Awangarda: Tradition and Modernity in Postwar Polish Music

By Lisa Cooper Vest

In Awangarda, Lisa Cooper Vest explores how the Polish postwar musical avant-garde framed itself in contrast to its Western European counterparts. Rather than a rejection of the past, the Polish avant-garde movement emerged as a manifestation of national cultural traditions stretching back into the interwar years and even earlier into the nineteenth century. Polish composers, scholars, and political leaders wielded the promise of national progress to broker consensus across generational and ideological divides. Together, they established an avant-garde musical tradition that pushed against the limitations of strict chronological time and instrumentalized discourses of backwardness and forwardness to articulate a Polish road to modernity. This is a history that resists Cold War periodization, opening up new ways of thinking about nations and nationalism in the second half of the twentieth century.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Dec 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9780520975422

Lisa Cooper Vest

Lisa Cooper Vest is Assistant Professor of Musicology at University of Southern California 

Book preview

Awangarda

The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Constance and William Withey Endowment Fund in History and Music.

Awangarda

Tradition and Modernity in Postwar Polish Music

Lisa Cooper Vest

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2021 by Lisa Cooper Vest

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Vest, Lisa Cooper, author.

Title: Awangarda : tradition and modernity in postwar Polish music / Lisa Vest.

Description: Oakland : University of California Press, 2020. | Series: California studies in 20th-century music ; 28 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020016912 (print) | LCCN 2020016913 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520344242 (cloth) | ISBN 9780520975422 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Music—Poland—20th century—History and criticism. | Avant-garde (Music)—Poland—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC ML297.5 .V47 2020 (print) | LCC ML297.5 (ebook) | DDC 780.9438/0904—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016912

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016913

Manufactured in the United States of America

30  29  28  27  26  25  24  23  22  21

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

In loving memory of my mother, Evelyn Cooper

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Backwardness (Zaległość): Defining Musical Modernity in Poland before and after World War II

2. Lack (Brak): The Shifting Status of the Artist-Intellectual Class during the Thaw

3. The Dissemination of Culture (Upowszechnienie kultury): Rebuilding Elite Institutions and Educating Elite Audiences

4. Lag (Opóźnienie): Genius Construction and Looking Back to Move Forward

5. Modernity (Nowoczesność): Bogusław Schäffer and the Cult of the New

6. Awangarda: The Polish Avant-Garde as Tradition

7. Backward and Forward: The Polish Avant-Garde as Progress

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

1. Mapa wyjazdów, (1948).

2. Zygmunt Mycielski, Silesian Overture (Uwertura śląska) (1948; published 1950).

3. Zbigniew Turski, Symphony no. 2, Olympic (1948; published 1967), page 8.

4. Zbigniew Turski, Symphony no. 2, Olympic (1948; published 1967), page 87.

5. Włodzimierz Kotoński, Etude for a Single Cymbal Stroke (Etiuda na jedno uderzenie w talerz) (1959; published 1963), opening pages.

6a and 6b. Scenes from A Stroll through Old Town (Spacerek staromiejski) (1958; dir. Andrzej Munk).

7. Ruch Muzyczny 1, no. 10 (1957), page 4.

8. Ruch Muzyczny 1, no. 10 (1957), page 1.

9. Witold Lutosławski, Funeral Music (Muzyka żałobna) (1958), opening.

10. Witold Lutosławski, Funeral Music (Muzyka żałobna) (1958), pages 8–9.

11. Bogusław Schäffer, New Music: Problems in Contemporary Compositional Technique (Nowa muzyka: problemy współczesnej techniki kompozytorskiej) (1958).

12a and 12b. Bogusław Schäffer, Quattro movimenti (1957; published 1960), pages 45 and 60.

13. Bogusław Schäffer, Tertium datur (1958; published 1962), Movement 2, harpsichord score for Variation 5.

14. Bogusław Schäffer, Monosonata (1959; published 1960), opening bars.

15. Bogusław Schäffer, Monosonata (1959; published 1960), distribution of performers.

16. Bogusław Schäffer, Monosonata (1959; published 1960), Variation 1.

17. Bogusław Schäffer, Monosonata (1959; published 1960), Variations 15 and 16.

18. Bogusław Schäffer, Monosonata (1959; published 1960), Variation 29.

19. Henryk Mikołaj Górecki, Symphony no. 1, 1959 (1959; published 1961), opening page.

20. Krzysztof Penderecki, Strophes (Strofy) (1959; published 1960), pages 10–11.

21. Henryk Mikołaj Górecki, Scontri (1960), Section 6.

22. Krzysztof Penderecki, Dimensions of Time and Silence (Wymiary czasu i ciszy) (1960/61; published 1962), page 7.

23. Bogusław Schäffer, Concerto per sei e tre (1960; published 1963), page 81.

24. Tadeusz Baird, Etude for vocal orchestra, percussion, and piano (Etiuda na orkiestrę wokalną, perkusję i fortepian) (1962), page 11.

