DOROTA SOBIESKA: I have plenty of questions but prefer this to be more of a conversation.
TADEUSZ KONWICKI: Yes, but I have something to start with, and the best
questions are silly because they give one the chance to say something.
Clever questions always contain the answers themselves. Those very
ambitious Polish scholars ask a question which goes on for ten minutes
. . .
DS: To which you answer "Yes" or "No."
TK: That’s right. Or, trying to be equal to a task, I begin to repeat
myself, talk nonsense, things like that. So silly questions are the
best.
DS: In your writing about the territory you are from, there are usually
two sides: the ideal one and the one full of conflicts between the
nationalities living there. For instance, in "A Dreambook for Our Time"
you show the conflict between the Poles and the Lithuanians during the
Second World War. What is happening there now and how do you feel about
it?
TK: I don’t feel particularly good about it; that is, I experience
contradictory emotions because I root for both the Lithuanians and the
Poles there, and they are in continuous strife against each other. This
conflict subsides and then becomes aggravated again, and it is very
painful to me because it is a result of various petty political games
both in Lithuania and in Poland. And these matters are easy to solve,
but only when there is good will on both sides. The case is very
dramatic because the Poles there were under double occupation for fifty
years: Soviet, but also to some extent Lithuanian. The whole Polish
intelligentsia left this place—all the more active, more educated
social classes repatriated themselves. Only peasants and workers stayed
there, or that part of the intelligentsia that deteriorated because of
persecutions. That is why they are weak, and that is why they opted for
the Soviet system. On the other hand, Lithuanians were not in the best
system either. The were terribly persecuted right after the Second
World War. Almost one third of their population was taken to Siberia.
They put themselves together with great difficulty. But this is a very
strong, hardened nation. These people are not at all like the Polish,
but more like Scandinavians: hard-working, moderate, taciturn,
stubborn, reliable. And of course, clearly, after those years of
persecution, nationalism had to burst out, especially because their
past is troubling from our point of view. After all, they opted for
Germany in the last war. Their reasons of State could have been such
that they had to hold with the Germans, but from the European point of
view, and especially ours, it is troubling. So, both sides have their
faults, various old hostilities. But when it comes down to the real
conflict, it is like a quarrel between two villages. I come from the
Wilno Colony, and there were the Upper and the Lower Colony. The Upper
Colony was always rumbling with the Lower Colony. And this conflict
with the Lithuanians is, in fact, a domestic one because we are so
intertwined ethnically, historically, culturally, and even, though it
may not seem so, linguistically, because in Eastern Polish there are a
great number of Lithuanian borrowings. I even take delight in using
them. For instance, in the Wilno area, to say that we wanted "to ride
on a sled," we used to say "wazyniac sie," when "vaziuoti" in
Lithuanian means "to travel, to ride." I use the word "dyrwan" for
"wasteland," to say that the boys are running or the geese are waddling
on the "dyrwan." This is simply Lithuanian "dirvonas." "Rojsty," the
title of one of my books, is simply "raistai," which means "marshes,
bogs." Similarly, in Lithuanian there are many Polish borrowings, and
understandably so. And I will remind America that many outstanding
Americans, I am thinking here about movie directors, writers,
journalists, actors, admit the descent which we can roughly call the
tradition of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
DS: You were there after the war.
TK: I was. In 1956. I was there two days by a miracle because then the Soviet Union was still closed to us.
DS: This is in "Kalendarz i klepsydra," on your way back from China.
