Julia Hartwig - Literary café culture (54/100) скачать в хорошем качестве

Julia Hartwig - Literary café culture (54/100)

To listen to more of Julia Hartwig’s stories, go to the playlist:    • Julia Hartwig (Poet)   Julia Hartwig (1921-2017) was a Polish poet, essayist, translator and author of children's books. She studied at universities in Warsaw, Lublin and Kraków. Czesław Miłosz called her 'the grande dame of Polish poetry'. [Listener: Andrzej Wolski; date recorded: 2010] TRANSCRIPT: The literary company was fairly tight-knit, meaning, we used to eat together very often in the canteen at the Literary Union which today is in the House of Literature, and there we'd meet Holoubek, Łapicki as well as actresses and writers. Those were the two places during lunch where you could meet or find somebody, or in Czytelnik. Czytelnik was a place where a group of people would meet under the leadership of Tadeusz Konwicki for pleasant chats and every now and again, they'd admit somebody else to their table, but they were very selective. So there, of course, we could meet up for all kinds of occasions, including mainly social ones. For instance, in Czytelnik, even though he published there and was an executive member, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz was there but he didn't... he never came to the café, he avoided it like the plague because we often spoke about sticky political issues that he didn't want... he didn't want to participate in, and even now, I'm reading his Diary [sic] which is wonderful, especially the second volume, which exposes his attitude towards reality. It's hard to believe that the conformism was sincere and yet in his Diary he writes something in honour of Bierut and in honour of Gierek and in general about the things that were happening. It's true that he had no liking for the various party activists who used to pester him because he didn't like spending time in their company, he was accustomed to the very good company of composers and of pre-war writers. We formed a... we simply made friends with him among other writers with whom we also kept in touch by telephone and with whom we'd meet up. People would meet in cafés. Life was actually was pretty rotten because there was this constant, continual disquiet, with that... the secret police showing up here and there. Nevertheless, somehow people behaved in a relatively brave way in the sense that they went to cafés, they talked, they didn't particularly avoid difficult subjects, so the police must have been driven mad mainly because there was so much material to investigate, there was plenty of it and I think there was quite enough. For instance, there was a table in Aleje Ujazdowskie which was Słonimski's in the Ujazdowska café. Artur and I didn't go there very often as we're not... we weren't too keen on cafés, but because that's where... Słonimski came there every day, Monika Żeromska came there often, too, and various people from the radio, musicians came there, and there was always a group there, and Słonimski liked it very much when people came there and he'd always draw out some interesting political item from his stock which would start off the discussion, which was, of course, informal but everyone joined in either criticizing or applauding, it varied.