Legend about the Editor

Legends have always been woven around great editors, so it is difficult, despite the testimonies (or thanks to them), to get a reliable picture. After all, the editors themselves contributed to this (and legends were woven around Siegfried Unzeld, for example, the great editor of Hamburg's "Zurkamp", which he not only did not dispel, but skillfully encouraged), and Ježi Gjedrojć was no different in this respect. Namely, he was followed by a rumor that he was a tyrant and that he didn't listen to anyone. "The prevailing opinion about me that circulates in cultural circles", writes Gjedrojć in his autobiography, "is that I am a tyrant and that the editorial Kulture it never existed, that is, it consisted exclusively of one person, that is me. I am open to suggestions and criticisms of that position and it often happens that after discussion I manage to change the opinion of those who claim such a thing" (p. 219). And let the reader understand this place at his own discretion.

In Maison-Lafitte, I meet the historian, professor Slavomir Novinovski, who probably knows more about Gjedrojć and the Institute than anyone else. As a young man, he met the Editor exactly at the place where we are having a conversation. I ask him how it looked. "At first, it was scary," he says. "I entered his office, he greeted me, pointed to a chair and offered me a cigarette (mostly he didn't stop smoking), and when I refused because I don't smoke, I instantly saw that I fell even lower in his eyes. 'Tell me why you're here?', he asked briefly and fell silent, and I couldn't remember anything at that moment. Later, with a lot of effort, I managed to coax something from him that remotely resembled a smile. I realized then that I succeeded. Our conversations were interesting and meaningful. He knew how to listen."

...

A TROUBLE LIFE AND A MONK'S SOUL

Born in Minsk in 1906, Ježi Gjedrojć, until his arrival in Maison-Lafite, lived a life that cannot be called anything other than stormy, although, as he says, he dreamed of some kind of monastery life where everyone would leave him alone and where he could read (p. 147). After arriving in Paris, he really lived an ascetic, but not exactly a monastic life (he was in constant search for money), and since he barely managed to manage four hours of sleep a day, he worked and read an awful lot. He almost didn't write at all, except for letters that number in the thousands (he always made copies, he didn't need to), which are kept in the Institute's archives. He exhausted himself in correspondence with his authors, he was persistent, he got angry with them and argued with them (which is what the job of an editor entails), and most of all he persuaded them to write. Some of the greatest, like Witold Gombrović and Česlav Miloš, would almost certainly not have become what they are without Gjedrojć. However, he was not on good and cordial terms with either of them: he was too conservative to accept the promiscuous Gombrović and too experienced to trust the converted communist Miloš, while Miloš's theory about a ketman who takes on the appearance of an enemy in order to infiltrate his ranks and undermine him from the inside - seemed to him a mere excuse. However, he never rejected either Gombrović's or Miloš's text. He was too good an editor not to realize, in spite of himself, what kind of writers we were talking about. He didn't get along with Jan Kota either - even when he was awkward, ungrateful and, in fact, unbearable - but he helped him without hesitation.

...

Gjedrojć left Poland in 1939, never to return to the country he loved more than anything. (Why did he never return to Poland, I ask Professor Novinowski. One of the reasons, probably, the professor answers, is that he wanted to remain at a distance until the end so that he could see better.) The road takes him to Bucharest, then to Africa with the army of General Anders, with whom he will stay until the end of the war, mainly on administrative tasks. In Africa, he meets Jozef Čapski, with whom he will be friends until the painter's death. (Jozef Czapski, by the way, is one of the greatest Polish intellectuals of the 20th century. If Ježi Gjedrojć's life was exciting, Czapski could be said to be a witness of the epoch who, not always to his delight, participated in events, or sat in the front rows as an observer, until he was picked up from the stage and made an actor of the action. As he spoke at least six languages, in the internal jargon of Maison-Lafitte, he was called the Minister of Foreign Affairs jobs Kulture. Precisely thanks to his travels around the world, the lectures he gave at famous universities - he invested all the money he earned in Culture - and connections and personal ability, Culture was, in the beginning, surviving mainly from his ventures. The fact that his room from Maison-Lafitte - i.e. furniture, things, books - was transferred to Poland, to Krakow after Čapski's death shows how much respect he enjoyed.) In the same place, Gjedrojć also meets the married couple Zofia Herz and Zygmunt Herz, and Gustav Herling Gruđinski. The five of them, together with Gjedrojć's younger brother Henrik, will form the core of the Literary Institute and, with the exception of Gruđinski, will live together in Maison-Lafitte. (May I be allowed to say that during shared meals, the kind hosts gave me the place where the Editor always sat, and I felt important and privileged.) After a short stay in Italy (the Poles took part in some of the bloodiest skirmishes on Italian soil, in the Battle of Monte Cassino, for example) and England, the Polish team will find refuge in Paris. "Despite all the apparent rationality", writes Gjedrojć, "arriving in Paris was somewhat of a mad venture. We didn't know how we would survive. (...) We were penniless" (p. 142).

