We All Got It Wrong: Boy-Żeleński in Lviv

tadeusz_boy-zelenski_nac_8.jpg, default, Tadeusz Żeleński during the reading of 'Pietyzm i niedyskrecje w literaturze' in the Hygiene Association in Warsaw, 1937, photo: audiovis.nac.gov.pl (, We All Got It Wrong: Boy-Żeleński in Lviv

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Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński was born on the 21st December 1874 in Warsaw. But it is not his birthday that people remember. Far greater emotions are stirred up by the date of his death – 4 July 1941 – which is due to the controversy that surrounds the period of Boy’s residency in Lviv…

Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński was a prominent Polish poet, playwright and the translator of over 100 French literary classics into Polish. Among the cultural losses suffered by Poland during World War II, the unrecoverable, lost works of Boy-Żeleński cannot be forgotten. Such a fate met several of his works which were prepared for print: the two final volumes of his translation of Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu and Towards Proust – a collection of essays by the translator – as well as the final volume of his theatre criticism. His translation of Racine’s Britannicus was also swept away by the vicissitudes of war.

All these manuscripts, preserved with great devotion through the times of war by Boy-Żeleński’s wife Zofia Żeleńska went up in flames, along with her flat on Krakowskie Przedmieście, during the Warsaw Uprising. Both of the Proust volumes were also lost at the printing house which did not survive the uprising. Boy’s translation of Mérimée’s Théâtre de Clara Gazul also never saw the light of day, even though it is known that Boy completed it in Lviv.

Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński arrived in the city on the Poltva River on 10th September 1939.

Seductive terror

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Tadeusz Żeleński, photo: Wikimedia Commons

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Just twelve days after Boy’s arrival in Lviv, the city was occupied by the Red Army. A new, Soviet order was imposed. Things would never be the same again.

All Polish citizens were required – regardless of their nationality, religion or belonging to one or another social class – to vote under duress for the institution of the new system of government. Moreover, the so-called ‘passportisation’ of urban residents that was in force as of the end of 1932 made them all into ‘Soviet people’ with all the consequences that followed therefrom. In his article Another Quality: On Polish Resistance to the Soviet Occupation 1939-1941, Tomasz Strzembosz described the repercussions of this fact for Poles:

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So they were tried, for example, as counter-revolutionaries for their part in the work of the Second [Interwar] Republic or as traitors for fighting in the 1919-1920 Polish-Bolshevik war. They were Soviet citizens and, as such, they were obligated to fully, actively accept the Soviet state system, Communist socio-political doctrine, and the ideas of Marx, Lenin and Stalin. Their patriotic and social-class ‘responsibility’ was evincing proactive expressions not only of their loyalty, but – and above all – of their love for the system, its constitution, of the state’s leadership and of the leaders of the ruling party. Poles from the eastern territories had to take part (and this obligation was enforced even through physical coercion) in such acts of civic responsibility as voting.

Tygodnik Powszechny, No. 20/1990

Everyone also had to publicly avow their certainty as to the rectitude of the transformations taking place under the conditions of the ideology being imposed upon them by taking part in demonstrations, press sessions and meetings. They also had to undergo endless ideological inculcation classes and propaganda workshops aimed primarily at demeaning the Polish state, its system of governance, its history and the luminaries who created it.

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The announcement of Boy-Żeleński's public appearance in Siedlce, photo: Polona.pl

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This was expected of everyone and everyone was judged by these standards. If one were absent from a ‘spontaneous show of enthusiasm’ for the new regime, one could face arrest, imprisonment or exile to a labour camp. It only took the first few weeks of the occupation to dispel any doubts at all as to the nature of Soviet law and who it was that was making decisions about human life or death.

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The announcement of Boy-Żeleński's public appearance in Radom, 1924, photo: Polona.pl

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Each resident of Lviv had an obligation to register as belonging to a specific profession: anyone not having the proper ‘papers’ indicating membership in a given professional group could suffer the widely known consequences (prison, labour camp or death). When it came to the Polish intellectual elites, scientists and artists, the Soviet bureaucracy concocted far-reaching concepts of ‘community’, ‘uniting’ – voluntarily, of course – diverse groups in the name of its faith in the perfection of the ‘most progressive of systems’. This kind of ruthless subjugation of all resisters came to be known by them as ‘seductive terror’.

