<i>Foucault in Warsaw</i> [Foucault w Warszawie]

The state's manipulations of gay men in communist Poland have become the subject of a growing and increasingly visible contemporary literature, which includes fiction, nonfiction, and film, starting with the publication of LGBTQ+ activist and writer Andrzej Selerowicz's 2015 novel Kryptonim “Hiacynt” [Codename “hyacinth”]. Remigiusz Ryżiński (b. 1978; thirty years after Selerowicz) made his literary debut in 2017 with Foucault in Warsaw, which was nominated for a Nike Award and marked the start of a prolific writing career on gay subjects. The book has now appeared in a pitch-perfect English translation by Sean Gasper Bye.“Operation Hyacinth,” the notorious and squalid campaign targeting gay men by communist Poland's security forces in the 1980s, is the focal point of much of this recent literature, which includes Tomasz Jędrowski's critically acclaimed 2020 novel Swimming in the Dark (written in English in Germany by the book's Polish expatriate author) and Polish director Piotr Domalewski's 2021 feature film Hiacynt [Operation Hyacinth], which was co-produced and distributed internationally by Netflix and featured a cast of prominent Polish actors. The nonfiction literature on the subject was rounded out by Ryżiński's 2021 Hiacynt: PRL wobec homoseksualistów [Hyacinth: Communist Poland confronting homosexuals]. Foucault in Warsaw is notable for enlarging the historical frame of the subject of Polish state surveillance, manipulation, and harassment of gay men back to the 1950s as well as for its making visible the remarkable story of the French philosopher (and later celebrity intellectual) Michel Foucault's direct experience of both gay Warsaw in 1958–1959 and the brutal reality of the practices of country's communist security and intelligence forces. Ironically these practices took place in a country with a long legal history of decriminalization of homosexual activity between consulting adults.Much of Ryżiński's book could be described as a combination of landscape and group portrait of gay Warsaw in 1958. This digressive style is powerfully evocative for anyone who knows Warsaw then or now, gay or straight, and its close attention to details of various bars, saunas, and cruising spots and the voices of the Polish gay men that inhabited them (which might have included Foucault) palpably reanimate that vanished time and place. While Ryżiński's own prose is bracingly precise and unornamented, the voices of many of the vintage Warsaw homosexuals he quotes verbatim are often rude, colorful, and funny in ways that echo the gallery of aging gay men that populate the pages of Michał Witkowski's groundbreaking book Lubiewo [Lovetown, 2004]. The landscape of gay Warsaw provided by Ryżiński includes descriptions of the often quirky and campy apartments its denizens inhabit. This rich but meandering thought cloud alternates with Ryżiński's sharp aphoristic style. The energy, precision, and eloquence of his most powerful assertions and insights—his ability to shape a perfect line—becomes convincing even in the absence of conventional arguments or evidence to support them. There is great passion and sincerity behind and around Ryżiński's saturnine voice.The group portrait at the core of the book's quest consists of Foucault and the handful of younger Polish gay men he befriended alongside his expected contacts among Warsaw's cultural and intellectual elite. The question hovers at the outset if it was someone within this circle of young men that betrayed him to the secret police, but in the end they are all exonerated by Ryżiński's research. Foucault clearly possessed a talent for friendship that transcended the barriers of language and culture (he spoke no Polish), and was able to both be generous and win the trust and protectiveness of these Warsaw friends in spite of the differences in privilege, age, and personal freedom that were always in the room. Foucault slept with some of these men, but no one was hurt by him—nor ultimately did any of them betray him. Foucault comes off here as an unpretentious and likeable person in his dealings with his Polish gay friends. The Poles in this picture are remarkable mainly for their ordinariness and basic decency as human beings; their interpersonal foibles are those of young gay men everywhere, in spite of their harrowing stories of arrest, blackmail, and physical abuse at the hands of the Polish authorities. There are also stories of sympathy and acceptance towards these gay men by their parents and others in their complicated lives in often small, overcrowded family apartments. The popular prewar actress Mira Zimińska, for example, proved