The Labyrinth of Culture through the eyes of the Polish essayist Mieczysław Jastrun

In the panorama of the Polish essayist of the years after the Second World War, Mieczysław Jastrun, who lived from 1903 to 1983, occupies an important place. The poet himself, a novelist, a literary historian, and a translator, Jastrun knows deeply the secrets of artistic creativity, has personally experienced the difficulties in the writer's attitude towards the world. They deal primarily with the problems of freedom and the eternal repetition of "things in life" as well as the importance of love, birth, morbidity and death for human existence. These topics are also present in his cultural essay "Labyrinth" in the 1964 cycle "The Mediterranean Myth". On island Crete, among the olive groves, orange and lemon groves, stands the palace of King Minos - Jastrun begins his account of the ancient myth. The King is a good and just ruler. But when we go into the palace, it will turn out to be not a simple building but a confused and gloomy labyrinth. Even guards who know different secret passages can not handle the big building. People have been seen to enter the palace, but it has not happened to see anyone coming out of there. There was a rumor to the queen that she had preferred a bull to the king, and that her son Minotaur was the creature of this ugly love. The semi-human creation lived in the Labyrinth, eager for human sacrifices. The good king Minos could not stand his piercing roar. Minotaur was always hungry. Finally, the king asked the Athenians for an annual tax: seven boys and seven girls - food for the monster. Since then, all mothers and fathers in Athens have been trembling about the lives of their children. But the Minotaur roar subsided. Since then, the royal daughter Ariadna, who is said to be very beautiful, was walking around the gardens by the palace and dreaming of great love, a wild and dangerous adventure to squeeze her out of the silence and soft beauty of the enchanted island.

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Jastrun does not give the sequel to the legend. And it is said that Theseus, the son of the Athenian king, with the help of Ariadna broke into the Labyrinth and killed the insatiable Minotaur. The Polish essayist was mentally conveyed in 1941, when paratroopers descended on Crete Island, so torn by mines and grenades. This is not Icarus, nor his father, Dadal, the creator of the Labyrinth. These are German desantchers! Among them, perhaps, is the son of Hans Castorp, the hero of Thomas Mann of the novel "The Magic Mountain ". What would the young German think about when he landed on the island of King Minos and Minotaur? Could he know something from the dream of his father, who falls asleep in a snowstorm and looks to him a happy mankind living in a blessed land? Are not the empty and cursed phrase Hans Castorp's words after waking him out of the mysterious dream: "I do not want to let death rule my thoughts!" And maybe death can and should be caused, so that dying people feel they are dying? "the son thinks. The cause of death is a law of life, a duty of the young and the strong. Thus, the Pole Mieczysław Jastrun entered a secret dispute with the German man Thomas Mann, and his humanism contradicts the brutal reality of life. Because the reading of Dante shows that the man has an extraordinary ingenuity in causing torture. Dante's "Hell" with its underground concentration camps, where souls are subjected to continuous physical and spiritual torture, gives the type of imagination that created it. And this imagination has an infinite ability to transcend. The fantastic torture machine described by Franz Kafka in his novel "In the Criminal Colony" long before World War II, has just overtakes various, no less inventive, facilities. This way of playing with the human body at the border of the murder has not gone along with the Middle Ages, and it flourishes today, Jastrun suggests. But what does all this mean? It takes courage to ask such questions. Because we are increasingly adapting to coexistence with the dark forces in life. The shame of such nodal questions, as well as the public recognition of the dehumanization of man, the brutal and the primal fashion, prove that mankind gradually becomes accustomed to the apocalypse, which it only provoked. We find the strongest concentration of despair and absurdity of human affairs in the most recent literature. This is a labyrinth of anxiety from which Ariadna's thread will not pull Theseus away if he appears. But the characters appear in times when they have a suitable audience, with a choir that responds and completes. And there is no such choir.

Characteristic is the evolution of individual authors. Albert Camus's "Plam", compared to his novel "Falling," is almost an optimistic work. But the salvation of writers, in the work of which the moral problem occupies a central place, is in the very passion of displaying light and darkness. It would be pointless to argue-and the reason for this is the thick-skinned and more suited to rhinoceros consciousness-that we have a new form of decadence. Even if in modern literature we encounter fallen angels, let's not forget that they have received the highest approval from Dante. It was the most ardent angel who could not wait for the light to fall as a green fruit. A patron of all these writers is Dostoevsky - the rebellious angel of the culture of modern times. He first built a labyrinth whose mysterious moves are known only to himself. Whoever is afraid to enter this building is looking to escape as far as possible so that he does not fall into her embarrassing shadow. There are different forms of escape. The "pure form" escape is the discovery of the most recent time. Such an escape does not deserve scorn even though it does not cause sympathy. The sense of helplessness is as if the most authentic and most exciting tone of today's literature. It appears in different forms, but it testifies to one: to the crisis of modern thought, to the crisis of the whole European culture.

In the end, concludes Mieczysław Jastrun, the cognitive power of man, the senses given to him by nature begin to appear to him increasingly inadequate. They reach out to master the world for practical purposes, but in the study of the nature of the universe they reveal their sad nullity. And here begins a new stage in the struggle of man with his own limitation - according to Jastrun the most worthy of all the battles ever led to the earth. Because, notwithstanding the sense of our pitiful place in the universe, the brevity of the individual human life, and the existence of the whole species, we are given what can not be experienced neither by the stronger of us animals nor by the insects whose senses sometimes are more insightful than ours: the sense of the mystery of the surrounding world and the thirst for knowledge. Understanding that our truths are often not credible, drives us to new and new discoveries and to seek out the labyrinth that exists inside and outside us.