How to Endure Authoritarianism

A few weeks ago, I achieved at last a long-imagined pilgrimage to the home of the great Polish poet Wisława Szymborska, in Kraków. I have written often about Szymborska, who spent most of her life in Kraków and died there, at the age of eighty-eight, in 2src12. Her poetry first fell on me, as it did on so many others, like an anvil made of feathers—striking but soft—after she won the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1996. There was no literary shrine I wanted to go to more, to doff my spiritual hat and drink in the surroundings of the poet, who is beloved by readers for her unique mix of humor, more even than wit, beautifully amalgamated with sudden turns of pensive reflection. What’s more, I got to go there in the company of her former amanuensis, Michał Rusinek, and Michał Choiński, a poet and scholar. Both men teach at the ancient and hallowed Jagiellonian University (where Szymborska herself studied) and Choiński is also the author, as improbable as it sounds, of a long, original, ambitious history of The New Yorker, recently published in Polish for a Polish audience.

Szymborska’s last home, where she lived for fourteen years, was a three-room apartment in a residential neighborhood about twenty minutes from the center of town. It seemed to me extremely modest, not to say student-like, though my Polish friends’ slightly censorious frowns when I volunteered this thought made me realize that, in the Kraków of the Communist era, it would have actually been considered rather grand. But certainly the room where it happened, where the poetry got written, was as modest as any college dorm room, with a small single bed next to the small desk where she wrote. (She lived there alone. She was married briefly, after the Second World War, then had a long love affair with the short-story writer Kornel Filipowicz; their collected letters, which should be available in English, have been a best-seller in Poland and were published in Spain and Italy, in translation.)

In that little writing room, we spoke of the great poet—of her chain-smoking and of her love of silly puns, odd town names, and Kentucky Fried Chicken, which, when it came to Kraków, she delighted in, to the distress of her more fastidious friends. (There is, however, a stroganoff-with-dumplings dish named for Szymborska at her favorite restaurant in old Kraków. That is delicious.) Though the talk was of the details of a life, the shadow that hung above our conversation, as one had hung above that life, was intently political.

Szymborska was not a political poet in any conventional sense, but she was one, and a great one, inasmuch as she struggled to articulate, with charm and with purpose, the way that people seek power and pleasure in their social lives—to increase their utilities, as the drier political philosophers say—while engaging with family, friends, lovers, and fellow-citizens in the daily struggle for persistence. Not all engagé poetry need be from the battle front: in “The Catcher in the Rye,” Holden’s little brother, Allie, who copies poetry onto his baseball mitt, is asked who was the better war poet, Rupert Brooke, who actually fought in one, or Emily Dickinson, who did not? The right answer, from Salinger’s point of view, was, obviously, Emily.