herself a powerful protector of the gay men performing in the high-profile Mazowsze folk dance company that she managed into the 1970s. The portraits of the Polish gay men in this book are each at once individual, recognizable, and free of stereotype, as is the picture of the society around them. Even the secret police are spared demonization; they instead come off as petty and dismal human beings for all their cruelty and the often terrible consequences of their actions.The posthumous biographies of Foucault consistently repeat an unsatisfying short version of the events that led to his dramatic departure from Warsaw on twenty-four-hours’ notice after a brilliant first year as the founding director of a Center for French Culture at the University of Warsaw, with Foucault working as an extension of the cultural attaché of the French embassy during a period of promising new cultural diplomacy initiated by the de Gaulle government. Foucault was also revising the final draft of his doctoral dissertation at the time, which would become his first book, Histoire de la folie (published in English in 1965 as Madness and Civilization). The potential scandal to be contained at all costs by the French was Foucault's entrapment in a textbook example of Soviet-style kompromat: the charismatic thirty-two-year-old French doctoral candidate and diplomat was caught having sex in Warsaw's landmark Hotel Bristol with a younger man identified as a male prostitute by the secret police. The young man in question was in fact neither gay nor a prostitute, but was employed and deployed by the secret police (while homosexual relations between adults were legal in Poland, prostitution was not).Among the astonishing revelations of Ryżiński's book is the true back story of the young man in this “honey pot” scenario, including his eventual confession and reconciliation with Foucault after being redeployed to Paris to gather more “intelligence” on prominent gay French academics and cultural figures. The kindness and openness of Foucault's reception of him in Paris coincides with a bitter new awareness on the young man's part of just how dishonest the Polish communist authorities had been with him and Polish society as a whole. The result would be his permanent break with the secret service.The French and Polish authorities each had compelling reasons to erase all traces of “the Foucault affair” both at the time and later, and it is precisely the apparent absence of any official evidence that becomes the obsessive quest of Ryżiński as a queer literary detective opening up a high-stakes cold case. The book could be described as a “counter procedural,” with the author going down various social, archival, and literary rabbit holes in the absence of conventional evidence or precedents for his research. Ryżiński's journey into and through this history is as much the narrative of the book as the extraordinarily detailed history it eventually exhumes. The effect of Ryżiński's dogged efforts recall the character of Agnieszka, the aspiring documentary filmmaker played by the young Krystyna Janda in Andrzej Wajda's films Człowiek z marmaru [Man of marble, 1976)]and Człowiek z żelaza [Man of iron, 1981], with the young Foucault's life and actions in Warsaw taking the place of the officially “erased” model Stakhanovite worker in the two films.The search term hiding in plain sight that opened the elusive documents collecting dust in Warsaw's Instytut Pamięci Narodowej (Institute of National Memory) for Ryżiński was “Homosexuality.” The doppelgänger that haunted homosexuality in communist Poland was of course homophobia—and its melodramatic toggling between shame, blackmail, murder, and suicide. The “madness” that seized Polish civilization in the Soviet era was not rampant queer sexuality, but the desperate and superfluous embrace of homophobia by often deeply mediocre members of the secret police seeking to prove their efficacy and justify their existence through the mass surveillance, blackmail, and even torture of a broad cross-section of gay men. By the 1980s, the absurdity of the Hyacinth Operation was revealed to be a dying gasp of the country's Soviet-style security services (this when the public face of the Communist government was the shameless secular libertine Jerzy Urban). Domalewski's film suggests that the motive driving Operation Hyacinth (which in the film circles around the murder of a gay man) was the closeted homosexuality of a high-ranking officer in the secret police.Poland only appears fleetingly in Foucault's writing. His dissertation and the first French edition of Histoire de la folie included a dedication to “the stubborn, bright light of Polish