In the Fellowship of the Working People

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Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński, photo: Wikimedia Commons

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A witness to those times, the painter and sculptress Wanda Ładniewska-Blankenheim, in her article From Boy’s Last Two Years (Lviv 1939-1941), wrote:

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Refugees from the entire area of Poland that had been occupied by the Germans came to Lviv seeking employment – any employment, anywhere – just so that they could obtain a piece of paper with an official stamp, just so that they could enter into the fellowship of ‘working people’. Otherwise their existing difficulties (…) would soon grow to the scale of true catastrophe.

Zeszyty Historyczne, No. 4/1963

One of five copies of an anthology of Young Poland’s poetry miraculously recovered from the Ossolineum containing an extensive foreword by Boy also has his dedication: ‘To Mrs. Wanda Blankenheim, my most lovely guide through Lviv, I offer this book, T.Ż. Lviv, 1 VIII 1940’. The rest of the print run remained stored in crates after the outbreak of the war. The Soviet authorities were reluctant to publish such a ‘sensitive’ book.

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The announcement of Boy-Żeleński's public appearance in Otwock, 1924, photo: Polona.pl

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Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that Tadeusz Żeleński decided to return to the field in which he had originally trained: medicine. He took advantage of the possibilities offered by his brother-in-law, Dr Jan Grek, the husband of Maria Pareńska (Maryna in Stanisław Wyspiański’s Wedding), who was, in turn, the sister of Zofia Pareńska (Zosia in Wedding), Boy’s wife. Żeleński lived with his sister and brother-in-law and worked in the pediatric clinic of Prof. Dr Franciszek Groer in the department led by Prof. Dr Stanisław Progulski.

The writer’s biographer Barbara Winklowa concluded in her monograph Boy in Lviv 1939-1941:

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His return to medical practice after a twenty-five-year hiatus suggests that he wanted to find work that would be relatively peaceful and anonymous and that would not draw the attention of the authorities – work that, on the one hand, would give him the funds he needed to live on and possibly even to help his family back in Warsaw and that, on the other hand, would allow him to live through that most uncertain period without engaging in public activity.

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'Boy-Żeleński's Salon' board, Smolna 11 Street in Warsaw, photo: Wikimedia Commons

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Boy, working at first in the paediatric clinic, ultimately registered himself with each of his professional groups: as a writer, as a journalist, and as a physician. His notes from those years have not been preserved, so we must rely upon the memory and testimonies of others. Michał Borwicz, in his article Engineers of Souls, described two founding meetings in Lviv of new creative associations:

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‘Journalists – eighty percent of whom were anti-Communist and who were accustomed to a better level of treatment – would leap to their feet in unison every few minutes to give ‘thunderous applause’ each time Stalin’s name was mentioned.

Zeszyty Historyczne, No. 3/1963

Everyone sensed the eyes of informers watching them, though they did not know how and where they were hiding. Borwicz looked around the auditorium and saw a crowd of “cadaver-pale faces and wildly applauding hands”. The meeting of writers, by contrast, took place “free of threats and more in a tone suggestive of seduction”.

I mention these two initial meetings, because they sum up the tendencies that thereafter guided literary life: underlying everything was the terror and the shadow of the omnipresent NKVD; in outward practice, there was this tone of seduction and feigned delight, but on the condition that any knowledge or social curiosity be constrained by a blind obedience to instructions’, he concluded.

We all got it wrong

Thumbnail — 'Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński' by Witkacy, photo: Wikimedia Commons

The forced flirtation of the Soviet regime with the Polish cultural community in Lviv should not be seen as an enthusiastically undertaken co-operation. Of course, among our artists in Soviet Russia there were some individuals who accepted the hammer-and-sickle system, but this did not at all guarantee them freedom of activity or even personal security, a fact of which they became aware too late and often painfully so. One should also not believe contemporary press articles, for it has long been known that the signatures appended to various petitions and manifestos were often placed there by the authorities without the knowledge of the supposed signatories and, even if the signatures were genuine, they were placed there not out of free will, but rather out of fear for the signers’ welfare or for that of their loved ones.

As Boy’s nephew Władysław Żeleński recalled in his text Boy’s Decision in Lviv, Prof. Stanisław Kot, following a dramatic crossing of the Prut River, arrived from Lviv at one of the meetings organised in Bucharest in October 1939 by Jerzy Giedroyć. He related that methods were used under Russian occupation that involved taking people of various professions or categories and forcing them to attend assemblies at which they would have to vote for resolutions the full text of which they would only see on the following day when they would be published in Czerwony Sztandar (The Red Banner).