TK: That’s right. It was the most unpleasant stay of all for me because
Wilno was then completely Soviet, that is, an Asiatic city in which I
recognized some architectonic traces dear to me. Even the natural
surroundings were familiar. All of it, though, was swarming with
Asiatics, this most unpleasant Russia, the czar’s, from the end of the
nineteenth century. My impressions then were terrible. It seemed to me
that it was a lost cause. Years later, in 1988, I was there because of
my film "Lava," which is based on Adam Mickiewicz’s "Forefathers," and
I saw Wilno a little recovered, in a somewhat better condition but
still with obtrusive, importunate Russianness, which appears not only
in the language, signs, clothes but in certain manners quite
disagreeable to us. I was there a year later when I showed my "Lava" in
the fall, and I saw a more Lithuanian city. On the streets one could
see young Lithuanians perhaps even in the majority and could hear their
language. Good-looking young people, with European aspirations, dressed
like the rest of Europe. These were the good signs that I saw from the
Lithuanian point of view. But from my point of view, I do not see any
good signs; and I think that I will not be returning to Wilno if I
don’t have to. No . . . no, I won’t be going because this city, or its
appearance, is recorded in my memory as different. Even if it were
supposedly a Polish city, and I visited it after a few decades, it
would seem to me somehow alien. And because it is after all
Lithuanian—even with these Polish, Jewish, or Belorussian enclaves- it
is a city whose character is changed. This Wilno, which I remember,
passed to the memory, to our European cultural archives. At the same
time, I have to stress here that it lives splendidly in its new
circumstances. There is a tremendous scholarly interest, especially
among Slavists, Polish scholars from Europe, and European historians.
Every so often they devote conferences to the culture of the prewar
Polish Eastern borderland, where Europe clashed with what we used to
call Asia, where the Latin culture met the Byzantine. This borderland
was extremely fertile. And we know that all borderland territories are
interesting. If we look at America, I, as an unprofessional observer,
see that the American South is closest to this ethos. Why? Because of a
mixture, a clash of cultures.
DS: I am thinking even of the mentality based on a certain tradition: manor houses, large families, and family ties.
TK: Here you extend the comparison which I talked about: that is, a
certain form of feudalism met and interacted with contemporary
capitalism, if we allow ourselves some Marxist ambitions to use these
terms. Those similarities exist and I can feel them. When I watch
American films that take place in the South or read books or even
listen to their music, I can see traits of custom, some kind of
distinct resemblances to our ethos, to our moral and cultural syndrome.
DS: You often speak of yourself as "a guest," someone passing by. Is
this connected with your place of birth or the passing of generations
or what?
TK: There are many reason for that. First of all, you have to consider
this geographical territory, this borderline, certain customs and
morals connected to a certain mentality, and, even more, certain
ethics. I am an orphan, and to be an orphan carried a special status
there—even, in a way, a kind of profession. Families were interrelated,
entangled; half of the Wilno country, I may say, were my relatives. So
I was at someone else’s house all the time, at an aunt’s or uncle’s or
grandparent’s. This must have developed in me the habits of a vagrant.
Another thing, when we observe these people’s customs, we can see that
in terms of civilization it was a backward European region—very fertile
culturally but not at all industrially. Long distances scattered human
settlements, difficult communication among people—all these formed
certain attributes of one’s character. For instance, self-restraint, a
kind of asceticism. Religious life—I am thinking of my Catholic
environment—was very austere. This religiousness was perhaps even more
stern than the Protestant. All this shaped a certain kind of man, his
character, dignity, as well as his sense of humor, but above all
asceticism. What is it? A lack of appetite of the kind middle-class
societies have, restraining, controlling it as something reprehensible.
Pushing one’s way through to be first or lying to show off was
disgraceful. That’s why I have no motives, like possessiveness, that
middle-class societies have. I was relatively free here even in the
worst times [the Stalinist period] because there was nothing to punish
me with, there was nothing to take away from me—because I am not
greedy, grasping, possessive, because I don’t care about most things.
That gives me freedom. That’s why I can say that I am only passing by.
I am not entangled in affairs, coteries, cliques, lobbies which fight
for literary position and money. And in Poland there is always an
especially fierce fight for the seat of the bard, the poet-prophet, the
father of the nation.
DS: But unlike in America, in Poland such a position exists.
TK: Literature there does not have the national and messianic
significance that it has in Poland, because in Poland literature’s
life-history is the life-history of maintaining this society’s
identity. Thanks to literature, this society somehow survived all its
bad fortune, but the situation brought upon it awful habits, such as
servility or the obligation that, like the Catholic church, it has to
fight with fists raised against all enemies. Such a position lent
literature wings, honor, position, but at the same time restricted it
to expectations. So, summing up, with my disposition, I am outside the
game of interests. I am an exceptional outsider, even though I show up
in the city, make jokes, and so on; but I am excluded from the game,
from all this. I do not participate in the exchange, the races. But it
is not a bad position, and it’s a voluntary one. I am in a way
independent, though showing of one’s independence is stupid because we
are all dependent on the climate, Bush’s whims, and I am even dependent
on my wife of whom I am a little afraid. So the only thing to do is to
diminish the degree of dependence.
