American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages

A Fugitive from Utopia: The Poetry of Zbigniew Herbert by Stanislaw Baranczak; ZbigniewHerbertReview by: Madeline G. LevineThe Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Winter, 1988), pp. 675-676Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European LanguagesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/308793 .

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Reviews 675

movements of the 1980s as New Wave, German Neo-expressionism, Transavant-garde and Neo-Geo. He explains the devotion of Russian artists to "stylistic monogamy" by their inde- pendence from the market, although, in reality, it is precisely the market that forces artists to practice "a signature style" in order to maintain constant recognition.

Throughout the whole book Glezer displays an opinionated position by appealing to such subjective epithets as "super-prestigious gallery" or "the best unofficial artist." In this one senses the author's need to make up for the lost context of the culture under discussion or, perhaps, to camouflage his own unwillingness to accept some uncomfortable realities of much of the 6migre art in the West.

Margarita Tupitsyn, SUNYPurchase

Stanislaw Baraficzak. A Fugitive from Utopia: The Poetry of Zbigniew Herbert. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987. 163 pp., $22.50 (cloth).

Among contemporary Polish poets, Zbigniew Herbert is second only to Czeslaw Milosz in international repute. Rendered by expert translators, as it has been, his poetry is as moving and resonant in English as it is in Polish. Herbert's poetry translates so well because his most characteristic poetic device-irony-functions on an intellectual level that is not dependent on the peculiarities of any specific language. Furthermore, his cultural sphere of reference is the Western tradition, broadly defined, and is not limited to the small world of Polish experience. It is good to now have available the first book-length study of Herbert in English. (A Fugitive from Utopia is a somewhat abridged version for English readers of Uciekinier z Utopii: 0 poezji Zbigniewa Herberta [London, 1984]).

Baraficzak's central thesis is that Herbert's poetry is always suspended in an "ambivalent tension" (9) between the polar opposites of "frailty and perfection, experience and myth, dis- inheritance and heritage" (135). The philosophical and ethical foundations of Herbert's poetry can be summed up as a fierce commitment to the human condition as it is and a rejection of both nostalgia for an irretrievable arcadian past and yearnings for an impossible utopian future. The highest ethical value affirmed by the poetry is a constant striving for perfection, whether in the aesthetic or the moral sphere, but the insistence on such striving is tempered by an a priori acceptance of the impossibility of ever achieving that goal.

A Fugitive from Utopia starts with an overview of the philosophical problems raised by Herbert's identification of disinheritance as man's essential condition, and then settles in to a painstaking analysis of the specific poetic structures and devices through which that tragic vision is revealed. Basing his analysis on a number of well-known poems that overtly display Herbert's ambivalence about the overarching antinomy of heritage vs. disinheritance, Barafi- czak identifies three major sub-categories of antinomical relations: the spatial opposition of West vs. East, the temporal opposition of past vs. present, and the experiential opposition of myth vs. experience, all of which may intersect or overlap with each other. The heritage of the past is often expressed in cultural myths that have arisen in the West (which is to say, in non-East Europe) while immediate experience brings these myths-and hence that past and that western world-into question.

Having thus established very economically (in fewer than thirty pages) the centrality for Herbert of the opposition between heritage and disinheritance, Barafczak adopts a different analytical approach in the remainder of his study. His strategy is to look at the poetry through its most important component parts in order to avoid what he considers to be a pervasive tendency among critics to read Herbert simplistically: "The critics usually appear to take into consideration, as it were, only the meanings of Herbert's sentences and their configurations, while treating the lesser semantic units as if they did not matter at all. In fact, however,

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676 Slavic and East European Journal

Herbert's poetry also reveals its precise inner organization on its lower levels; his words are burdened with meaning and only seem to be transparent and unequivocal" (30).

Baraficzak's search for key words and images in Herbert's poetry reveals a system of inter- locking aesthetic and ethical values that appear in opposing pairs representing the key concepts of heritage and disinheritance on virtually all the structural levels of the poetry. Thus, for example, literary or mythic characters who appear in the poems are divided into heritage- bearing gods and angels and disinherited humans. The world of men is often represented by grayness, earth, shadowy images; the world of the gods, by whiteness, light, air. But the poems do not choose between one world or the other; rather, "It is precisely this suspension between heritage and disinheritance that characterizes the position of the implied author in Herbert's poetry .... The basic structural pattern in Herbert's poetry is not only the incessant confron- tation ... but also the mutual unmasking of the two sets of antinomical values" (64). Herbert's metaphors, because they serve this unmasking function, are characterized by paradoxicality; their purpose is not to reveal a similarity between the terms of comparison but, rather, to use their essential dissimilarity as a means of highlighting the differences between them, as, for example, the distance between the worlds of myth and experience. The goal of unmasking is achieved by adopting unusual perspectives-whether spatial or temporal-from which to observe a described object or event and to expose the contradictions between appearance and inner truth.

It will come as no surprise to readers of Herbert's poetry that Baraficzak considers irony to be his principle poetic method, his most important weapon for unmasking brutality and depravity. What Bara6fczak brings to the critical understanding of Herbert's deployment of irony is a keen analysis of the particular modes of ironic discourse that appear in the poems and whose effect depends in part on the identity of the implied speaker in each work-the interaction, in other words, between the modes of irony and the forms of monologue. These interactions are illustrated by reference to a wide range of poems, only snippets of which, unfortunately, are cited as illustration. The discussion of the mechanisms of irony as well as its functions and limits is the heart of this book. Indeed, Baraficzak's analysis of irony as the sole defense of the underdog in the Mr. Cogito poems and others is so stimulating that one wishes he had not felt constrained to maintain an artificial balance in length among his four chapters.

A Fugitive from Utopia is a splendid introduction to Herbert as poet and as moral philoso- pher. It also provides an interesting model of a critical approach that employs rigorous struc- tural analysis to reveal the ethical values at the heart of a poetic oeuvre.

Two complaints are in order, both directed at Harvard University Press. (1) The bibliography published in the Polish version of this book should have been included in the English version. (2) Out of respect for the Polish language subscripted capital Ls should not have been used in bizarre imitation of the hooks on V and #.

Madeline G. Levine, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

A. II. MapHH, pen. KHnuCHanR mopoeasn. Onbtm, npo6aeuMb, uccaedoeaiinu. BbIn. 18. M.: KHHra, 1986. 224 cTp., lp. 90K.

Book trade in the Soviet Union is organizationally a complex and functionally a highly impor- tant operation. Its importance lies in the obvious fact that it provides a necessary link through distribution between publisher and consumer.

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