Newcastle/October2001

PUBLISHING IN POLAND, 1976-1989:

REFLECTIONS OF PREFERENCES AND CONSTRAINTS

John Bates

The title of this presentation is deliberately tentative. It is largely a progress report about a research project I am currently engaged upon, the title of which is ‘Censorship as a Factor in Polish Underground Publishing, 1976-1989’, and for which I have received a Carnegie Trust grant. I completed the first half of this project during a three-week trip to Poland in September. At that time, I interviewed a number of people – academics, writers (poets) and publishers – who had worked in the unofficial publishing sector from the mid-1970s. Polish samizdat or ‘the second circulation’ as it came to be known was the largest phenomenon of its kind in Central and Eastern Europe. Why this was so, is one of the questions that interest me here.

The core of the project concerned both how official publishing and specifically, censorship, continued to exert an influence upon unofficial publications, that is, continued to constrain freedom of speech even in a network intended to obviate such restrictions. The critic and poet Leszek Szaruga’s statement that ‘not giving the state authorities arguments that could be later used against us’ provided one of the main starting points for my investigations.[i] It was highly tempting to treat this statement synchronically – as applicable to the whole duration of the ‘second circulation’. Szaruga is not entirely clear on the matter, but, on balance, I now feel inclined to see this attitude as typical of the early phase of its existence up to the first Solidarity period (August 1980-December 1981), that is, diachronically. During that phase, underground publishing was merely beginning to establish itself with two principal literary journals (Recorded Work aka The Record, from January 1977, based in Warsaw, and Pulse, from 1977, originating in Łódź) and one major publisher, NOWa (Independent Publishing House), which commenced operations in late 1977. The initially small-scale nature of these operations may explain the tendency Szaruga observed of not criticising colleagues active in the underground. This tendency was corroborated recently by Tadeusz Konwicki, who claimed that his novel A Minor Apocalypse (1979) was censored by NOWa.[ii] In the 1980s, however, with the massive increase in the unofficial sector, he might have decided simply to publish the novel with another underground publisher.

This begs the larger question of the nature of the independence of the ‘second circulation’. NOWa was closely associated with the Workers’ Defence Committee, set up in September 1976 to defend the interests of workers charged in connection with the June 1976 riots in Radom and at the Ursus plant in Warsaw. While it, like Recorded Work, might be defined as WDC publications, this did not entail interference by the WDC in their operations: both remained ‘independent’ though seemed inclined to observe certain rules of decorum vis-à-vis the WKC, as Konwicki attests.

Of all the censorship systems operating in postwar socialist Central-East Europe, the Polish one may be organisationally closest to the Soviet model. Certainly in the sense that the system was dominated by a supreme central office (the Main Office for Control of the Press, Publications and Public Performances (Główny Urząd Kontroli Prasy, Publikacji i Widowisk), extant throughout nearly the whole period of Communist rule, and based on the Soviet GlavLit. The establishment of this body occurred partly as the direct result of the work of two Glavlit employees sent to Poland at the end of 1944 with the aim (as their correspondence to their superiors would have us believe) of bringing some order to the anarchy within Polish publishing. Soviet influence can also be detected in the use of terms defining particular stages of the print censorship process: ‘preliminary’ (wstępna) and ‘subsequent’ (następna) censorship, as well as in the preference for the terms ‘control’ and ‘supervision’ over ‘censorship’.

Focusing on the operations of this body (as the present paper does) should not obscure the fact that it was not the only censorship agency: publishing houses’ editorial boards, newspaper and journal editors, the Army, ministries, the Press Agency and libraries, to mention but a few, were all to varying degrees activiely involved in limiting access to information. The Main Office, as Jerzy Łojek stated in 1980, was in practice ‘ultimately only the tip of the superstructure and the final supervisor of the whole system of actual censorship which is profoundly embedded in the management structure of publishing houses, the press, television, cinematography and theatres.’[iii] His statement presents a view of the censorship office’s role as, essentially, one of the supreme instance, with persons placed lower in the hierarchy doing the bulk of the work at an earlier stage. Andrzej Urbański, speaking from personal experience, has described the GUKP’s role in the 1970s as being to “supervise the supervision.”[iv] In other words, the purpose of censorship was to verify that the regime’s ideological norms (propaganda) had been appropriated by writers and duly reproduced in their texts. As Stefan Kisielewski put it, the censorship system was designed to make readers think that authors actually thought as they wrote and to ‘accustom writers to thinking and formulating their thoughts in one particular way since writing in any other manner would be eliminated or changed by the requisite excisions.’[v] Contrary to the Soviet experience, however, this process largely failed in People’s Poland.

