…YOU CAN LOSE YOUR HEART HERE
Every one cares about the capital city, I think – obviously, in a different way. I know extreme reactions to Warsaw – they oscillate between love and hate. For people from provinces, meaning places from outside the City (as Londoners would say) it seems to be a mythical city, where one can succeed in everything – at least at the beginning. After some time they start hating it: for their disappointments, high prizes, noise, crowd, elbowing… People originally from Warsaw – whatever accounts for this identification – are determined by their birthplace, from where they rarely move forever: they come back here even from the other end of the world called upon by its mermaid’s song.
The editorial team of “Więź” magazine in its April issue (4/2006) undertook a risky task of asking a question whether one can like Warsaw. A post-war song gives a positive answer (Antoni Libera mentions it in his article, whose title repeats the central theme of the issue, “numerous evidence shows that it used to be an interesting city before the war, rather attractive and with a distinctive character” and that is why it was called “Paris of the North”), however, nowadays the unambiguous appraisal is being questioned. It is a result of an individual, rather than collective, experience of the capital city dwellers. What do the magazine guests: writers, historians, architects, anthropologists and a theologian, invited to share their thoughts about Warsaw have in common apart from their place of abode? They are aware that one cannot free oneself from the legacy of the city and they find it necessary to take a stand on its alleged boorishness, decline of moral standards, eclecticism and fragmentary nature – an exceptionally trendy epithet that supposedly reflects the nature of Warsaw in the best way.
Antoni Libera notices that it is two disappointments associated with Warsaw that influence the selfless aversion of the majority of our society to the capital city: the magnificent city of the times of the reign of Stanislaus II with its neoclassic architecture, bitterly experienced by September Campaign and Warsaw Uprising defeat – disappeared. It was replaced by ideas for rebuilding Warsaw “in a Soviet-Moscovian way”, complemented by concepts from the time of Gomułka and Gierek. Who will be able to see today the earlier beauty in “the extremely chaotic, hideous and jerry-built city centre and dozens of socialistic quarters built from the so called prefabricated concrete”? The second disappointment is of public character and concerns “the Warsaw people”. The distinctive bourgeois-plebeian world of the capital city described by Tuwim in Kwiaty polskie (Polish Flowers) was replaced – irrevocably according to Libera – by the dregs of society from the country, “nondescript people deprived of roots and tradition. And it is them – them and their offspring brought up in the estates – who decide about the nature of Warsaw people.”
The terrifying vision of the author of Madame is decidedly moderated by Jerzy Pilch’s conciliatory tone (Zalety warszawskich wad – Virtues of Warsaw Vices). He used to be a Małopolska lover – i.e. Cracow – now prefers the capital city. Not concealing his individual city preferences, including a need for “choosing loneliness, not being condemned to it” and “a choice of possibilities”, Pilch admits that his capital city residency guarantees both of them. He sees the roots of the aforementioned phenomena in a peculiar surfeit being a characteristic of the Warsaw population. “Statistically, meaning in a slightly absurd way, people in Warsaw are more frank than those in, say, Cracow. Most of its population (about 60%) came to live in the city, so one can deduce that the courage of change is their direct or genetically passed on experience … [They are] maybe wittier, because they keep their distance from themselves.”
I am aware that positive intuition of a writer of impressionistic nature will not convince readers hesitant between love and hate towards the capital city – especially those from outside the City who know it in a non-direct way. Warsaw present in books – I know it from my own experience – shows usually only one, patriotic-liberation face and presents itself in a tragic-heroic attire. It was Koniec świata szwoleżerów (The end of the World of Light Cavalrymen), Hanna Krall’s interview with Marek Edelman, books by Konwicki or Białoszewski that determined the literary walks around the city in search of “hope, similarities and differences, and first of all smaller or bigger islets of freedom that always exist despite oppression – if not freedom of action, freedom of thought” – as Marta Zielińska says in her article Stracona i odzyskana. Warszawa w lekturach (Lost and Regained. Warsaw in Books). The image of the city shaped in this way does not comply with its market image that is promoted by media and repeated in tourist brochures. “Warsaw unusually smarts the results of this bizarre situation, this gap between the tradition and the present.(…) In the [most recent] novels it is usually a better or worse described background, friendly or hostile, but flat as a postcard without any deeper meanings and relations with people.” The capital city requires thought and careful observation, a literature researcher suggests. Warsaw is multi-layered, we cannot deprived it of this feature.
An additional element that attracts our compatriots to the capital city is still the fact that “in a further, historic perspective [of the next dozen, or maybe twenty years] Warsaw is doomed to success anyway” – maintains Dariusz Gawin, an idea historian, in an editorial conversation Pomysł na Warszawę, pomysł na Polskę (An Idea for Warsaw, an Idea for Poland). “It will have to be, though, consummated in a form of creative chaos that is, however strategically or minimally, but planned.” It is worth reminding after the capital city dailies those who are not well informed about the realistic decisions made regarding the city modernisation, for example – Krakowskie Przedmieście Street – whose repair is approaching rapidly. The modernisation of this representative street will take at least eighteen months, so we will get used to both the construction works and construction noise – hoping to see the promised effect, that is wider pavements and squares in front of churches, disappearance of parking spaces and more recreational-café freedom. However, during the 460 – at least – days ironists and malcontents will have irrefutable arguments against the chaos in the capital city. Would it be possible to explain to them that Warsaw people “have awareness, which is not really comprehensible to the inhabitants of the rest of the country, that they live in a temporary city, whose character consists in the yearning for its irrevocably lost own character” as Konrad Niciński says in his book review of Miejskie (Of City) by Stanisław Kowalczyk? Personally, I do not mind Warsaw’s changeability. Moreover, it motivates you to do walking tours in search of its “irrevocably lost greatness.” I belong to the incoming population described by Pilch that, like him, have been living in Warsaw for a few years now. But my grand great-uncle was a native of Warsaw and a monument is being erected now for his achievements. Who then has a right to this city?
To finish off our tour around Warsaw with the April issue of “Więź” magazine, I highly recommend taking a walk to Central Station with the characters of a short story Ludek (Manikin) by Kazimierz Orłoś from his latest volume of short stories. Having read it I look differently at an old bricklayer who “in a black jacket, unshaven, with grey hair and without a hat, at different times of a day – goes around the main hall. He hobbles by people queuing to the ticket booths. He passes by shop windows, stands and bars. Flinging his wooden foot, he climbs upstairs and from there, from over the banister, stares at the hall. Until his eyes begin to water.” The old Januszewski has a particular reason for coming to the Central Station regularly. Like all of us, he has his own relation with this city. Sometimes closer to love, sometimes to hatred.
Beata Pieńkowska
Translated by Kinga Witowska
Discussed journals: Więź