The Generation of ‘68/New Wave consisted of students who experienced the repression taken against students around the country who protested the closure of Mickiewicz’s Forefathers’ Eve (1968), as well as the brutal suppression of workers on the Baltic Coast two years later. These events caused political concerns, however muted, to play a key role in their literary works. Although some of the leading figures positioned themselves as ‘confrontationists’ (kontestatorzy) in the vein of nineteenth-century Polish Romantic resistance, and the Cracow group Teraz (Now), which included Adam Zagajewski and Julian Kornhauser, advocated a strategy of ‘direct speech/straight talking’, circumlocutions (and indeed Aesopic language) often proved necessary in view of stringent State censorship. Generally, however, theirs was a democratic and committed standpoint, and the voice in their poetry is often that of the szary człowiek (man in the street), cautious, anxiety-ridden, but also filled with disquiet with respect to the regime.

The focus of attention in their poetry was the official language of propaganda (Newspeak/nowomowa), particularly as employed in newspapers. Consequently, Stanisław Barańczak (author of the earliest manifesto, The Mistrustful and the Presumptuous, 1971) and Ryszard Krynicki, based in Poznań in the West of Poland, adopted a strategy of ‘linguism/linguistic poetry’, designed to satirise Newspeak and expose its inadequacies, thereby sensitivising audiences to the numbing effect of official discourse. This strategy was ultimately to prove misguided since the state maintained its power not merely through Newspeak but with the aid of an oppressive apparatus, whose operations were immune to merely linguistic criticism. Similarly, ‘straight talking’ as promoted in the movement’s (near posthumous) manifesto, The Unrepresented World, published by Kornhauser and Zagajewski in 1974, whilst intended to overcome the ‘duplicity and division’ in contemporary culture could only have detrimental effects for literature - if taken literally. The severity of their attack on leading writers such as Zbigniew Herbert and their apparent fondness for ‘realism’ reminded some of Socialist Realist agit-prop.

The authorities regarded the New Wave poets with considerable trepidation and generally frustrated their attempts to launch their own literary journal, thus severely restricting their publishing. Consequently, when the protest against changes to the Constitution in 1975 and then the workers’ protests against price rises in June 1976 occurred, and led subsequently to the establishment of the underground publishing network, the so-called ‘Second Circulation’, New Wave representatives unsurprisingly played a leading role. Barańczak (along with Andrzejewski) was one of the co-founders of KOR in September 1976. Barańczak later contributed the programmatic article for the first underground literary magazine, Zapis (The Record/Recorded Work) in early 1977. His words in this article were in many ways a summation of the New Wave’s position: ‘[it is our] conviction that it is not only an author’s right but his duty to register, or record, to perpetuate in words everything that, in his eyes, conveys the truth – either in the cognitive sense, or from the point of view of psychology and art. This truth – however mistaken or ill-conceived it may be – he has no right to conceal or stifle; he must not tone it down or repress it by self-censorship, or veil it by hints and allusions, or allow it to be curtailed and mutilated. He must record it faithfully, if only in order that it may be confronted with other truths, criticised and enriched in accordance with his own conscience and discretion. Unless this obligation is fully realised, literature has no meaning.’