Volume 35, Number 19 · December 8, 1988
Prophet of Lubyanka
By J.M. Cameron
My Century: The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual
by Aleksander Wat, edited and translated by Richard Lourie, with a foreword by Czeslaw Milosz
University of California Press, 407 pp., $35.00
Western readers are familiar with the intellectual and moral journey made by those who broke with the Communist party after the Thirties. The Moscow show trials, the German-Soviet pact, the Czech coup d'état, the Soviet intervention to defeat Nagy's revolution in Hungary, are leading moments in recent history and all are marked by further fallings away from the Communist parties under Soviet leadership. One may cease to be a Communist, but having been a Communist leaves ineffaceable marks on the psyche, and the intellectual view of the world is painfully dislocated. What has hitherto been a presupposition of thinking dwindles to a prejudice, one as serious as the belief that the earth is flat or that our fortunes depend upon the positions of the stars and planets at the moment of birth, and after the abandonment of communism it is as though we have been given a new world, a new history, with large features that have hitherto been unnoticed.
Review, 3439 words
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