>"Her [Wisława Szymborska, the great Polish poet] poetry first fell on me, as it did on so many others, like an anvil made of feathers—striking but soft—after she won the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1996."
>"The Poles are more acutely aware than we [Americans] are, for obvious historical reasons, of the inevitable steps in the establishment of an authoritarian state. They have seen tyranny rise from both sides, from the right and the left—from the incalculably evil Nazi occupation to the long and stupidly brutal Soviet one—and so have become experts in authoritarian takeovers, and authoritarians, of all kinds. Whether imposed by a military or not, they point out, the subsequent steps of tyrannical takeover are, if I may synthesize, predictable: demonize the helpless, criminalize all criticism, idolize the leader, then paralyze individual action through corruption." >"Demonizing the helpless is all too familiar to the people of Kraków, which is a short hour’s drive from Auschwitz, and many of my new Polish friends had been struck by the bizarre sadism of a Department of Homeland Security recruitment video, posted with the caption, 'We’re having an All Night Revival.' It shows ice [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] raids with detainees being loaded onto trucks and protesters being zip-tied, set derisively to a song by the country-music star and Navy veteran Zach Bryan, who has been critical of the raids." >"Criminalizing all criticism, hardly needs detailing; most of the leading democratic dissidents, including in Poland, spent time in prison." >"The third—the absurd idolization of the Leader—secures a tyrant’s certainty that he can get away with anything, no matter how obviously ridiculous. He then consolidates power, corruptly, within a small group—sometimes by looting, sometimes by bribery—so that even plutocrats become so entrenched in corruption that, despite a seeming independence, they cannot act independently. The powerful become stuck in the same system as its victims." >"The essential insight of the dissidents, in Poland particularly but not in Poland alone, was that resistance against authoritarianism begins as much in the pre-political or nonpolitical arenas as it does in politics. That was Václav Havel’s <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/02/17/exit-havel> constant point in the former Czechoslovakia, about the necessity of building 'parallel structures' to the centralized authoritarian one, writing that all attempts by society to resist the pressure of the system have their beginnings in the pre-political arena." >"By living 'within the truth,' Havel meant simply refusing to participate in what are known to be lies or to be easily intimidated by the intensity of the liars. And one can speak the truth to just a few listeners at a time and still make it matter. When people are told that they are merely 'preaching to the choir,' they are, in fact, teaching the choir to sing in tune: to know which melodies rise and which fall, what’s wise and what’s foolish. Small sounds have loud echoes." >"His [Adam Michnik] 'Letters from Prison <https://www.amazon.com/dp/0520061756>,' from 1986, opens with an introduction by *The New Yorker’s* own Jonathan Schell, who offered an apt summary of Michnik’s arguments: (Start doing the things you think should be done, and . . . start being what you think society should become. Do you believe in freedom of speech? Then speak freely. Do you love the truth? Then tell it. Do you believe in an open society? Then act in the open. Do you believe in a decent and humane society? Then behave decently and humanely.” ------------------------- By: Adam Gopnik [Adam Gopnik, a staff writer, has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1986. His books include “The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery.”] Published in:* The New Yorker* Date: October 30, 2025 A visit to a poet’s home in Kraków recalls the lessons of Eastern Europe’s dissidents. A few weeks ago, I achieved at last a long-imagined pilgrimage to the home of the great Polish poet Wisława Szymborska, in Kraków. I have written <https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/wislawa-szymborska-the-happiness-of-wisdom-felt> often about Szymborska, who spent most of her life in Kraków and died there, at the age of eighty-eight, in 2012. Her poetry first fell on me, as it did on so many others, like an anvil made of feathers—striking but soft—after she won the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1996. There was no literary shrine I wanted to go to more, to doff my spiritual hat and drink in the surroundings of the poet, who is beloved by readers for her unique mix of humor, more even than wit, beautifully amalgamated with sudden turns of pensive reflection. What’s more, I got to go