freedom.” This phrase also serves as the epigraph to Ryżiński's book. In Foucault's paradoxical philosophical and poetic lexicon, “freedom” connotes the “madness” that justifies the creation of penal systems. Foucault, like Witold Gombrowicz, was also an admirer of Alfred Jarry's 1896 surrealist farce Ubu roi, which opens with the stage direction “the action takes places in Poland, which is to say nowhere.” Foucault's trope of “Polish madness = freedom” unknowingly touches a deep stream in Polish literature that begins with Mickiewicz and Słowacki, and runs through Wyspiański, Witkiewicz, and Gombrowicz to the figure of the cruelly wronged model worker Birkut being detained in a communist psychiatric ward in Wajda's Man of Iron.Ryżiński provocatively suggests that Warsaw's Soviet-era Palace of Culture can be seen as the concrete architectural embodiment of Foucault's famous image of the panopticon, the central watchtower that permits the state's surveillance of society-as-prison. Yet Ryżiński's own portrait of communist Poland's official surveillance culture is one of shadowy subterranean bureaucrats and brutal police living in fear for their own futures, absurdly generating bulging typewritten files of intelligence on citizens that would later either disappear (in the case of Foucault) or never be read by anybody (the moldering files that Ryżiński eventually uncovers about Foucault's gay Polish social circle). One of the startling moments in the book is when Ryżiński in his laconic voice (redolent of film noir) realizes that his notetaking in the archives of the Institute of National Memory has become a posthumous mirror image of the anonymous secret police functionaries that compiled those files in the first place.Foucault was always privately warm and enthusiastic regarding Poland in spite of the unhappy end of his early stay in the country. This private solidarity became public after the declaration of martial law in Poland in December 1981. At the height of his fame and influence as a public intellectual in France and the world, Foucault with sociologist Pierre Bourdieu co-authored a highly visible petition protesting the socialist Mitterrand government's neutral stance toward the events in Poland, comparing such detachment to that of the French leftist government of Prime Minister Léon Blum when confronted with the abuses of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. Foucault subsequently made a road trip to Warsaw in the company of Bernard Kouchner (the co-founder of Médecins du monde) and actress Simone Signoret to personally deliver much-needed medical supplies. When received by government representatives in Warsaw, he conspicuously refused to shake the hand of the Minister of Health of the martial law regime. These energetic public interventions on behalf of Polish society in the face of the country's military regime proved to be his last political acts before he succumbed to AIDS in 1984. That Polish resistance to communist rule in general and the martial regime in particular had no more eloquent advocate in France than a gay, HIV-positive, secular intellectual surely in part explains the archival and public erasure of his earlier history in Poland that confronted the young Ryżiński when he began his research for his book.While Sean Gasper Bye's translation is accomplished, the editors of the English edition have too slavishly reproduced the Polish edition of Foucault w Warszawie in terms of notes and annotations. The story of Foucault in Warsaw is astonishingly rich in capturing several dimensions of Polish gay history and cultural life in and after 1958. While the obscure French-Polish film actress Françoise Bourbon is duly identified in a note, the veritable encyclopedia of notable Polish LGBTQ+ artists and intellectuals that appear more significantly in the book are not identified in ways that a non-Polish English-language reader would want and need to grasp the larger context and significance of the story being told. We are unfortunately not yet at the place where awareness of the queerness (or even the general significance) of Jerzy Andrzejewski, Józef Czapski, Maria Dąbrowska, Witold Gombrowicz, Paweł Hertz, Jarosław Iwaskiewicz, Konstanty Jeleński, or Jerzy Zawieyski can be taken for granted beyond Poland. Given the homophobic political culture cultivated today in Poland by the Catholic Church and its allies in the recently-departed PiS government (PiS is ironically made up of a surviving right wing of the broader Solidarity movement that Foucault openly endorsed before his death), the need to repeat and remind Polish readers of the scale and complexities of this history is also as important as ever.