Volume 32, Number 11 · June 27, 1985
Poland: The Uses of Adversity
By Timothy Garton Ash
'I think it very encouraging that it's here that Marx's dream is being fulfilled,' Kurt Vonnegut told the leading underground weekly Tygodnik Mazowsze on his recent visit to Poland. He meant Marx's 'dream of the withering, or rather ignored, state.' Vonnegut's nice conceit captures the extraordinary quality of Polish intellectual life today. For here is a communist state in which the best writers are published by underground publishers, the best journalists write for underground papers, the best teachers work out of school; in which banned theater companies just carry on performing, in monasteries, while sacked professors carry on lecturing as 'private guests' at their own seminars; in which churches are also schools, concert halls, and art galleries. An entire world of learning and culture exists quite independent of the state that claims to control it—a real world of consciousness floating high and free, like Mohammed's coffin, above the false world of being.
Feature, 4975 words
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