25. Henryk Mikołaj Górecki, Elementi (1962), page 18.

26. Bogusław Schäffer, nonstop (1960; published 1964).

Acknowledgments

In many ways, this is a book about time, and about the many different ways that individuals may experience and respond to time’s passage. It seems fitting, then, to think back upon the twelve-year period during which I worked on this project. This span of more than a decade was a season of great personal change for me, including the death of my mother, multiple moves across two countries and four states, the completion of my PhD, and the start of a new job. In the face of so much change, time sometimes seemed to move very quickly—too quickly—and sometimes to creep forward in stretches of monotony and stagnation. It was only with the financial, intellectual, and emotional support of many institutions and individuals that I was able to develop my ideas, complete my research, and write this project.

I began my study of Polish music, history, and language at Indiana University, where I had been encouraged to apply by my undergraduate mentors, Jan Wubbena and Shirley Forbes Thomas, without whom I would never have imagined attending graduate school or studying musicology. At Indiana University, the faculty of the Musicology Department and the affiliate faculty of the Russian and East European Institute challenged me to think critically about music in historical context. Halina Goldberg recognized something in me when I arrived in Bloomington as a green first-year graduate student. She gave me space to ask questions that were too big, too messy, and she encouraged me to keep going back to the sources, allowing them to lead me forward. Without her guidance, I never would have taken on such an ambitious dissertation project. J. Peter Burkholder, whose vast musical knowledge is only matched by his scholarly and personal generosity, listened to so much music and analyzed scores with me, and he urged me to contextualize postwar Polish composers within a broader narrative of twentieth-century music. Phil Ford always challenged me to move beyond details to the bigger picture, and I certainly would not have found the path from the dissertation to this book’s narrative framework without his challenge. With Padraic Kenney I have discussed Polish history, and especially Polish interpretations and critiques of Soviet ideologies, and I am grateful for his insights. Daniel Melamed’s rigorous work with primary sources influenced my own methods very clearly, and Jane Fulcher’s perceptive questions about artists’ relationships to political power have energized my own investigations of Polish composers working under communism.

In working on my dissertation project, my research and writing were supported by several institutional fellowships. First, in 2009–2010, I was able to complete my initial research with the support of the Fulbright-Hays Program, where I also benefitted from my affiliation with the Institute of Musicology at the University of Warsaw. Professors Zbigniew Skowron and Sławomira Żerańska-Kominek supported my work, arranging introductions, offering advice, and discussing my findings. At the headquarters of the Polish Composers’ Union (Związek Kompozytorów Polskich), union president Mieczysław Kominek, assistant director Izabela Zymer and archivist Beata Dźwigaj granted me full access to the union’s archival materials and to the extensive library of books, scores, and recordings. When I was working at the Archive of Twentieth-Century Polish Composers at the Library of the University of Warsaw, director Piotr Maculewicz and the archivist-librarians Magdalena Borowiec, Elżbieta Jasińska-Jędrosz, and Barbara Kalinowska were endlessly supportive, not only of my work, but also of my well-being during my stay. At Polish Radio, Waldemar Listowski, the director of the Recordings Archive, granted me access to a wide variety of rare recordings; I am also grateful to Paulina Zygier in facilitating my contacts with Polish Radio. The archivists and the director of the Center of Documentation (Ośrodek Dokumentacji) at Polish Television, Tomasz Bujak, allowed me access to archival materials related to Polish Radio. In addition, I had assistance from many archivists at the Archive of New Documents (Archiwum Akt Nowych), at the National Archive in Kraków (Archiwum Narodowe w Krakowie), and at the Annex of the Kraków National Archive, housed in Spytkowice.

