Piotr Nowak, photo: Bartek Syta Before becoming an internationally renowned historian of ideas, he studied the Russian language and literature at the University of Lódź, where he landed accidentally. In 1949, for political reasons, he was not admitted to either philosophy or Polish studies. A year earlier his father, Michał Walicki, an eminent art historian, had been sent to prison, and the children of those convicted after the war had their social opportunities restricted in many areas of social life.
In their household, the Walicki family referred to Russia without hatred, instead scaring each otherwith stories of the Bolsheviks. And these – as they were careful to note – were not the same thing. Furthermore, for the young Walicki, Russian literature and thought were an effective antidote to Stalinism. ‘I felt threatened not by “Russification” but by “Sovietisation’’’, he recalled years later of that time. He admired Russia and felt comfortable with it. We owe him great works on Turgenev, Dostoevsky and countless others. I think his creative intention was to teach Russia about Russia, like the Crow tribe re-learning their own and now forgotten ‘sun dance’ from the Sioux, their opponents. ‘I write more perhaps for the Russians than for the Poles’, reads a letter to Miłosz from December 1960, ‘although I know that they will not read me. I would be happy if I could help the Russians to recover their most precious tradition, the lost and battered traditions of moral restlessness’.
I have travelled to Russia many times with the same intention. From the Russians, I assimilated instantly notions that would have taken me two lifetimes to assimilate via books, not to mention the fact that someone would still have had to point them out to me. Then I learned to place these notions within the Russian emotional experience of the world, which is, after all, only possible in Russia. At the same time, I tried to contain in them the thought of their cultural backwardness in relation to Europe, warning them of the bane of xerox-modernisation [the attempt at modernisation through imitation of reforms or practices implemented elsewhere, trans.]. My friend Yana Brazhnikova – I remember it very clearly – had a talk at a conference organised at the RSUH [Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow, ed.] on the nationality of philosophers. It was very interesting; at the same time, I was put off the great insights it contained by the name of Jacques Derrida, which stuck out from every other sentence. When I asked my friends what the hell all this postmodern stuff was for, I learned that when Derrida had visited their university, he’d seduced them by confessing that it was only in Russia and thanks to the Russians that he realised that the words drug (friend) and drugoi (other) could actually derive from the same stem.
I would argue that no postmodernism or any other ism is needed for Russians to understand who they are. Sometimes, in fact, Russia’s magnificent culture needs to be discovered even despite the Russians themselves, despite those especially who prioritise that of others over their own. This view of Russian affairs was not unfamiliar to Walicki, who believed that:
(…) the Russian intellectual elite cannot directly ‘jump’ from Stalinism to Europeanism, that its heritage is too great and its historical experience too terrible and too important for humanity for it to be ignored even for a moment, that the Russians should think about fully assimilating the cultural heritage and experience of the West only when they have returned to their own roots, reassimilated their own culture, when they have ‘re-discovered’ their tragic history.
