Mario Vargas Llosa once said, after reading a novel that remained "imprinted on his whole body, or rather on his soul," that he felt "a pressing need" to meet the author in person, to thank him personally. Of course, after reading these lines, you can't help but wonder if you've ever felt that way, and, more importantly, who the writer is. Some authors might fall into this category because of their writing, others because of their subject matter, others because of their ideas, or all of the above. But there are some who have something more, their lives, lived in such a way as to have a decisive influence on their contemporaries, and these are the people we would like to meet to convince ourselves that they really exist.
When you read and reread Adam Michnik's writings, when you discover his life and work, you get the feeling that he might be a made-up, chimerical author, because he is extremely difficult to define. It is almost a cliché to say that he is both loved and hated, adulated and reviled. His writing stems from his life. Michnik's homeland is Truth, and the land of this homeland is Freedom. The greater the danger, the more he throws himself into the fray. It is not prison that frightens the young student, but the loss of consciousness, and a life that is not worth living is one in which thought is captive. When, in December 1983, General Kiszczak, the head of the police, offered him the chance to leave the country, Michnik wrote him a letter saying that he knew that, if he were him, he would have chosen the Riviera, but that was precisely the difference between them: “you are pigs, we are not." For someone who had seen communist prisons since he was young, the beatings of the communist secret police had the opposite effect to that intended by those who administered them. Faced with the option of leaving the country, Michnik wrote that "it is not phobia that dictated these lines. Nor is it patriotic blindness. It is not courage that makes me choose prison over exile. I make this choice out of fear. Out of fear that by saving my neck, I might lose my honor."
Every minute lived, every word spoken means liberation. This makes Letters from Prison show an optimistic prisoner. Michnik himself says that, regardless of the political regime, optimism is preferable, and pessimism is boring because it usually comes true. To be optimistic means to be original. However, despite all his optimism, Michnik's message is not for those seeking mental and moral comfort; his writing cuts to the bone, and it is hard not to feel it piercing your skin. When the world is hidden in the comfort of silence, he speaks. Then, when others would have pointed fingers, Michnik comes across as a historian who explains, not judges. When he read Piotr Wierzbicki's Treatise on Larvae in 1978, Michnik regretted not having written it himself. "How many times, exasperated by the 'larval' condition of those around me, did I sharpen my pen and deliver a fiery tirade? But I wrote nothing." Why didn't he do it? Michnik's lesson is not one of accusation, even though he might have been the most entitled to do so, and the world often expected it of him. Even then, the man who would become the symbol of dissent was putting the brakes on emotional impulses in the face of simplistic judgment. "We look at the world in one way when we want to change it, in another when we are just trying to understand it, and in yet another when we set out to judge it morally [...] Let us not forget that each of us is sometimes inconsistent and petty. Let us at least strive to understand why."
In Michnik's world, people are viewed without filters, and they are subject to mistakes and pettiness, because, as he put it, an angel maintained in his angelism can quickly metamorphose into a devil, a lesson he himself learned from a book de described as visionary to the point of cruelty, Dostoevsky's Demons, a novel he detested but always returned to, like an addict to cocaine, as he himself put it. Perhaps the difference between Michnik and others in his situation is also due to his training as a historian. His refusal to simplify, his contextualization of facts, his attempt to understand people's behavior according to their position and the moment often put him at odds with the mainstream. Thus, Michnik does not join the chorus of Thomas Mann's accusers because the author of The Magic Mountain remained silent in exile once Nazism came to power in Germany. For Michnik, what is relevant is the moral lesson that can be drawn from the German author's private correspondence, not looking at the one who remained silent, but at the one who, strangled by disgust, wished for the Nazi executioners to be defeated even before they invaded Poland.
The theme of the intellectual's status under dictatorship and in freedom is, in fact, one of the most important in Adam Michnik's work. Because, as he showed starting from the case of Thomas Mann, outside of his work, the writer becomes one of us, "a weak and hesitant man, both frightened and attracted by the temptations of the material world." But the intellectual is attracted to truth and dignity, which become his drug. And then the obsessive question returns: what is to be done? "Be pious, then, a rebellious intellectual, but do not give up your skepticism, at least as far as political commitment is concerned. (...) In a world of relativized moral norms, introduce the clear simplicity of the Gospel precepts (yes*yes, no*no)... You must remain faithful to lost causes, say unpleasant things, stir up opposition. You must take blows from your own people and from strangers, for only thus will you attain the good, which otherwise would have remained untouched'." Once communism fell, intellectuals had to oppose group phobias, madness, and conformism and remain a thorn in the side of 'normal' society. Their position was no different from that of poets, about whom Marina Tsvetaeva said that they were all Jews. So too should intellectuals have been prepared to be attacked as harshly as anti-Semites attacked Jews. "But it is always better to be a Jew than an anti-Semite," is what we learn from Adam Michnik.
