Soul Survivor.

Another Beauty, by Adam Zagajewski (Farrar, Straus, 215 pp., $23)

I recently saw the film East-West with a friend who grew up in Communist Romania. The film is based on the actual experiences of some Russians who fled their country for France during the 1917 revolution and accepted the invitation from a supposedly more open Soviet government to return after the Allied victory in World War II. In the film, the friendly invitation turns out to be a fraud; the emigres are brutally treated and soon learn the truth of the police state they cannot now escape. Not long into the screening my friend was weeping and nudging me with whispered comments. I remember, she said, recalling her own experience under a Soviet-dominated regime. It was like that. Yes, they were like that.

I was suddenly struck by how little I had heard about life under Communism since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Why has there been only a trickle, and not a flood, of memoirs, histories, biographies, films, and documentaries comparable to what eventually followed the fall of Nazism? Jean-Francois Revel has suggested that the unwillingness to expose the full extent of the suffering endured under Communism is a signal that socialist utopianism is not yet dead-which is all the more reason to appreciate Adam Zagajewski's lovely memoir, Another Beauty.

Zagajewski, who has been called "a major poet" by Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz, is known in the West mainly through three volumes of poetry-Tremor (1985), Canvas (1991), and Mysticism for Beginners (1997)-and two collections of essays. Born in 1945 and raised in the "lesser totalitarianism" that followed the "crisis of 1956," in which a Polish workers' uprising resulted in a thaw, Zagajewski was part of the "New Wave" of writers and intellectuals who rose in opposition to Communist rule in 1968. He was politically active during the '70s, emigrated to Paris in 1982, and now teaches one semester a year at the University of Houston. Zagajewski is the first to admit that his is not one of the more dramatic stories of life under Communism. Unlike my friend's father, for example, he was never harassed, hunted, tried, and imprisoned, although he was blacklisted and involved in confrontations with the police. But in a way, what he has to tell us about the quiet desolation of the soul under socialism, about the mind in exile from "self-evident truths," is even more crucially important.

Zagajewski has endured many types of exile in his life, as he relates in one of his books of essays, Two Cities: On Exile, History, and the Imagination (1995), and in the present book as well. First there was the exile from Lvov, where he was born, and where his family had lived for generations. When the borders were altered after World War II, the region became part of the Ukraine, and the Zagajewski family was forced to move to Gliwice in order to remain in Poland. His education in Krakow he considers a minor exile in itself, a voluntary "leaving home" that brought him into a wider world, as did his later removal to the West. But most important is the internal exile-the divorce from truth and the absence of "wholeness"-that characterized life under Communism. As a result of this exile, Zagajewski asserts, he sought a home in the world of art, poetry, and the imagination.

As a member of the politically conscious New Wave movement, Zagajewski wrote political poetry (most of which, regrettably, has not been translated into English) and collaborated with Julian Kornhauser on a manifesto called The World Not Represented (1974), a polemic against the previous generation of Polish poets who had remained agnostic about Communism. Ironically, however, when Zagajewski saw in the early '80s that Communism was nearing its end, he began to feel the limitations of politically engaged art and to compose the kind of poetry the West knows him by, recording small moments of illumination, lucidity, and grace, resistant to political abstractions. As he writes in "Fire": "I used to sing/those songs and I know how great it is/to run with others; later, by myself,/with the taste of ashes in my mouth, I heard/the lie's ironic voice and the choir screaming/and when I touched my head I could feel/the arched skull of my country, its hard edge." If the new book and his later poetry show him reaching for truth, it is the mystical truth that rationalism denies, not a systematic framework of thought.

Another Beauty is not a continuous narrative, but a collection of descriptions, meditations, and speculations. Instead of large, cataclysmic events, Zagajewski presents the everyday grayness of life behind the Iron Curtain, the little humiliations incurred through physical and spiritual privation: the hills around Lvov "splattered with Soviet ugliness"; the lights burning in the censorship bureau in Krakow far into the night as the morning papers are scrutinized; the households crowded with broken appliances and worn-out goods because no one can be sure when some salvaged part might be useful; the deadening mendacity of a Marxist education and the ever-growing list of "forbidden books"-like those of Milosz. Some of Zagajewski's university teachers thrive under Communism, shamelessly currying favor with the state; others have their humanity scooped out as they carefully skirt subjects that might impinge on official "truth." But this is not a story of bleakness. There are also glimpses of the beauty and inspiration that classical music and the great poetry of the past could still provide, of the exceptional persistence of the Catholic Church, of the courage of dissident intellectuals such as Adam Michnik (who wrote the widely read Letters from Prison and Other Essays), and of ordinary people managing the business of survival in the "small pockets of life" still untouched by the sludge of totalitarianism. Such are the factors that the poet credits with his own survival of the soul-numbing rule of Communism, and not any great inspiration from the Free World. Although he did not undergo the awesome trials of a Solzhenitsyn, Zagajewski seems to support the Russian writer's conviction of the inadequacy of Western thought and culture-its rationalism, relativism, nihilism, and taste for the ironic, its deoxygenated modernist art and literature that no longer seek to satisfy the soul's hunger for the divine.

Zagajewski locates what he sees as the fatal aesthetic turn toward modernism on the night of October 4, 1892, when French poet Paul Valery suffered a spiritual crisis and by dawn had "destroyed all his previous idols" except "the idol of the intellect." He will "henceforth . . . never again submit to inspiration" but "will exalt craft" instead. With this, Zagajewski dramatically concludes, "the flame had died. The way to the 20th century now lay open." Of modernist icons Picasso, Stravinsky, and Joyce, Zagajewski offers a less reverent view, that they sacrificed vision to formal experimentation, and that "they acted as if history had run its course," as if there were no longer "a human community that was perhaps still yearning" for "wholeness."

Like Solzhenitsyn, Zagajewski also sees a general decline of character in the West. Surrounded by jogging bodies, glowing skin, and celebrity sex "in the great wealthy cities of the West," he believes the "soul is slowly dying, genuinely forgotten." Indeed, the "simplest certainties" that the poet again possesses now that Communism is a thing of the past can sometimes seem as imperiled in the West as they were in the East-the existence of the soul and of the "higher life," the importance of moral understanding and a grasp of the difference between good and evil.

Yet despite the pessimism, irony, and stylistic coldness of many of the modern writers he has read, as well as the loss of the divine in the modern world, Zagajewski finds that he is still, to borrow Wordsworth's phrase, "surprised by joy." "Goodness does exist!" he exclaims. "Not just evil, stupidity, and Satan." In the poem from which he takes his title, Zagajewski writes, "Salvation lies with others," and asserts, "We find comfort only in/another beauty, in others'/music, in the poetry of others." Zagajewski's memoir is his acknowledgement of those "others," the artists and writers and ordinary and extraordinary people who he believes saw him through. "I emerged whole from this crucible," he can gratefully say, "or nearly whole." Let us hope we hear more from these "others" who have likewise undergone this crucible and emerged with the gift of another beauty.