Things, however, are slowly starting to improve, the magazine is becoming more and more popular, and the Editor and his friends are proving to be a pretty capable world (business-wise). However, their main activity is publishing magazines and books in Polish.

CULTURE IS POLITICS (AND VICE VERSA)

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For that small group of Poles, it was never in doubt that culture is by definition political, and that politics, again by definition, is cultural. That's why it is Culture published texts in the widest possible range, from political analyzes of the decisions of the West German parliament, Solzhenitsyn's texts, Koestler's books, geopolitical thoughts and reflections on totalitarian regimes, through historiographical essays, testimonies from communist Poland, reflections on religion (which, according to Professor Slavomir Novinovski, played a discreet role in Gjedrojć's life, but there is every chance that he was reserved towards the Church even when it proved to be a good ally in the fight against communism), considerations of complex, by no means easy Polish-Ukrainian relations, to reflections on culture and art... And always, without exception, these were reflections on freedom, but not reflections on metaphysical and abstract freedom in the manner of one Sartre, for example: We are all in a cage, Sartre would advise Camus, and the fact that we are in a golden cage still does not cancel the fact that we are in a cage, my dear Camus. Such considerations were not close to Gjedrojć and his daring team. They were interested in political freedom, that freedom in which one can speak and write without danger of repression, in which one can freely assemble and move, and inner freedom is a matter of individuals. Or, to stay with Sartre, the cage in the Soviet Union and the "cage" in France are not exactly the same, and for prudent Poles Sartre's dilemmas were not particularly challenging. Hence Poland as an obsession, Poland under the paw of Comrade Koba, then Khrushchev, then Brezhnev and other lovely comrades from the friendly Soviet Union. It's no wonder that, after all, Aleksandar Kwasniewski, the president of Poland who defeated Lech Walesa in the 1995 elections, went to Maison-Lafitte, Gjedrojća, immediately after taking office.

This, of course, does not mean that Culture was closed to metaphysical considerations, but the criterion was always and above all the quality of the text. It is so interesting that in Culture several communists also published texts, but nationalists - never. It is precisely this moment that is important for Serbia, which has been floundering in the slush of nationalism for more than 35 years, and has lost both its foothold and its orientation. Nationalism is an autoimmune disease, a self-destructive mechanism that, like hatred, eats away at itself. Gjedrojć knew this and loved Poland with all his heart, but also with his mind (which, well, is missing in the Serbian case). At no moment in his long life did he think that ethnic origin, as such, in itself, could define him as a man. And this is clearly visible both in the magazine and in the books published by the Institute. It was not taken for granted what it means to be Polish, because to be Polish - to summarize some of the reflections of the great Editor - meant again and again to become To a Pole, never be who you are, but to become what you are. This meant cultivating oneself again and again (hence culture). When looking at the texts published in Culture, even according to the principle of a random sample, we find an almost unshakable editorial decision that nothing is taken for granted, but, especially what is taken for granted, must be thought anew. Relations with Germany, for example. Or Ukraine (which, sooner or later, will free itself from the Soviet grip). Reflections on history and what the past means in general. What is sovereignty and how to achieve it in a specific situation? Which model of freedom to choose and is freedom chosen at all? Quite simply, there were no untouchable topics.

Gjedrojć, for example, spoke only Polish, he didn't even master French well. It didn't work out for him, says Anna Berhardt, an energetic and witty lady who, with her colleagues, takes care of the heritage of the Polish Literary Institute in Maison-Lafite. However, the fact that he only spoke Polish did not make him, per se, a Pole, nor did it prevent him from being a European in the purest sense of the word. Hence the concrete consideration of borders, political organization after the fall of communism, the creation of possible alliances and, of course, culture as the very core of what makes politics politics.

A MUSEUM WITHOUT A MUSEUM ATMOSPHERE

Today, the upper part of the house in Maison-Lafitte has been turned into a museum, while the ground floor, under the baton of Anna Bernhard, is a normal life. This is a very unusual museum: the exhibits are there, the audio guide is there, no one speaks too loudly, the house is old and wonderful and there is something museum-like about it, but there is no established museum atmosphere. There is a lot of work, and the fate of this institution is the constant search for money. The contemporary archive, the house itself, the two pavilions where researchers and guests stay, like the signatories of this reportage, require maintenance. That is why the house-museum itself is very lively. Whenever I enter the house, I bump into someone I don't know. There is always a visitor who, like a sleepwalker with headphones on his ears - an hour of extremely selected and interesting audio material - passes through the premises, students and colleagues pass by, but this does not prevent Ana, Olga and Eva (permanent staff) from organizing everything that is needed, including preparing food together. In that house full of good spirits, everything seems quite normal, as if Ježi Gjedrojć and his team went on vacation (which, by the way, they hardly allowed themselves during their lifetime), leaving the care of everything they created to other, no less dedicated people.