THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC 453emas, newspapers, radio, and television; and state support had made the career
of the approved artist much more secure than previously. Yet political confor-
mity remained the touchstone of success. Although the obligatory 'Socialist
Realism' of the Stalinist era had been abandoned, a representative of the official
censor had a permanent office in every cultural institution. Few of the vital polit-
ical or social issues of the day could be candidly discussed; many of the leading
talents, such as Slawomir Mrozek (b. 1930), the dramatist, or Roman Polanski
(b, 1933), and Andrzej Wajda (b. 1926) the film-directors, preferred to work
abroad for long periods. As Mrozek has shown in his play Emigranci (The
Emigrants), which consists of an unbroken conversation between a nameless
intellectual and a nameless worker, Intellectual Freedom had itself become one
of the burning cultural issues:
AA: It's an astonishing thing, but a man who is otherwise quite sensible, like me, does
not want to see the most obvious truth when it hurts his pride. At first I jumped
around like a monkey in a cage. I swung on my tail, leaping with great speed from
the bar to the wall, or from the wall to the bar: or when given a nut, I tried to crawl
into the shell, to feel myself lord of limitless spaces. It was a very long time before I
really escaped from my illusions and convinced myself that I really was a monkey
in a cage.
XX: Monkeys are funny, I've seen them at the zoo.
AA: You're right. Monkeys in a cage can be funny. That's why, when I finally decided
that I was a monkey, I began to laugh at myself, and I kept on laughing until the
tears ran down my mush. Then I realized that my clowning was not so hilarious,
although it amused my audience and my keepers enough for them to throw me extra
nuts and sweets. But the sweets made me sick, and I could no longer climb into the
shells. It was then that I understood how for a monkey there was no other way but
to admit that he was a monkey. ..
XX: Of course, of course.
AA: And also, from his monkeyish, slave-like condition, to draw if not pride then at least
widsom and strength... For in me, in this humiliated, imprisoned monkey, in my
brutish predicament, the entire knowledge of humanity was enshrined, fundamen-
tal knowledge, that is knowledge unspoiled by the accidents of progress or the haz-
ards of freedom. For this reason, I, an imprisoned monkey, determined to write a
book on Man.
XX: But monkeys can't write books.
AA: I agree, especially in a cage. But that point was only proved later on. For the time
being, I was crazed by the prospect of writing my life's work about Man in his pure
state, about Man the slave, about myself, the first such work that the world has seen
... As I told myself: We may have nothing, but we have slavery.' That's our trea-
sure. What do other people know about such a theme?... The entire literature of
slavery is either phoney, or irrelevant; it's written either by missionaries, or by lib-
erators, or else by slaves longing for Freedom, that is to say by people who have
ceased to be complete slaves. What do they know about integral slavery, turned in
on itself, self-perpetuating with no thought of being transcended? What do they
know of the joys and sorrows of a slave, of the mysteries of slavery, of its beliefs
and customs, of its philosophy and cosmogonia, of its mathematics. They know