The Polish-language émigré journal Kultura and the names of those who ran it – Jerzy Giedroyć and Józef Czapski – have become iconic. Published from 1947 onwards, Kultura covered the Cold War era and ceased to exist only with Giedroyć’s death in 2000. What is the significance of this journal, which operated for half a century? Kultura was more than a magazine: it was a tool of cultural diplomacy, a laboratory for independent political thought, a platform for authors living in exile and those censored behind the Iron Curtain, a bridge between the West and the Eastern Europe, a hub for a transnational information network, while also embodying a pluralistic, dialogue-focused, open and European cultural ideal. The standard it set remains a benchmark today, and its influence is still felt.
The new world order that emerged after the end of the Second World War, Poland’s forced integration into the Soviet bloc and the resulting bitterness prompted editor Jerzy Giedroyć to found the Literary Institute in Rome in 1946, with the support of the 2nd Polish Corps, through which he could exert cultural and political influence from exile. A year later, the Literary Institute moved its headquarters to Maisons-Laffitte, a small town near Paris, and continued to operate as a financially independent publishing house. The Literary Institute’s primary goal was book publishing, with the Kultura journal seeming like something additional. Over time, however, Kultura gained significance and became the Literary Institute’s flagship publication.
From the very beginning, the Literary Institute’s staff included writer and critic Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, who was listed as an editor alongside Giedroyć in Kultura’s first issue; the writer and visual artist Józef Czapski, who – in addition to regularly publishing his prose and graphic works in Kultura – provided immense support to the journal through his network of contacts and fundraising efforts; and the Hertz couple: Zofia Hertz, who ensured the day-to-day operations and organisational infrastructure of Kultura, and Zygmunt Hertz, a true philanthropist who built the journal’s distribution network.
Cultural Diplomacy through the Power of Words
The Literary Institute’s entire scope of activity fit into a broader framework. Its aim was to exert political and cultural influence through the power of words, to shape public opinion via the publication of books and periodicals – first, among Polish émigrés; second in Poland itself; and third, in Western European democracies. As Giedroyć put it in an interview: ‘For me, the question of the impact created by words was the most important.’ In Giedroyć’s view, words became the primary tool of political action. Underlying this was the idea that the enemy should not be defeated, but rather convinced – and this is possible only through words. And what would have been the much-desired goal of this influence? According to Giedroyć’s vision, it was to ensure that ‘the principles of political equality, social justice and respect for human rights and dignity’ prevailed in public life.
All of the Literary Institute’s activities were aimed at achieving this impact: the 512 books published in the Biblioteka Kultury series (by authors writing primarily in Polish, as well as in Russian, Ukrainian or German); the 637 issues of the Kultura journal spanning 54 volumes (1947–2000); and the 171 issues of the quarterly journal Zeszyty Historyczne, launched in 1962 (which focused on documenting and analysing historical events).
In the case of Kultura, therefore, it would be difficult to separate the cultural from the political: the two complemented and intertwined with one another. This concept also defined the journal’s profile in terms of genre: prose and essays were the leading genres, rather than poetry and drama. Giedroyć sought out the political even in literature; typically, among the texts arriving from behind the Iron Curtain, he sought to publish dissident, nonconformist and critical voices that also shed light on the very nature of the communist system. He was interested in literature that had been banned behind the Iron Curtain, which could not be published by state-run publishers in the Soviet bloc. But the intertwining of culture and politics is also clearly evident in the attention paid to the literature of neighbouring nations. The abundance of literary translations published in Kultura strongly supported the political program aimed at promoting the democratisation of neighbouring nations. In this way, Kultura served as a tool of cultural diplomacy designed to achieve the aforementioned political goals.
Giedroyć understood the power of words and their effective impact in first-rate journalism and reliable reporting, and nurtured trustworthy writers. Kultura was synonymous with an adherence to the facts, credibility, insightful analysis and the selection of truly significant topics. The Kultura circle believed that journalism that sticks to the facts, is independent, of high quality and practised responsibly does indeed have an strong effect.
A Laboratory for Independent Political Thought
The Kultura circle regarded the normalisation of Poland’s relations with its neighbours as its primary task. This primarily referred to the territory encompassing Ukraine, Lithuania and Belarus, which Juliusz Mieroszewski, political columnist for Kultura, termed the ‘ULB’. Thus was born the so-called ‘ULB doctrine’, which placed thinking about Poland’s foreign relations and geopolitical position on a new foundation. The ULB concept was based on the premise that an independent Poland could exist only among independent neighbours. The ULB doctrine therefore accepted the post-1945 borders and supported the independence aspirations of nations living under Soviet domination, namely the Baltic states, Belarus and Ukraine. This line of thinking left nostalgia behind and remained realistic: it renounced territorial claims and federalist ideas that would have ensured cultural hegemony for the Poles in the territories in question.