The present paper takes as its parameters the years 1976 to 1985. The first date relates to the rise of the underground publishing network known as the ‘second circulation’ (drugi obieg), while the latter marks the eve of Gorbachev’s glasnost’ policy, which contributed to the major liberalisation of publishing policy in People’s Poland. The selected problems which the paper discusses are limited to three issues: the effect of the second circulation upon literary publishing, the impact of the new censorship bill of July 1981, and the question of Aesopic language on either side of this date. The key questions in the works examined are political, largely connected to Poland’s relations with the USSR.

The Second Circulation

The reality of post-war literary production was that, until the rise of the ‘second circulation’, censorship was inscribed into the overwhelming majority of texts. Although individual works did circulate in manuscript like Soviet samizdat publications (for example, Janusz Szpotański’s satirical opera Cisi i gęgacze, which mocked First Secretary Gomułka and his entourage, and Jacek Kuroń and Karol Modzelewski’s renowned Open Letter to the Party in the 1960s), the first serious challenge to the Party’s monopoly on information and publishing — a systematic independent publishing operation — emerged only in the mid-1970s. Initially, this took the form of information bulletins disseminated by the Workers’ Defence Council, KOR (Komitet Obrony Robotników). Two prominent writers (Jerzy Andrzejewski and Stanisław Barańczak) had helped to found this organization, whose purpose was to collect funds for workers imprisoned and beaten after the protests against government price rises in June 1976. By early 1977, this activity had led to the publication of the first independent literary journal, Zapis (Recorded Work), which comprised, overwhelmingly, works which the censorship office had rejected. The premise of the journal was that it would exist as long as the writers concerned could not appear in print ‘above ground’. In effect, it was a means of exerting pressure upon the authorities, but strictly within the terms of the Helsinki Final Agreement to which the Polish government had signed up. In other words, those operating within the second circulation refused to consider their actions in any way illegal. The founders of Zapis demonstrated this by giving their real names and addresses within the first number. In so doing, they were, of course, laying down a challenge to colleagues who remained within the official circulation, but also, in turn, gave those colleagues a bargaining chip in their dealings with the political authorities.

The original circulation of Zapis was at first miniscule (3-4 copies of badly printed A4 for the first number), but, like the other journals which followed, it received an enormous boost with the arrival of Solidarity, which aided the printing and distribution process. At the beginning, their moral impact far outweighed their statistical significance, for they presented writers with the challenge or opportunity to publish works free of GUKP interference and thus to say exactly what they liked. In the first instance, Zapis published works which the censors had banned, but with time it began to publish texts specifically written for the new circulation. For young poets, in particular, it offered considerable advantages over state publishers. Firstly, it greatly accelerated the production schedule (6 months in the underground compared with several years in the state sector).[vi] Secondly, extrapolating from Andrzej Friszke’s estimate of an average of 2-3000 copies in the late 1970s for NOW-a (an acronym for ‘Independent Publishing Agency), the biggest underground publisher, print runs were superior to state publishers’ (500-1000).[vii]

The immediate official response was a drastic increase in the restrictions applied to rebellious writers. An infamous censorship blacklist, applied originally by the government to signatories of the protest letter against changes to the constitution in 1975, included a number of leading writers active in the underground.[viii] Over the longer term, the authorities adopted a more considered policy, creating a pseudo-consultative body, the so-called Literary and Publishing Council (Rada Literacko-Wydawnicza), at the 1978 Writers’ Union Congress in Katowice, designed to facilitate the passage of ‘difficult’ texts through the censorship process. This was not the first such consultative body established during Gierek’s rule: at the 1972 congress in Łódź, the so-called Commission for Intervention (Komisja Interwencyjna) had seen the light of day. Placed under the aegis of the Union’s Main Executive, its purportedly negotiated directly on behalf of writers with publishers and the GUKP. In this way, it was hoped that political tensions within the Union stemming from writers’ anger at the vagaries of censorship might be alleviated.

