Anatol Stern’s Preface to I Burn Paris
The fate of this novel has been as remarkable and stormy as the fate of its author — one of our most outstanding revolutionary Romantics — was remarkable and tragic. Bruno Jasieński was born in 1901, in the tiny town of Klimontów in the Sandomierz Township. “My father,” he wrote in his autobiographical sketch, “was a provincial doctor who spent all his life in this backwater, thirty-five versts from the nearest railway station. The peasants, who spent much of the year in starvation, he generally treated for free . . .” There is a touch of Stefan Żeromski in these words. He attended grade school in Warsaw and entered the university in Kraków in 1918 — the year Poland regained independence. This was a year when a great wind of new poetry was blowing through Europe, and Jasieński became one of the leaders of our literary avant-garde. From the very beginning his poetry was a revolt against the bourgeoisie, but soon Jasieński was to give it the force of fiery social revolution — in the epic “Song of Hunger” (1922), and in the poems of “Earth on the Left” (1924), with its waft of new Romanticism. His readings were broken up by the police, while the issues of the Lwów Worker’s Tribune he published in were confiscated as furiously as our poetry pamphlets had been . . . In 1925 Jasieński went to Paris, sentencing himself to a voluntary emigration, from which he vowed never return. What was the experience of the twenty-four-year-old poet, finding himself in this “strange city he’d never set eyes upon”? From the start of his recollections, there is all his bitterness and revolt linked with his native country. He is plagued by the thought of his homeland’s most dramatic conflict — between the peasant and the landowner. This finally took form in the tragic leader of the Galician peasant uprising of 1846, and thus was born the poem The Lay of Jakub Szela. At the same time, a novella by Paul Morand appeared in a volume entitled Europe galante. This was a piece on the lifestyle of the Soviet proletariat, entitled “Je brule Moscou.” Morand was all that Jasieński despised most: a suspect elegance of style that stood in for real art, a contempt for the tragic side of life, and a disbelief in its highest aims. So as a response to Morand’s text, I Burn Paris was born. The difference was that while Morand sought to burn down the capital of the hardworking Soviet proletariat, the protagonist of Jasieński’s novel . . . What Paris did Jasieński have in mind when he sentenced this beautiful city to symbolic annihilation? . . . Let’s recall the political context of the period preceding the novel’s appearance. 1