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Aleksander Smolar - The genesis of 'Aneks' (44/201)

145 views · Published 18 December 2018 · 2:12 · Indexed 7 October 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2018 · News & Politics

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To listen to more of Aleksander Smolar’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFwlxPLurqAOCrabBgGrqLA7

Aleksander Smolar (b. 1940) is a Polish writer, political activist and adviser, vice-president of the Institute for Human Sciences and president of the Stefan Batory Foundation. [Listener: Vitek Tracz]

TRANSCRIPT: But coming back to that other aspect of my identity, namely my annual stay in Italy which gives me time to consider my own situation: who am I, what am I going to do, and in some way how I’m going to overcome my trauma. The people there, who made up the circle around my brother and his wife in Uppsala in Sweden, also played a role in this. They had all kinds of ideas, not all of them particularly fully developed, of what to do for Poland. I remember arriving there and we had a series of meetings where I proposed publishing a literary quarterly, firstly, because I believed that many of us came from an academic background. We were in America when Janek Gross or Irena Gross, or in Sweden there were people from the academic world, or like me with my wife in France, or in other words, we naturally turned to people with the same background as ours. Secondly, it was also a question of a practical choice, meaning, we couldn’t count on smuggling through large numbers of copies to say nothing about finding the means to publish lots of copies. In light of this, these cost benefits, as economists would say, in other words the relation between the cost and the effect, inclined us to produce an elite publication which meant that we’d appeal to a relatively limited group of people and not like some people thought, publish a newspaper for workers or something like that. And that’s how 'Aneks' came to be which in some way defined our role, namely that we wanted to be nothing more than an appendix and did not under any circumstances have any aspiration like those of traditional Polish émigrés, to lead events, to inspire the things that were happening in Poland.

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