Stanisław Jerzy Lec. In a changing, unstable and uncertain world

w Stanisła Jerzy E a C L in g n g , a i n ch unstabl e and i l a o w r t r e d u nc n e n N L r d a eug e r f . o p ro

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tanisław Jerzy LEC was born on 6 March 1909 in Lviv. He died on 7 May 1966 in Warsaw. He was born in the Austro-Hungarian empire, in the capital of a crea%on which was strange to say the least – the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria – which in those days was known as Lemberg. In 1918, at the end of the First World War, Lemberg was returned to Poland and was given back its Polish name of Lwów.

In 1939, the city was occupied by the Soviet Union and its name was changed to Lvov. Today, the city is located in Ukraine and is called Lviv. Lec died in the Polish People’s Republic, in the capital which was called, and is s%ll called, Warsaw. During the occupa%on by the Third Reich, the city was nevertheless called Warschau – Lec stayed there for a %me. These changes of names, of countries and of poli%cal systems are enough to make you feel dizzy, and yet they’re simplified here. And we shouldn’t forget the crea%on of the state of Israel in 1948... Perhaps it’s wiser simply to say this: Stanisław Jerzy Lec was born and died in a changing, unstable and uncertain world. Hidden behind these words are extreme cruelty, genocide and terror. They form the framework of Lec’s life and those of his contemporaries. The genera%on of Czesław Miłosz.

Stanisław Jerzy’s mother was called Adela Safir, and his father’s name was Benon de Tusch-Letz. Lec’s Jewish ancestors

hailed from Spain and arrived in Poland via the Netherlands and Germany. In the 19th century, the family received from the emperor the %tle of baron for services to the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. If we were to start wri%ng the introduc%on of this text afresh, we would write ‘Baron Stanisław Jerzy de Tusch-Letz was born...’etc. During the First World War, the Lec family sought refuge in Vienna; once they had returned to Lwów, Stanisław Jerzy studied at the Evangelische Oberschule before going on to the Kamerling Gymnasium. The language spoken at home was Polish and surely German; at school he spoke German; his milieu was Jewish, Polish and Austrian; his cultural circle – certainly Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and secular. In 1927, he began to study Polish literature and language before studies in law at the famous (Polish) University of Lwów. He completed his studies in 1933, just as Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany.

Lec’s work was first published in a literary magazine in 1929. He then made an important decision: he renounced his aristocra%c %tle. Baron de Tusch disappeared forever from his signature. His first verses s%ll bear the German version of his name – Letz. His first books came out in 1933, when he published two tomes of his sa%rical poems under the Polish spelling of his name – Lec. From then on, he always signed his work using this name, some-%mes even reducing his first name to its ini%als: St. L. But Lec would also talk about the hidden meanings behind his surname. LEC read back to front means the TARGET in Polish (cel); in Hebrew – the CLOWN; in German – the LAST (Letzt). And if we add to this the fact that his mother’s maiden name, Safrin, means WRITER in Hebrew, a mul%lingual, Polish-German-Hebrew des%ny is what escapes from this chaos of epoques, this hotch-potch of names and borders: Lec was meant to be a writer, a sa%rist (a humourist), a target/vic%m and the last survivor.

As with many of his genera%on, Lec had been linked to the communist leJ before the war, although he never belonged to

any party. In 1939, Poland’s eastern territories, including Lwów, were seized by the Soviet Union (which incorporated them) under the terms of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. Lec wrote for the Czerwony Sztandar, a communist newspaper then published in Polish, even wri%ng a poem in Stalin’s honour. He was a witness to fear: he experienced the arrests of the leJ-wing literary elite (Władysław Broniewski, Aleksander Wat, Tadeusz Peiper), the provoca%ons and depora%ons or, quite simply, sudden disappearances. A period of terror had set in.

In 1941, The Germans took back Lvov. As a Jew, Lec was placed in the labour camp at Tarnopol. He escaped certain death by literally escaping from the grave which he had dug himself. This fortunate incident saved his life, followed later by his perfect knowledge of German. He reached Warsaw (Warschau) and joined the autho-ri%es of the communist resistance. His Semi%c appearance meant it was impossible to hide him in the city. He was sent to the detachments of fighters in the region of Lublin – an%Semites, we might add (Lec wrote about this) – alongside whom he fought un%l the end of the war.

AJer the war, in 1949, Lec became a press aKaché for the Mission of the Polish Republic in Vienna, in the occupied Soviet zone. It’s hard to think of a beKer candidate for this post, with his excellent knowledge of German, %es to the city (da%ng back to childhood) a good educa%on, excellent manners, a commitment to leJ-wing ac%vism since before the war broke out and a good reputa%on as a poet and sa%rist, enhanced by the fact that, at the %me, (1946-1950) he was in the process of edi%ng four poe%cal and sa%rical tomes. It’s wise, however, to take a closer look at this. A power struggle was underway in the communist camp and Lec’s intellectual training as a poet and his wri%ng style were rejected in favour of blind obedience and socialist realism.

