European Literary Biography

Aleksander Wat

Name: Aleksander Wat
Author: Tomas Venclova
ISBN: 9780300064063

by Tomas Venclova

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Overview

Aleksander Wat was, in many ways, the archetypal Central European intellectual of the mid-twentieth century, a man who experienced and influenced all the tumultuous political and artistic movements of his time. Yet little has been published about him, even in his native Poland. This book is the first account of Wat's turbulent life, accompanied by a thorough analysis of his extraordinary poems and prose works in their diverse periods and genres. Tomas Venclova, himself a poet of international renown, has uncovered numerous new biographical details, made the surprising discovery of an unfinished novel Wat began fifty years ago, and woven together the themes of Wat's life and work. At different times a futurist, surrealist, and Communist fellow traveler, Wat turned away from communism after his imprisonment by the Soviet secret police and became a vociferous spokesman for democracy. Venclova tells Wat's story from his Polish-Jewish upbringing in the early 1900s, his participation in the literary avant-garde in the 1920s, and his work as editor of an influential Communist journal before World War II through his emigration to the West in 1959 and his death in 1967. Venclova argues convincingly that Wat's literary achievement promoted the rejuvenation of Polish and East European letters after the Stalinist era. His broad intellectual influence on many, including Czeslaw Milosz, helped to consolidate the moral and political opposition to totalitarian ideology that has profoundly changed political realities in the late twentieth century.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Polish writer Wat was born with the century on May 1, 1900, a date and a year that seem, in retrospect, to predict his life as a fellow traveler and as a witness to the worst this century had to offer. The son of a prosperous Jewish family in Warsaw, he became infamous as a Polish futurist and then for his short tenure as the editor-in-chief of the increasingly rabid Communist periodical The Literary Monthly. That tenure would end in 1931 with the first of 14 prisons-Polish and Soviet-through which Wat would rotate over the next 15 or so years. Wat was never terribly prolific. A highly experimental prose poem, Pug Iron Stove, and a short-story collection, Lucifer Unemployed, dominate his prewar works; two books of poems and the autobiographical My Century, his postwar output. Venclova is better as a critic than as a biographer, putting Wat's work clearly in context with other Polish, Russian and Western European writers and also within Wat's own thinking on language, particularly on his preference for metonymy and disdain for metaphor. What is most unfortunate is that Venclova gives little sense of the tumult of Poland in the first half of the century, or of Wat's inner, nonliterary life. For example, one comes away confused about Wat's deeply conflicted religious identity: the son of a Jewish scholar, Wat converted to Catholicism; his last wish was to be buried in a Christian cemetery in Israel; and his suicide in 1967 was prompted, says Venclova, by the wave of East European anti-Semitism that followed the Six-Day War. Too bad, as Wat's life and times are arguably more interesting to Western readers than his work. (May)

Library Journal

With the appearance of this volume, avant-garde writer Wat (1900-67) finally receives appropriate recognition. A Polish Jew, Wat was exceptionally well read and highly inquisitive. The publication of his prose poem "Pug Iron Stove" (1919) secured his place as a leading Polish futurist. From then until his eventual suicide, Wat coped with shifting but omnipresent combinations of censorship, imprisonment, illness, and despair. Like other restless intellectuals, he embraced communism only to reject it later. Venclova (Russian and East European literature, Yale) skillfully interprets his subject's rich and at times seemingly impenetrable poetry and prose as they relate to his life and times. Wat's mature voice echoed the great tragedies and uncertainties of the 20th century. He spoke convincingly about the evils of totalitarianism but also evoked the absurdity of human existence in other, nonpolitical ways. Of considerable value for academic and large public libraries.-Mark R. Yerburgh, Fern Ridge Community Lib., Veneta, Ore.

Booknews

An intriguing biography of Polish poet and intellectual Aleksander Wat (1900-1967) whose imprisonment by the Soviet secret police turned him into a vociferous advocate of democracy. Venclova (Russian and East European literature, Yale U.) argues that Wat's literary achievements promoted the rejuvenation of Polish and East European letters after the Stalinist era. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.