By now there could be no doubt. Pushing and thrashing, people pressed closer to the speakers. The accompaniment fell silent. A moment later the same voice rang out a third time:
“Paris speaking!”
After the unbelievable testimonials of the English pilot, this sounded like the key to a baffling riddle. A second later the voice rang out again, emphatic and deafening:
“Paris speaking! At present, the city of Paris holds seven radio stations built over the past two years, with an average capacity of 500 kilowatts apiece. We have set our machines to the frequencies of all the Continent’s most popular stations. Tuning in to any of these, you will have no choice but to hear our voice, several times more powerful than their antennae…”
The words fell silent. For a second you could hear the broadcast of the smothered station, laconically announcing that the Japanese were declaring war against the Soviet Union. A moment later the same voice drowned everything out again:
“Workers! Soldiers! Peasants! This is the revolutionary government of Paris speaking. The Paris you thought dead is alive. The rumors of the raging epidemic are all lies. The Paris epidemic was eradicated two years ago. The only survivors were the thousands-strong Parisian proletariat who had been thrown in prison during the May crackdowns. The proletariat survived amid the ruins of the old Paris through their isolation in prison, and during these years they have erected a new Paris – a free workers’ commune. Seeking to ga… the ti… start…”
Through the tangled web of words came the jaunty chords of a piano:
crooned the tenor from the smothered station.
“…the imperialist war, brought on by your bourgeois governments against the world’s first worker-peasant state, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, thrusting a blade into the chest of the revolutionary proletariat of all nations, forces us to break this artificial isolation for the first time and turn… direc…”
the stubborn tenor warbled on.
“This is the workers’ Paris. Workers! Peasants! People bound by the yoke! A war against the USSR is a war against you, a war against our commune that you shall defend, as an international revolutionary bastion in the sea of capitalist Europe. Pick up your arms! All for revolutionary Paris! For dis… pea… with the Uni…”
“…live… your revolution of workers and pea…! Down with the mili… pitalist… live… vil war! Long live Paris, capital of the French Socialist Republic of Soviets!”
The black maws of the speakers blared the brassy fanfare of The Internationale.
The crowds were consumed, it seemed, by a frenzy. People ran, shoving and trampling one another. Thousands of mouths agape with astonishment picked up the lingering refrain of The Internationale.
And under the swollen sails of the song the masses shuddered like titanic ships, creaking in their joints, swaying in the shallows of the roadways and heavily pushing forward.
Afterword
At present, one of the few objects in Poland commemorating the life and work of Bruno Jasieński – a high school that bore his name in his hometown of Klimontów – has officially undergone a name change,[1] on the grounds that the writer in question is not “a role model for today’s youth” and, indeed, has a “demoralizing effect” on their young minds. Leaving aside the question of the desirability of judging literature on such criteria, what seems most astonishing is that even now, over seventy years after his torture and execution in a Soviet prison, Jasieński is still such a socially awkward commodity, certain to make Anglophone readers as uncomfortable as Polish ones. Most of the greatest writers seem to have been born at the wrong time, but only a small handful of the truly odd ones feel as though they wouldn’t be quite at home – or embraced – at anytime.
Bruno Jasieński arrived in Paris in the fall of 1925. In his last surviving statement for the Russian NKVD before his execution, he listed three reasons for leaving Poland: (1) he had graduated from university and was due to serve twenty months of compulsory military service, (2) he was being sued for alleged blasphemy during one of his poetry readings in Lwów (today’s Lviv, Ukraine), which could have resulted in a year or two in prison, and (3) he was an unemployed literature graduate whose scandalous reputation scarcely promised him work as a high-school teacher. Difficult as it may be to imagine from today’s perspective, his poetry readings had been banned by the police in many Polish cities, and on one occasion an audience had even stoned him for his work.
Jasieński intended to learn French and to write novels in his new language. Instead, he immediately enrolled in Chinese and Japanese classes, and wrote freelance articles for the Wiek Nowy[2] newspaper in Lwów. Among other events, he covered the exhumation of renowned Romantic poet Juliusz Słowacki’s remains in Paris and their shipment back to Poland. He also worked as a director at the Polish Workers’ Theater, where he staged an adaptation of one of his own poems.
The decision to write I Burn Paris is immortalized in Aleksander Wat’s conversations with Czesław Miłosz in My Century. Wat claims that Jasieński misunderstood the title of Paul Morand’s newly published novel Je brûle Moscou (brûler also has the idiomatic meaning, to “travel through quickly”), and was so enraged that he set about writing a retaliation piece: Je brûle Paris. Poland’s most untiring Jasieński advocate, Krzysztof Jaworski, suggests in Bruno Jasieński in Paris that this story might have been somewhat embellished: Jasieńśki had written positive reviews of Morand’s work, a rarity in Jasienski’s critical output, suggesting that the “rage” might have been colored in for effect. But such is the appeal of Wat’s story that it retains its hold in the popular imagination.
Jasieński was indeed expelled from France for this novel, and import of the book (it was originally serialized in L’Humanité) was forbidden on the grounds that it “exuded blind and stupid hatred for Western European culture.” Nor did it do much for his popularity in Poland, though in Russia it became a legitimate phenomenon: the first edition of 140,000 copies sold out in a matter of days, prompting a second edition of 220,000 copies.
I Burn Paris remains a reluctantly acknowledged masterpiece in part because of all its ambiguities. The effect comes from following moral impulses so obsessively that they sometimes become their own opposites. The novel marks what is generally thought to be Jasieński’s transition from Futurism to Catastrophism. His Futurist poetry took the staccato rhythm and mechanics of typewriters, trams, factories etc. as their substance, a quality echoed in Part 1 of the noveclass="underline"
1
The school is now officially the Urszula Ledóchowska Liceum, named after the plucky Roman-Catholic nun-cum-saint.
2