DS: You went through so many changes, periods like Wilno, partisan war,
Stalinism, Gomulka, and so on. Now, with all the recent changes in
Poland, a certain world has ended and a new epoch has begun. How do you
feel in this new system of values?
TK: As always. I was always the same. I felt the same before the war
and in the partisan troops. I was also an outsider. Even though once I
was in the Party, I was never a brilliant activist, but rather a
nobody. But what’s important is the question of what is happening apart
from these political changes—it’s astounding! We see that the so-called
evil empire, which seemed impossible to shake or to crack, collapsed
under its own weight. No American bombs or Marines crushed this empire;
it fell under its own weight. Yet another important thing is that the
end of the century is coming and, what’s worse, the end of the
millennium. Those numbers are obviously arbitrary, but people are
nevertheless influenced by them—the phenomenon of autosuggestion. And
this affects our frame of mind, our decadence. But I think the greatest
influence on the second half of the twentieth century was World War II.
And I think that the holocaust produced a continuous sense of guilt and
despair, which is manifested in moral nihilism. All anarchistic
movements, all trends of liberation from moral conventions—hippies and
other movements of young people, women’s or homosexual’s protests—all
these resulted from the moral crash that happened during the war. All
that edifice of human thought and morality which we had built for 2000
years suddenly tumbled down because of the Nazi genocide. And even you,
the young, are born with the thread of hunger containing the sense of
guilt that we all have, a sense that something happened not quite
right, that these 2000 years of human efforts were wasted if such a
catastrophe could occur. All these factors create the general unrest
that we feel—that values are changing, that certain habits are breaking
down, that generations appear that want to articulate something new but
are unable. But we remember what Roitschwantz says in Ehrenburg’s
novel: if they dismiss this one, it means that they will accept a new
one—that if certain values break down, it means that right away new
ones will appear because this is how the market of life operates. So I
do not see any magical meaning in this time, do not exaggerate. I do
not think that anything extraordinary is going on but only what always
happens in human destiny. I think that all generations that enter life
resemble in their psychological profile individual people. I mean,
there are hysterical generations and there are sober ones, ones with
exuberant imagination and ones without any. It is as if you looked
through the last hundred years and observed all these ways to live
connected with the generation’s frame of mind. That is why I do not
believe in canons of art. There are none! This is chaos! Every
generation creates its own canons. One generation likes this, and the
next comes and likes something else. And we see it even in fashion,
clothes. Now I watch films from the sixties and women’s clothes appear
to me terrible, but in fifteen, twenty years they will be attractive
again.
DS: Except, perhaps, shoes. They rarely come back.
TK: As for shoes, I have a very peculiar attitude. Shoes were my
childhood and youth complex. Why? Because we had immense snows in the
Wilno country, and I was a passionate sportsman, and because of my
boots, my feet were always wet from skiing or skating.
DS: In "Rojsty" (Marshes) this motif is omnipresent, like the young nurse whose feet are frozen.
TK: Where I lived, shoes had a biological practical function. They were
necessary for life, whereas now days shoes are like gloves: chosen to
match the clothes and thrown away after a while. They have moved from
the practical sphere to the aesthetic.
DS: But American shoes still tend to look practical.
TK: That’s right, because their civilization is a few centuries late.
Their pioneers had to have solid boots, unlike Parisians who in the
eighteenth century had pavements.
DS: Coming back to the new system of values in Poland which is geared towards money . . .
TK: It doesn’t befit you, an American, to accuse me, a Pole from
Warsaw, of a money motif. All American art is based on the money
syndrome—a little bit about sex, but money is the real issue. So it is
quite normal that money begins to play an important part here now. But
I am anxious about something else, and that is the changes in our
thinking conditioned by the Catholic church and even by rationalistic
circles which were hidden, persecuted, inactive for decades and now
have a chance to demonstrate themselves. These are unwelcome signs in a
world afraid of nationalisms, smugness, and quarrelsome parochialism.