Given that the Censorship Office answered solely to the Party, the Commission seems rather to have been an additional smokescreen for the censors. Invariably, a trusted Party dignitary (first a leading critic, Andrzej Lam, then the director of PIW publishing house, Andrzej Wasilewski) chaired it, seeing their main task as one of testing the political climate for ‘controversial’ texts.[ix] Wasilewski also chaired the new Council, so the desire to be seen to be offering a fresh alternative apparently outweighed the fact that it merely duplicated the Commission’s work.[x] The authorities delayed its appearance until May 1979,[xi] and filled it with loyalist writers, which tended to forejudge its effectiveness as an independent body. And yet the list of works held up in the GUKP shortened significantly, a fact which was attributed to the Council’s and specifically Wasilewski’s ministrations.

Simultaneously, the Party attempted to separate the ‘hard core’ of oppositionists from more pliable ‘hangers on’. The basis for enabling, or rather impeding, publication ‘above ground’ thus became exclusively political. Writers who renounced underground activity might be allowed back into official circulation. Insofar as Zapis’s original mission had been to pave the route of writers back into public circulation, this policy met its demands. Writers who returned to the ‘official’ circulation, such as Marek Nowakowski, did not automatically cease to collaborate with the ‘second circulation’. Others, including Tadeusz Konwicki from the older generation, preferred to remain underground, much to the Party's chagrin.

The appearance of the second circulation, while significantly extending the boundaries of literary freedom, did not axiomatically entail a literature without constraint. Leszek Szaruga has spoken of a kind of ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ that operated amongst writers in the underground. This meant not exposing the Aesopic strategies which colleagues practised in the official circulation, and, in order to deprive the regime of ammunition, not criticizing the views or works of fellow underground writers in print.[xii] The sole legitimate targets were regime supporters. It was not until the mid 1980s that a more open and free-ranging debate emerged in the underground, which saw open divisions appearing within the facade of solidarity. This debate resulted from the publication of Jacek Trznadel’s series of interviews with contemporary writers about their participation in the socialist realist project of the early 1950s, a collection entitled Hańba domowa (Civil Disgrace). One of the interviewees, Zbigniew Herbert, who had effectively been a non-person during those years, lambasted his fellow writers for their collaboration with the Stalinist regime. This generated controversy because some of the latter were leading figures in underground publishing.

The key point here is that the debates, when they arrived, were principally ethical/political. Similarly, up until the latter half of the 1980s, literary works, in an echo of the political authorities’ own sometime stance, tended to be judged in ideo-political rather than artistic terms. The great majority of prose works published in the underground fell into the category of political literature, whether written by Polish exiles, such as Miłosz, or dissidents resident in Poland. Przemysław Czapliński has commented that one of the major strands in contemporary underground literature was ‘anti-socialist realism’.[xiii] In other words, dissidents dealt with issues of concern to the political authorities, but simply reversed the key principles — attacking the regime, instead of supporting it. The tendentiousness was therefore as transparent as it had been in the state-supported novels of the socialist realist trend in the 1950s. The deeply polarized climes of the early 1980s (following the imposition of Martial Law) reinforced this attitude and encouraged writers to view the place of publication as an ethical decision: publishing ‘above ground’ was tantamount to being morally compromised.

Although it would perhaps be an exaggeration to claim that the second circulation practised censorship, it is clear that the moral injunction of solidarity amongst underground writers did stifle open discussion. There were taboos which could not be broached. Key amongst these would be the portrayal of the Solidarity union in negative terms. In conversation Józef Łoziński has stated that, in view of the fairly unsympathetic treatment of party officials in his novel Hunting Scenes from Lower Silesia, he had originally canvassed colleagues active in the underground about the likelihood of publishing the novel there. When advised that he would have to make the Solidarity figures more positive, he decided to risk his chances with an official publisher.[xiv]

The second circulation presented a mirror image to, and thus in some ways complemented, the official network: Miłosz’s poetry could appear in official editions, while the underground published his more overtly political works, such as The Captive Mind (1953) and The Seizure of Power (1955). The work of anti-Communist writers such as Orwell, Solzhenitsyn, and Koestler could naturally only be published in clandestine form. An interesting comment on state-underground relations was made by Mirosław Mileński at a Politburo meeting of 14 April 1981, suggesting a degree of accommodation (or, perhaps, political realism) on the part of the Party leadership: ‘confiscation of poor [journalistic] pieces by the censorship office doesn’t possess any great significance, because if their authors and those behind them really care about their publication, then they’ll appear in the form of illegal publications or else be broadcast over factory radio.’[xv] The blasé attitude expressed here probably did not survive the Soviet Politburo letter of June that year, which admonished the Polish leadership for ‘surrendering’ the print media to oppositionist forces. Certainly, the Journalists Association was the first of the ‘creative unions’ to be dissolved under Martial Law.