And so, on 19^th November 1939, at one of many such assemblies, a declaration was passed entitled ‘Polish writers welcome the unification of Ukraine’. Janusz Kowalewski, a participant in that meeting, described Boy’s reaction:

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I am signing this only because in this resolution they promise freedom of speech and of study and a struggle against racial and national discrimination, but not because I agree with their methods. I agree to the aims, but not to the methods. As long as those matters don’t change, I will not consent to any cooperation, political or literary. At most, I would accept the chairmanship of the Romance languages department.

Kultura, No. 15/1949

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Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński, photo: Benedykt Jerzy Dorys / Polona.pl

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Following the arrest of a group of leftist writers, Boy, shaken, wanted to withdraw his signature. But how? The total political and censorial control of the press effectively prevented anyone from doing so.

Among those arrested were, among others, Władysław Broniewski, Aleksander Wat, Tadeusz Peiper, Anatol Stern, Juliusz Balicki and Wojciech Skuza. Michał Borwicz recalled:

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On 23 January 1940, the painter D. [Władysław Daszewski] invited a number of leftist writers to a restaurant and kept insisting that they accept the invitation. In the restaurant, at a separate table, there ‘happened to be’ sitting a high-ranking NKVD officer accompanied by a local actress. At a certain moment, the officer launched a provocatively insulting comment at the Polish writers. When Broniewski responded, the guy jumped up, ran over to the Polish table and yanked off the tablecloth, scattering everything onto the floor. The smashing of the china and crashing of the silver gave the signal. Into the room, as if summoned by a gong, came a pack of NKVD men. Not in order to break up a fight (one hadn’t started yet!), but rather to provoke one! With the skill of professional gangsters, they attacked the writers. Punched in the jaw, Aleksander Wat passed out. Others began to defend themselves! Police vans were already waiting outside.

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Banquet given in honour of Boy after an official dinner party in Sorbonne, 1927, photo: audiovis.nac.gov.pl (NAC)

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That same night, non-Communist writers were also arrested: the short story writer and secretary of the Writers’ Union (disbanded by the occupiers), Teodor Parnicki, the comedy writer Wacław Grubiński (probably for his earlier work ‘Lenin’), and the translator and former secretary of Robotnik (The Worker), Halina Pilichowska.

The exact simultaneity of the two arrests proved that this was no coincidence and that a list of those to be arrested had been prepared in advance. The pro-Communist writers were deliberately invited to the restaurant and the ‘drunken brawl’ was to provide a pretext for their arrest – not for their political views or their ‘revolutionary’ writings etc., but for ‘disorderly conduct’. The way the affair played out demonstrated that the police hadn’t gone to the trouble of staging a more credible scene.

Wanda Ładniewska-Blankenheim cites a conversation between Boy and Feliks Kon’s daughter, Helena Usijewicz, who, upon arriving from Moscow, noted that in Lviv there aren’t any revolutionary poets. To which Boy replied: ‘Well, you arrested Broniewski’. Her response: ‘Then he can be released’. ‘But when he’s released, he’s certainly not going to write the same things as before!’, said Boy. ‘Why not?’ came the laconic and rhetorical reply.

‘We all got it wrong. They deceived us. The truth is that in this system no human being can live who wishes to express even the very slightest of critical views. This is the most terrible enslavement of thought that history has ever seen’, Tadeusz Żeleński observed with regret.

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Tadeusz Żeleński signing his books in the headquarters of 'Wiadomości Literackie' weekly newspaper in Warsaw, 1932, photo: audiovis.nac.gov.pl (NAC)

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His biographer Barbara Winklowa insisted that, even using contemporary press reports, we can find many instances of assemblies, meetings and demonstrations which Boy did not even attend. Moreover, all the whispers about Żeleński’s allegedly voluntary accession to communism of the Kremlin variety are absolutely groundless and spread by people unfamiliar with the effectiveness of Soviet propaganda. Borwicz explained:

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Right after the war, a number of articles were written in Poland about his ‘attraction’ to Communism. There is nothing more doubtful. Whilst taking part in the active literary life of Lviv, Boy strove to eschew political statements. If, despite this, on one occasion or another, he also spoke at a non-literary event, it must be remembered that (if only due to the popularity of his name and the – somewhat forced – honours he received) it was harder for him than for others to refuse such invitations.