there in the company of her former amanuensis, Michał Rusinek, and Michał Choiński, a poet and scholar. Both men teach at the ancient and hallowed Jagiellonian University (where Szymborska herself studied) and Choiński is also the author, as improbable as it sounds, of a long, original, ambitious history of *The New Yorker*, recently published in Polish for a Polish audience. Szymborska’s last home, where she lived for fourteen years, was a three-room apartment in a residential neighborhood about twenty minutes from the center of town. It seemed to me extremely modest, not to say student-like, though my Polish friends’ slightly censorious frowns when I volunteered this thought made me realize that, in the Kraków of the Communist era, it would have actually been considered rather grand. But certainly the room where it happened, where the poetry got written, was as modest as any college dorm room, with a small single bed next to the small desk where she wrote. (She lived there alone. She was married briefly, after the Second World War, then had a long love affair with the short-story writer Kornel Filipowicz; their collected letters, which should be available in English, have been a best-seller in Poland and were published in Spain and Italy, in translation.) In that little writing room, we spoke of the great poet—of her chain-smoking and of her love of silly puns, odd town names, and Kentucky Fried Chicken, which, when it came to Kraków, she delighted in, to the distress of her more fastidious friends. (There is, however, a Stroganoff-with-dumplings dish named for Szymborska at her favorite restaurant in old Kraków. *That* is delicious.) Though the talk was of the details of a life, the shadow that hung above our conversation, as one had hung above that life, was intently political. Szymborska was not a political poet in any conventional sense, but she was one, and a great one, inasmuch as she struggled to articulate, with charm and with purpose, the way that people seek power and pleasure in their social lives—to increase their utilities, as the drier political philosophers say—while engaging with family, friends, lovers, and fellow-citizens in the daily struggle for persistence. Not all *engagé* poetry need be from the battle front: in “The Catcher in the Rye <https://www.amazon.com/dp/0316769177>,” Holden’s little brother, Allie, who copies poetry onto his baseball mitt, is asked who was the better war poet, Rupert Brooke, who actually fought in one, or Emily Dickinson, who did not? The right answer, from Salinger’s point of view, was, obviously, Emily. The occasion of my visit to Kraków was a conference, attended by American and Polish scholars, students, and writers, on the current state of American life. *The New Yorker’s* inestimable critic-at-large Anthony Lane joined me and Choiński at an event in the city’s great Market Square for a discussion about the magazine. It was, to put it mildly, touching and energizing to talk about the wit of E. B. White and A. J. Liebling and Roz Chast to an avid Polish crowd who seemed to want to know how we had done what we’ve been doing for as long as we’ve been doing it. Yet the Poles were eerily conscious of not only the general shape but the specific details of the dark cloud that is falling on American life. What is startling to an American author, playing the bemused role abroad that John Updike so beautifully captured in his tales of Henry Bech, is that the Poles are more acutely aware than we are, for obvious historical reasons, of the inevitable steps in the establishment of an authoritarian state. They have seen tyranny rise from both sides, from the right and the left—from the incalculably evil Nazi occupation to the long and stupidly brutal Soviet one—and so have become experts in authoritarian takeovers, and authoritarians, of all kinds. Whether imposed by a military or not, they point out, the subsequent steps of tyrannical takeover are, if I may synthesize, predictable: demonize the helpless, criminalize all criticism, idolize the leader, then paralyze individual action through corruption. Demonizing the helpless is all too familiar to the people of Kraków, which is a short hour’s drive from Auschwitz, and many of my new Polish friends had been struck by the bizarre sadism of a Department of Homeland Security recruitment video, posted with the caption, “We’re having an All Night Revival.” It shows ice raids with detainees being loaded onto trucks and protesters being zip-tied, set derisively to a song by the country-music star and Navy veteran Zach Bryan, who has been critical of the raids. These seemingly pointless advertisements have a purpose, the Poles told me: to acclimatize first the federal police, and then the rest of us, to cruelty as entertainment. The second step, criminalizing all criticism, hardly needs detailing; most