But this seems to be temporary, too. This society was uncorked, like a
bottle with a terribly fermented liquid. All the bubbles, gases, have
to escape from this society. I think that the Polish intelligentsia,
thanks to its tradition, is strong, and we are able to take control of
our society’s mentality, unlike the Russians who are afraid—the Russian
intelligentsia still feels weak, though in my opinion it is strong. But
its self-confidence is not very dynamic. They are afraid of these vast
territories, these crowds which no rational thought can subdue. But we
are not in such a bad position because we never lost strong ties with
the West, with European and world thought.
DS: Recently I read a long report by Ryszard Kapuscinski (a Polish
journalist), who visited Russia, traveled there, and went to a mine
because its workers were on strike. Then he came back to his friends
that belonged to the Russian intelligentsia and asked them why they
weren’t there, why they did not formulate the worker’s demands. They
were puzzled at his questions. In Poland there were always some ties
between the intelligentsia and the workers, but not in Russia.
TK: That’s what I am talking about. I think that the Russian
intelligentsia is already strong, and only has to be more decided, has
to have the will to want it. But we have to remember that there is a
kind of global consciousness. And this global consciousness also
affects Russia, and Russia has to yield to global moral, social, and
intellectual processes. So it must not be too bad. Because if it is
bad, the world will end. The so called end of the world will come if we
continually slide down. But because those biped mammals—those
humans—are an awfully vital and resourceful species, I think that they
will manage to persist and still pollute the air.
DS: Coming back to some of the things you have said before, could we say that you are a Pole from the East?
TK: It sounds better to me . . . but please hold this question because
it is a good one. I would prefer to call myself a European from the
East because of all my biography, my coming from this borderland. I am
not a particularly zealous patriot, which is something that rankles the
people here. But already public opinion has become somewhat used to my
not being constantly serviceable in these matters. Of course I
sympathize with those people who live by the Vistula river. I am very
ambitious for them and often defend them when I see them suffering from
injustice done them by other nations. But I am not a particularly
fervent patriot. I feel myself to be a European, an inhabitant of this
little piece of the big continent where so much started. I even feel
emotional ties with America. In "Rzeka podziemna, podziemne ptaki" I
write about Manhattan, which seems to me a torn-away piece of my Wilno
country, a piece that sailed the ocean and now hangs beneath America’s
belly. I do not feel that America is strange or alien to me. Of course,
this is also connected to the fact that America was created by
immigrants and especially my countrymen, that is Belorussians, Jews,
Poles, and others; whoever emigrated from these territories founded big
movie companies, newspapers, theaters, business, clothes production . .
.
DS: So you say, your countrymen Belorussians, Lithuanians . . .
TK: Tartars . . .
DS: Jews, Karaites . . .
TK: That’s right.
DS: Russians?
TK: Here an ignorant Pole awakes in me. Here, I feel a certain reserve
. . . even more so because Russian culture is captivating, and I am
under its huge influence.
DS: As you wrote in "Moonrise, Moonset," you are a "hideous hybrid
formed at the boundary of two worlds," that is Polish and Russian.
TK: I like Russianness. I feel an unhealthy attraction to it, and that
is why I recoil from saying such things, because this Russianness was a
mortal threat to us. That is why I hesitated here, and restrained my
enthusiasm for Russia. But indeed yes! Indeed yes! I remember once I
was in San Francisco, invited by the Department of State. They ask me,
"What would you like to see? There is a film festival in San
Francisco." "What do they show?" "Tarkowski’s ‘Rublov.’" I never saw it
before and was not really inclined to. I say, "Of course," and go. Some
kind of a hall divided by a cherry-red curtain. The festival was very
modest, to say the least. The audience stands waiting. A thousand White
Russians stand in their coats with their velvet collar’s from the
czar’s times. They chat. They came to see a Russian film. I am there
alone, unexpectedly, because the only Americans are ushers. And I
almost cannot resist shouting, "Hey, there, listen! I am your man, I am
one of you!" So this is clear proof of how many threads intertwine in
me. And, I have to confess, I think that’s good . . . that’s good. This
is where Europe is going. That is, I would have liked it best if we had
a Europe of regions, so that villages would fight rather than
countries, like the Upper Colony with the Lower Colony—those from the
village pick up our girls, so we have to beat them black and blue—not
that wars are fought for some bombastic ideological principles.
