Lew i komedianci

What do the three short stories and two short plays by Bronisław Wildstein have in common? Politics and passion. Politics – though not in the sense of disputes between parties, and not as those usually blunt pins used by any given editorial staff of a media outlet to prick the public figures they dislike. Politics here means the interpersonal sphere, or rather, that part of it where people are driven not only by their feelings and passions, by their personal gains or loyalties, but also by their convictions and a vision of how to run the world. 

This should come as no surprise since Wildstein, a man of many endeavours and talents – an oppositionist, writer, émigré activist, philosopher and editor – has always been most curious about the way convictions shape people’s lives and attitudes while they intertwine, and sometimes merge, with their more private reasons and motives. Even as we read the volume’s first story, The Lion, we see it unfold on two levels, so to speak. Is Alexandre Kojeve – an outstanding philosopher, a “restorer of Hegelianism” and at the same time a high-ranking official of a French government agency – the story’s protagonist? We never get a clear answer, even though we should remember that Wildstein’s prose is always written like a roman a clef where the “key” matches with various degrees of precision. 

Of more importance than the captivating, though rather cliché combination of “operational” events – a charming young woman, heaps of praise, an envelope with money – is the build-up unravelling on another level (the underground?) of this prose: an operation of self-justification in which the protagonist proves to be a master. 

Similar “operations” – self-justification, invoking higher reasons, and using them to cover one’s nakedness – are carried out in other stories and plays of this volume by protagonists active in various areas of public life, be it an office, a boarding house, or a theatre stage after the curtain has fallen. Though Wildstein, the author of several novels, attempts the drama genre for the first time, he succeeds in his effort. His plays, however, might almost be considered puppet shows: his characters are driven to action, wound up by the spring of the doctrine they profess, and led by the thin wires of pride.