Steps by jerzy kosinski pdf professional#

The photographic darkroom emerged as a perfect metaphor for my life. Until I left for America I lived the life of an “inner émigré,” as I called myself. From week to week, from meeting to meeting, it was a very perilous existence. I was twice thrown out from the Students’ Union and twice ordered back. Still, the accusations, the reprimands, the attacks, continued. I avoided having close friends, men and women who would know too much about me and could be coerced into testifying against me. Within the limits of the totalitarian doctrine there is no defense against the supremacy of the Party that claims to be “the arm of the people.” When I was growing up in a Stalinist society my guidelines were: Am I going to survive physically? Mentally? Am I going to remain a decent being? Will they, the Party, succeed in turning me into their pawn and unleash me against others like me? Since I could not avoid being in conflict with the Party, the unions, the whole totalitarian routine imposed on everyone, my real plight had to remain hidden. One’s whole life depended on an outcome of such an accusation-and of the review of one’s total conduct that followed.

Then my case was picked up by the Party cell of the Students’ Union at the university. They are geared to policing that is what they’re there for. These unions control work assignments and permits, exhibitions, grants, awards, etcetera. The same politically oriented State setup as the Writers’ Union, you know. For the same reason, I was also suspended at the university, but then reinstated thanks to my uniformly good grades-and the personal intervention by the dean and the rector, both scholars of “the old guard.”įirst, the Party members of the Photographers’ Union. My membership in the union and my right to have my photographs published or exhibited nationally or abroad was suspended for an indefinite period. It ended on a very unpleasant political note however at one annual meeting of the Photographers’ Union I was officially accused of being a cosmopolitan who sees the flesh, but not its social implications. I even produced some nudes of rather attractive nonsocialist female forms. My photographs pointed out an independent, naked human being who, even in the total State, was still willing to be photographed naked.

They showed the solitude of a man alone in an empty field or on a crowded street, and the State buildings and Party memorials, ridiculously monumental, inhuman in their grandeur. Thus, my photographs often portrayed old age, which knows no politics. Within the limits of photography, I could contrast collective behavior with individual destiny. Given the dimensions of the political trap, could you express in photographs anything you felt? Which language would I choose? I was split, like a child who belongs to two different families studying in Polish at the university, but at home-my parents, even though Polish, were both Russian-born and -educated-all that mattered was Russian tradition and Russian literature. Of course, there were some other reasons for my apprehension about becoming a writer.

Steps by jerzy kosinski pdf professional#

That’s why I slowly moved toward visual expression: while officially studying social psychology, I became a professional photographer. I considered this a trap: I would not speak for it nor could I publicly speak against it. To be a writer was to become a spokesman for a particular philosophical dogma. Make no mistake about it: all my generation was perfectly aware of the political price paid for our existence in the total State.

I never saw myself as a man willingly expressing opinions in a totalitarian State. I would never have written in Polish or in Russian. If you had continued to live in Eastern Europe and written in Polish or, as you were bilingual, in Russian, do you think your novels would have been published? And if so, would they have been popular? Kosinski was traveling abroad and could not be reached when the transcribed text, prepared by interviewers Rocco Landesman and George Plimpton, was ready for his review. Photograph by Rob MieremetĮditor’s Note: The following conversation with Jerzy Kosinski, which does not contain the customary interviewer’s headnote, is a much expanded version of the one that appeared in The Paris Review in 1972. Interviewed by George Plimpton & Rocco Landesman Issue 54, Summer 1972