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JM Coetzee on Zbigniew Herbert
The Nobel Prize-winning novelist celebrates Zbigniew Herbert, whose defiant work proved that even the darkest times call for poetry
He was admitted to the Polish Writers’ Union, but resigned from the comfortably subsidised life it provided when, after the Stalinist takeover of 1948, a straitjacket of socialist realism was imposed on the arts, and the humanities faculties of universities were purged of non-Marxist tendencies. The clampdown on political activity imposed by the Soviet Union in its satellites, with tight controls over thought and expression, was not the only impediment to a rebirth of autonomous Polish cultural life. The decision to become an ironist for life can, ironically, backfire; or, to recall the extended figure in “A Small Heart”, the bullet that you fired decades ago can go all the way around the globe and hit you in the back.
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