1. force Demagoguery
The phrase of today's operation – "the revolution of cultural consciousness" or "the revolution of political consciousness" – is not a pervasive echo of Brzozowski at all today, is simply a phrase little than ever. That's what settles things. due to the fact that the theatre of the revolution is only our cultural awareness and nothing else – nothing must be and cannot derail the revolutionary processes of any tormenting violence. Everything that arises in the revolutionized cultural awareness of Poland is the consequence of internal, own, deeper consciences of the orders, the consequence – to emphasize one more time – only your own good will. conventional fears of the Polish intelligent against binding the cultural revolution to any changes and stimuli resulting from political change, petty and instinctive denial by the Polish intelligent culture with an ambition to influence outside a certain political zone, demagogued fear of the Polish intelligent towards a culture allegedly not only determined by political background, but even arising at the command of politics – at last, erstwhile everything exposed!
Klerkowska, intelligent, petty demagogue about force is fiction today. Everything that is now being created is simply the fruit of freedom. It is simply a standing, not by order, but by order. These commands beat from the origin of the only and free: the conscience of the creator. This was intended to show the introduction of this, rehabilitating the vitality and reality of the phrase about "cultural awareness".
2. The climate of a flourishing myth
The climate of imperial culture is not something that extends beyond us and which, as a result, may endanger to destruct and kill us. It is only something created within the psyche, something that can only make us further due to the fact that it itself is the consequence of development. Although this limitation of cultural processes to the limits of pure creative consciousness can endanger with various another dangers: precisely the temptations of clericism, the breaking of relationships with a full non-cultural reality. But since this temptation present does not lead anyone to sin, it besides shows the fictitiousness of this danger. The climate of imperial culture, in which our collective consciousness lives, develops it for Polish 19th and 20th century traditions highly original.
The 19th century created in Poland the concept of national culture as sui generis of a giant diary of the nation. This concept is implemented by both “The Children” and “Kordian” as well as “The Liberation” and “The Wind from the Sea”. With a akin concept of culture as a diary of the nation, alien interests may have, or must have, a mark of waiting for diary indiscretions, for circumstantial cultural sensations. Culture must be taken only for the intent of seeing its exotics. Polish exotics! Exotics, however, curious, fascinating, but never forces to deepen its imagination of the world, to accelerate ethical processes, in words, does not educate or strengthen man in his humanity. Self-culture, having ambitions to influence others, to transcend the political boundaries of its own nation, to radiate its own values and to bind them, to bind strangers to 1 another – in 1 word, imperial culture must be more than a diary. Reading another people's memoirs always has a subdermal taste of indecentness, impmoralism, especially of diaries of individual who suffers.
Imperial culture must replace the expressionist attitude of self-expression by the creationist attitude of the creation of cultural works as nonsubjective as possible, independent from the creation of their creators, able to go alone and without our care – to conquer the world. It draws from its own interior and its own external atmosphere of plastics, but transforming it into objective, supra-Polish, universalistic works of culture – here is the core of the transformation.
3. The story of Culture and Her Realism
Cultures truly strong, conscious of their own strength, never halt at organizing their cultural myth. The will of strong cultures is not consumed and does not destruct by producing and putting before the conscience of a human being all time are fresh imperatives. Imperatives and cultural myths – this must be remembered – are most easy created in a blackout, as the emanation of a drunken imagination. The easiest reason is due to the fact that in this blackout or drunkenness they lose the character of hard and dangerous tasks, and they intertwin and identify willingly with any perceived and unrealistic reality. In fact, in a masculine, mature look between the story and the imperative of culture and the real reality there will always be a distance. This distance, the measurement of this distance, is simply a measurement of the force of conquest. It shows cultural courage. It is subject to a hard test of cultural dynamism. due to the fact that cultural forces are not measured by a power metre or by the amount of horsepower. It measures the conscious, seen and felt as a task, the span between the imperative and story and the realistic imagination of the existing reality.
Realism of culture is equally a substance of strength and goodwill, as myth. Culture is truly strong alongside the effort to make a story for the effort of grasping, a kind of imperialist conquest by a cultural consciousness, full of, most complete reality. Only these 2 moments: story and realism, which are structurally linked to each other, give culture a man's balance, maturity and discipline. Otherwise, it is either romanticist to confuse reality with our desire and longing, or opportunism not so much countenance as to take as a norm "all things exist."
4. The request for cultural movement in Poland
The fight against “Polish fantastic” is not enough. We request a story of imperial culture. The story of a large story: a fire that ignites consciences, cleansing them of tinyness. These thoughts were created in this very hot climate, but besides purifying – a climate of imperial culture, along with its large myths-objects: the conversion of Polish snobism to Polish autonomy, Polish imports for Polish exports, Polish subjectivism and memoirism, in which the romanticist request to express its own soul is repented, to objectivity, in which the male, mature, from Tomism the increasing request to make – creation. There is simply a deep and liable request to bring about in Polish culture – and today, at least, preparation, if not a call – any large, wide, nation-wide cultural movement that would bind these 2 moments of the Polish revolution – a story of the empire and a realistic, courageous imagination of the reality surrounding us – and which would be a movement of moving along this large historical way from what truly exists to what must be. There are besides conditions for triggering specified a movement of Polish culture. These conditions make a harsh, deadly condition for the weak, but hardening, climate of the 4 years of war that we have not had in history.
But at the same time, knowing the traditions of Polish smallness, individually understood in Poland the issue of ethical responsibility, overgrowth of ambition and the deficiency of large historical pride, Polish longings for sensationality and indifference to the truths of culture as something boringly natural and apparent – knowing, seeing realistically the Polish cultural reality, it is hard to hazard the opinion that even in the climate of imperial culture and with another favorable conditions the fruits of the war revolution can truly see. In Polish conditions speaking about the ripening of anything always seems to be a paradox.
Stanisław Lomień [conspiracy reporter] Andrzej Trzebiński]
for: “Art and Nation” No. 13/1943
Andrzej Trzebiński (1922-1943) – poet, playwright, literary critic and publicist. Since 1942 he has been associated with the Confederation of the Nation. In the conspiracy he was primarily active in the organization of the literary movement, not only the creator, but besides the visionary, the theorist, the ideology of culture. From the beginning he participated in the publication of “Art and Nation” – the first underground literary almanac. He was the author of many software articles attempting to specify the tasks of literature and the place of the generation entering it during the business situation. At the turn of May and June 1943, he took over the position of editor-in-chief of “Arts and Nation” after Wacław Boyarski. He kept this letter until he was arrested on November 6, that year. Shot six days later in a street execution.
