Александр Ват: Жизнь и творчество польского поэта и писателя

Polish poet, writer, art theoretician, memorist

Aleksander Wat was the pen name of Aleksander Chwat (1 May 1900 – 29 July 1967), a Polish poet, writer, art theoretician, memorist, and one of the precursors of the Polish futurism movement in the early 1920s, considered to be one of the more important Polish writers of the mid 20th century. He allowed his children a liberal education. His family had interests in Polish literature and drama and one of his sisters, Seweryna Broniszówna (13 July 1891 – 28 June 1982), was an actress. In 1919 he was among the young poets to proclaim the advent of new, futuristic poetry. The following year he published his first collection of poems titled JA z jednej strony i Ja z drugiej strony mopsożelaznego piecyka (Pug Iron Stove; literally: I at Either Side of the Pug Iron Stove), which gained much popularity among the supporters of the new trends in literature of the epoch. In 1927 he followed up with a volume of short stories, Lucifer unemployed (Bezrobotny Lucyfer in Polish). the biggest and the most renowned Polish printing house of the time. he was exiled to Kazakhstan, with his wife Paulina, also known as Ola Watowa (26 April 1903 – 9 February 1991), and their 9 year old son, Andrzej. During the war his oldest brother, Aron, perished with his wife and two children, probably at Treblinka.

In 1946, Wat was allowed to return to Poland during Polish population transfers (1944–46), along with most Polish nationals expelled from the Territories of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union. He was appointed chief editor of the State Publishing Institute (PIW). Considered unreliable by the Soviet sponsored Communist authorities in Poland, he was removed from his position and not allowed to publish his own works. He devoted much of his time to translating of several classical pieces of English, French, German and Russian literature to Polish. In the wake of the political thaw induced by Nikita Khrushchev's process of de Stalinisation, Wat returned to public life in 1957.

In 1959, he emigrated to France and settled in Paris. In 1963 he received an invitation to teach Slavic Literatures at the Center for Slavic and East European Studies of the University of California, Berkeley. From the beginning of 1964 until June 1965, Wat worked at Berkeley. There he recorded a series of discussions with Czesław Miłosz about his life, which he considered a kind of "spoken diary", published posthumously under the title "My Century". Wat committed suicide on 29 July 1967 at his home in Antony, France. The disease of which he had suffered for fourteen years is usually quoted as the cause of his final act, but biographer Tomas Venclova sees the wave of East European anti Semitism that followed the Six Day War as the triggering cause. During his youth Wat had long considered ending his life before reaching the age of twenty five, which he saw as the last moment before the onset of inevitable mental ossification.

Wat had a deeply conflicted religious identity: the son of a Jewish scholar, he developed an atheistic worldview as a young boy due to his extensive reading, but converted to Catholicism during his time in Soviet prisons. His last wish was to be buried in a Christian cemetery in Israel. Portions of Wat's literary archive, including the audio recordings of interviews with Czesław Miłosz that were edited into Moj Wiek (translated into English by Richard Lourie as My Century), are held at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.