A Warsaw diary.

So many profound writers have emerged out of the darkness and oppression of Eastern Europe in the last two decades, and by comparison so much of our writing seems so frivolous, trivial, eccentric, neurotic, and self-indulgent, that melancholy meditation arise. Do widsom, centrality, and great art come only through suffering, individual or collective? Must a person or a culture be deprived of a good such as liberty in order to be able to appreciate it? In the case of liberty, how can our culture foster the appreciation and responsible use of it, rather than the abuse and destruction of it? More than a decade ago, Jacques Barzun wrote that in Western culture today "the antinomian passion" (i.e., libertinism) "is the deepest drive of the age."

By contrast, the "deepest drive of the age" in Eastern Europe is often for liberty and dignity, as the Polish experience shows, exemplified by this fine diary by the distinguished Polish novelist kazimierz Brandys, who went into exile shortly after completing it. Brandys joined the Communist Party at the end of World War II in revulsion against the homicidal immorality of Fascism, but finally left the Party in the mid-1960s, thoroughly disillusioned by what he calls its cmoral nihilism." Brandy's pensees do not have the isolated, heroic, existential, almost pentecostal brilliance and beauty of Andrei Sinyavsky's A Voice from the Chorus (1976); Poland is grey, not black, and offers some margin of liberty that persists even, one suspects, after the imposition of martial law in December of 1981. The world of Sinyavsky was the world of the Gulag; the world of Brandys was the world of censorship and harrassment.

But what writers such as these have in common--and what one finds so very moving while traveling in Eastern Europe and talking with its dissenters--is their consciousness of, hope for, and loyalty to the dual legacy of Western civilization: the canon of classic literature, from Plato and Vergil to T. S. Eliot and solzhenitsyn, and the Judaeo-Christian tradition. These two elements mix with, reinforce, and balance each other in a continual and permanent dialogue; and this leaven of civilization lives in these Eatern Europeans and in their books.

thus Brandy's, who is not in any formal sense a believer, nevertheless writes frequently, profoundly, and urgently about religion. Speaking of two East German pastors who publicly immolated themselves in protest against government oppression, of a similar act committed in Prague in 1969 by the Czech Jan palach, and of the hunger strikers of the Workers' Defense Committee (KOR) in a Warsaw church in 1977, Brandys argues that this is "the real of religious experience . . . whose essence in the subordination of the changing time of events to the eternal time of values"; he goes on to say that no more "important question has ever been addressed to man" than the question of whether there is "any value that endures beyond events and is independent of their historical time." Another ex-Communist Polish intellectual now in exile, the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, makes the same point when he writes that the "inspiration that pervades all forms of worship" is "a desire to escape the misery of contingency, to force the door to a kingdom which resists the voracity of time." Both men thus echo the remark of Harnach that "Religion is the power to escape from the power and service of the transitory"; a statement that in turn reminds us of Augustine and Plato. This is the living tissue, the apostolic succession, of Western civilization.

Yet Brandys is not a philosopher, but a novelist and literary observer, and his diary is filled also with commentary on the political, economic, and social life of Poland from 1978 to 1981, the period during which Solidarity emerged and which, he rightly says, "will remain inscribed in European history as a memorable struggle fought for a society's soul and its rights." Whatever happens, he tells a group of students, "no one can take that spiritual possession away from us."

The Pope's return to Poland in June 1979, which this reviewer too witnessed, was for the non-Catholic Brandys a vindication of Western civilization, an affirmation that the nation had "protected and preserved its own truth," that it was not only in communion with the deepest springs of the Christian and classical traditions, but that it had now produced one of their most eloquent spokesmen and personifications. However worried Brandys may be about "the mental and ethical erosion in people" under Communism, the Pope's trip, his life, this character, seem to Brandys to vindicate the depths of the moral tradition of the West and especially of Christian Polan, whose catastrophic history has a moral "beauty" unexcelled: "Probably no other country in the history of Eurpe has committed so few blameworthy acts against the world "was a zone of law and of life" betwen "Germany's schizophrenic power and the deranged void that is Russia." This is not chauvinism, but the nation understood as "suffering servant" and exampler of "mankind's noble ideas--Christianity, humanism, democracy, freedom, the human person, and faith." Though these virtues slay me, yet will I love them, says Polish history, in Brandys's view. "Nec temere, nec timide" (neither rashly nor fearfully), said a solidarity banner I saw in Poland; and brandys, marveling, describes demonstrations by "workers with crucifixes." Here the two streams, the classical and the Christian, join to form the river of life itself.

Brandys ends his diary on a somber note--as how could be not-describing his own exile, the advent of Jaruzelski, and the imposition of martial law. It is a valuable document about a state in whcih, as Zbigniew Brzezinski put it, "politics have been corrupted from the outside but society has nevertheless succeeded in protecting its fundamental values." The res publica is alive, in spite of the state; and however long and brutal the tyrant's shadow, the light behind and beyond it, which delineates, identifies, and subordinates that shawdow, is Christian humanist civilization, writ large and charismatically personified in the Slab Pope whom the poet Slowacki had foretold in 18949:

Love he dispenses as great powers today

Distribute arms:

with sacramental power--his sole array--

The world he charms.