Mellowed Marxism

THE MODERN POLISH MIND (440 pp.) --Edited by Maria Kuncewicz--Little, Brown ($8.50).

Poland's Communist Boss Wladyslaw Gomulka managed to bring the 1956 "October Revolution" to a halt somewhere between Communism and democracy. But the intellectual revolution that began at the same time was not so easily braked. The intellectuals have continued to rebel at Communism's strictures, and this collection of essays and short stories is a gauge of how far they have carried their new independence. The best of these writings are quite profound probings of the human soul; the weakest are a far cry from political hack work.

Foxes & Blocks. The contributions, whether Catholic, existentialist or Communist, amount to one long indictment of tyranny. There are searing reminiscences of the Nazi occupation. The Communists are criticized less directly than the Nazis --by inference and allegory--but just as forcefully. In The Gold Fox, by Catholic Novelist Jerzy Andrzejewski, a small boy imagines a gold-colored fox in his bedroom that makes him happier than the dreary, jaded human beings around him.

But family and friends conspire to cure him of his vision, and he ends up, like any good little boy, building collective villages out of blocks and playing "Unmask the Kulak." In a thinly disguised satire of Communist Poland, Novelist Stanislaw Len describes the mythical planet of Pinta. Its soil is so arid that the government embarks on a series of irrigation projects.

The land is soon sufficiently irrigated, but the bureaucrats refuse to give up their jobs, and continue irrigating until the entire planet is covered with a few feet of water. "The element which should have been mastered," writes Len, "simply mastered them. Yet no one was prepared to admit it, and the next inevitable step was to declare that everything was as it should be." People struggle through the streets with their heads barely above water; anyone who complains or even gurgles too loudly is thrown into prison.

In Favor of Jesting. Even in Poland, Marxist writers tolerate other opinions and even incorporate them into their own works. A young philosophy professor, Leszek Kolakowski, who was once a dedicated Stalinist, now talks more like a democrat. The leader of the 1956 intellectuals' revolt, he was singled out for attack by Gomulka for carrying "revisionism" too far, though he is still allowed to teach at the University of Warsaw. In his essay, The Priest and the Jester, Kolakowski compares a philosophy of absolutes to the priest in history, a philosophy of skepticism to the jester. Between them there is eternal struggle. "Both violate the mind," writes Kolakowski, "the priest by strangling it with catechism; the jester by harassing it with mockery." Kolakowski favors the jester, who "mistrusts the stabilized world, denounces as doubtful what appears as unshakable." Another philosopher, Adam Schaff, who recently visited the U.S., remains more loyal to Marxism, but recognizes that individual principle sometimes conflicts with group discipline. Marxism, he writes, should tolerate such clashes because of its "methodological skepticism."

Taught by cruel experience to be cautious, these modern Polish writers are not so rash as their romantic predecessors and much more realistic. They combine an unflinching look at the grimness of life with a subdued hope for something better, an attitude that has spilled over into the other arts, including the best products (Ashes and Diamonds, Joan of the Angels?) of Poland's revitalized motion picture industry. "The Yalta agreement between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union," writes Editor Kuncewicz, summing up, "had the unexpected result of transforming Poland into a laboratory where the most incompatible elements of human destiny are melting into new forms of coexistence."

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