Still Alive: An Autobiographical Essay
By Jan Kott
Translated by Jadwiga Kosicka
Yale University Press, 291 pages, $30
Writing of the scene in “Richard III” where a messenger warns Lord Hastings to flee immediately or risk execution, Jan Kott once asked, “Who has not been awakened in this way at four a.m., at least once in his life?”
Few if any British or American literature professors could have posed the rhetorical question as confidently as Kott did 30 years ago in his controversial “Shakespeare Our Contemporary”-a book that inspired a generation of directors and critics. But this Polish theater scholar who came to the America in 1966, spent most of his career far from the protected environment of universities. Indeed, the events narrated in “Still Alive,” Kott’s new autobiography, are what made possible his startling question, which is typical of his highly personal approach to literature. Like many Poles who lived through both Hitler and Stalin, Kott had often heard the sort of 4 a.m. knock that woke Lord Hastings.
“Still Alive” begins with Kott’s student years in Paris, and presents us with a veritable Who’s Who of prewar European intellectual life. But it is the following three chapters, “The Occupation,” “The Overcoat” and “Chronicle,” relating his experience during and immediately after World War II, which form the true heart of the book.
Kott’s acute sense of theater is at its best in these pages, which combine intellectual history with the action of a suspense novel. Occupied Poland was a dangerous place for Kott. He participated in the resistance movement of the Polish People’s Army from 1942-45 and joined the underground Communist Party in 1943, when the penalty for membership was death.
Although his father had him baptized, both of Kott’s parents came from Jewish families, and his wife, Lidia, was Jewish. In order to survive, they moved constantly from house to house and city to city, often narrowly escaping capture. Somehow, too, the prolific Kott found time to write his first book.
In one of many memorable incidents from this period, the future Yale and Berkeley professor avoided execution by posing as a doctor and delivering a baby at a Polish train station where German soldiers were conducting a punitive roundup. While others on the platform were sent to their deaths, Kott, whose knowledge of childbirth derived from a novel he had read, was assigned to a forced-labor camp as an obstetrician. Shortly afterward, he was released mistakenly when a German commander complained about the arrest of his chauffeur, named Kot.
Twice Kott was condemned to die by his own side. The first time, in the Polish People’s Army, Kott fell asleep on watch and was spared execution when he was discovered to have a high fever that turned out to be a combination of malaria and typhus. Late in the war, Russian troops nearly hanged him as a spy because he was wearing a coat taken from a German railwayman. With the noose literally around his neck, Kott summoned up enough broken Russian to convey his real identity.
Kott, like Shakespeare, makes few distinctions between theater and life, applying the same critical eye to his own experience as he does to plays. In seeking to understand his own survival against a background of so much suffering and death, for example, Kott considers the outcome in dramatic terms:
“(I)n those rare cases where one succeeds in escaping from the trap, there is something of an unforeseeable coincidence that can be considered as either miraculous or absurd. . . . In the transposition of these situations from life . . . into dramatic genres, one sees clearly the mixture of high and low, pure and impure, pathetic and vulgar. . . . Happy endings, in this prevalence of misfortune, are somehow morally suspect.”
This is the same clearheaded skepticism one finds in “Shakespeare Our Contemporary,” which shares a mistrust of happy endings. Kott tells a revealing joke about English, French and Polish critics who are asked to speculate on who will restore order at the end of “King Lear.” The English critic argues for the Duke of Albany, which is still one of the titles of an English monarch. The French critic insists on Edgar, the dutiful son. The Polish critic is convinced that order will not be restored.
Having participated in the communist resistance during the war, Kott was in an excellent position when a Soviet-sponsored government took over in Poland. For a while, he was an important party intellectual and university professor. Gradually, however, he grew disillusioned with the hypocrisy and deception of official communism (“My literary tastes . . . were always better than my political choices”), finally resigning from the party in 1957.
The chapter in “Still Alive” on the Stalinist era gives the autobiographical background to Kott’s earlier work on Shakespeare’s histories-a thinly veiled critique of Marxist dialectical materialism-in which he sees the repetition of the “Grand Mechanism,” with one tyrant replacing another, rather than historical progress or resolution.
Kott, or his editor, provides the reader with a “Chronology” and a “Selected List of Names,” both of which could be more extensive. At times, the onslaught of names in “Still Alive” becomes rather daunting. I often found myself searching the “Selected List” in vain, wondering why some relatively familiar figures with little role in the narrative are included (“Nicolae Ceaucescu, Romanian Politician”), while many who are less well-known but more significant in the story are not. Likewise, in a book remarkably stingy with specific dates, the 14 entries in the “Chronology” are hardly adequate for Kott’s eight eventful decades.
More complete reference aids would be especially helpful because “Still Alive,” with its discontinuities, repetitions and unpredictable movements through time and space, does not really pretend to be a complete autobiography. (The title of the Polish edition is “Footnote to the Biography.”)
Each “chapter” is really a self-sufficient essay, and Kott rarely draws the explicit connections between chapters that would make the book a coherent whole. From one point of view, Kott’s refusal to impose a final meaning on his life retrospectively is a form of intellectual honesty; how can he legitimately grant himself what he denies history and “King Lear”? Still, I couldn’t help longing for a unifying structure, even as a conscious fiction. Primo Levi’s brilliant “Periodic Table,” which Kott’s memoir sometimes brought to mind, employs just such a fiction.
Kott’s final two chapters, while they do not tie everything together, are his most moving and eloquent. This may well be Kott’s last book. “The Fifth Heart Attack,” added for the English edition, describes his declining physical state and approaching death with the lucid, detached elegance of Montaigne’s late essays. Like Montaigne, another writer who rejected grand narratives and sweeping moral conclusions, Kott leaves his most valuable legacy in his example:
“Every man, and thus I, too, must die. Deeply religious and deeply areligious people have less anxiety and no doubts about the afterlife. Strong faith and unflagging skepticism are similar.”