While I was in Poland, I had the great privilege to meet and speak with a number of the people whose names appear in my study. I learned so much from my interviews with Ludwik Erhardt, Alina Sawicka-Baird, Włodzimierz Kotoński, and Professors Michał Bristiger, Jan Stęszewski, and Mieczysław Tomaszewski. I want to extend particular thanks to the late Eugeniusz Rudnik, who generously met with me a number of times at the headquarters of Polish Radio, discussing his years as an engineer and composer at the Experimental Studio there, and even giving me tours of the facilities. Mr. Rudnik allowed me access to his private archive of materials, without which I would not have been able to write my case study of the studio in chapter 3. I am also extremely thankful to Bolesław Błaszczyk, who introduced me to Mr. Rudnik and who also invited me into his home to talk about (and listen to) Polish avant-garde music.

After having collected so many materials, I received funding for subsequent reading and writing stages from PEO International, the Mellon Foundation, and from Indiana University. Beyond financial support, though, I depended on the intellectual and emotional support of friends and colleagues who were always ready to identify moments in my argument where I was making assumptions or taking logical leaps. Especially as I immersed myself in the world of Polish cultural politics of the late 1950s and early 1960s, reading reams of party-state documents, archival materials from the Polish Composers’ Union, and press debates, it was helpful to receive generous and intellectually rigorous critique from Katherine Baber, Daniel Bishop, Kunio Hara, Alison Mero, Kerry O’Brien, and Amanda Sewell.

My PhD dissertation provided a foundation for further development, but it was certainly not yet a book. In identifying opportunities for development and thinking about ways to open up my argument for a broader audience—and to answer Phil Ford’s challenge in crafting a compelling narrative—I am thankful for fruitful discussions that I have had with Andrea F. Bohlman, Beata Bolesławska-Lewandowska, Cindy Bylander, Joy Calico, Lisa Jakelski, Katarzyna Naliwajek-Mazurek, J. Mackenzie Pierce, Marysol Quevedo, Nicholas Reyland, Adrian Thomas, David Tompkins, and my colleagues at the University of Southern California Polish Music Center, Marek Zebrowski and Krysta Close. In hearing their perspectives and responding to their questions, feedback, and advice, I was able to reimagine the project in important ways and to incorporate many new resources collected in a 2016 trip to Poland, funded by the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music.

As I began writing the book in earnest, I found a wonderful writing partner in Martha Sprigge, who has read my work, discussed Cold War and postwar history with me, and been my accountability partner. Others who have generously offered their time and energy in reading and responding to my in-progress drafts include Andrea F. Bohlman, Deanna Day, Joanna Demers, K. E. Goldschmitt, J. Daniel Jenkins, Anna Krakus, Andrea Moore, Daniel Castro Pantoja, Douglas Shadle, Nate Sloan, and Nicholas Tochka. I am extremely grateful to my two peer reviewers, Danielle Fosler-Lussier and Kevin Karnes, whose constructive feedback at two different stages in the writing process reminded me to keep my logical through lines clear and to invite my audience to engage with my ideas. Richard Taruskin’s close reading and concern for my translations was extremely helpful; because this book’s argument is grounded in discourse analysis, I appreciated both his and editor Raina Polivka’s willingness to think through my translation choices with me, considering the shades of meaning that attended key concepts. I am also grateful to Josh Rutner for the care he took in preparing this book's index.

Chapter 4 includes material from my chapter, "Witold Lutosławski’s Muzyka żałobna (1958) and the Construction of Genius," in Lutosławski’s Worlds, ed. Nicholas Reyland and Lisa Jakelski, 15–37 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2018). I am grateful to the publishers for their permission to reprint this material. I have also received permissions and support from a whole host of sources with regards to the musical examples that appear throughout this study. Specific crediting information appears in captions, but here I would like to thank Małgorzata Fiedor-Matuszewska and Katarzyna Zuber at Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne in Kraków, Poland; Monika Turska and Zofia Mycielska-Golik, the respective heirs of the Zbigniew Turski and Zygmunt Mycielski estates; Krystyna Gierłowska at the Aurea Porta Foundation; Caroline Kane at Schott Music Corporation; Shari Molstad at Hal Leonard; and Erin Dickenson at Concord Music Publishing/Boosey & Hawkes. Throughout the process of seeking and obtaining permissions, I received generous advice and assistance from colleagues in Europe and the United States: Marcin Bogucki, Beata Bolesławska-Lewandowska, Brian Head, Ted Hearne, Marcin Konik, and Urszula Mieszkieło.