Released from prison and freed from communism, Michnik became both an adversary and an uncomfortable partner. Both he and his friend Václav Havel, who had since become president of Czechoslovakia, declared themselves opposed to ‘cave-dwelling’ anti-communism. They viewed communism in the context of history and saw the regime's supporters as fallible human beings who could become democrats. At that time, they were most repulsed by radical anti-communists, who had been silent as fish during the communist era and now wanted to build gallows for communists. For many, it remained incomprehensible how those who had been beaten and deprived of their freedom were against any form of revenge, as they were perceived to be defending their ‘tormentors’. Michnik opposed lustration, seeking instead to find a solution that would make Poland a homeland for all. However, this was not a movement that excluded repentance. Referring to those who had been communists in their youth, he protected those who, he said, redeemed their youthful mistakes over the years through their existential attitude, through books, films, theater performances, and words of protest expressed publicly. Democracy did not mean using the Securitate archives, obsessively repeating ‘memory’ and ‘truth’, words which, in the language of the "new absolutists and new populists," meant nothing more than revenge and discrimination, an old hobbyhorse of the ‘Polish backstabbing’, which would have had other victims such as Tadeusz Kościuszko, Josef Piłsudski, or Czesław Miłosz.
The theme of forgiveness is perhaps what shocked the people around Adam Michnik the most. From a position of freedom, forgiveness was a duty, and for him, those who managed to do so were worthy of admiration. In one of the Securitate's actions, he recounts, the son and wife of Jacek Kuron, dubbed ‘the devil’ by the political police, were beaten. Then, the Kuron family's dog, their beloved dachshund was killed. But what was fascinating, Michnik points out, was that during all this time, he never heard Kuron say, "I'll get my revenge, I'll show them." And this attitude won him over: "I cannot help but think with envy of his determination in favor of mercy," wrote the "vice-devil" Michnik a few years later. But it would be a mistake for the reader to think that forgiving also meant forgetting. Forgiveness could not be dissociated from truth, because he believed that one can only truly, authentically forgive when one is faithful to the truth. For someone who had been a political prisoner in the 1960s and 1980s, moral victory was not about being tolerant of oneself, but about "trying to proclaim tolerance towards one's enemies." Following this logic, in 2005 Michnik made a public appeal to President Lech Kaczynski to issue an act of abolition on the basis of which Poland would become "a state without burnings at the stake, without political trials," a state "of tolerance and compromise."
Adam Michnik fought against the powerful and supported the weak. Inspired by the words of his father, a Jewish communist, the young Adam—an anti-communist Pole—knew that he had to defend Ukrainians, Armenians, Jews, and Poles as long as they were weak, and not when they became strong enough to lead others. He knew that nationalism was a scourge that would endanger European unity, that anti-Semitism had persisted even in the absence of Jews in Poland, and that a united Europe had emerged after World War II as a response to the failure of Nazism and the rise of communism. All this made left-wing supporters see Michnik as too right-wing, while conservatives considered him too left-wing. However, Adam Michnik's creed has always been in the service of the values of liberalism and pluralism, where reason guides society, in the service of basic Christian values, where truth will set us free, where there is morality in politics, and that world can only be European civilization. "For us Europeans behind the Iron Curtain, the idea of Europe simply meant the rejection of the communist project. It symbolized freedom instead of servitude, creativity instead of submission and fear, a multitude of colors instead of gray and uniformity, human rights instead of the principle that man is the property of the state, open borders and unrestricted rights instead of barbed wire, the Berlin Wall, and censorship of publications."
Józef Tischner, a Catholic priest, philosopher, and friend of Michnik, recounts an episode that is as amusing as it is relevant. The two were in a circle of friends of the priest, and after Adam left, he asked the others: "Do you know why God created Michnik?" There was silence. After a moment, one of those present said with a smile that betrayed his discovery: 'So that the smart ones can get a little smarter, and the stupid ones can get even more stupid’. I would say that there are also those of us who have wondered whether Adam Michnik really exists.
Bibliography:
Mărturisirile unui disident convertit (Confessions of a Converted Dissident), Preface by Vladimir Tismăneanu, Afterword by Jozef Tischner, translation and notes by Sabra Daici (Polirom, 2009)
Scrisori din închisoare și alte eseuri (Letters from Prison and Other Essays), translation by Adriana Babeți and Mircea Mihăieș, Preface by Vladimir Tismăneanu (Polirom, 1997)
Restaurația de catifea (The Velvet Restoration), edited by Mircea Mihăieș, Preface by Andrei Pleșu. Translation by Daciana Branea, Dana Chetrinescu, Cristina Cheveresan, Dana Crăciun, Ioana Copil-Popovici, (Polirom, 2001).
