speaks through each poem; they address the issues of the worker and the education of socialist youth, and illustrate problems that lie within the reader’s sphere of interests.
Andrzej Piotrowski: I would like to conduct an experiment, involving the comparison of two pieces of writing: an extract from Good!, the epic poem by the great poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, and extracts from a poem called Winter Scenes – Pink Apples, by the novice poet Ryszard Kapuściński.
In Mayakovsky the theme of the poem is work, work, which is a basic element of life in socialist society. In Kapuściński we are dealing with another element – rest (children on holiday).
Kapuściński does not strongly stress his political affiliation, as Mayakovsky has done . . .
The author of Winter Scenes takes the position of an observer, a commentator. And here lies a basic error.
A second error, which highlights this comparison best of all, is Kapuściński’s use of a symbol which comes, as we know, from a totally different era, which erases the simplicity of the poem, creates appearances of insincerity and avoids calling things by their proper names. I say appearances, as I have no doubt that Kapuściński is sincerely dedicated to our common cause and knows that poetry should have a truly ideological countenance.
It is hard to judge a poet on the basis of only one of his poems. Kapuściński’s future work will give us the opportunity to examine the matter again . . . Each of us keeps repeating the comment that every creative artist learns from his mistakes. We say it all the more sincerely, as Kapuściński is our friend, and we ourselves will help him to overcome his errors through criticism of his poems.
At the end, colleague Ryszard Kapuściński read out his new poem, closer, in his view, to the correct poetic traditions.
ON OBLIGATIONS
Well, my comrades and poets,
let me say a few words to you.
For us the need is vital
to outpace the tortoise in poetry too.
. . .
Let’s not mince our words,
the matter is simple and clear:
we cannot let poetry’s cause
be left to trail in the rear.
We are lagging far behind.
But after the miners let us race.
Perhaps you can easily guess
What Mayakovsky would say in our place?
. . .
Many a man will outdo me, I know,
Outshine me with his talent’s flame,
I am not swapping the song of the lyre
for labour’s whirring just for fame.
They question Markiewka,
Poręcki, Michałek, and Markow.
They’re questioned by the workers led
by the Party.5
The socialist realist verses are Kapuściński’s first conscious ideological declaration.
Up the ‘staircase’ of Mayakovsky’s stanzas, the eighteen-year-old Rysiek enters two worlds: that of literature, and the kingdom of the New Faith.
6
Lapidarium 1: The Poet
‘I was a victim of Mayakovsky,’ he said years later in a conversation with a younger colleague, the poet Jarosław Mikołajewski. ‘My attempts at the time, my “Mayakovsky period”, was disappointing for me too. I wanted to shake it off, but I no longer had the time to look for other paths to take. I started working as a journalist and moved over to prose. To reportage.’
Kapuściński never fully confronted his youthful choices, and never mentioned the circumstances of the era in which he went through his ‘Mayakovsky period’. What cause did it serve? Years later, how did he judge that time and his involvement in it as a poet writing propaganda poems?
After his adventure with ‘Mayakovsky-ism’, he parts ways with poetry for almost thirty years. He reads and collects books by Polish and foreign poets but does not return to writing poetry himself. He will not publish his collection of poems entitled Notebook until 1986; his second and last, The Laws of Nature, will come out shortly before his death. He says he does not feel like a ‘professional poet’, that what he values in poets is their attention to language itself (whereas prose writers pay the most attention to the plot, and essayists to actual thought):
Writing poetry allows you to touch the living language, explore its limits, and appreciate the value of the actual word and metaphor stripped of secondary reinforcement.
Some states and moods cannot be expressed in any other way. Only through poetry.1
Kapuściński’s poems arouse greater interest abroad than in Poland. The Italian writer Claudio Magris calls him ‘an original poet of intense and sparing expression’,2 and compares him with the greatest Polish poets of the twentieth century – Czesław Miłosz, Wisława Szymborska and Tadeusz Różewicz.
I ask another eminent Polish poet, Julia Hartwig, who was a friend of Kapuściński’s, about their conversations concerning poetry. I also ask what she thinks of her late friend’s poems. ‘He was a poet manqué,’ she replies. ‘He said that if he could have chosen who he would like to be, he would have chosen to be a poet. He read poetry and was interested in new work, and sought out opportunities to meet poets. He did his best to encourage young, unknown and underrated poets. I don’t think his poetic talent was a patch on his talent as a reporter. And I think he had a complex about it. His poems are certainly genuine, some are truly well “made”, but they don’t have what I would call a “grand scale”, they don’t move anything inside me.’
Didn’t he have a great talent for poetry?
‘Maybe he didn’t, or maybe he did, but was never able to develop it, because he spent his whole life doing something else. Writing reportage means being “in action”, “in motion”. Poetry demands a different kind of focus; it develops different qualities in a writer. As Baudelaire said, poetry requires “doing nothing”. Kapuściński was sometimes a superb poet in prose.’
Andrzej Czcibor-Piotrowski remembers how, with some sorrow and a little envy, Kapuściński once said to him: ‘You are a poet in the Polish Writers Union, but I’m just a journalist.’
7
On the Construction Site of Socialism
In the first year of history there are more than a hundred students. They sit on long benches, several of them on each one. There is not enough room, and it is terribly crowded. Post-war poverty.
Ewa Wipszycka, years later a professor of ancient history, remembers it like this: ‘From the start it was a known
