My Century
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- $27.99
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- $27.99
Publisher Description
In My Century the great Polish poet Aleksander Wat provides a spellbinding account of life in Eastern Europe in the midst of the terrible twentieth century. Based on interviews with Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz, My Century describes the artistic, sexual, and political experimentation—in which Wat was a major participant—that followed the end of World War I: an explosion of talent and ideas which, he argues, in some ways helped to open the door to the destruction that the Nazis and Bolsheviks soon visited upon the world. But Wat’s book is at heart a story of spiritual struggle and conversion. He tells of his separation during World War II from his wife and young son, of his confinement in the Soviet prison system, of the night when the sound of far-off laughter brought on a vision of “the devil in history.” “It was then,” Wat writes, “that I began to be a believer.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
For Wat (1900-1967), Polish futurist poet and man of letters, his ordeal in Polish and Soviet prisons was a time to read Proust and meditate on Bach's Passion ; this Jewish intellectual's soul-searching culminated in his conversion to Christianity in a Russian cell in 1941. His reminiscences are sprinkled with arresting observations on Machiavelli, the sources of poetic inspiration, Doctor Zhivago , Plato, the erotic. They also provide a darkly realistic picture of the various circles of the Stalinist system of hell. Not always easy reading, this collection consists of lightly edited transcripts of interviews with Wat conducted in 1963 by Czeslaw Milosz, who contributes an introductory essay. The early sections offer a shifting panorama of Berlin and Paris in the '20s, of Mayakovsky in Warsaw and Polish dadaism.
