Too Many Laughs

The only things that Moscow sends us are jackasses, idiots and spies.

--Line from the Polish classic Dziady

Though Dziady, written by Poet Adam Mickiewicz in 1832, has long been a staple of study in nearly every Polish high school, its appearance on the Warsaw stage a few weeks ago caused an uproar. When audiences laughed too loudly at the anti-Russian lines, the government's censors closed down the whole production. In recent weeks they have also closed two other plays and kept from circulation the most promising Polish movie of the year, a surrealistic comedy on politics called Hands Up. Also kept from circulation was Critic Janusz Szpotanski, 34, author of a musical satire, The Silent and the Honkers, that caricatured some Polish public figures, including Party Boss Wladyslaw Gomulka. After listening to a tape recording of his play, a Polish court sentenced Szpotanski to three years in prison for harming state interests.

Such is the state of artistic freedom in Poland, where the government has lately become more brittle and restrictive than ever in silencing its critics and banning what does not please it. The regime's heavy-handed treatment of Poland's cultural community has become so oppressive that last week, meeting in the first extraordinary session of its 48-year history, some 350 members of the Polish Writers' Union voted to draw the line at the government's most recent crackdown. In a strongly worded resolution, they accused the Gomulka regime of throttling Poland's cultural life.

Aging & Suspicious. What makes Poland's intellectuals so angry is that it was in Poland, after the enlightened, anti-Stalinist regime of Gomulka took power in 1956, that the trend toward intellectual freedom in Eastern Europe really began. In the days following the popular uprising that installed Gomulka, Warsaw's stage bloomed with avant-garde theater--the existentialism of Sartre, the absurdism of Beckett and a home-grown brand of vicious gallows humor. Recently, however, while an aging and suspicious government tolerates less free discussion at home, the Poles have watched in frustration while non conformity flourishes among such neighbors as Czechoslovakia.

The government's tight control of intellectual life, which is also mainly responsible for a decline in film production and literary output, has already reduced the number of party members in the 600-person Warsaw branch of the Writers' Union to 10%, and a current revival of official anti-Semitism will probably reduce it even further. Nor are the intellectuals alone in their restlessness; among Poland's 32 million citizens, too, there is a growing boredom, if not dissatisfaction, with the regime. With only 1,860,000 members, Poland's Communist Party is now proportionately one of the smallest ruling Communist parties in the world. Naturally, the party's malaise tends to become the butt of the very humor that the regime fears and seeks to ban. As a joke making the rounds in Warsaw last week had it, a popularity poll of top Polish leaders is now impossible. Reason: no one remembers who they are any more. The government was not laughing at that one, either, but there was not much it could do about it.

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