This mindset also shaped the Literary Institute’s profile: the publishing house provided a platform for dissident voices, discovered and published works of Soviet uncensored literature, known as samizdat, and fully supported the Polish Solidarity movement. In addition, it sought allies among members of émigré circles. This is well illustrated in an open letter advocating for Ukrainian independence, the ‘Declaration on the Ukrainian Case,’ published in 1977, which was signed not only by Poles but also by a small number of Hungarian, Czechoslovak and Russian dissidents. Kultura considered it a priority to make the concept of Eastern Europe part of Western discourse, in order to foster empathy in the West towards the inhabitants of Eastern Europe.
A Journal with Agency
Although Kultura was founded amid the political circumstances of the Cold War, at a time when Europe was divided by the Iron Curtain, it sought to transcend political and cultural divisions, geopolitical barriers and ideological dogmas. It did not accept either geopolitical or cultural realities, but operated in the spirit of a possible future – the ideal of European reunification and independence of Central-European nations.
It sought to contribute to the advent of this future as a proactive platform. Through its activities, it strove to promote change: it defined itself in opposition to Soviet dominance, sought dialogue with the liberal opposition in the Soviet Union, rejected the identification of Russia with the Soviet Union, discovered dissidents in the region, amplified the democratic voices within the Soviet bloc and provided a platform for uncensored literature. The political concepts published in the journal were characterised by pluralism and pragmatism, while at the same time Kultura strongly supported the peaceful evolution of the Soviet bloc. Its goal was to foster the formation of an opposition – one group, but preferably more.
The situation of Kultura can be described as a kind of ‘in-betweenness’. The journal occupied the boundary of various scales and levels of the public sphere and public discourse. Thanks to this, it was able offer connections and serve as a bridge between them in multiple directions. It served as a forum for Polish émigrés, yet never intended to sever ties with the authors and readers of Polish literature living in the homeland. It represented the progressive currents of Polish literature and political thought, while keeping European values in mind in terms of its cultural ideals. While it maintained a strong Eastern European focus and paid special attention to dissident writers from the region in order to counterbalance Soviet dominance, it also provided a forum for representatives of the Polish diaspora scattered far and wide. Although the editors of Kultura worked in a small town near Paris, the journal’s distribution network allowed it to broaden its reach to every continent across the global.
A Hub in a Transnational Network
Kultura established a cross-border, so-called transnational information and distribution network that connected Warsaw with Buenos Aires, Chicago with Gdańsk and London with Sydney via Paris. Within this cross-border space, an extraterritorial – that is, not state-bound – literature emerged.
Kultura rejected the division of Polish literature into émigré and domestic literature and thus provided a platform not only for representatives of the Western political émigré community but also for authors living in Poland behind the Iron Curtain. Over time the journal gained such prestige that virtually every influential author sought to be published in Kultura. It is not surprising that the majority of the journal’s authors lived in Europe and North America. Given the political realities of the Cold War, however, it is striking that, in terms of the geographical distribution of authors being published in Kultura, there was no sharp dividing line between East and West; in other words, the circulation of these texts bridged the barrier posed by the Iron Curtain and transcended geopolitical fault lines.
Who published in the journal? First of all, the journal provided a platform for Polish émigré authors; Czesław Miłosz and Witold Gombrowicz, for example, both made their debuts in the magazine in 1951. What was the significance of such a magazine for émigré authors? For Gombrowicz, Kultura served as a point of stability in the period following the Second World War: in exile in Argentina, he had no chance to fulfill his literary ambitions; in communist Poland, he feared that he could only advance by compromising his principles; and the conservative London émigré community was averse to his innovative postmodern prose style. Thus Gombrowicz remained a contributor to Kultura until the end of his life, and his relationship with the journal defined his entire literary career.
From the very beginning, Kultura sought to broaden and deepen its ties with the mother country. Polish authors banned in Poland were thus able to publish in Kultura, though often under pseudonyms. Their books appeared in the Literary Institute’s series Bez cenzury [Without censorship] in the form of tamizdat – that is, as banned literature produced behind the Iron Curtain but published only in the West. The significance of Kultura in this regard grew even more during the state of martial law that was imposed in Poland between 13 December 1981 and 22 July 1983.
