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Aleksander Smolar - Life among the émigrés of Paris (143/201)

156 views · Published 20 December 2018 · 3:27 · Indexed 26 September 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: While I was in Aix-en-Provence, there was only one group that I successfully won over – that's very interesting. The one group that I grew close to was the Jesuits. I'd forgotten that among the things I did while I was in Paris, which was also important, was to get involved with, well – I think I've already spoken about this – a Catholic publication. It is highly acclaimed and to this day it continues to be relevant in the intellectual life of France, but after 20 years I've just retired from the editorial board. It's called 'Esprit'. It's the personalists' publication – they are a great formation of Catholic intellectual thought. It was actually hard to tell – it's not Catholic in the same way as publications in Poland are Catholic. Religious issues are almost completely absent – they are there but they are very low-key. It is a publication that covers a range of topics including politics, sociology, philosophy. There were and probably still are – although I no longer have contact with this generation – wonderful people. So I found myself in the midst of a group of Catholics.

Émigrés from various countries gathered around this group of Catholics. Apart from the people from 'Esprit' I met a variety of émigrés, excluding those whom I got to know through the Paris-based 'Kultura'. There was Pavel Tigrid who was a famous personality, a little like a Czech Giedroyc, who published 'Svědectví' in Paris. Incidentally, he had his office on the street on which… which you know very well, namely, the street on which we live in Paris. That's where he had his office. Later, I met several famous Russians. There was Sinyavsky who became my friend – he was an exceptionally colourful character, very intelligent. He refused to learn French and he forced waiters to take his orders in Russian. I was beside him… he lived just outside Paris. He was an extraordinarily colourful character. There was a poet called Delaunay whose ancestry was French and apparently he was descended from the last executioner [sic] of the Bastille. He belonged to this group of rebels who protested against '81 in the Red Square – sorry, in '68 against intervention in Czechoslovakia. And he, although his French ancestry was in the distant past, a young poet – he was still a young man – in the bar he would place his order saying, 'Krasnoe vino, encore!' He drank, he drank a lot. There was Natasha Gorbanevskaya with whom I had the closest of friendships; she later symbolically became a Polish citizen. The Polish government granted her this at her request. She was a poet and she also took part in that protest in Red Square. Maximov was there, too. I knew all of the great… apart from Solzhenitsyn whom I never met, but then I don't think he was ever in Paris. So I knew all of the well-known, the most famous Russians.

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