, workers 26.1 per cent, the peasantry 14.1 per cent. At teacher training colleges proportions were less extreme but similar: the inteligencja made up 38.3 per cent, workers 35.6 per cent, peasantry 20.9 per cent. At university children of the inteligencja made up 65.5 per cent of the Arts Faculties, 55.9 per cent of Medicine, 51 per cent of Technical Faculties, 50.9 per cent of Physical Education departments, 43.2 per cent of Economics, and 40.3 per cent of Agriculture Faculties. Only in Theology were the 20.1 per cent of inteligencja dominated by 45.6 per cent of peasant and 27.8 per cent of worker students. Statystyka szkolnictwa: szkolnictwo ogólnosztalcce: opieka nad dzićtmi i mlodziź: 1964–65, no. 4 (Warsaw: GUS, 1966); Rocznik statystyczny szkolnictwa: 1944–67 (Warsaw: GUS, 1967), 434–5. Szczepański, J. J., ‘Materialy do charakterystki ludzi świata naukowego w XIX i pocztkach XX w.’, Odmiany czasu teraźniejszego (Warsaw: KiW, 1971), 50–1.Google Scholar

²⁹ Siciński, A., Literati polscy: przemiany zawodů na tle przemian kultury wspólczesnej (1971).Google Scholar Gömöri has estimated that at least 50 per cent of writers were descended from the pre-war, land-owning, professional class. Gömöri, G., ‘The Cultural Intelligentsia: The Writers’, in Lane, D. and Kolankiewicz, G., eds, Social Groups in Polish Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), 159.Google Scholar It is worth contrasting Siciński's findings on the writing community with the character of the Polish priesthood in the 1970s: 60 per cent of priests come from southern Polish villages, only 8 per cent come from towns and cities; 82 per cent of priests come from families with 4–10 children; more than 65 per cent of priests come from families where parents had only a primary or incomplete primary education; 15 per cent came from families where the parents had a secondary education, and only 10 per cent from families with parents who had some kind of academic education. Piekarski, A., Freedom of Conscience and Religion in Poland (Warsaw: Interpress, 1979), 149–50.Google Scholar

³⁰ See also Wiatr, , Studies, 110–11.Google Scholar

³¹ Herbert, Z., ‘Interview’, Partisan Review, Vol. 54, no. 4 (1987), 574.Google Scholar

³² ‘Zbigniew Herbert: A Poet of Exact Meaning: A Conversation with M. Oramus’, in Wiessbort, D., ed., The Poetry of Survival: Poets of Central and Eastern Europe (London: Anvil, 1991), 328.Google Scholar Very few writers resigned from ZLP, and only a few were ever expelled; the science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem was expelled in 1951 for failing to produce enough.

³³ Interview with J. Żulawski, Warsaw, 29 May 1990.

³⁴ Borowski, T., Wybór opowiadań (Warsaw: PiW, 1959)Google Scholar; idem, This Way For Gas Ladies and Gentlemen Please (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976).Google Scholar

³⁵ Kolakowski, L., ‘Światopoglqd i krytyka’, Nowa Kultura, 16 Jan. 1955.Google Scholar

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