Martial Law proved to be a highly ambiguous period with a number of famous literary works that had been rejected by the censorship eventually seeing the light of day. Key amongst these were Jerzy Andrzejewski’s novels from the 1960s: The Appeal, which was published in Paris in 1968, and Pulp, which was published abroad and in the underground prior to receiving an official edition in 1981 [See: Materials 1]. The regime’s motives were fairly transparent - to pose as liberal and also to blur the distinctions between underground and official. By the latter half of the 1980s, however, the relaxation of official strictures in publishing had undermined the underground’s appeal as the purveyor of forbidden fruit, so much so that Krawczyk, the Minister of Culture, could declare somewhat seigniorially in 1987 that the state was concerned about the underground per se only at the quality of publications it produced, for, as everyone knew, nothing of significance had appeared there for years.

The New Censorship Bill of July 1981

The new censorship bill of July (implemented 1 October) 1981 marked a major stage in the transformation of writer-state relations. Solidarity had insisted on the regulation of censorship as one of its original 21 conditions in the Gdańsk agreement of August 1980. The new legislation struck a compromise between the political authorities’ desire to maintain the old system and Solidarity’s drive for greater transparency and accountability. For example, the new law placed the GUKP under the supervision of the Council of State (instead of the cabinet) and hence allowed the Sejm to exercise some power over its operations. A large number of different kinds of publication were removed from GUKP control altogether, including: (i) speeches made in parliament; (ii) academic and educational publications; (iii) all publications of a religious character published with the agreement of the Church; (iv) internal information bulletins; and (v) books by Polish authors written prior to 1918 and reprints of works published legally in People’s Poland. The bill’s single most important innovation was the right of authors to appeal censorship excisions via the Main Office in Warsaw or the Supreme Administrative Court. Where these bodies upheld the original decision, the author enjoyed the right to have each cut clearly marked in his or her text.[xvi]

The new bill, in theory, provided for significant curbs on the arbitrariness that had characterized censorship practice hitherto. The removal of reprints of all pre-1918 Polish works and post-1945 domestic texts from the censorship process effectively meant the end of the ‘secondary censorship’ stage, whereby the desirability of republishing works from the political perspective was assessed, although this has proven difficult to verify from censorship materials in the archives. Under point (iv), Solidarity publications could obviate censorship restrictions. Prior to the imposition of Martial Law, the Solidarity weekly Tygodnik “Solidarność” managed to overturn two censorship decisions.[xvii] Finally, since the paragraph under which censors excised passages had to be indicated in the cut text, the author could at least indicate the general area (s)he had wanted to discuss. Usually, these involved some reference to Poland’s subordination to the USSR. [See: Materials]

Not all publishers, writers and editors pursued their rights with alacrity. Catholic newspapers, for instance, tended to be alone in their insistence that censorship interventions be marked, and the introduction of Martial Law encouraged the GUKP to flout this more liberal legislation. In the months leading up to the implementation of the new bill, however, heads of censorship offices across Poland prepared their employees for the changes in practice which it would entail. In truth, the bill allowed for the normalization of censorship practice, by formalizing and legitimating the GUKP’s existence in People’s Poland, and this was the line which censors took — somewhat opportunistically — in their own deliberations. The Head of the Lublin Office, M. Wereski, speaking at a meeting of censorship officials on 6 March 1981, outlined the new approach in the lead-up to the promulgation of the July 1981 censorship bill:

Censorship has not been, is not, and, I believe, is not likely to become in the near future an institution of which writers are especially fond, although we ourselves can remember all too well the assurances of cooperation for the good of the common cause that were made on various occasions up to [last] August by the same people, who, since then, have presented themselves most conspicuously as martyrs for the cause of freedom of opinion. What can we say, the more lies there were in their declarations, the greater their opportunism and desire to be in the forefront of the renewal in the new conditions. We might say that there is nothing out of the ordinary in all this, that it’s just the way things are and, as Wańkowicz wrote, ‘when the winds of history blow, the rubbish flies to the top’. [...]