Moreover, Kultura was not a forum of isolated creators. One of the journal’s greatest achievements was precisely that it connected authors and readers living in different corners of the world, creating an infrastructure for dialogue among them. On another level, it created a literary and cultural space that had previously, between the two world wars, been associated with the world of coffeehouses.
A significant number of Eastern European authors were also featured in the journal. Kultura’s wide range of interests was reflected in the publication of special issues in Russian, and later in Czech and Slovak languages. In the Biblioteka Kultury series, works by dissident authors such as Boris Pasternak and Alexandr Solzhenitsyn were published in Russian as well as in Polish. Of exceptional significance is the fact that in 1959, the Literary Institute published an anthology entitled Executed Renaissance, which documented and represented the works of a Ukrainian generation ravaged by Stalinist terror.
Kultura was synonymous with access to uncensored, trustworthy information. Giedroyć strove to obtain reliable information about the countries behind the Iron Curtain and their political developments, and he encouraged those associated with the journal – both those working nearby and those farther away – who had visited countries behind the Iron Curtain to share their impressions in Kultura. The journal featured a regular column covering events in Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine.
In the very first issue, the journal’s editors expressed their goal that Kultura should reach not only Polish readers living in exile but also a domestic readership. Several information channels played a major role in reaching a Polish audience. Radio Free Europe, whose broadcasts were received even behind the Iron Curtain, regularly summarised the content of Kultura’s issues and organised roundtable discussions to debate the most important articles published in the journal. Of course, Kultura reached Poland not only via shortwave radio but also thanks to activists who took the risk of smuggling the issues across the border through clandestine channels. In the late 1960s, ‘couriers of free speech’, disguising themselves as tourists in the Czechoslovak-Polish border region, smuggled issues of Kultura into Polish territory in their backpacks. Of course, it was not only the smugglers and couriers who took great risks, but also the readers in Eastern Europe, since anyone caught behind the Iron Curtain had to face state repression. Many paid for their collaboration with Kultura with prison sentences lasting several years.
As a superpower, the United States, along with many other Western and émigré publications, viewed Kultura journal as a tool of ‘soft power’. They believed that by smuggling Western publications behind the Iron Curtain, they could significantly influence the isolated societies of the Soviet bloc. Thus, as part of the CIA’s secret book distribution programme, copies of Kultura also made their way to Poland. Various covert agencies purchased large quantities of the journal, mailing them to Eastern Europe or distributing them directly to Eastern Europeans visiting the West.
Impact
It would be difficult to overestimate the significance of Kultura; its influence is still felt today in many areas. Even during the Cold War, Kultura served as a source of inspiration and a model to be emulated for émigré communities from other countries. Kultura inspired the founding of Kontinient, which became one of the most important journals of the Western Russian émigré community. Kontinient held views very similar to those of Kultura on many issues, and its founding expanded the possibilities for dialogue.
Kultura developed a new kind of geopolitical strategy for Poland and the states of the region, according to which independent and democratic neighbours strengthen one another, and it is this mutual relationship that can provide protection against the threat posed by the great power from the East. This political philosophy, established by Kultura, is still evident today in Poland’s international relations; you need only consider the strong expressions of Polish solidarity with the Ukrainians following Russia’s 2022 aggression against Ukraine.
Kultura treated Central Europe as an asset and did much to ensure that it was seen as such by the West as well. Through its openness, its commitment to dialogue and its high editorial standards, the journal contributed greatly to raising the visibility of Central and Eastern Europe and strengthening its democratic values, and it significantly shaped public discourse and the thinking of younger generations.
There is no doubt that conditions have changed fundamentally since the Cold War: the hegemony of the written word has been shaken, and printed books and newspapers have lost their former role and influence. It is worth, however, leafing through the combined second and third issues of Kultura from 1947, in which the journal’s editors claim that reading culture within émigré communities is in deep crisis and that trust in written word has declined. Through half a century of activity, Kultura has proven that trust in the written word can be restored through consistent, first-rate work and that quality journalism wields power. You might argue that certain processes are irreversible, and Kultura’s history cannot be applied directly to the current situation. Why, then, is it still worth keeping Kultura’s legacy in mind? Primarily because there remains a need for dependable information and discerning journalism in a world where content generated by artificial intelligence, fake news and disinformation are blurring the lines between reality and the virtual with overwhelming force.
In this new world, Kultura’s history and the standards it has established will continue to serve as historical examples of how to combat disinformation, act with an eye towards a better future, gain agency and bring about change.
Bibliography
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