DS: I have a couple of questions connected with Mickiewicz and his
Polish national epic "Pan Tadeusz." Let’s take the very beginning of
it: "Lithuania, my fatherland!" A Pole will say that, of course, it is
Polish, and so is Mickiewicz, whereas a Lithuanian without hesitation
that he is Lithuanian.
TK: Aleksander Malachowski, a journalist and member of Parliament, once
said very nicely about Mickiewicz: half-Jew, half-Belorussian, the
greatest Polish poet, begins his epic with the words "Lithuania, my
fatherland!" And that is the essence of what I am telling you from the
very beginning about all these matters and myself.
DS: While reading your "Bohin Manor," I had a feeling that it was
written in direct relation to "Pan Tadeusz," perhaps because of a manor
house, a Jew who is an important character.
TK: Elias here is, in fact, a test. I wanted to see how our public
opinion would receive this love story, how deep our anti-semitism runs.
The test came out all right. The novel was well received even though I
designed the love story somewhat disturbingly: a woman from Polish
nobility with a Jew. But of course all these circumstances, landscapes,
moods. The action takes place several decades after Mickiewicz’s times.
In the territory things didn’t change so fast, not civilization nor
custom nor ways of thinking. I didn’t have to do any research, check
what dishes they used or how they traveled because I still remember
from my childhood Mickiewicz’s world and because the nineteenth century
in the Wilno country ended in 1939.
DS: I had a similar feeling reading a book of interviews with Milosz when he spoke about this territory.
TK: He is a stray! He is from the Kowno region in Lithuania! From the
Niewiaza river. He came to Wilno as a grown boy. So he is not a native
of Wilno. He is a Lithuanian.
DS: You see, I can’t see the difference.
TK: How’s that? Because you, poor Poles, when you hear his poem about
his homeland to which he will never come back, you think that he writes
about Poland. No! He writes about Lithuania from the thirties! The
homeland to which he will never come back is Kowno Lithuania, the
country on the Niewiaza.
DS: With Poles, it is like this: whoever speaks Polish is a Pole. But
where you come from, because so many languages coexist, perhaps the
territory defines one’s belonging.
TK: Of course language determines man somehow, his homeland, but not
necessarily his nationality. Anyway, all this will not matter in the
future when probably all of us will have to speak English, in this
terrible pidgin language of languages. In that language everything is
upside down. You can’t pronounce one word normally, not even "Jesus
Christ." A certain Englishman told my friend who had a speech defect
that he would speak English well because he didn’t open his mouth.
DS: Are you biased against this language?
TK: No, I just cannot learn it! I passionately tried, and the more I studied English, the better I spoke Russian.
DS: To change the subject, what is Puszkarnia in your books?
TK: You see, everybody invents magic places, like the Mormons who have
their mountain where, they believe, the world will end; and I’ve got
from them a piece of rock from this mountain. Every society tries to
make its life more magical, to grant it greater value than the obvious,
and they especially do it to some places. And this is, in fact,
justified by history. Certain places that were considered magic proved
to be volcanic or, like the Suwalki region, spread over uranium
deposits. They affected human life. The belief that the earth
influences human life is called tellurism. Every civilization creates
for itself such magical places, like Mount Sinai. And I, sinfully,
allowed myself to invent a few places, like the Wilno Colony,
Puszkarnia, the French Mill, which is already starting to catch on in
Europe, and I am very proud of it. Some English and French think that
Puszkarnia exists and that something good is there.
DS: That God dwells there?
TK: Once I heard the greatest compliment. A reader of mine wrote to me
that after one of my films, her four-year-old son said: "Mom, at night
I dreamed of Puszkarnia," which he didn’t know, never was there, but
his imagination was inspired in the direction so dear to me.
DS: But factually, what was Puszkarnia?
TK: Probably it is an old place of manufacture, a primitive factory
from precapitalist times. They must have produced artillery there in
the eighteenth century. And this name survived even though Puszkarnia
now bears only traces of something old. Besides, all these symbolic
places are our nostalgia for the passing of time. We enjoy finding
signs of old life.
DS: Staying with this territory, I would like to ask you about the
storytelling that you mention in "New World Avenue and Vicinity."