I believe, comrades, that we should arm ourselves more and more in legal arguments. Not all of the provisions of the penal code are going automatically into the new bill, but I think that — for the present — we can make use of many of them. We shall provide lists of those articles which may be violated by the content of publications, but point out that these regulations do not have to provide the grounds for interventions but may serve as an argument in the discussion, an argument used as a warning against the possibility of a crime and against any act which is forbidden by law. After all, the party plenum and the prime minister demand respect for the law, in all its severity.

We also have, comrades, to use as we see fit, the decree which still remains in force. We can employ the criteria of the new bill before it comes into force, which would be an act of political goodwill on our part, in line with the spirit of the time. But if we are to be strictly correct, we have to observe the provisions of the decree, because it is still the law. May I remind you that it contains a point about misleading public opinion by providing information that is contrary to reality ? So perhaps it would be worthwhile to refer to this clause, if only for the sake of argument ?

The most important thing is that we should not work in isolation, but in alliance with the party and journalists wherever we can. We cannot allow disagreements to develop where cooperation hitherto has been good, we must make all efforts to achieve good cooperation where lately there has been none. The rightness of our decisions must depend not on legal arguments, but on ideological and political persuasion, and, in consequence, on a climate of social approval for our actions and society’s conviction that we are serving to protect the supreme values of all citizens of our country.[xviii]

In various ways, the GUKP emerged ‘from the shadows’ during the 1980s. This is indicative of what Tomasz Goban-Klas has termed ‘the legalistic orientation of Jaruzelski’s rule’.[xix] Jerzy Bafia’s brochures on censorship, Prawo o cenzurze (1983) and Prawo o wolności słowa (1988), attempted to naturalize censorship as a phenomenon of any political system. The gist of his argument suggested the relatively liberal nature of the post-war regime, insofar as its legislation had generated no protests on the scale of the interwar regime’s then draconian 1938 Press Law, also pointing out that preventive censorship, albeit of a limited kind, existed in the USA. Unsurprisingly (for a pro-regime exposition of the issue of censorship), Bafia focused on the crimes that might be committed through abusing the right to freedom of speech, concluding: ‘the fundamental aim of this work is to show the order-giving and socially constructive role of the censorship law and thus its subordinate role to the idea of legality in this particular sphere of public life also.’ Meanwhile, Roman Bratny in his second volume of self-serving memoirs, Pamiętnik moich książek (1983), gave an account of his skirmishes with the GUKP, which demonstrated it to be an inalienable part of the post-war cultural landscape. In this connection, to conclude, the mention of censorship in the second Kubikowski extract should be mentioned - the use of the term ‘censorship’ in conjunction with People’s Poland was no longer taboo.

Aesopic Language

The degree of collaboration between writers and censors that publishing, especially newspaper production, necessitated, has led some Polish scholars to view the censor as the ‘co-author’ of literary and other texts.[xx] While the censor’s role was an ambiguous one, and highly secretive, the term ‘co-author’ has ramifications which render its use problematic, not least the fact that the censors preferred to take, as Aleksander Pawlicki notes, a relatively passive role.[xxi] Generally, it may be more accurate to call the censor a ‘co-editor’.

The concretization of fictional texts, especially when censors thought they contained allusions to taboo events or topics, occupied a central place in the censor’s reading and reviewing strategies.[xxii] This strategy lay at the heart of censorship practice, particularly since Polish literature had a long-established tradition of Aesopic language dating back to at least the nineteenth century. The decoding of such language had taxed the censors from all three partitions during the nineteenth and early twentieth century.[xxiii] After the ‘Thaw’, when Aesopic language returned in all its force, the responsibility fell upon Polish censors to define the boundaries of its acceptability. By the late 1970s, an index to the ‘Monthly Instructional Information’ alerted censors to some of these literary masking strategies. On the basis of censored materials contained in previous monthly summaries, it gave advice under the following headings: ‘The correct reading of texts whose political or social meaning is intentionally concealed by authors with the aid of allegory or other linguistic and stylistic devices (May 1976, p. 11; April 1977, p. 8,’ and ‘Reading texts. The interpretation of texts and works ostensibly not provoking reservations (May 1976, p. 11).’[xxiv]