Is that the reputation I want to leave my son?

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The judges of the Polish Literary Awards, from the left: Tadeusz Żeleński, Andrzej Strug, professor Józef Ujejski, Wincenty Rzymowski, Władysław Zawistowski, 1935, photo: audiovis.nac.gov.pl (NAC)

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The newly established writers’ union was joined ‘in the name of the brotherhood of nations’ by Poles, Ukrainians and Jews. The acceptance of each candidate was determined by a review of their CV, which was exposed to the harsh criticism of all those assembled. One evening, when the candidacy of Boy-Żeleński was up for discussion, the meeting was chaired by the Ukrainian writer Aleksander Hawryluk.

Michał Borwicz recalls:

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Hawryluk held in his hand a biographical sketch of the author of The Gilders along with a bibliography of dozens of his works and hundreds of his translations of French literature. At the moment when he was to have invited the ‘candidate’ to rise, he stood up himself and said: “In the presence of a writer who has written more than many people have ever read, it is not he, but I, who should stand.” The audience spontaneously reacted with loud applause. For Boy? Probably. But also for Hawryluk: for he, in one very simple sentence, was able at least for a moment to restore the proper hierarchy of things.

At Jan Kazimierz University (soon after renamed the Lviv Ivan Franko State University), Tadeusz Żeleński took charge of the Department of Romance Languages. The Soviet authorities, in allowing him to hold that university position, sought to give the impression that they could cooperate with a progressive individual, although he was not a Communist. Boy, for his part, felt that the position should be retained in Polish hands. So he gave his lectures – in French! – about French literature, but filled with allusions to social issues, freedom and liberty. He began with a series of lectures about Marcel Proust.

Some people held against him that he agreed to become a university French literature professor under the Soviet regime, especially as he had turned down an analogous offer before the war from the university in Poznań. In fact, the two situations were diametrically opposed. He turned down the offer earlier because he didn’t want to interrupt his literary activities; in Lviv, he took the position so that he would not have to poison his pen by writing coerced texts in support of the reigning propaganda.

In retreating to the literary back benches (like his hero Montaigne?), he expressed the wise scepticism of the writer. Borwicz confirms this:

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It’s true that, even in private conversation, it was hard to persuade Boy to express his own opinion about current events. I remember, though, how he once told me sort of evasively with a very melancholy smile: ‘I’m afraid that under this new system my Proust readers will disappear’.

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Miss Polonia contest judges, 1929, among others: the sculpturer Edward Wittig (sitting on the left), the painter Tadeusz Pruszkowski (the first one sitting on the right), the painter Karol Frycz (sitting in the middle), the writer Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński (the second one standing on the left), the writer Zdzisław Kleszczyński (the first one sitting on the right), photo: audiovis.nac.gov.pl (NAC)

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Entering into collaboration with Czerwony Sztandar (the Red Banner, the only Lviv newspaper in the Polish language) and Nowe Widnokręgi (New Horizons, published in Moscow, also in Polish), Boy was probably guided by similar motives as those that led him to accept the professorial post. On the pages of those periodicals, Boy consistently popularised the great writers of Polish and French literature and their works.

After the outbreak of the Nazi German-Soviet war, Lviv was occupied by the Nazi Germans starting 30^th June 1941. On the night of 3^rd/4^th July of that year, Boy was arrested by the Nazis, along with Maria and Jan Grek and a group of Lviv professors. Towards morning on 4^th July, they were all executed on the Wzgórze Wuleckie hills.

Tadeusz Żeleński did not take advantage of suggestions that he evacuate along with the Bolsheviks deeper into the USSR as did some of the members of the writers’ union. He said to Wanda Ładniewska-Blankenheim who asked him if he’d go with them: ‘Should I leave such a legacy to my son?’. He also rejected her suggestions that he should leave the flat he had been living in and go into hiding.

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Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński, 1927, photo: audiovis.nac.gov.pl (NAC)

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Janusz Kowalewski considered this to be a conscious protest on Boy’s part, choosing in effect to sentence himself to death ‘at the hands of the Nazis. In this way, Hitlerism and Stalinism complemented each other in destroying freedom in Europe’.

According to Barbara Winklowa, ‘The terror of the Stalinist dictatorship differs from the Hitlerist dictatorship only in its more “scientific” sophistication’.

