Look Who it Was Random video

Aleksander Smolar - Who was contributing material to 'Aneks'? (152/201)

96 views · Published 20 December 2018 · 3:19 · Indexed 23 September 2026

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

Watch on YouTube

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: So that was the profile 'Aneks' had from the start. One of our first issues was Utopia and socialism, actually no, I think it was Utopia and the Left, in other words the utopian dimension of the left wing. We published what you could call typical texts, sovietological or in other words, analyses of the countries in our region written by Western specialists. We reprinted texts by Czech oppositionists and not only oppositionists, but also from the time of the Prague Spring – Hungarians, Russians; that was the world where our interests lay. It was the world of concepts that could feed the spirit, a world of information about countries which were or ought to be close to Poles because they, too, were dealing with similar issues. We compared various texts – texts on philosophy, on political science, on economics and, because of my interests, we published a lot of material on economics. Later, when we were publishing Polish material, we had some very good people working with us. There was Włodzimierz Brus, my former boss, Staszek Gomułka from the London School of Economics, and there was other Polish content on economics and sociology – we had some very good ones, like the one from Bauman. I can't recall at the moment whether we had anything from Marysia Hirszowicz. We also had essays on philosophy and on general topics by Leszek Kołakowski and some material from the younger generation. At first, this was well-received in the West. The thing that was characteristic in our case and was linked to our burden, the baggage we carried around with us was that for a long time we didn't add an imprint page so no names, my own included, were published. It appeared later – only my name. It wasn't an imprint page because there was no real editorial board – that kind of thing was spontaneous from one issue to the next. This then changed and besides it was a sort of family business meaning Iśka and Nina, and Gienek and I were the permanent staff running things. In addition, there were close associates, people like Dorosz, Gross whereas the others were people who gladly took part in frequent discussions, suggested content, translated – people who were very dedicated and of whom there was a growing number coming from Poland. In any case, my name appears very late, very late. It was the same in Radio Free Europe where I used a pseudonym and in the newspaper, and my texts… for a long time, my contributions to 'Aneks' were signed using various pseudonyms.

More from this channel