Culture & War

ukrainska_flaga_gettyimages_94.jpg, default, The Ukrainian flag flies over a dilapidated residential area in the city of Borodyanka, northwest of the Ukrainian capital Kiev, photo: Sergei Chuzavk, center, #000000

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We live in a world where the speed limit has been abolished, the brakes have broken, and suddenly anything is possible. The Russians have proved once again that life can be as short as death: before you know it, what used to be is long gone.

Throughout the 19th century and into the 20th, Poles paid a high price for the dream of freedom. Today, it is Ukrainians who are paying with their blood for common values, and in particular, for the right to freedom and the attempt to define themselves in relation to a country that had an urge to enter another country with its tanks and drive around for a while, from east to west and back again.

These things will soon need to be portrayed; they cannot be ignored or turned into a joke. I can see room here for collaboration between historians, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian philologists and perhaps philosophers in the creation of a new, common story. This time, I am talking about the real, not imaginary, demand for interdisciplinary projects – at university, these would be syllabuses in which we could put what is happening now into some comprehensible terms. Therefore, we must learn to talk about hospitality, assimilation, or loyalty to a country that offers such hospitality. There are also other subjects to consider: the meaning of a united Europe and the principle of its renewed self-governance, patriotism, nationalism, and national identity.

Ukrainians and Poles have always been divided by religion. Today – thank God – it no longer has the power to divide. We have welcomed three million Ukrainians to Poland. There will be more. Some of them will soon enter our universities. It is not so problematic if they are students of mathematics or computer science. But what about humanists? Are we supposed to read With Fire and Sword, Trans-Atlantyk or watch Smarzowski’s film with some of them, while with others, we are supposed to read Taras Bulba or a one-sided story about the Ukrainian Insurgent Army?

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Piotr Nowak, photo: Krzysztof Rosiński

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Let us remember that a renewed dialogue with Ukrainians may be an opportunity not only for them but also for us. I would not perceive it in terms of taming mutual strangeness, defusing squabbles and curing old wounds. It is about creating a story together for the future. Does this mean that we should not look to the past? That is impossible since – as the poet T.S. Eliot wrote in Burnt Norton – ‘time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future, and time future contained in time past’. A history fraught with bloodshed on both sides must be told afresh, factually and honestly, with a view to future generations but also to those who have fallen. So, ‘let us look to the past so as not to see it again as the future’ as Leszek Kołakowski wrote.

Today we Poles, Ukrainians and the whole civilised world have a common goal – to defeat Russia without destroying it. However, we must also do everything to ensure that Russia will not threaten us ever again, or at least for a long time. But what does that actually mean? What does it look like from our perspective? What do we – Poles, Ukrainians, Europeans, Americans – look like from the Russian perspective? Is fostering propaganda that dehumanises the enemy, which we deal with every day, a move in the right direction? I believe that culture and universities should be free of this type of propaganda.

There are voices calling for a freeze in cultural relations with Russia. Although I understand this perspective from the standpoint of current political practice, a decision to boycott Russian cultural goods seems wrong and counterproductive long term. Culture – any culture – needs to be known because ignorance is a sign of weakness. Russian culture, on the other hand, should be taken away from the Russians themselves, who have proven en masse that they do not understand it. They do not understand Pushkin, the freethinker, somewhere the meaning of Dostoevsky’s Demons escapes them, and they do not realise that Shostakovich is not only the author of the powerful Leningrad Symphony but also of Symphony No. 14, full of reverie on death and passing, built on a dialogue with the greatest European poets: Rilke, Apollinaire, Lorca.

