Words Liberate the Mind: Paris-Kultura, Zeszty Literackie, Tamizdat, Cultural Pluralism, and Polish-Russian Solidarity in Central and Eastern Europe’s Political Liberation

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

By the end of the WWII, Warsaw had become, in the words of Czesław Miłosz, “the most agonizing spot in the whole of terrorized Europe” (Miłosz 1953: vii). Following the Red Army’s subsequent entrance into the ravaged city, Miłosz offered a concise summary: “Like all my compatriots, I was thus liberated from the domination of Berlin – in other words, brought under the domination of Moscow.” (Miłosz 1953: viii). As Poland and the other “ancient states of Central Europe” (Churchill 1946) were subsumed into the Soviet sphere, a striking homogeneity emerged: each had a dominant ideology, a single ruling party, secret police, a planned economy, and a monopoly on information (Applebaum 2018). Yet Poland’s long history of both foreign domination and political resistance was unique (Szczepanski 1962, Gross 1986). In 1946, a group of Polish intellectuals chose to become political émigrés. Their mission: to wield the “magic force” of the printed word, so powerful in Eastern Europe, to liberate the minds of those at home. Thus, founded in 1947 in Paris, Kultura’s role was to build bridges to Poland’s neighbors still under Soviet domination: Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Czechs, Slovaks, and Russian dissidents. Through cross-border solidarity and the promotion of independent writing, Kultura inspired other émigré periodicals such as the Paris-based Zeszty Literackie. This panel explores the influence exercised by the intellectual and artistic debates featured in these publications, especially behind the Iron Curtain. Finally, it assesses their contributions to the political changes post 1989.

Sub Unit

• History: 1945-1990

Chair

• Julie Hansen, Uppsala U (Sweden)

Papers

• Politics of Giedroyc's Kultura towards Russia (Weissberg-Cybulski, Milosz, Herling-Grudziński, Czapski) - Irena Grudzinska Gross, Polish Academy of Sciences (Poland)

• Literature as Force for Political Resistance: Cultural Pluralism and Cross-border Solidarity on the Pages of the Paris-based Polish Quarterly Zeszyty Literackie - Zakhar Ishov, Uppsala U (Sweden)

• Alternative Intellectual Genealogies of Solidarity: Edward Abramowski - Tadeusz Jerzy Koczanowicz, The New School

Discussant

• Jessie Labov, Corvinus U (Hungary)