Stanislaw Jerzy Lec did not die — he changed his lifestyle

Ukrainian book lovers should hurry and buy this book that can be read in the morning and evening; you can open it and read an aphorism, drink from a bottomless well of wisdom, and leave home feeling well armed. It is easier to live with Lec. Yesterday you were ready to throw yourself into a wall, and today you realize: “Suppose you succeed in breaking the wall with your head. And what, then, will you do in the next cell?”

In reality, though, things are not that pessimistic; we understand that “it is easy to hang puppets. The rope is already there.” Therefore, “let us blow into our own sails. Let’s search for new shores.” “Dealings with undersized individuals deform the spine.” And finally: “I had to spread my wings because I was thrown from the supreme heights without a parachute.”

Needless to say, every intellectual already has a Russian translation of Lec in his home library, but this is the first Ukrainian translation. Unkempt Thoughts, Read on Napkins and in Notebooks Thirty Years Later is the title of the newly published book. I must point out the significance of the fact that a Galician translator worked on two Polish books to publish a Ukrainian one. It was easier for him to find Ukrainian equivalents of Polish words and expressions used by the author who actually wrote in “Galician.” The book was released by the Kyiv publishing company Dukh i knyha (Spirit and Book).

Stanislaw Jerzy Lec was born in Lviv on March 5, 1909, and during trying periods in his life he returned to the city several times. He loved Warsaw, of course, but he was very fond of Lviv. Nor was it coincidental that his son Tomasz single-handedly organized a small exhibit consisting of five plane-tables weighing some 30 kilograms. Through innovative technology the plane-tables can be opened up in five minutes to show Lec and Lviv, photographs and charts, manuscripts, and more photographs.

One photograph portrays the five-year-old Lec posing with his father against the backdrop of old Lviv. They are looking at each other. At this very moment Baron de Tusch-Letz may have been telling his son about banking because he cherished plans of Stanislaw becoming a bank manager, a respectable man and owner of several banks, who would consistently and confidently build his capital until his dying day, surrounded by his large family.

Destiny, however, decided differently. Shortly afterwards the family moved to Vienna. His father died, and his mother Adele, who was from a landowning family in Safrin, returned to Lviv.

Tomasz Lec said he wanted to see the place where his family had lived — in a prestigious district of the city, on Slovatska Street, opposite the post office. He took several pictures of the building and then walked the streets, admiring the city. “That’s precisely how I’ve always visualized Lviv. I knew the city from pictures and charts. My father studied here in well-known schools, like the Evangelist Oberschule and Kamerling High School. Then he enrolled in Jan Casimir University, where he majored in Polish studies and law and made his literary debut. He received his Master’s degree here and published his first collection of verse entitled Barvy (Colors).”

As a student Lec was embarrassed by his wealthy home with its rich furniture and aristocratic lifestyle. In fact, throughout his life he surprised everyone who knew him with his contradictions. His first wife wrote that when he was a young man he was a socialist, despite the luxury lavished upon him by his family. He was a communist in Nazi-occupied Poland. He wrote poems in German in Lviv under the Soviets and made no secret of his title, Baron de Tusch-Letz, in the Polish People’s Republic. Moreover, he insisted on this title being placed on record. For nearly his entire life he had a portrait of Franz Josef hanging on the wall over his desk, and he made a special point of wearing cufflinks custom-made for him in Frankfurt out of gold coins and depicting the state emblem of Austro-Hungary.

His quirks were not rooted in melancholy peacockery or Lady Fate’s benign attitude. He had his share of the rough treatment visited upon every child of Abraham. His forefathers had followed the mythical road of the Jewish Diaspora, traversing Spain, Holland, and Germany, reaching the Slavic territories, becoming assimilated and adapted, as has always been the case with Jews. Once a lady asked him how long it had taken him to “become formed.” Six thousand years, Lec told her politely. He knew what he was talking about.

As a result of his political activities — writing articles for socialist revolutionary periodicals, making speeches in the Technological Institute’s Yellow Hall — Lec had to leave Lviv for Warsaw. There his works quickly became popular, and the “literary cabaret” he founded in collaboration with Leon Pasternak (referred to as the Theater of Boys by some and as the Five Kopeck Theater by others), was closed by authorities after eight performances. Nor did his law-abiding image improve after he took part in a congress of cultural workers initiated by the Antifascist Popular Front.

Realizing this and fearing arrest, Lec fled to Romania, but returned to Warsaw shortly afterwards, got married, and started living like a regular man of letters, having to economize on everything, even on the most basic needs. All his hardships notwithstanding, he paid for coffee when he shared Witold Gombrowicz’s table, sometimes Julian Tuwim’s. Cafes played a special role in his life. That was where he did his creative work, watching and listening to customers. He sometimes wrote on napkins. He set his texts to Galician motifs that, in turn, revealed Austrian, Polish, or Ukrainian melodies. He wrote down his thoughts in streetcars and park benches. He was the “last European peripatetic philosopher,” according to Krzysztof Teodor Toeplitz.

After the Second World War broke out, Lec returned to Lviv and was captured by the Nazis. His biographers claim that he made two escapes from Nazi concentration camps. The first one succeeded when he was in a coffin that he built himself; the second time he stole a Nazi uniform and took advantage of his perfect command of German. God only knows how this man twice evaded execution by firing squad or how he made it back to Warsaw.

