My Century: The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual

by Aleksander Wat

Other authorsRichard Lourie (Translator), Czeslaw Milosz (Foreword)

Paperback, 2003

Status

Available

Call number

891.8

Genres

Biography & Memoir

Biography

Collection

Your library

Publication

NYRB Classics (2003), Edition: English Language Version, Paperback, 448 pages

Description

In My Century the great Polish poet Aleksander Wat provides a spellbinding account of life in Eastern Europe in the midst of the terrible twentieth century. Based on interviews with Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz, My Century describes the artistic, sexual, and political experimentation --in which Wat was a major participant-- that followed the end of World War I: an explosion of talent and ideas which, he argues, in some ways helped to open the door to the destruction that the Nazis and Bolsheviks soon visited upon the world. But Wat's book is at heart a story of spiritual struggle and conversion. He tells of his separation during World War II from his wife and young son, of his confinement in the Soviet prison system, of the night when the sound of far-off laughter brought on a vision of "the devil in history." "It was then," Wat writes, "that I began to be a believer."… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member JohnJGaynard

My Century is a memoir based on lengthy warts-and-all tape-recorded conversations between Aleksander Wat and Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish Poet, in Berkeley and Paris in 1964-1965 towards the end of Wat's life.

Wat was the founder of the communist leaning "Literary Journal" in Poland at the end of the

1920s. As Milosz says in his foreword, "there are many heroes in this book" and while talking about his own experiences Wat pays tribute to them all. Wat began life in a genteel assimilated, intellectual environment in Warsaw,the descendant of an old and distinguised Jewish family. In "My Century" he describes how many of his intellectual friends from Warsaw were ground down and destroyed by Stalinism. He tells the story of how the Polish communist party was eliminated, and why, and how he himself became an anti-communist and converted to Christianity, after a night in prison in which he was convinced he had seen the devil. The book contains some memorable, terrible descriptions of wartime prisons: Zamarstynow in Lwow, the Lubyanka in Moscow, Saratov... He also recounts his many meetings; with the "Old Communists" who had helped bring Lenin to power and who had fallen victim to the great purge in 1937; and the "Urks", the common criminals who could make life hell for the intellectuals and political prisoners. Wat never goes in for anti-Russian sentiment and in fact mentions the acts of kindness he received from ordinary Russian guards and even NKVD interrogators.

Wat, unfortunately, did not have the time to finish telling the story of his life to Milosz. The final chapter in the book is written by Wat's wife, Ola. In it she describes how Wat was befriended, and most probably saved, by an "Urk" into whose cell he was thrown when he was leading Polish (mostly exiled Polish-Jewish) resistance against the NKVD "passportization" campaign, in Kazakhstan in 1943, during which the aim was to force Poles to switch to Soviet Russian citizenship.

The last paragraph of Aleksander Wat's section of the book ends, "If it hadn't been for the kindness, the warmth that those people, those Orthodox Jews (in Kazakhstan), showed to me, a "meches", a converted Jew.... They didn't know whether I had been baptized or not. I never talked about it. But I wore a cross. Later on, when we were in revolt (against accepting Soviet passports) and were under arrest together, it was so hot that I took off my shirt. And yet I was the leader of those pious Jews in prison, me, a Jew with a cross around my neck."

In the years immediately after WWII, Wat's poetry became very influential among the younger Poles.

I place the book right up there, with Grossman's Life and Fate.

Show Less