The black legend about a red boy

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A group of writers: Tadeusz Żeleński, Jadwiga Migowa, Stanisław Mróz, Tadeusz Żuk-Skarszewski, unknown occasion, the beginning of 1930s, photo: audiovis.nac.gov.pl (NAC)

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In connection with the situation that Tadeusz Żeleński was confronted with in Lviv once the Red Army had arrived, the question arises as to what his attitude was towards the USSR prior to World War II. In the opinion of those who knew him at the time, most say that he was apolitical or even politically naïve. When word of Boy’s death reached the West, Zygmunt Nowakowski addressed the question as follows in an obituary:

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He remained in Lviv amidst the roar of Soviet tanks and of the loud, terribly melancholy songs of the Soviet soldiers. Later […] various rumours arose of his alleged collaboration with the Bolsheviks. Some people beat their chests, swearing that he even signed some kind of cooperation agreement. That he sold out to the Communists, body and soul. This was said by people who live here amidst prosperity and complete security – people who have never experienced the rule of the Bolsheviks.

Wiadomości Polskie, No. 23/1942

Nowakowski added that Boy stayed in Poland both in the autumn of 1939 and in the summer of 1941. ‘Were the foolish tales of his collaboration with the Red occupiers true, he could either have utilised means of locomotion or any of several other modes of evacuation’. A Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński that actively cooperated with the communist regime would have been yet another victory for them to show off - and on an international scale no less - a situation that we can see did not occur.

Marian Hemar in his text The Threshold and the Fortress wrote:

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Boy was not a ‘leftist’ writer; he wasn’t ‘political’ at all. Saying that Boy was ‘red’, rumours about his supposed collaboration with the Bolsheviks in Lviv, that’s worse than unfounded slander: it’s nonsense.

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Tadeusz Żeleński during public reading series in Paris, 1927, photo: audiovis.nac.gov.pl (NAC)

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Editor-in-Chief Mieczysław Grydzewski added in Silva Rerum – a regular column in his paper Wiadomości (News):

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It suffices to read Boy’s reviews for Tretyakov’s play ‘Roar, China’ which was staged in Warsaw to realise that Boy despised any falsehood, any moral, social, political or literary hypocrisy, regardless of its origins, belief system, nationality or colour.

Wiadomości Polskie, No. 19/1968

In his monograph Boy-Żeleńśki, Prof. Henryk Markiewicz added:

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He despised the Nazi regime, but he also had no illusions about the Communist system: he unerringly understood the Soviet arts as testimony to the terror and falsehood that reigned therein.

An eyewitness to Boy’s time in Lviv, Prof. Wiktor Turek of Toronto, wrote in turn:

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Boy never hid his revulsion for the reality that the Soviet army and NKVD had brought to Lviv. He was horrified by the crudeness, slovenliness and falsity with which the new social and political order was introduced by the occupier. Not only was he not attracted to Communism; on the contrary, it shattered his faith in the capability of the human race to achieve progress. In Lviv, he felt lonely and abandoned; he dreamt of escaping from the Soviet occupation, but he wasn’t thinking at all of fleeing to the West – he was just planning to return to his family in Warsaw. He spoke of his family constantly, but he responded with silence to my mentions of the possibility of escaping through Hungary to France.

Zeszyty Historyczne, No. 4/1963

One can go on and on further citing testimonies of people who knew Boy-Żeleński well. Revelations about the supposed fraternisation of the author of Słówka with the Bolsheviks in Lviv – or elsewhere for that matter – generally come from people who never had any real contact with him – we won’t go into them. Barbara Winklowa did that in her monographs Boy in Lviv 1939-1941 and On the Vistula and the Seine in which she debunked with great precision the sensations published in various publications (some even in supposedly scholarly publications!) by those who maintained the dark legends about the writer.

Unfortunately, very few authentic source materials about Boy have survived to this day. We don’t have recordings of the radio programs in which Żeleński took part (he had a childlike voice, with a falsetto – Aleksander Wat said in My Century speaking with Czesław Miłosz – ‘I can’t imitate his voice, Witkacy did a great imitation – we’d be rolling on the floor with laughter’) nor any film material of him. His partly lost body of work was brought back to life by the next generation: two lost volumes of his translation of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu by Proust were ‘reconstructed’ by Maciej Żurowski, Magdalena Tulli and Julian Rogoziński.

Originally written in Polish, Dec 2019, translated by Yale Reisner, Jul 2021

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