Finally, I want to thank my USC colleagues and students, my friends, and my family, who have provided a constant stream of support and encouragement throughout this long period of work and discovery. Above all, my husband Matthew Vest has been my closest companion, walking with me even during the darkest nights of the soul. He is always my first audience for every draft, every idea, and every argument, and his infectious enthusiasm and energy have buoyed my own spirits, even when they have flagged. I dedicated this book to my mother, but without Matthew, this book would not exist! I love him for that and for a million other things.

Introduction

THE POLISH MUSICAL AVANT-GARDE AND NATIONAL TRADITION

This is a book about Polish musical culture during the Cold War, but it is not a book about the Cold War. This distinction is important because the musical movement known as the Polish avant-garde or the Polish School of post–World War II composition has very often been framed—especially by its West European and American audiences—as a direct response to Soviet political repressions and the subsequent cultural Thaw. This framing remains tenacious in the twenty-first century, decades after the conclusion of the Cold War. For example, in 2014 music critic Alex Ross described this period in Polish music history as a remarkable surge of musical activity, or a Polish Renaissance, that emerged after Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953. The Thaw that followed created a space for the importation of avant-garde ideas.¹ This Polish avant-garde was distinct from its Western counterpart, Ross clarified. Thinking back to the 1961 premiere of Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1960) at the Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, Ross argued that the piece’s psychedelic extravagance reflected the Polish avant-garde’s difference: as a group, they tended to be less studied, less process-driven, than [their] Western counterpart.²

It was understandable that audiences heard (and are still hearing!) Penderecki’s unconventional timbres and textures as a gesture of resistance. In 1961, Threnody registered as pure reaction, a scream of horror. The visceral sonic qualities of Penderecki’s compositions from this period would later attract a whole host of film directors; his music accompanied Jack Torrance’s crumbling sense of self in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), and David Lynch used Threnody to evoke the origins of evil in his 2017 return to Twin Peaks. The intense affective resonance of this music is undeniable, but this was not the only feature that caught international attention in the early 1960s. For many contemporary observers, Penderecki’s employ of key Western avant-garde techniques, including serialism and indeterminacy, signified his and other Polish composers’ rejection of the Soviet aesthetic doctrine of socialist realism. This doctrine had called composers working in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc to reject Western formalism, defined as an embrace of complexity and elitism at the expense of ideological communication with the mass audience. Together, then, both the sound and style of Penderecki’s Threnody (and many other Polish compositions at the 1961 festival, including Witold Lutosławski’s Venetian Games) indicated that Polish composers were separating themselves from the Soviet line and announcing a political affiliation with the West. This perception was not entirely wrong, certainly, but there is a more complicated story to tell here, because there were more than two available political and cultural positions in this period. Building on its specific national identity, Poland was blazing its own path.

Even Cold War–era listeners picked up on this Polish in-betweenness. In attendance at the 1961 premiere of Penderecki’s Threnody was composer and critic Everett Helm, who had served after World War II as chief of the Theater and Music branch of the United States Office of Military Government in Germany.³ Helm was well aware of the contemporary political implications attached to both Western avant-gardism and Soviet socialist realism, and he played up those implications in his review for the American audience. He explained to his readers that Poland had long historical ties to the West, but since the war, it had been a communistic nation, and a member in good standing of the East Bloc.⁴ In describing the Warsaw Autumn Festival, though, he located Poland in an intermediate space, situated between West and East, past and present, and argued that this positioning had given rise to a new generation of composers who were ready to occupy the front rank of the European avant-garde. There is a curious redundancy in this formulation, suggesting that Helm was placing the Polish composers within the avant-garde of the avant-garde: they were pointed forward, as far into the future as they could go.

That futurity was relative. When Helm discussed the music he was hearing, his language did not indicate that he was hearing it through a lens of its newness alone. In describing Penderecki’s rather terrifying Threnody, Helm explained that there is no melody, harmony, or rhythm in the traditional sense. Yet the sum total is, remarkably enough, both music and art. The piece creates a strong atmosphere that is perversely romantic. In response to Lutosławski’s Venetian Games, Helm praised the composer’s use of chance procedures in service of a meaningful structure. His definition of Penderecki’s and Lutosławski’s avant-gardism therefore lay in their perversely romantic embrace of both technical innovation and the capacity of music to communicate meaning. This observation pops up again in Ross’s review fifty years later, in his acknowledgment of the fundamental difference that characterized Polish music in this period; it felt very new, but somehow it was also more intuitive, more expressive, than its Western counterpart. This music occupied a space between contemporaneity and tradition, between West and East, between formalism and realism. It sounded simultaneously new and old.