of the leading democratic dissidents, including in Poland, spent time in prison. The third—the absurd idolization of the Leader—secures a tyrant’s certainty that he can get away with anything, no matter how obviously ridiculous. He then consolidates power, corruptly, within a small group—sometimes by looting, sometimes by bribery—so that even plutocrats become so entrenched in corruption that, despite a seeming independence, they cannot act independently. The powerful become stuck in the same system as its victims. Yet, as depressing as it was to talk to hyperconscious veterans of such tyrannical tours, beautiful Renaissance-made Kraków is also a space of optimism. John Keegan, the great military historian, wrote once that, paradoxically, the German tactics upon retreat from the D Day invasion were a kind of early working model for nato to deflect a potential Soviet one. So, in a similar way, the actions and the philosophy of the great Eastern European dissidents’ trial might become a lesson to us. They were trying to become a liberal democracy in the face of tyranny and illiberalism, while we are trying to save one in the face of the same forces. This is not to suggest for a moment that our struggle is even remotely comparable in scale to theirs. But the essential insight of the dissidents, in Poland particularly but not in Poland alone, was that resistance against authoritarianism begins as much in the pre-political or nonpolitical arenas as it does in politics. That was Václav Havel’s <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/02/17/exit-havel> constant point in the former Czechoslovakia, about the necessity of building “parallel structures” to the centralized authoritarian one, writing that all attempts by society to resist the pressure of the system have their beginnings in the pre-political arena. As he wrote in his essay “The Power of the Powerless <https://www.amazon.com/dp/178487504X>,” from 1978, “For what else are parallel structures than an area where a different life can be lived, a life that is in harmony with its own aims and which in turn structures itself in harmony with those aims? What else are those initial attempts at social self-organization than the efforts of a certain part of society to live—as a society—within the truth?” By living “within the truth,” Havel meant simply refusing to participate in what are known to be lies or to be easily intimidated by the intensity of the liars. And one can speak the truth to just a few listeners at a time and still make it matter. When people are told that they are merely “preaching to the choir,” they are, in fact, teaching the choir to sing in tune: to know which melodies rise and which fall, what’s wise and what’s foolish. Small sounds have loud echoes. One returns again and again, in Poland, to the wisdom of the great dissident—for whom, I admit, I have a phonetic fascination—Adam Michnik. His “Letters from Prison <https://www.amazon.com/dp/0520061756>,” from 1986, opens with an introduction by *The New Yorker’s* own Jonathan Schell, who offered an apt summary of Michnik’s arguments: “Start doing the things you think should be done, and . . . start being what you think society should become. Do you believe in freedom of speech? Then speak freely. Do you love the truth? Then tell it. Do you believe in an open society? Then act in the open. Do you believe in a decent and humane society? Then behave decently and humanely.” Which brings us back to Szymborska and her writing room. Having seen all manner of extreme suffering from the Holocaust to Soviet rule, she turned to the heroism of daily life for succor and meaning. And she succeeded in building, in words, another place to live: one of ambiguity and reflection, of teasing satire and mordant wit. “Granted, in daily speech, where we don’t stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like ‘the ordinary world,’ ‘ordinary life,’ ‘the ordinary course of events,’ ” she said, in her Nobel acceptance speech <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1996/szymborska/lecture/>. “But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And, above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.” Even in extremis, Szymborska knew, life persists on its own terms and must be honored. The world is made of rooms, like hers, where private life takes place and the poetic imagination lights and then finds its way to the market square. The expression “Nothing is usual or normal” is a truth in two senses, meaning both that we should relish the dailiness of things and also that, in the ordinary course of events, the only thing we have the right to expect is the unexpected. “This is not normal,” our own daily words of shock and warning are also, in a way, words of wisdom and even hope. Things will never be normal again. But then nothing ever is. ♦
