Two Victories for the Word

Illicit presses roll in Poland; banned writing blooms in China

Writers sometimes prevail over conformity and thought control in the Communist world. In Poland, where the relatively liberal government imposes an elaborate system of censorship, dissident writers are courageously risking retribution to produce a flourishing underground literature. In China--the most repressive of Communist nations--several long-banned novels and poems have begun to reappear in print. Although some of the authors had succumbed to the savagery of China's recurrent anti-intellectual campaigns, others had survived to witness this small but significant victory for the word.

A Display of Samizdat

In a modest Warsaw apartment three intellectuals lean intently over a small worktable. One man places a sheet of blank paper over an ink-impregnated flannel cloth that is taped over a typed stencil. Another man quickly rolls an old-fashioned washing-machine wringer down the page from top to bottom. A woman deftly lifts the sheet with a pair of tweezers and lays it on top of a pile on the floor. The printed pages, produced at the rate of 700 an hour, would later be laboriously collated, bound by hand, and delivered to readers of Opinia, an underground monthly published by the dissident group RUCH (the initials in Polish stand for Movement for the Defense of Human and Civil Rights).

Dozens of rudimentary printing presses are responsible for an astonishing boom in illegal samizdat (self-published) periodicals, manifestoes and even books that are currently circulating by the thousands of copies throughout Poland. Reflecting a wide range of dissident opinion, the samizdat publications are symptomatic of the mounting discontent that has made the country potentially the most unstable nation in Communist East Europe. Today there are at least twelve regularly published underground journals. Their criticism of the regime of Party Chief Edward Gierek* goes well beyond economic problems. It includes sweeping demands for democracy and freedom from Soviet hegemony.

Last week, for example, Opinia included in its seventh issue a sardonic history of Poland over the past 150 years that referred to the "temporary owners of the Polish nation" since 1944 who have used the "physical force that stands behind them." Another article discussed Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police, who was of Polish extraction. It concluded: "We kindly ask you, leaders of the Polish People's Republic, stop building monuments and displaying pictures of him."

In the industrial city of Radom, where embattled workers burned down Communist Party headquarters in 1976, the latest issue of the samizdat magazine Robotnik (The Worker) began circulating last week. It focused on an injustice that weighs heavily on the Polish proletariat: lack of any real representation. Robotnik called for genuine workers' organizations to replace the officially sponsored trade unions, which the journal called "dead institutions."

Among intellectuals, the most popular samizdat publication is Zapis (Record). A literary quarterly founded last spring, Zapis prints stories and essays by some of Poland's most distinguished but oftcensored writers such as Novelist Jerzy Andrejewski, the author of Ashes and Diamonds.

Other flourishing samizdat periodicals include Bratniak (Fraternity), a student publication produced in the port city of Gdansk, Postep (Progress), a magazine devoted to the problems of Poland's farmers, and Puls (Pulse), a literary journal from Lodz that was devoted this month to official censorship in the Polish movie industry.

To help coordinate nationwide samizdat, a publishing operation has been started by Scientist Miroslaw Chojecki. Called NOWA, an acronym for Independent Publishing House, Chojecki's printing establishment in a Warsaw apartment includes 20 typewriters, six crude presses and a skilled team of 30 people who help print, bind and distribute samizdat books. The workers charge nothing for their labor.

Thus far the government has been reluctant to crack down heavily on the samizdat publications for fear of stirring up even more popular unrest and making martyrs of the underground writers. Polish officials dismiss the dissident writing as insignificant, but they regard its proliferation with dismay. Earlier this month, police confiscated 450 copies of Opinia in the Warsaw apartment of one of the journal's distributors. But that put only a modest dent in the magazine's circulation. About 5,000 copies of every issue are printed, and each copy is believed to have 20 to 30 attentive readers.

Flower Show

It was not exactly a reprise of Mao Tse-tung's celebrated 1956 call to "let a hundred flowers bloom," but at least a few buds were in sight. After a decade of cultural starvation, book lovers in China have suddenly been able to buy four novels and two poems that had long been banned; five other proscribed works have been announced for future publication. The return to grace of these forbidden works is part of the continuing campaign against the Gang of Four, headed by Mao Tse-tung's widow Chiang Ch'ing. At a Peking literary forum two weeks ago, 20 authors--including some whose works have been newly rehabilitated--attacked the Gang for "wantonly disrupting the creation of literary works of art."

Now that the Gang is safely behind bars, the writers declared that literature in China was free to demonstrate that "reality is complicated, varied and colorful" --even though true Communist art should reflect "the facts of revolutionary life." Carrying out this new literary policy, the People's Literature Publishing House has reissued Pa Chin's famed 1931 novel Family, a saga about the authoritarian family system in pre-Communist China. A kind of Chinese equivalent of Gone With the Wind, the novel was the basis of many film and theater versions until it disappeared from circulation in 1965. In a postscript to the new edition, Pa Chin, 73, has obligingly provided a dutiful apologia for the novel's political mistakes, saying: "I noticed some of the evils of the old society, but I was unable to provide the remedies."

Another Chinese classic scheduled for reissue is Midnight, a 1933 novel about an evil and greedy capitalist, by Shen Yen-ping; fittingly, perhaps, he adopted the pen name Mao Tun, meaning contradiction. After the Communist takeover in 1949, Mao Tun abandoned literature for politics and eventually became Minister of Culture. In 1965 he was fired--apparently at the behest of Mme. Mao--and his early fiction was banned. Last month the 81-year-old author reappeared in print after more than a decade of silence.

Among the most gifted of the newly rehabilitated writers is Lao She, a chronicler of pre-Communist China's lower classes who is best known in the West for his 1936 novel Rickshaw Boy. During the Cultural Revolution, Lao came under ferocious attack by the fanatical Red Guards. After a dutiful attempt to write proletarian poetry in accord with the party line of that chaotic period, Lao She told his wife he was leaving home in search of "a peaceful place." He walked to the nearby T'ai-p'ing (Great Peace) Lake in Peking, where he drowned himself at the age of 67. Subsequently, all of his novels, plays, poetry and humorous sketches were banned. Last month the magazine People's Literature published two of Lao's last poems. According to one stanza, "If there were no Communist Party, Then all would be a wilderness of ghosts."

Sadly, intellectuals who have tried their best to follow the unpredictable twists and turns of Chinese politics have often fared badly. A poignant example: China's greatest living philosopher, Feng Yulan, 83, who has fallen into disgrace for the third time in his career. In 1957, after Mao ended his "hundred flowers" campaign, Feng was branded a rightist. Bowing to the winds of change, the Columbia-educated author of the renowned two-volume A History of Chinese Philosophy repudiated his life's work. During the Cultural Revolution, Feng was denounced as a counterrevolutionary; once again he confessed abjectly to his sins. After that ordeal he was restored to his post as professor of philosophy at Peking University. Last month Feng fell victim to the campaign against the Gang of Four. His crime: writing a poem in 1974 that favorably compared Chiang Ch'ing with the dictatorial 7th century Empress Wu. The aged philosopher was excoriated as an "adviser" to the Gang who had "swindled the public" and "maliciously abused the proletarian revolutionary forces." qed

* Gierek, whose country is predominantly Roman Catholic, last week requested and was granted an audience with Pope Paul VI in the Vatican.

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