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Aleksander Smolar - Providing food for the soul (156/201)

87 views · Published 20 December 2018 · 3:48 · Indexed 30 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: This always fascinated me – I used to say ironically, metaphorically that Poland is a specific country of the interior meaning that it's very self-absorbed and unfortunately, today this a burden, a ballast which weighs down the intellectual and political life of the country. I find it with distressing frequency even in people who are extremely critical of the current events in Poland. There's an inability to pass beyond this and to show our differences and our similarities. Perhaps there are more general principles and it isn't just a problem that Joe Average has, even if his name happens to be Kaczyński, that maybe there are certain processes involved, certain structural phenomena. This doesn't happen very often even in people who have a title prefixing their names, academics. So from this point of view, I believe… there are publications which are reprints of Western newspapers, but on a deeper intellectual level – namely, essays – we're not talking about specialist publications because sociologists read in English and read Western specialist publications as do economists. However, this middle level of general reflection or information on public issues, going relatively deeper than anything you'd find in a daily, weekly or even monthly periodical – this kind of food for the soul is almost non-existent. Still, I won't be doing anything about that… it's obvious that I won't be doing anything about that now. In any case, it was a fragment of our lives, a certain stage which we can recall with undeniable pleasure and satisfaction. I mean, it was useful and this was confirmed by numerous declarations and reprints. In general, we – this small group of people, beginning with family and those around them – played an important publishing, intellectual and informative function. Well, we were also lobbyists organising help and here, the London Smolars played a far more significant role although we did all kinds of things. In addition, there were people in Sweden who had a link with us and in America and in Italy, and they were doing similar things. We were all connected and were more or less from the same wave of emigration and generation; if you compared us with the old emigration, which was huge, then we have nothing to be ashamed of. The old emigrants undoubtedly did considerably more – there was a huge number of them, at least in London, and they created a whole raft of institutions; in England itself they in some sense rebuilt Poland in exile. Nevertheless, in terms of relations with Poland I think that we – bearing in mind the number of people and the potential that we had at our disposal – we did a great deal in the time that I, that we spent as émigrés.

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