The pulse in Jasieński’s poetry is a mechanical one. It was (remains) shocking for its bold disregard of what this mechanization means, preferring merely to hand us a portrait of the state of things in the modern world and making a poetry that reflects it. Yet in his prose the wonderment is gone, the machine has run amok, and the ramifications of this state of things has become the focus. Even so, the recurrence of these images retain some of the young Futurist’s fascination for the factory-made man, and his prose holds onto the one-two punch of the poetry’s mechanized rhythm. The repetition of such adjectives as “matte” and “flickering” tell us something else: Jasieński’s novel is an early example of literature with a distinctly cinematic sensibility (Eisenstein is certainly a reference point), a narrative viewed through a camera lens.
A similar ambiguity emerges in Jasieński’s treatment of the moral decadence and degradation of society, which takes many forms: brothels, child prostitution, racism, grinding poverty, jazz music, the lifestyles of the upper classes and the bourgeoisie, and so on. Pierre, the novel’s initial protagonist (whose death occurs early, in a strangely offhand gesture), appears as a kind of interwar Candide, stumbling through the dark woods of modern French society, pummeled by its various mechanisms. Of course, in the midst of detailing the horrors that await Pierre in his descent to madness, Jasieński ends up writing passages that very much resemble a decadent novel. Everything is grotesquely bent out of shape, but the sections detailing the revulsion and vileness are, from a literary point of view, some of the most compelling to read. It is a dilemma familiar to the religious painter: Hell is more fun to paint.
Finally, there is a strange and unresolvable contradiction in the fact that a novel which culminates in celebrating the triumph of socialism and its potential to spread across Europe is also a novel whose central motif is the spread of a deadly and unstoppable plague.
None of this is to doubt the sincerity or conviction of Jasieński’s aims. The violent imagery of anti-Semitism in the form of a Jewish refugee casually murdered by a Russian officer seems a precursor to the jarring images from World War II. The impression is made all the more powerful when one recalls how rare such graphic depictions were in European literature then. Jasieński’s humane treatment of P’an, the Chinese communist, again runs counter to the period’s common fear of a yellow horde ready to sweep across the Continent. What remains impressive in I Burn Paris is the fact that, whatever the moral or political status of the characters, Jasieński gives them full rights to our understanding and sympathy. In this disease-infested Paris everyone may well be cutting everyone else’s throats, and the portrait of humanity as it stands might be dismal beyond repair, but as individuals, everyone gets a fair hearing, a fleshed-out literary existence.
But the ambiguities I have mentioned do seem to suggest that there is a subconscious, or subterranean, life to the narrative, one that goes unacknowledged by the writer as such, but which is perhaps the chief source of discomfort in reading the novel. Whether it is the Futurist undermining the Catastrophist, Jasieński casting doubt on his own best intentions, or a classic case of attraction/repulsion syndrome, it is a tension that runs through much of the book.
I should note in passing (though without the humility of a footnote) that the translator’s introduction – surely the most conservative of all arts, save perhaps typography – has undergone a shift in demeanor over the past few decades which is, not surprisingly, reflective of the shift in the so-called art of translating as such. This shift might broadly be defined as one from creative virtuosity to academic fidelity – both approaches with their own pitfalls – and accordingly, the sometimes disarming sincerity and eccentricity of translators’ introductions of the 1960s and 1970s has largely given way to those that are at best blandly informative, and at worst larded with an academic rhetoric that puts the translator in a position of authority over his subject (i.e., the writer being translated). As I have no intention of playing such shabby tricks with the reader, because I am old-fashioned enough to believe that a translation should be motivated, above all, by a kind of bald enthusiasm for the author at hand, and ultimately, because this particular writer is one of painful, and sometimes uncomfortable honesty, I should like to include the following.
Any introduction to I Burn Paris should explain what I see as the real tragedy of Bruno Jasieński, though I would like to refrain from wringing my hands and gnashing my teeth. The tragedy has less to do with the conventional pathos of a highly gifted writer sentenced to death in the vast slaughter of Stalinist Russia (though surely this is tragic enough), than with a more unconventional sort of tragedy: that of an artist pursuing his own delusions to the bitter end. From his earliest poetry, Jasieński was a writer with a powerful sense of his own showmanship and the manufacture of his own identity. This included the monocle he liked to wear, the pseudonym (real name: Wiktor Zysman), affiliation with various literary movements, manifestoes, public statements, rallies, and performances. Even as an aesthetic writer (as opposed to the politically engaged writer he later became), he had an acute sense of creating a persona – the writer himself was viewed as another fictional character. Jasieński’s literary voice is seldom, if ever, an intimate one – it is that of a man holding forth from a tribunal or a podium. It is a Romantic impulse, a sign that a writer sees his role as a spokesman for the people (compare Bruno Schulz’s “secretly clasping his reader’s hand under the table”).
There is a certain inevitability, perhaps, in such writers finding politics. Like many avant-garde artists of his time, Jasieński identified with Marxism. When he found himself expelled from France after the publication of I Burn Paris, the Soviet Union gave him a hero’s welcome (a surviving photograph: crowds with banners at the train station, gathered round to greet him). His public addresses maintained the confidence and bluster of his early Futurist manifestoes. That is to say, one has the creeping suspicion that the character of Jasieński the writer (as opposed to Zysman – whoever he was) had not been fundamentally altered, it was only the rhetoric and the vocabulary that had changed. When the purges began in earnest in the 1930s and it became very dangerous to be a public persona, Jasieński had already made a few enemies, and he was soon fighting accusations of being a Polish spy and an enemy of the people. He was arrested on July 31, 1937, and executed on September 17, 1938.
There survive a few of his letters written from captivity directly to Stalin, begging for clemency. In his last letter of many pages, written in self-defense, he lists the shocking tortures to which he was subjected (fingernails pulled out, teeth kicked in), but just as shockingly, for the first time, we seem to hear Zysman speaking, begging to be allowed to die rather than continue the tortures. Zysman drops all the swagger of his character. And if I am not wholly mistaken, there is a dim recognition of the insanity of having arrived there simply for having played his role – and a confusion at the notion of all this fiction ultimately having such brutal consequences.