A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising

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THE RECEPTION of the original 1970 publication of Miron Białoszewski’s Pamiętnik z powstania warszawskiego (A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising) by readers and critics in Poland and the Polish diaspora was divided. Understood by many as a major literary event thanks to the author’s bold rejection of unthinking nationalist fervor and powerful deployment of the norms of spoken language, the memoir was condemned by others as a blasphemous mockery of a revered moment in national history, the mockery made worse by the author’s rejection of any hint of rhetorical pomposity. The functional prosaic title of the book appears to promise a work of unambiguous content: a recounting of a major historical event — the Warsaw Uprising of 1944—as recollected by a participant in that event. But Białoszewski’s memoir is not the straightforward narrative its simple title suggests.

If we can divide memoir literature into two basic categories — one, the public figure’s review of events in the public domain, often written with an eye to perpetuating a particular interpretation of those events, and the other, the more private self-revelations of the memoirist who seeks in the past a clue to his own personality and career — we can say that Białoszewski’s memoir partakes of qualities from each of these categories. His subject is a major historical event, but he was not a public figure when he participated in it. When he came to write his memoir some twenty years after the fact, his fame was as a private man of letters, yet his return to the past is not primarily a search for self-knowledge nor an effort to reveal to the public the sources of his art.

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