Russians do not remember that they killed and tortured their own, most outstanding ones: Gumilev, Mandelstam, Shpet, Akhmatova, that the great Tsvetaeva took her life not in Czechia, not in France, but in the Soviet Union, that the KGB officers went abroad to murder Alexander Galich, that the exiled Nabokov, Bunin, Brodsky never returned to their homeland. It is necessary to explain to Russians that the musical, painting and literary masterpieces created by the greatest of them are also directly connected with everyday life, that the limits of their language, resulting from insufficient knowledge, are also limits of the world they live in. The camp prose must not be called fiction, something I have heard so many times, even from educated Russians! ‘It is horrifying to see the gulag,’ – Shalamov writes. ‘No man in the world should know gulags. In the gulag experience, everything is negative – every minute. A man only becomes worse’. Surely. But one must know that.

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Photo: Ivor Prickett/Panos Pictures/Forum

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Another issue is responsibility for the destruction of the post-war order. Together with the whole world, we should do everything possible to hold all the Russians accountable, as was done with the Germans after the war. There should be a comprehensive ‘denazification’ and ‘decommunisation’ of the Russian political system as Vasily Grossman wrote convincingly about the intertwining of communism and Nazism in his novel Life and Fate. I have the impression that Germany has not intellectually settled accounts for its crimes. I do not take Gunter Grass’s work into consideration; it is too metaphorical and ‘off-topic’.

Similarly, Karl Jaspers’ Die Schuldfrage is no settlement with the crimes of German Nazism but rather a pessimistic reflection on human nature. The same applies to Heidegger’s eloquent post-war silence. And yet Germany has at least accounted for its crimes politically, additionally paying for them to some nations in Deutschmarks. On the other hand, the Russians have come to terms with their crimes intellectually – authors such as Andrei Platonov, Varlam Shalamov, and Vasily Grossman went the furthest in this area – but they have not come to terms with them politically. The Germans have opted for peace and business, understanding virtually nothing of what they have done. In contrast, the Russians understand everything they do, opting for war with the entire Western world.

These are the consequences of not fully accounting for 19th-century imperialism and 20th-century totalitarianism. Therefore, in a sense, the war in Ukraine can be viewed as a continuation of the decolonisation movement that took place in Western Europe in the 1960s.

Thumbnail — Hannah Arendt, 1944, photo: Fred Stein Archive/Archive Photos/Getty Images

Today it is no longer possible to study the texts of Alain Besançon, Hannah Arendt, Varlam Shalamov, Tadeusz Borowski, Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, Czesław Miłosz as if nothing happened, as if there were no Irpin, Bucha or Mariupol. We must constantly reiterate this question: has Russia ever paid for the evil it did to itself and the world? In the Kolyma permafrost lie untold corpses of Russians exiled by the tsars and by Stalin. And the eminent Polish Sovietologist Włodzimierz Bączkowski observed in Notes on the Essence of Russian Power, a text written in 1939, that:

In recent years Russia has waged a long series of wars, stretching over a total of 128 years – of this number, wars aimed at expanding Russia’s borders have lasted a total of 101 years. Only four defensive wars were fought during this time, and they lasted a total of just four and a half years. These data, supported by the table of Russia’s territorial development, suggest a preliminary view that Russia’s wars of annexation are the most appropriate manifestation of the country’s power.

Not work, not God, not religion, but pure violence defines Russian substance – the principle of Russian self-definition. This raises further questions. If Russia is defeated, what impact will that have on Poland? What role will Polish universities and Polish culture play in telling the story of what has happened? If we take up in advance the issues I have raised and those I have not even considered, I think we will not be surprised by the scale of the problems. Most importantly, we will not become a subject of politics but an active actor in it.

Originally written in Polish, translated by Culture.pl, 26 May 2022

^{Sources: ‘Uwagi o istocie siły rosyjskiej’ in Kronos by W. Bączkowski, 2022; K. Jaspers, ‘The Question of German Guilt’ (Die Schuldfrage); V. Shalamov, ‘Kolyma Stories’; L. Kołakowski, ‘Z dziennika lektury’, in: L. Kołakowski, Niepewność epoki demokracji, Kraków 2014, p. 279; T.S. Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’ (No. 1 of Four Quarters).}

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