The question of the general reader’s reception of the author’s concealed message dominated the censor’s attention. Another dimension of the strategy of ‘concretizing’ allusions lay in the capacity of authors to ‘update’ in a politically or ideologically unacceptable way, figures and events from the past. Censors always viewed this ‘updating’ (uwspółcześnienie) or ‘making topical’ (zaktualizowanie) with great suspicion, and strove to compartmentalize history, denying the relevance of the past to the present. In 1972, GUKP employees received instructions to remove all analogies to the present from articles devoted to the three-hundredth anniversary of the death of a Pauline monk, Augustyn Kordecki. Specifically, they were to resist ‘any attempt to present Kordecki as a current symbol of the struggle against threats to the [Catholic] faith. Journalism which places the figure of Kordecki solely in the historical realities of the seventeenth century is permissible.’[xxv] Censors sometimes failed to eliminate such ‘updating’ of past figures. The Main Office deemed the appearance of Wojciech Karpiński’s article ‘Lord Acton on the Ancients’ in the Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny (7 August 1977), to be one such oversight. It alleged that under the guise of summarizing Lord Acton’s views on liberty and democracy in ancient times, Karpiński had expressed his views on the situation in contemporary Poland. Most aggravatingly for the Main Office, its employees in Warsaw had removed the same article, albeit it under a different title, from the July number of the literary monthly Twórczość (Creative Work).

Articles which drew attention to the Poles’ practice of always reading ‘between the lines’ naturally also fell foul of censorship. Censors took exception to an essay by the renowned historian Janusz Tazbir entitled ‘The Historical Novel as a Contemporary Source’, which was due to be published in the collection The Literary Work as a Historical Source by Czytelnik in 1978. Tazbir had taken the unconscionable step of emphasizing potential Aesopic elements in recently published historical monographs, stressing historical parallels between the Polish situation in the nineteenth century and the People’s Republic: ‘by deciphering in this way individual items, the author has made topical the substantial achievement of this genre, especially in Poland and the USSR.’[xxvi] In effect, Tazbir offended against censorship decorum: his personal ‘secondary’ (post-publication) reading suggested that the censors had been wrong to pass these works for publication in the first place.

Conversely, censors would identify as Aesopic works not intended as such by their authors. One example is an article by Włodzimierz Bolecki, rejected by censors under two different titles, from different journals, in successive months in 1978 — ‘Art is the Vanguard of the Public Conscience’ aka ‘Plato and the Avantgarde’.[xxvii] Bolecki’s ‘mistake’ was to write about a classical subject (the place of writers in Plato’s Republic) and make reference to current Polish writers in the same article. From the last days of communist censorship comes another example: the removal of the epithet ‘Jewish’ from the title of the poem, ‘Jewish Writers Leave Germany 1927’, in Grzegorz Musiał’s collection Berliner Tagebuch (1989). The censor seemed to be concerned with the possibility of an allusion to one of the darker episodes in post-war Polish history, the emigration of most of the remaining Polish Jews in 1967-68 in the aftermath of the Party’s anti-Jewish campaign.

These examples illustrate the limitations that can be imposed upon the status of the author as the source of authority about his own text. What they also bear out is the relentless Aesopic reading of texts in the contemporary Polish context. Bolesław Sulikowski has made exactly this point in his analysis of Polish responses in the 1980s to Miloš Forman’s film of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The key idea for the Polish audience, he discerns, is that of the ‘institution as totalitarian state’, which completely overshadows the psychiatric elements as well as the psychological motivation of those who uphold the repressive regime.[xxviii]

It seems to me that, even before the collapse of the Communist system in Poland, Aesopic language as a vital artistic strategy was under serious threat. Understandably from the second circulation’s freedom from adopting masking strategies, on the one hand. On the other, from the consequences of the new legislation, when authors insisted upon their right to have censorship interventions marked in the censored text. The clauses under which works were censored promoted a kind of Aesopic reading in which the general critical trend took precedence over the specific case (See: Materials 3): the reference to article 2, clause 2 suggested that the author had written something against the regime; while the presence of clause 3 indicated anti-Soviet content. In a sense this marks the continuity between censorship under Russian occupation in the nineteenth century and in its Communist variant.[xxix] Under the Tsarist yoke, Polish editors would meet Russian censors in cafes to discuss formulations which would enable the works to pass muster. Plied with drink and softened with bribes, the Russians would licence such hackneyed similes as ‘the conflagration which left behind much ash’ (about the abortive uprising of 1863).

