Adam Zagajewski: The Wry Metaphysician

Hudson Review, The, Spring 2005 by Lewis, Tess

He comes home, locks

himself in, hiding from a servant. How smoothly

the lock turns. It is probably

in on the conspiracy. He's crying.

That the all-powerful Will might have co-opted even inanimate objects in a conspiracy against human happiness is a perfect touch. Yet Zagajewski's humor does not limit his sense of tenderness or his eye for sensuous detail. The poem notes, for example, how Schopenhauer's "solitude, hard-woven, / thin as Dutch linen, trembles."

Zagajewski's poetry is elegant, accomplished, and among the best writing coming out of Europe today. Yet it should not overshadow his prose. His essays offer insight into a refined poetic sensibility and a rigorous moral intelligence at work. A poet's passion for language is evident on his every page. Among the meditations and aperçus of "The New Little Larousse" in Two Cities, Zagajewski mounts a defense of adjectives. Students and fledgling writers are constantly warned away from adjectives and told to give their writing strength and sinew with judiciously chosen nouns and verbs. But from Zagajewski's longer view, this question of style is rather more complex.

Nouns and verbs are enough for soldiers and leaders of totalitarian countries. For the adjective is the indispensable guarantor of the individuality of people and things. I see a pile of melons at a fruit stand. For an opponent of adjectives, this matter presents no difficulty. "Melons are piled on the fruit stand." Meanwhile, one melon is as sallow as Talleyrand's complexion when he addressed the Congress of Vienna; another is green, unripe, full of youthful arrogance; yet another has sunken cheeks, and is lost in a deep, mournful silence, as if it could not bear to part with the fields of Provence.

This stylistic question is not simply a matter of aesthetics or subtlety and precision in language. Zagajewski points out that "Ethics is another area that wouldn't survive a day without adjectives. Good, evil, cunning, generous, vengeful, passionate, noble-these are words gleaming like razor-sharp guillotines." Language may indeed serve as an indispensable guarantor of individuality. Yet it also lends itself to more sinister ends. Of course it takes a good ear and a sure touch to wield adjectives as justly as Zagajewski.

Zagajewski's nonfiction writing has followed the same arc as his poetry, gradually evolving from direct engagement with social and political affairs to a concentration on the private, inner life of the individual. His focus on the private does not exclude a concern with political matters, rather it is a crucial question of perspective: the world examined through the prism of individual experience rather than an examination of the world as a force exerted upon the individual. The essays in Solidarity, Solitude, written before Poland's first postwar free elections in 1989, are his most explicitly political. They were written, of course, at a time when avoiding political involvement-Solidarity, in short-was unthinkable for a man of Zagajewski's convictions. However, he immediately felt constrained by the active civic life. It left little room for solitude, "for literature, art, meditation, for immobility," and intensely private experience. Zagajewski does not set solitude against solidarity. It is matter of balance, not exclusion. Although he describes the debilitations of life under Soviet rule and the excitement of resistance, his main concern in this book is what a future for Poland with a free political life would look like. Would the "splendid spiritual tension" that grew out of Polish antitotalitarianism survive without an enemy against which it could react? One of antitotalitarianism's dangers is that it offers its proponents the seductions of a Great Alibi. By concentrating all evil in the oppressors, it absolves the victims from examining their own failings. And this habit of limited vision will be the victims' greatest handicap when they are finally able to define and shape their identity proactively rather than in reaction to subjugation.