The poe%cal and sa%rical pamphlets which he published at that %me met with severe cri%cism. As for the rest, one should note

that Vienna under occupa%on bore no resemblance to pre-war Vienna and Lec himself was not the man he had been. Indeed, he was the last survivor... In 1950, when he was no longer working at the Mission, Lec and his family decided to move to Israel, which communist Poland felt to be tantamount to betrayal and deser%on. Sadly, the poet never managed to feel at home there.

In 1952, he took the drama%c decision to return to Poland. He had leJ Poland for Vienna at a %me when the poli%cal regime was right in the middle of a transforma%on. Now, it was to Stalinist Poland that he returned. People were afraid to meet him, he was ostracised, no-one was allowed to publish his work and his books were withdrawn from libraries. He translated a liKle (amongst other things Mother Courage by Bertolt Brecht and the poems of Paul Celan). He tried to repent.

Readers had to wait un%l 1956 before his new collec%on of poetry came out, even if the ban on his work being published in the literary press had been liJed in 1955. The last ten years of his life were filled with literary work: he wrote poems, prac%sed sa%re, translated. In 1955, the weekly Nowa Kultura published 15 aphorisms by Lec. No-one remembered that, back in 1949, he had already published four in the weekly Szpilki. Between 1955 and his death in 1966, Lec found a home for his Unkempt Thoughts in the pages of various newspapers, especially Przegląd kulturalny, Świat and Dialog. Alongside this, from 1957, they were published as volumes, in an ever-increasing number of edi%ons,

by Krakow Literary Publica%ons (1957, 1959, 1964). The an%Semi%c campaign of 1968 meant that the next edi%on of Unkempt Thoughts only came out in 1972. The 1957 edi%on contained 193 aphorisms, the 1991 edi%on 2160, and the 1996 edi%on 2605.

In the most complete edi%on, published by Noir sur Blanc in 2006, we can count 4711 aphorisms, thanks to the great Lec specialist, Lidia Kośka, who devoted a monograph to him. She had the opportunity to read several aphorisms which had not been

published, wriKen on sheets of paper or even servieKes. Some had fallen foul of the censors, others hadn’t even got that far for obvious reasons, but some may have been wai%ng to be published or else formed part of the poet’s reserve.

Lec called his works thoughts, phrases and – rarely – aphorisms. He may not have wished to impose upon them the precise form of the aphorism, with its ancient roots, which in Hippocrates’ collec%on of medical rules, called his Aphorismoi, signified ‘differen%a%on’, or ‘defini%on’. He did not want to become part of the tradi%on of ancient or French sentences and maxims with which his work had liKle in common, save perhaps for their elegance. The German language tradi%on is closer to Lec, par%cularly the works of Karl Kraus. In his Unkempt Thoughts, the writer is giving us a clear sign when, asked how long his thoughts needed to take shape, he answers ‘six thousand years’.

It’s a clear clin d’oeil in reference to the Jewish calendar. Links with Hebraic thought are legion in Lec’s oeuvre. There are some similari%es to Polish aphoris%c texts but they are negligeable. Even the %tle Unkempt Thoughts is a reference to a writer close to Lec, Heinrich Heine, who wrote ironically about “Schön gekämmte, friesierte Gedanken” (“beau%fully combed and coiffed thoughts”).

The Unkempt Thoughts were hugely successful in Poland during Lec’s life%me. They were mostly interpreted from a poli%cal angle, as an expression of opposi%on to the communist regime. They were also successful outside Poland, especially in Germany. Moreover, they are unques%onably masterpieces of Polish literature, a master class in composing aphorisms. Lec, there can be no doubt, delighted in this glory and popularity… but it also caused him a certain amount of sadness, because Lec saw himself first and foremost as a poet. He was a talented poet, but his Unkempt Thoughts are truly first-rate and have retained their freshness and their traps. They delve deep into the stereotypes linked to language, grand statements, myths and automa%sms,

however innocent they may claim to be. And then they suddenly shaKer this innocence with such lightning lucidity and with such spirit that one could almost find them frightening. And even if they do s%ll bear an an%-poli%cal charge, what we can see even more clearly is their profoundly philosophical dimension.

Transla'on: Leah Maitland

Leonard NEUGER (°1947) is a literary historian and translator. AJer gradua%ng in Polish from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, he obtained a PhD from the University of Silesia in Katowice in 1978 and submiKed his professorial thesis in 1993 at the University of Stockholm, in Sweden, where he lived from 1983. Since 1995, he has been professor of Polish Language and Literature. In 2003, he was appointed director of the Department of Slavic Studies at the University of Stockholm.

He is the author of more than 200 essays, cri%ques and academic works in the fields of contemporary Polish literature and transla%on theory. He writes for several publica%ons linked to Polish emigra%on, as well as working for Swedish Radio and the BBC. His work has been published in reviews such as Dekada Literacka, Teksty Drugie, Zeszyty Literackie, Signum and Lyrikvännen. He has translated Carl Michael Bellman, Rita Tornborg and Tomas Tranströmer amongst others.

Neuger’s past is also connected to the fight against communism. AJer the riots in March 1968, he was arrested for trying to set up a student organisa%on and was imprisoned for five months. He is one of the co-founders of Solidarność at the University of Silesia. Imprisoned in December 1981, he remained behind bars un%l June 1982, before deciding to leave Poland for Sweden. He is now back in Poland.