For Western audiences, the liminal temporality of the Polish avant-garde was a sign of Poland’s progressive political position within the Eastern Bloc—an interpretation that neither Polish composers nor party-state officials were shy about exploiting when they wanted to promote their own postwar music culture on an international stage. Polish cultural actors were able to leverage the Cold War frame of their reception, as musicologist Lisa Jakelski has shown, to facilitate the cultural mobility of Polish music and musicians between different political zones and to build broad institutional support at home.⁵

Still, there are key questions surrounding the emergence and proliferation of the Polish avant-garde in the late 1950s and early 1960s that cannot be addressed fully within a Cold War frame, because they suggest the presence of longer-breathed historical trajectories and continuities. How did Polish composers build such powerful momentum so quickly after Stalin’s death? How were Poles so successful in resurrecting interwar intellectual networks after the war, and then in using those networks to support elite culture under communism? Why were they able to create and promote music grounded in aesthetic ideals and experimental techniques that should, logically, have incurred negative attention from the official sphere? And why in the early 1960s did so many Polish composers turn their attention to musical texture, timbre, and time, developing such a distinct sonic language? What kind of affective power did they intend their music to have, with its synthesis of old and new, and how did they interpret that power in relation to Soviet and Western aesthetic debates about meaning in music?

To answer those questions in the following chapters, I employ discourse and music analysis to interrogate intellectual, political, and aesthetic histories, but there is a common thread running through my investigations: time. In twentieth-century Poland, and especially after World War II, questions of national identity and of Polishness in music were bound up inextricably with the language of time. Progress and tradition, future and past, experimenter and epigone—these tensions animated the musical, cultural sphere in postwar Poland, calling into existence an idiosyncratic timeline against which the sliding scale between opposing coordinates might be mapped and measured. We cannot fully understand the specific arc of Polish musical avant-gardism through the periodicity of the Cold War, which was defined according to the logics of the Soviet and US political machines. While the conditions of Cold War geopolitical struggle shaped the reality in which Polish composers were working, they were not reacting exclusively to the conditions of that struggle.

In articulating a more expansive temporal frame for postwar Polish cultural life, I draw on precedents set by historians Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder, but I do not use that frame to trace the regional, supranational rhythms of war and its aftermath.⁶ Neither am I primarily concerned with the transnational, global networks and exchanges that flourished under the social, cultural, and political conditions of the postwar years.⁷ Instead, I turn inward, to the nation’s interior experience. Philip Gentry makes a similar turn in his study, What Will I Be? American Music and Cold War Identity, arguing that the search for global cultural coherence can sometimes erase important local particularities.⁸ Even within the United States (which was, in many ways, the epicenter of Cold War discourse), Gentry asserts, the threats and challenges posed by the postwar era were felt primarily as domestic, not international, ones. Such a turn to the national perspective can be especially revealing in exploring the power dynamics that activated the interstices between the Soviet and US empires; for instance, in her study of musical sound and political action in later twentieth-century Poland, Andrea F. Bohlman proposes that local and everyday experiences shaped the symbolic work, discursive nuance, and aural cultures of Solidarity.⁹ Paying attention to these local experiences provides insight into the work that national identity can do, interrupting and rendering contingent the political—and temporal—forces that might otherwise seem all-encompassing.

A turn to the national perspective in my own study uncovers the internal conditions that enabled postwar Poles to imagine a uniquely Polish musical avant-garde: the generational, institutional, political, and aesthetic affiliations that shaped cultural actors’ definitions of Polishness and progress in music. Although their definitions were not always compatible, composers, musicians, and intellectuals after World War II shared a desire to generate Polish cultural progress—and a belief that cultural progress was linked to national progress writ large. To achieve those goals, they had to negotiate terms for moving forward, and then to renegotiate when political conditions and power relationships shifted. The musical avant-garde movement, as a symbol both of Polishness and progress, was therefore an expression of a tenuously held consensus, grounded in shared experiences and a desire to establish continuities between past aesthetic and intellectual traditions and contemporary Polish experiences.

WHOSE MODERNITY?

