My Century

By Aleksander Wat
Translated from the Polish by Richard Lourie
Foreword by Czeslaw Milosz

In My Century the great Polish poet Aleksander Wat provides a spellbinding account of life in Eastern Europe in the midst of the terrible twentieth century. Based on interviews with Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz, My Century describes the artistic, sexual, and political experimentation—in which Wat was a major participant—that followed the end of World War I: an explosion of talent and ideas which, he argues, in some ways helped to open the door to the destruction that the Nazis and Bolsheviks soon visited upon the world. But Wat's book is at heart a story of spiritual struggle and conversion. He tells of his separation during World War II from his wife and young son, of his confinement in the Soviet prison system, of the night when the sound of far-off laughter brought on a vision of "the devil in history." "It was then," Wat writes, "that I began to be a believer."

Reviews

Such a fascinating book to read, this spoken memoir by Aleksander Wat! ....Aleksander Wat was a poet, and My Century is a work of art....[It] may be read as a spiritual biography of a generation of European intellectuals....I would put it on a shelf in the vicinity of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag, so compelling is its testimony and analysis.
— Jan T. Gross, New York Times Book Review

I couldn't put it down . . . one reads it with an excitement only a great novel can elicit. . . . No one has written so well on prison life, to my knowledge, since Dostoevsky.
— Irving Howe

Illuminating....What Solzhenitsyn did for the camps, Wat has done for the prisons.
— J.M. Cameron, New York Review of Books

As a document of historical witness, My Century is an extraordinary work. But more than that, it is a masterpiece of autobiography. Wat's voice is irresistible, and he tells his story with such rigor and intelligence, such overpowering human warmth, that one is permanently altered by his words.... It would be impossible for me to overstate my admiration for this book. It is a magnificent achievement, one of the most moving and powerful books I have ever read.
— Paul Auster

Also see:

Letters: Summer 1926 By Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetayeva and Rainer Maria Rilke Translated by Margaret Wettlin, Walter Arndt, Jamey Gambrell Preface by Susan Sontag Appendix and epilogue by Jamey Gambrell Letters: Summer 1926 takes the reader into the hearts and minds of three of the twentieth-century's greatest poets at a moment of maximum emotional and creative pressure.

Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist By Alexander Berkman Introduction by John William Ward No other book discusses so frankly the criminal ways of the closed prison society, its homosexuality or extortion. No other political prisoner even remotely approaches Berkman's sympathy for what most of the revolutionaries refer to contemptuously as common criminals.

On the Yard By Malcolm Braly Introduction by Jonathan Lethem A major American novel, and arguably the finest work of literature ever to emerge from a US prison, On the Yard is a book of penetrating psychological realism.

Letters from Russia By Astolphe de Custine Introduction by Anka Muhlstein The Marquis de Custine's record of his trip to Russia in 1839 is a brilliantly perceptive, even prophetic, account of one of the world's most fascinating and troubled countries.

Sign up for our free email newsletters for updates and special offers on NYRB books.