TK: This is my audacity of a sort which comes from my belief that I
invented a new literary genre or subgenre. I am so used to diaries,
memoirs, journals in literature. So I invented an intermediate form, a
loose stream of memories, quotations, sudden recollections and
digressions. They also have their justification relating to the customs
and geography. If you imagine a wooded area where human settlements are
scattered over several miles, where the nearest train station is forty
miles away, where communication is so difficult, where everywhere
around is a forest, where mail is always late, where you have no
bookstores, theaters, gramophones, then forms of entertainment are
restricted. People visit one another during holidays, come for
Christmas or a wedding or a name day, and it lasts for a week. Then,
what is the most enjoyable way to cheat time, apart from music? A
talent to tell stories. There is always someone who was somewhere far
away in the world or rather who knows circulating stories about
legendary figures. I spend my vacation on the Hel Peninsula. One of the
houses there is called America, and the guy who lives there, a
Kashubian, is called America because he was in America and came back.
He got a label for life. Somebody was in America, somebody was in
France or fought the Caucasus—they were substitutes for books,
readings, radio programs, or even movies. So this form, this ability to
confabulate, was common. And also, the language was bewitching,
compared to central literary Polish, because it had all these
influences—Lithuanian, Belorussian, Jewish and even Russian. It was
melodious, from the borderland, gaining some sounds that central Polish
never had, as the disappearance of nasal vowels. It was a language, so
to say, not quarrelsome, not verbose, in love with detail, with an
extremely musical, song like intonation. All this constituted the form
that I ingeniously attribute to myself but that was used by Wankowicz
and many others, not to mention our dear Adam Mickiewicz, who in "Pan
Tadeusz" created a model for the following generations. Period.
DS: In your novels you seem to use repetitively certain short
expressions, such as "Achilles who some day will be a superb
professor," or " a man who was eating a hard-boiled egg" in "Nic albo
nic." A name is followed by a short expression identifying this person.
Were such formulaic expressions used in the storytelling you speak
about?
TK: The point is that my generation is aware of its fate all at once.
There is no way to forget the whole biography and no way to avoid
saying about the man who was eating a hard-boiled egg that he had been
in Auschwitz or that this woman, so well-dressed and perfumed with
Chanel, survived a Siberian labor camp. So the seal of our biography,
complicated and stormy, dictates such style and even the collage form.
DS: Your personal biography or historical?
TK: Of our generation. I mean biographies with war, the ideological
change, crucial questions, constant wresting with the ultimate, which
an American middle class man never faces. He can only have his house
burned, or a car can hit him on the street.
DS: But they also have such literary forms as a collage.
TK: Yes, but for them these forms are only a literary fashion. There is no dread behind them, no real life experience.
DS: Perhaps I should have been more specific about the storytelling you talked about. Such a folk tradition . . .
TK: Of nobility, gentry.
DS: There was a tradition of storytelling in Yugoslavia, a tradition of
long epic poems recited from memory. There are records and books about
it. These poems used formulaic expressions that remind me of the ones
you sometimes use.
TK: I invented all this to make things more interesting. I never
followed any storytelling model. It is characteristic of my style to
charm, chat, contradict, leap, question, speak with self-irony, and
just to make it look nice, I couch it in a literary-historical thesis.
It doesn’t pay off to make much of my stories.
DS: How’s that?
TK: I am very convincing even when I pull your leg.
DS: So there was nothing like that at all?
TK: See, I said it so well that you now defend it. Go ahead, we have to finish.
DS: All right . . . three more questions. The first one is about
animals which so often show up in your novels, especially in the
"Anthropos Specter-Beast." What are the reasons for your feelings
toward animals? Your past?
TK: Of course. Everything comes from what I said at the beginning, from
this territory. We were afraid of wolves all my childhood and youth. As
a partisan in the winter of 1944-45, I still heard those packs of
howling wolves around the woods. Household animals were real members of
the household. They were people, even though our stern religion forbade
us to anthropomorphize animals. It was even a serious sin from the
canonical point of view. But we anthropomorphized them anyway because
those animals lived with us all the time. They were not like your
dandy, doted on lap dogs, but they worked together with us. A dog was
guarding a house or drove the cows to pastures, a cat was catching
mice, horses worked, cows gave milk. These animals shared our fate.
That is why our approach to animals is not like yours, Western
Europeans, not patronizing or falsely sentimental, but matter-of-fact.