Historian Reinhart Koselleck has argued that in Western Europe, a new understanding of time emerged in the late eighteenth century, one that erected a firm boundary between past and present. This happened as individuals stopped thinking about the passage of time in relation to eschatology and the rhythms of the natural world and instead entrained to forces of modernization: secularization, industrialization, colonial expansion, and scientific experimentation. With this shift, the space between experience and expectation widened, and progress was mapped upon chronology in a straightforward, diachronic line.¹⁰ Koselleck’s historical argument cannot account, however, for the emergence of modernity in nations or groups who were repressed by or excluded from those same historical forces of modernization. In such contexts, the connection between experience and expectation, past and future, often remained strong.¹¹

During the period covered by this study, extending roughly from 1930 to 1965, Poles used historical experiences of rupture and loss as reference points in interpreting present realities and developing goals for the future. They looked to the partitions of the late eighteenth century (1772, 1793, 1795) that had removed Poland from the European map for over a century, dividing its territory among the Russian, Prussian, and Austrian Empires. They remembered failed uprisings—the November Uprising (1830–31) and the January Uprising (1863–64)—and the waves of repression and exile that followed each one. The reestablishment of an independent Poland in 1918 provided an opportunity to imagine what a Polish future might look like, but World War II brought yet another partition, this time between the Nazis and the Soviets. The extreme devastation and loss of life during the war and the Holocaust traumatized the surviving Polish citizens, and the gradual solidification of Soviet power after the war and the Yalta Conference left them, again, without a fully independent nation. All of these losses, all of these erasures and gaps, led to an urgent collective sense that Poland had become disconnected from the chronological passage of normal time, and, as a result, the nation was not yet modern. It was in the context of this sense of temporal displacement that Poles worried about their national backwardness (zaległość) and their progress (postęp) toward modernity.

Many different words became attached to the language of national backwardness in this period; speakers might alternately address Polish lag, delay, lateness, isolation, deficiency, or ignorance (willful or otherwise). Each of these words had its own set of implications, but two main discursive frames for thinking about national backwardness emerged. One was related to chronological time: if modernity was fixed to a homogenous world-historical timeline, then Poland’s position outside of modernity located the nation at some earlier chronological point, previous to the contemporary moment. The other frame was defined by accumulation: if modernity existed as a balance sheet, with certain economic, intellectual, cultural, or experiential benchmarks, then Poland’s backwardness could be measured in terms of its deficiencies or gaps.

Following historian Maria Todorova, I use the terms lag and lack in relation to these two different conceptualizations of national displacement from modernity.¹² Artists, intellectuals, and party-state officials wielded these twinned forms of backwardness as both a specter and a threat, adjusting their language when necessary in response to new challenges or goals. Because lag and lack each presumed different parameters for measuring modernity, their deployment stimulated different kinds of progress. In the context of lack (brak), the act of catching up was one of acquiring missing elements. Throughout the 1950s, cultural and political actors constantly invoked various forms of national lack, and they spoke of remediating this problem by filling the gap (zapełnienie luki). Their language implied that Polish cultural backwardness was confined to specific lacunae and that its reversal would be a simple matter of addressing those quantitative deficits. For lag (opóźnienie), on the other hand, catching up became an imaginative act of quickening, of propulsion, spinning out connections between past histories and future visions.¹³

Maria Todorova cautions that Western scholars have wielded backwardness discourse in the past to affirm Cold War–era stereotypes about the real economic, political, and cultural backwardness of Eastern and Central European nations. Such narratives have routinely presented Eastern Europe as the late inheritor of developments originating in the West. Todorova traces this thread from Hans Kohn’s 1944 division of Western and Eastern nationalism into civic and organic forms, to studies such as Daniel Chicot’s collection The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe (1989) and even to Benedict Anderson’s influential work of nationalism theory, Imagined Communities (1983), which, although it disrupts Eurocentric narratives about the origins of nationalism, still puts a premium on firstness in nations’ attainment of horizontal-secular, transverse time.¹⁴ In his Time and the Other (1983), Johannes Fabian identifies a similar problem in the field of anthropology, arguing that the entire discipline was founded on an unequal power relationship between the West and its Other, and that this relationship had been expressed in terms of time. Anthropologists displaced their objects of study from the present moment, locating them at an earlier point on a developmental timeline.¹⁵ This problem, in both Todorova’s and Fabian’s view, grew out of the presumption of a neutral world-historical timeline. If scholars imagined that their notions of development, progress, and modernity functioned outside the ideological power structures of colonialism and imperialism, then they were bound to reinforce those power structures.

