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Overview
In the first English translation of Still Alive, the renowned Polish essayist and theater critic Jan Kott recounts his perilous odyssey through the endless political crises of Eastern Europe in the mid-twentieth-century, illuminating not only the fate of a whole generation of intellectuals, but also his main concern: how to make sense of one's own existence"As a portrayal of turbulent times, the book is priceless, in particular because of its extraordinarily vivid depictions of the atmosphere of everyday life under Communism."-Stanislaw Baranczak, Harvard University
"An incisive and vivid testimony of a gifted and zestful survival, Still Alive offers a suspenseful story of its author's harrowingly narrow escapes in Nazi-occupied Poland, and an illuminating account of his vicissitudes under the postwar Communist regime. That this widely acclaimed memoir is now available in English is good news indeed."-Victor Erlich, professor emeritus of Russian literature, Yale University
"Written by a man with literary taste and a sense of the dramatic who knows how to tell a story without ever losing a sense of humor, taste for life, and a kind of gaiety."-Nicole Zand, Le Monde
"The entire writing resonates with life and its mysteries, some resolved, some not. . . . The rigors and victories of Kott's life somehow offer sustenance to all who question existence."-Library Journal
"A splendid evocation by an eminent theater critic and philosopher of what it meant to be alive-sometimes barely-during the tremendous upheavals in Europe caused by the Second World War and the installation of the Communist regime in Poland. . . . Kott shows an unerring sense of the telling detail that imprints a scene in the memory. A riveting book."-Kirkus Reviews
Synopsis
Still Alive recounts the perilous odyssey of a renowned man of letters through the endless political crises of Eastern Europe in the mid-twentieth-century. Jan Kott - Polish essayist and theater critic, author of the landmark work Shakespeare Our Contemporary, winner of literary awards on two continents - tells of his association with the Surrealist circles in Paris before the Second World War, his adventures as a partisan in the Polish underground, his postwar involvement in the Polish Communist Party, his disillusionment with communism, and, finally, his emigration to America. His story reveals not only the dramatic turns of an individual life but also the fate of a whole generation of Eastern European intellectuals. At once witty, suspenseful, and profound, Kott's memoir begins with a boccie game played in 1939 with Trotsky's future murderer and ends with a deeply moving description of his fifth heart attack in 1991 that illuminates the book's main concern: how to make sense of one's own existence. Kott does not pose this as a philosophic problem, but as a natural response to the extreme situations he was forced to master and survive. This is the remarkable testimony of a man whose life brought him many opportunities to face the consequences of radical choice and in whom the consciousness of those essential encounters continues to resonate. Published in Polish in 1990 and acclaimed by critics throughout Europe, the book is now available in English for the first time. Kott has added much new material to this edition, including the final chapter.
Publishers Weekly
Kott, Polish-born essayist, theater critic and Shakespearean scholar who emigrated to the U.S. in 1966, begins this autobiographical odyssey in Paris in 1939 where he played boccie with Leon Trotsky's future murderer. It ends with an account of the author's fifth heart attack in 1990 and a meditation on reconciling oneself to death. Accident, fate and the molding forces of history are leitmotifs in Kott's existential adventure. In France he befriended the Surrealists Andre Breton and Tristan Tzara, as well as their circle, yet also spent months as a seminarian in a Dominican monastery. Born in Warsaw in 1914, Kott returned to Poland in 1939, fought in the resistance against the Nazis and joined an underground Communist cell; he relates a series of hair-raising, narrow escapes from the Germans. His protracted enchantment with Stalinism, a blind faith that nearly wrecked his marriage, takes up the final phase of this sharply etched memoir. Readers' Subscription Book Club selection. (Apr.)