Through the Poet's Eye: The Travels of Zagajewski, Herbert, and Brodsky [Hardcover]

Bozena Shallcross (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 25, 2002

An exploration of the sensory experience of travel and the corresponding revelatory perception of the visual arts in the essays of three major East European poets.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Bozena Shallcross is associate professor in the department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and at the Polish Studies Center at Indiana University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From Chapter 1:
Travel Schemes of a Flâneur

During the turbulent 80s, when the initially triumphant Solidarity labor union was crushed, and with it the hope of a nation struggling under the yoke of communism, it would seem natural for Polish writers to respond directly to the plight of their country. Many did, and did so forthrightly, while others, the poet Adam Zagajewski among them, were torn between two contradictory impulses: unanimity with a society in which he had roots and an unfettered solitude elsewhere. Zagajewski made his choice: his solitary position was a condition necessary for creation, and in 1981 he went to Paris.

Yet the desire not to participate must have been difficult for the poet, particularly in light of a Polish poetry burdened with the Romantic myth of artist as noble flag-bearer. The dilemma of political activism (the Deed) versus creativity (the Word) was shared by most Polish Romantics, and was acutely felt by Adam Mickiewicz whose choices frequently indicated a total incompatibility of these two options.i Similarly, Zagajewski- once a member of the New Wave movement,ii became reticent in the early 80's, although he wrote essays, most notably Solidarity, Solitude. He also recognized his own desire to escape responsibilities imposed by a society's misfortune in order to enter what he found to be much more personally rewarding: the epiphanic world of art. The critic Adam Kirsch characterizes this domain as his "zone of solitude" and points to Solidarity, Solitude as the turning point in his development.iii In this respect, it is hard not to agree with Kirsch's evaluation of this volume, which almost in its entirety, pays tribute to history as it pertains to a certain collective thinking, with one notable exception of "Flamenco," an essay which takes as its premise a solitary union with art.

This is not to suggest that Zagajewski in "Flamenco" advocates any misanthropic estrangement from the demands of society and history, but simply that he searches for a different path for individual expression. Precisely because of this essay's crucial role in Zagajewski's growth as a thinker, Kirsch's further argument that a separation of "things not conditioned by history" according to what genre the poet writes in ultimately falls short.iv To be sure, Zagajewski neither consigns his defiance of history solely to verse, nor does he limit his essays thematically to deliberations on politics and society. Instead, what can be stated about his stratagem, which deliberately mixes genres and topics, is far more complex.v In his essays, the opposition between history and the self on the one hand, and revelation and the quotidian on the other, are not treated from the point of view of aesthetic escapism. His method-particularly evident in his most recent book-length essay, entitled Other Beauty-is represented through a deft interweaving of such disparate elements as memoir, art criticism, autobiographical sketch, and aphorisms with patches of poetic diary stitched in. A new sense of mission and solitude that it evokes I shall discuss later in this chapter.

Other Beauty insistently attests the author's complete withdrawal from partaking in any political activity, which for him clearly belongs to the concerns of the past. Zagajewski does not repudiate whatever efforts he brought to bear in using his art to engage in political causes, but he redirects its tenets towards a different challenge. In fact, his expression of a new sense of belonging to the community of man is one of the new directions and responsibilities he uses in his search for a totality (calosc). Although the volume extensively explores the private and the familiar territory of the narrator's past, it also speaks of his inner struggle to reach out to the world of beauty created by others. This act, balancing the writer's spiritual pursuit, evokes transcendence on a small intimate scale and comes nearer to the ineffable transcendence of God.vi As a milestone in his development, Zagajewski's most recent volume of essays harks back to "Flamenco," the first recording of an illumination in Zagajewski's prose writing, an illumination achieved in large part as a result of his observing Vermeer's "other" pictorial beauty. Even the title of the volume-W cudzym pieknievii-speaks of its author's dialogic project and his absorption of the world's cultural heritage. Czeslaw Milosz was the first to notice Zagajewski's natural capacity to resist cultural deprivation,viii which was an almost inevitable fate for generations of Poles who grew up under the communist regime and were shaped by its uniform system of education and propaganda. Years later, in his brief note on Other Beauty, Milosz observes that the poet's development directed him to embrace a new type of involvement:

As a poet and as an essayist, Zagajewski has the feeling of partaking in something huge, that is, in the constantly growing region of the executed works, in which the emotions, thoughts, and experience of mankind are preserved. His self-conscious passivity, that is, an action of absorption (emphasis mine, BS) gradually broadens from Gliwice and Cracow to the landscapes, architecture, and painting of Italy and France.ix

In the act of contemplation, the poet accepts as a primary value the enriching presence of works of art which he encountered in various parts of the world. Zagajewski's receptiveness in embracing other cultures-inasmuch as that culture through the hands and eyes of an artist is represented by works of art-has rather distinct ramifications for his earlier work, his poem "W cudzym pieknie" ("Other Beauty") providing a clear example.x

What separates Zagajewski from many other writers who follow the same path of solitary reflection is his attachment to the visual aspects of his passages. In order to emphasize the pensive nature of his strolls, I would claim-by redefining Montaigne's distinction between the passage and the essence-that Zagajewski treats his passages as the means of reaching the essence of reality. This insight, as we shall see in the chapter to come, is sometimes associated with his epiphanic rapture.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 200 pages
• Publisher: Northwestern University Press; 1 edition (June 25, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0810118378
• ISBN-13: 978-0810118379
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,207,073 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.