Materials:

1. Jerzy Andrzejewski, Pulp (Miazga), Poland: NOW-a, 1979, London: Polonia, 1980; Warsaw: PIW, 1982 [1981]

(a) ‘Solzhenitsyn’ cut down to ‘S-yn’ (1981, 22)

(b) Cut: ‘The barren but viscous monotony of lies, falsity and omission which day by day, with obsessive persistence, pour forth from all the mass media.’ (1980, 27)

(c) Cut: ‘Andrzej M., whom I met after lunch, told me a little story devised apparently by Leszek Kołakowski three years ago. Many children’s toys, made out of wood or pieces of metal, have the words ‘Do It Yourself’ on the box. So in one of these boxes, Kołakowski says, there were two planks, a hammer, nails and a thirty-three year old Jew.’ (1980, 28)

(d) Cut: ‘... Shop sales, as everyone knows, take place twice a year round the world. Selling humanist values at knockdown prices goes on all year long under totalitarianism.’ (1980, 33)

(e) Raszewski talking about the state of Polish culture (described as ‘whole’ [1981] instead of ‘shitty’ [1980])

‘We gave them a kick up the arse in March [1968], but a few of them have really hard arses, far too hard to build socialism.’ (1980, 58)

Reduced to: ‘Some of them are hard-necked, far too hard-necked for our history.’ (1981, 78)

2. Censor’s interventions marked by square brackets.

Zbigniew Kubikowski’s ‘The Glass Wall’ (‘Szklany mur’), published in Odra, 10/1983-6/1984.

(a) Part 8 (May 1984) opening paragraph:

‘[...] the renewal begun in 1971 demonstrated enormous although, as would become clear ten years later, not unlimited elasticity in the style of wielding power and organising public life in Poland. Above all it appeared that styles might be totally opposed. [...] The next change of style, implemented at the start of the eighth decade, significantly enlarged the boundaries of freedom [of expression] leaving only the system of wielding power as a restricted area.’ (54)

(b) ‘In this situation the censorship memorandum or restrictions imposed by the authorities meant exclusion from universal participation and had practical significance only for the delinquent affected.’ (55)

3. Censor’s interventions marked by article and clause of new censorship bill.

Teresa Torańska’s interview with Stefan Staszewski in first official edition of Oni:

(a) ‘Society, too, we don’t have to spell it out. Society accepted the authorities, with distrust, disbelief, after a period of struggle and laying down its arms, but it did accept them and its most conscious part, [which] even realised that Poland would not have full sovereignty, that it was passing from one occupation to another - did not believe that the two occupations - Nazi and Soviet - were equivalent. (342)

(b) ‘Everything is concealed, because the Party is afraid of its own history.’ (374)

Convention: ‘[— — —] Ustawa z dn. 31.07.1981 o kontroli publikacji i widowisk art. 2 pkt 2 i 3 (Dz. U. nr 20, poz. 99, zm. Dz. U. nr 44 z 1983 r. poz. 204)’

Art. 2 In making use of freedom of speech and print in publications and public performances [authors] may not:

2) incite to overthrow, abuse, deride or denigrate the constitutional system of People’s Poland,

3) attack the constitutional basis of the foreign policy of People’s Poland or its alliances.

Jerzy Bafia, Prawo o cenzurze (Warsaw: KiW, 1983, 226)

Overhead:

1. Interviews: (a) Leszek Szaruga (aka Aleksander Wirpsza; Zapis, Puls, Krytyka)

(b) Jarosław Markiewicz (dir. Przedświt, 1982-)

(c) Bronisław Maj [Cracow]

(d) Wlodzimierz Bolecki

(e) Grzegorz Musiał (New Privacy) [Bydgoszcz]

2. Issues arising: (a) terminological problems: ‘independent’

(b) censorship in ‘drugi obieg’ (or editorial policy?) logistical problems (paper, access to printing presses)

(c) reasons for getting involved: ‘wypaleni’, profit motive, ‘solidarity’.

(d) interdependence of official and unofficial circulations (Miłosz; Andrzejewski – Miazga)

Aesopic language (transposition of official values into unofficial sphere – ‘o doniosłej problematyce’)

(e) taboos (Mackiewicz; Genet)

different conceptions of liberty