Sławomir Mrożek - The Elephant

Best known for his Absurdist dramas, Sławomir Mrożek remains one of post-war Poland’s most celebrated writers. Beginning his career as a political journalist, Mrożek published his third volume of short stories, The Elephant in 1957, just as new Communist Party leader Władysław Gomulka was liberalising Poland after succeeding the Stalinist Bolesław Bierut.

The Elephant was a domestic bestseller as Polish culture flowered during Gomulka’s ‘thaw’. Andrzej Wajda’s films and Stanisław Lem’s metaphysical science fiction gained Western recognition, but alongside the works of Witołd Gombrowicz, finally allowed publication in Poland by the government, Mrożek’s internationally acclaimed stories (translated into English by Konrad Syrop, who headed the BBC’s wartime Polish Service) contributed most to a sense that Gomulka would grant Poland’s artists more freedom – within limits.

Although it would be a mistake to read all of these stories through the lens of high politics, as they often mock wider human foibles, Mrożek often deploys his acerbic humour against Poland’s ruling United Workers Party (of which he was a member). Sympathetic to socialism, Mrożek satirises the regime’s officiousness and joylessness, particularly its use of language, more than its central ideology. His stories feel close in spirit to those Russians who attacked Stalinism in oblique, even surreal terms – Mikhail Bulgakov, Daniil Kharms and Vladimir Mayakovsky – but the social conventions it targets are visibly Polish.

The miniatures in The Elephant subvert the didactic stories favoured by the government’s cultural policy. In, ‘The Trial’, Mrożek envisions a world where authors are regimented by genre and given a uniform, defeating ‘the obscurity and ambiguity of art … once and for all’. The narrative is absurd: a single writer who cannot be categorised throws the system into crisis, triggered by a rogue ladybird which covers his insignia, changing its meaning. Daniel Mroz’s foreboding pencil drawing (one of many that illustrate the collection, similar in feel to Josef Lada’s for Švejk) anticipates the serious conclusion – that no writer dare represent another for fear of being implicated in some imagined crime.

The title story, written in typically unfussy prose, mocks those who attempt to please the Party for personal gain. The individualist zookeeper, on hearing that the ‘gaps’ in his menagerie are ‘being filled in a well-planned manner’, suggests that their long-awaited elephant be a rubber inflatable, in order to save money for the workers. Inevitably, his economy proves false, and the people’s losses are spiritual as well as financial: as adults, the children who witnessed the debacle have become alcoholic criminals, and worse, ‘they no longer believe in elephants’.

Mrożek frequently uses young people as outsiders whose innocence and idealism are punctured by governmental paranoia. In ‘Children’, the regime’s complaints that the youths’ innocuous snowman has been designed to mock individuals and institutions cause so much resentment that they build another one that deliberately does just that: the state creates subversion, and subversives, where they did not exist before.

‘The Giraffe’ also uses an animal as a symbol, but as in ‘The Elephant’, its non-appearance is crucial. Young Joe wants to know what this creature looks like: he asks one uncle, whose implausible description is delivered with considerable aggression, and he turns to his other uncle, a newspaper editor, for a better answer. But as no giraffe is mentioned in Anti-Dühring, Notes for Lecturers ‘or even Das Kapital’, Joe’s uncle cannot acknowledge their existence – the transition from Stalinism to more liberal socialism means that rather than lie to its subjects, the state dispensers of information apologetically refuse to admit the existence of anything that does not fit their ideology.

Mrożek’s Catholic education led him to sign an open letter to the Polish authorities in 1953 in support of three priests condemned to death (but never executed) on groundless treason charges, and several of these stories address religious themes. ‘Siesta’ draws most heavily on Mrożek’s complicated relationships with Christianity and socialism, exploring the awkward compromises that a Marxist priest has made with the regime, sacrificing his ideals for the sake of an imagined future.

‘Modern Life’ is the most focused attack on Party language. The bold opening statement, ‘Being a loyal citizen I have decided to spend one whole day entirely in the spirit and letter of official exhortations’, is testament both to Mrożek’s hatred of the regime’s colourless communication and Gomulka’s willingness to tolerate criticism. In just two pages, the tone jumps from flippant to deathly serious – a technique that Mrożek employs repeatedly, to startling effect. However, the regime’s inability to cope with spontaneity is best exposed in ‘The Monument’, where the people’s desire to honour the Unknown Fighter from the failed Russian revolution of 1905 without any State directive terrifies a Party official.

Sometimes, Mrożek rejects the very idea of didacticism, quietly building stories to the point of a moral conclusion which he then refuses. ‘From the Darkness’ depicts a village governed by superstition and ignorance, where creativity leads people to dreadful ends. But the mounting horror climaxes only with a pig staring at the narrator: perhaps an allusion to Orwell’s Animal Farm, but all the narrator concedes is that ‘Things are different here’ – the atmosphere is most important. ‘My Uncle’s Stories’ peaks with an argument between the narrator and his missionary cousin Bernard: the subtext-heavy line that triggers the conflict betraying Mrożek’s dramatic leanings. At its end, the narrator admits that he has no idea what became of Bernard, lamenting that ‘The uncertainty is killing me’.

The final story, ‘The Chronicle of a Besieged City’, ends pessimistically, reminding the reader that for all Mrożek’s wit, the co-option of communism by an aggressive and humourless state is not a laughing matter. This wryness makes Mrożek’s volume stand out amongst those works that charted the Eastern bloc’s transition from post-Dual Monarchy conservatism to oppressive state socialism. Above all, The Elephant captures that fascinating year of 1956, when Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ and Gomulka’s thaw gave hope to the other countries still under Stalinist rule: hope that was brutally crushed in the aftermath of the Hungarian Uprising that October.