Volume 31, Number 7 · April 26, 1984
The Surprise of Solidarity
By Neal Ascherson
A Warsaw Diary, 1978–1981
by Kazimierz Brandys, translated by Richard Lourie
Random House, 261 pp., $17.95
The First Polka
by Horst Bienek, translated by Ralph R. Read
Fjord Press (San Francisco), 326 pp., $7.95 (paper)
In 1978, when Polish intellectuals grew tired of playing games with the censors and launched an independent, 'unofficial' literature, there appeared the first number of the journal Zapis. Among the mass of samizdat—the smudgy bulletins of opposition groups, the academic monographs cobbled into book shape which looked like volumes of amateur pornography, the typed manuscripts read so many times that the paper had been fingered down to a texture like cotton—there was plenty of good thinking and good writing. But Zapis stood out from the rest—it was a literary periodical, a place for the discussion of cultural and political history, a forum for every sort of argument about the nation's future. And, perhaps, a confessional.
Review, 3143 words
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