 
|
When Socialist
Realism as the obligatory literary model died in Poland in
mid-1950s, many of its major exponents finished it off with a critique
of their own (more or less sincere) beliefs. This was even more
natural as poets like Adam Wazyk (1905-82)
were pre-war veterans of avant-garde poetry.
Wazyk, once a violent (and feared) promoter and theorist of SR, was
often seen as the first to sound the retreat into a realism of a
"broader" variety. His Poem for Adults
(1955) marked the end of this infamous trend in Polish literature. The
Forge, a literary weekly founded, among others, by Wazyk and Mieczyslaw
Jastrun (1903-83), applied Marxist criteria to vindicate the
"all-important (...) interdependence between the individual and
the history of a given society" (Milosz, The History of Polish
Literature). They also initiated what came to be known as the
"intelligentsia's settling of accounts with itself" for its
social role in prewar, wartime, and postwar Poland.
|
|