One problem with both Todorova’s and Fabian’s arguments, despite their crucial disciplinary correctives, is that they do not leave space for thinking about why individuals or nations might designate themselves as Other, or why they might aim the language of backwardness at themselves.¹⁶ Wielded reflexively in mid-twentieth-century Poland, the language of backwardness was not necessarily disempowering, nor did it rely exclusively on the comparative mode; on the contrary, this discourse generated agency for its speakers and allowed them to advocate for their own personal and national goals. Important signs of progress—such as an internationally recognized avant-garde movement—could then be interpreted as evidence that the caesuras in national tradition had been remediated, and that the vital arc between past, present, and future had been reestablished. It was in embracing an internal national timeline that artists and political leaders were able to instrumentalize Poland’s spatial, geopolitical position within the East-West divide, leveraging their in-between status to attract support from domestic and international audiences alike.

Polish cultural actors used backwardness discourse to think about modernity and time—its durations and even its directionality—in radically relative terms. In the fields of indigenous studies, postcolonial studies, and queer studies, scholars have long argued that time does not run along a homogenous, chronological line, and that modernity exists not as a monolith, but as a plurality of modernities. Indigenous studies scholar Mark Rifkin, for example, proposes a decolonized, phenomenological understanding of time that acknowledges the effects of collective histories and anticipations on contemporary experiences of time. Rifkin reminds readers that indigenous communities may purposely inhabit tradition in a manner that seems anachronistic or conservative in order to push back against the hegemony of settler culture, articulating their own distinctive way of being-in-time.¹⁷ Queer theorist Heather Love argues similarly that in the case of many queer modernist literary figures, backwards turns and an embrace of the past allowed them to relive painful experiences of loss, laying bare the contingencies and the costs of modernity. They reclaimed the past as something living—as something dissonant, beyond our control, and capable of touching us in the present.¹⁸ Although I want to avoid drawing facile equivalencies between the Polish national-historical experience and postcolonial, indigenous, or queer experiences, the theoretical principles underlying Rifkin’s and Love’s work are resonant in the case of Poland (and also other Central and East European nations). Their critical lenses allow us to imagine historical subjects who traversed timelines that were not always linear. For Poles, a perpetual state of historical displacement collapsed the space between past, present, and future, allowing them to look simultaneously backward and forward. The realization of future potential was not necessarily linked to the chronologically new; in a qualitative sense, it might also represent the successful manifestation of the past within the present.¹⁹

The Polish manifestation of avant-gardism therefore did not bear a clear connection to other models of avant-gardism with which we may be more familiar. It did not resemble literary scholar Peter Bürger’s well-known characterization of early twentieth-century European avant-garde movements as a rejection of the late-nineteenth-century, bourgeois foundations of artistic modernism, or Renato Poggioli’s location of avant-gardism at the intersection of activism, antagonism, nihilism, and agonism.²⁰ Both of those definitions refer to the ephemeral, reactive quality of early twentieth-century avant-garde movements. Bürger and Poggioli presume the avant-garde artist’s rejection of tradition and, along with it, notions of the autonomy of the artwork and of romantic creative genius; however, the Polish avant-garde did not participate in that act of rejection.

I am not the first scholar to note that Bürger’s definition does not hold when applied to avant-garde movements arising after World War II. British historian Perry Anderson has argued, in fact, that this incompatibility invalidates the existence of postwar avant-garde movements; the increasingly hegemonic power of late-stage capitalism has, in his view, left contemporary Western artists without an appropriable past, or imaginable future, in an interminably recurrent present, doomed to replicate the economic and political structures that surround them.²¹ Anderson’s pessimistic perspective hardly leaves room for thinking about the proliferation of avant-garde movements after the war on both sides of the Iron Curtain.²² His words are particularly inaccurate or unhelpful, though, in unpacking the shades of meaning that adhered to the Polish postwar musical avant-garde within the context of state socialism, or in noticing the destabilizing effect of the movement’s investment in pastness and futurity upon the experience of the present moment, which might alternately feel as if it were lagging behind or rushing ahead in chronological time. The antithesis of German Stunde Null (Zero Hour) narratives, which required collective forgetting in service of a new national beginning, Polish narratives about time and cultural identity after the war depended on continuities, and the avant-garde movement became, in that context, a manifestation of