Realistic Compromise

In the 14 months since Poland's pragmatic Party Boss Edward Gierek took power, the nation's writers and intellectuals--reflecting the view of Poles in general--have found that it is possible to live with Gierek's moderate regime. Stage Director Kazimierz Dej-mek has returned from exile and is again in favor; he was disgraced in 1968 for putting on a heavily anti-Russian production of Patriot-Poet Adam Mickiewicz's 19th century play Dziady, which included the line "The only things Moscow sends us are jackasses, idiots and spies." Writer Stefan Kisie-lewski, who was severely beaten in 1968 for calling the government "a dictatorship of dimwits," has been allowed under Gierek to travel abroad. Of the 939 books to be published this year, more than half are by contemporary authors, some of whom have not seen print in more than a decade.

Party's Watchdogs. Last week, as delegates of the 1,130-member Polish Writers' Union gathered in Lodz, Poland's second largest city, they were clearly not inclined to endanger those gains. Another congress in 1968 had vigorously protested the cultural repression of Gierek's predecessor, Wladyslaw Gomulka, and brought down the wrath of the regime. Jewish writers were particular targets; Antoni Slonim-ski, a patriarch of contemporary Polish literature, was denounced by Gomulka as "not a proper Pole."

This time, instead of overt defiance, the liberals concentrated on tactical victories and "a moderate, measured show of strength," as Slonimski put it. The large Warsaw chapter of the union voted down most of the government slate of potential delegates, and sent a more independent and distinguished group to Lodz. At the convention, a total of seven liberals--including Zbigniew Herbert, Poland's leading lyric poet--were elected to the 24-man executive committee that had previously been composed entirely of conservatives. Jerzy Putrament, who for 20 years has been the party's politruk, or watchdog, within the union, was narrowly re-elected to the committee by a single vote--and only because some of his prominent opponents happened to be out of the hall at the time.

Climate of Trust. In contrast to past congresses, government spokesmen went out of their way to be conciliatory. Zbigniew Zaluski, a leading conservative in the union, appealed for "a climate of trust between writers and the government." The new Minister of Culture, Stanislaw Wronski, promised to improve the material conditions of writers, whose wages and royalties have not been increased since 1952.

One issue on everyone's mind was censorship. Even conservative union President Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, 78, complained that Poland's broad censorship makes it impossible to deal with contemporary history. Liberal delegates did not attempt to press for total abolition of censorship. They agreed that Communist Party control in Poland must remain unquestioned, and --remembering the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia--tacitly accepted a ban on any works that would offend the Soviet Union. Instead, they set in motion machinery to make it more difficult for conservatives to expel writers from the union, and determined to press for more precise and less arbitrary censorship rules.

"Every reasonable Pole has to recognize the institution of censorship," Jerzy Andrzejewski, Poland's outstanding postwar novelist, told TIME Correspondent Strobe Talbott last week. "Previously, there were many writers in a marginal situation who could not publish, while at the moment I don't see any writer who cannot. This congress has shown that compromise is not a horrible thing. We should not make it more difficult for our politicians. I don't know what the end result will be, but right now we must be realistic and avoid provocation." Edward Gierek could almost be heard saying Amen.

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