When he reached the Polish capital, his physical and moral exhaustion took its toll. He had nowhere to hide, nothing to eat, and suicidal thoughts crowded his mind. Eventually he overcame these ideas and joined the local resistance movement. He edited the underground newspaper Soldier in Combat, the organ of the Popular Guard and later of the Armia Ludowa (Popular Army). He even took part in the partisan movement, for which he was eventually promoted to major (reserves) and awarded the Officer’s Cross of the Polish Renaissance.

God preserved his talent for the last decade of his life, when Lec’s aphorisms were flying from his pen and enriching the world. (Who does not remember the last page of Literaturna Hazeta, which people literally tore out of each other’s hands because Lec was published there?) People read them as though they were inhaling fresh air and laughed either at his “thoughts,” which he called his aphorisms, or about their own lives: “Watch you don’t get crushed under someone else’s wheel of fortune.” “All is in the hands of man. Therefore wash them often.” “Hay smells different to lovers and horses.”

Lec admitted: “What exactly am I writing: aphorisms, fiddle-faddle, lyrics, or satire? Oh no, I am writing myself and my diary.” Intellect, lyricism, and even satire are at the roots of his aphorisms. “Perceive the world as a game of contradictions and interpret it in the form of a linguistic paradox.” One time Lec received a letter from a reader, who wrote: “One must be very well read to comprehend your Unkempt Thoughts.” His wired reply was: “One must be! Must be! They want me to write for every militia sergeant. No! I won’t write for less than a second lieutenant.” Although the term “elite reading” does not fit Unkempt Thoughts, neither can it be described as “literature for the masses.” It is simply that in this case “sergeant” and “second lieutenant” represent various cultural strata. To some people conscience and soul mean something, and to others — nothing.

One cannot read Lec’s Unkempt Thoughts in one shot. You must have time to smile wholeheartedly or with a taste of sorrow, and catch yourself thinking, does this remind me of something? “How do you recognize a historical storm? Your bones hurt for a long time afterwards.” Or aphorisms like “Tell me whom you sleep with and I shall tell you whom you dream of,” “Several times I caught myself looking for myself on a globe through a magnifying glass,” “Even the voice of conscience undergoes mutation.”

I want to stop, but I continue quoting because I feel that what is said is magnificent: “A blood transfusion is often from one pocket to another,” “You can die on the island of St. Helena without being a Napoleon,” and “Do not write your credo on a fence.”

During the “Thaw” in the Soviet Union in the 1960s, Lec was practically unknown. At the time he was read in Poland and Germany and significantly later in Russia and Ukraine. “The aphorism is a form of the oldest book from which stemmed the ‘sciences’ of Ptah Hotep dating to 24 B.C., also the books of wisdom of the Old Testament. Ancient philosophy has reached our day in the form of aphorisms, and scattered and enigmatic expressions. It may be stated with confidence that European culture relies on several such expressions, of which the most significant one reads, ‘Know thyself.’”

We find this quote from a wall of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi on the first page of the first publication of Unkempt Thoughts, writes Lydia Koschka, one of the foremost German scholars of Stanislaw Jerzy Lec. Her article served as the foreword to the first Ukrainian translation of this Polish and world literary classic of the 20th century. The fact that his Unkempt Thoughts is available to the Ukrainian reader only now is both a serious failure and cause for great joy. So many people will now be able to discover Lec for themselves. A long time ago a friend of mine tried to convince me that those who understand every nuance of Yaroslav Hasek’s humor should read him in Ukrainian because Russian does not convey the special color of the original language.

Something similar can be said about Lec, of course, thanks to Andrii Pavlyshyn. He translated Lec with all his soul and the skill of a real Galician enhanced by the intellectuality of a journalist whose articles are close in spirit to Lec. Perhaps this is why the idea of the translation succeeded.

“It is easiest to translate poems and novels,” says Pavlyshyn, “because you have lots of space to maneuver there. But here you have a short text, a handful of words, go figure. You have to use universally recognized cultural values. I didn’t even try to translate some five percent of the two books that were published earlier, which were the basis of this collection; the meaning would have been lost.”

Karl Dedecius, a renowned historian of literature and Polish-German translator, traces the etymology of Lec’s surname. His conclusion is that fate decided to literally translate the Latin expression, nomen est omen (The name is a sign) in regard to Stanislaw. Letz means buffoon in Hebrew. In Middle German Lentze means a borderland fortification or fortified wall, lending it political meaning. The German letzen means both to fortify and to oppress, which can be associated with final matters (Letzte Dinge). Finally, Lec [Letz] means a funeral ritual. One is reminded of Mickiewicz’s Dziady (Forefathers’ Eve) and the march “Our Sea,” which ends with the words “He died with honor.”

Be that as it may, Lec wrote his own finest epitaph with his own aphorisms: “He who does not fit into a drawer should luxuriate in a coffin.” “Do not grow larger than pantheons.” “The end of an obituary: he did not die! He changed his lifestyle.”

Stanislaw Jerzy Lec truly did not die. He is alive and will live for as long as his aphorisms remain topical, as long as we will continue to laugh and mourn over his expressions, reading them through the night, unable to close the book and turn in.