Adam Zagajewski: The Wry Metaphysician

Hudson Review, The, Spring 2005 by Lewis, Tess

Identity, whether national or personal, is a complex, fluid affair, and for Zagajewski works of art are every bit as essential to self-understanding and definition as history and public life. "To think-and speakseriously, one must acknowledge that the structure of the world has a hierarchic nature. A hierarchy of values, people, events, and obligations is something unwavering and specific, just as in works of art and thought . . . Meanwhile one of the greatest pleasures flowing from intimacy with works of art is the constant, joyous affirmation of the belief that hierarchies exist." In the final essay, "Flamenco," he describes one moment of epiphany, when, seeking refuge from the chaos of New York, he slips in to the Frick Collection and is mesmerized by Vermeer's Girl Interrupted at Her Music. The cacophony outside is calmed. Drawn into the work's harmony, Zagajewski feels that Vermeer's painting has "simplified the cosmos, but differently: it diminished but did not dissect it." The vision lasts no more than a moment, but for Zagajewski, such stillness and clarity are essential to understanding oneself and the world. It is interesting to note that the president of the court in the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal often returned to the Vermeers in The Hague's Maritshuis museum for respite from the accounts of atrocities he heard day after day.

Two Cities is a more eclectic mix of themes and styles. It opens with a memoir of Zagajewski's coming of age under the Communist regime in the small town of Gliwice and his growing awareness of the discrepancy between official reality, mundane reality, and the life of the imagination. In the title piece he recalls that the adults of his childhood "were very tired and apparently only pretended that they still believed in something," going to mass out of habit rather than belief. But also, these men and women who had survived unimaginable horrors by "accident or miracle . . . or by paying a terrible price," seemed to have retreated into a voluntary amnesia. The "entire secret reality of memory -the reality of interrogations, searches, camps, escapes, and unbelievable coincidences-disintegrated without a trace."

In the book's second section, "From the Archives," Zagajewski recreates a bit of this suppressed reality through monologues by former Party functionaries and victims. For all their weakness, cowardice, and self-delusion, these men strike an unexpected, sympathetic chord. They tried to withstand enormous pressures with small compromises but were inexorably drawn in. Zagajewski has written that resistance was not primarily a matter of courage or heroism but rather an inborn reflex. One has it or one does not. He quotes Zbigniew Herbert's poem, "The Power of Taste."

It did not require great character at all

we had a shred of necessary courage

but fundamentally it was a matter of taste

He does not include other lines from the poem, typical of Herbert in their wry undermining of any definitive declaration.

Who knows if we had been better and more attractively tempted