I could hit a dog with a stone, but a dog could bite my calf. We were
equals; that is, we didn’t hold mutual grudges. So the presence of
animals was very important, including wild animals that had magic
meaning connected with the woods. You have to remember that Lithuania
received baptism by the end of the fourteenth century, four centuries
later than Poland, even more than that. And paganism in custom and the
subconscious is still there in certain relics. The woods, for instance,
were sacred. Oaks, snakes, streams, marshes, forest vapors—all these
things were very significant in our life. I’ve read "Perpetual Motion,"
a book by a Canadian writer, Graeme Gibson, and was struck by elements
of nature similar to "Wuthering Heights." The same thing was revived
among the inhabitants of Canada. So we have something in common, as
opposed to the townspeople, who don’t see trees or even birds.
DS: The acacia in your books has its own life.
TK: That’s right.
DS: I am thinking again of what you said in "New World Avenue and
Vicinity": "I can’t break away from the Wilno, from that hybrid land
that is both Lithuania and Belorussia and neither" or "If any time in
my future life I am caught mentioning the Wilno Colony, the Wilno
country, or Lithuania once more, let the nearest passerby shoot me
without mercy."
TK: True, but no one wants to. They nag me all the time to speak of those topics.
DS: So there may be real value in them.
TK: I said, I am a European, and I don’t want to be a regional bandore player.
DS: But I don’t see any contradiction.
TK: Exactly, you said it right. I want those topics to be universally relevant.
DS: A British poet, Philip Larkin, said once that he quit writing
novels because novels are about other people whereas poetry is about
oneself. If we go with this distinction, can we call your books poetic?
TK: Technically, yes. I write about myself because I came to the
conclusion that I am most competent in this sphere. Even if I create
various characters, make a plot, some chain of events, everything is
saturated with me. I am present all the time, to formulate, mold,
remind the reader that it’s me. I staked my writing on that. I think
that, in the terrible chaos we have now, objective, transparent prose
has to perish because it will be replaced by more perfect forms, like
film or television. Only a person can arouse other people’s interest in
societal relations. Some people are fascinating, others are old bores.
We want to be with some, and we run away from others. So I charm the
reader all the time and satiate him with myself, and in this way I use
poetic technique. And that’s the only thing worth doing, as opposed to
describing the world that we get every day from millions of TV
programs, journalists, photographs, newspaper reports. We know this
world inside out. We have enough dead bodies in Yugoslavia, Georgia,
Palestine, or anywhere else. Finally we are haunted by a thirst to find
some universal sense in all that happens. And that’s what poetry likes.
DS: My last question is really a set of questions about the portrait of women in your . . .
TK: Women are an element of beauty, loveliness, and pleasantness in the
world. And many people, I don’t say all, need beauty in life. For some,
valuables, trumpery, and golden glare are enough, but not for others. I
talked about trees or the sky. A woman also, in her gesture, movements,
silhouette, has something that makes a man stop, arrested, and look. Of
course what I am saying is very old fashioned. Now we have "unisex,"
and woman loses her femininity. Maybe this is a defense mechanism
against excessive population. Something happened, and maybe it’s God’s
gift, that women today have a different function, more utilitarian. For
my generation, a woman was first of all a mystery. Secondly, she had
her inscrutable dignity. And that is why for my generation, love was
not just copulative acts but a whole big procedure, strife, the magic
of winning this loveliness, this drop of beauty in our world, to use
great words. I belong to the generation intrigued by women. To give a
vulgar example, if I see beautiful women on our sidewalk, which is the
New World Avenue, I, as an elderly man, look after her, unlike young
men. So it’s a pity the magic place of women in our life got lost. We
only have women friends, buddies, guardians, stepmothers, foster
mothers. The world lost so much, but I suppose only for a while. As I
said, together with Roitschwantz, if they dismiss one, they will accept
a new one. If they lost their interest, then maybe they will soon start
to love women hysterically.
DS: But from the point of view of American feminism . . .
TK: Why spoil this nice final note! Why look for what feminists. . . .
I will tell you the truth. Feminists will die a natural death because
they are ugly, ungainly, and won’t have children and will become
extinct. And only beautiful girls will remain who will be feminists
only so much as need be. Thank you, we have to go.
DS: Thank you, too
