A short text by Stanisław Dłuski, a literary critic and lecturer at Rzeszów University, which he wrote for the bimonthly “Arcana”, is surprisingly moving. The article is dedicated to the pre-war poet Władysław Sebyla, who long before the outbreak of World War II already felt the apocalyptic fear of the coming machines of totalitarianism that would crush Poland. In any case, Dłuski most succinctly renders Sebyła’s figure:
Władysław Sebyła (1902–1940), second lieutenant of the Polish army, killed by the NKVD, a separate poet, faced the ultimate trouble in his short life. The last poem of the time, as Czesław Miłosz put it, about the incipit And again the clatter of soldiers’ feet, puts us before “border situations” (K. Jaspers), ie loneliness, suffering, death, struggle. Who are we when our homeland is threatened from the beginning of the state, is our life just consumption and pleasure in the squares of humanity, an escape from various pleasures, why wonder, focus on meaning?
It is not for nothing that the literary critic now remembers the pre-war poet:
It is summer, early August 2022, on the market square of Rzeszów under the umbrellas there is a buzz, girls and boys are drooling over glasses of beer, music is playing on the Titanic. For example, Sebyła was remembered by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz as always thoughtful, sad, self-absorbed, with a distance from people and the world. Missiles and soldiers at the airfield in Jasionka. Airplanes fly. The piercing silence haunts the teeth of the night. I have been immersed in myself and have been coming back to these poems since the 1980s when, as a young verse writer and Polish philologist, I was fascinated by these visions.
This intertwining of the summer of 1939 with last summer must be visible from Rzeszów and, more generally, from Podkarpacie, which became the gateway of life for millions of refugees from Ukraine. Premonition of the coming Apocalypse or at least some new tragic times Sebyła once felt over him, remembering “the stamping of soldiers’ feet”, “hundreds of Cossack whistles” and “star boot over Europe”. Today it is not the clatter of feet chaotically running to the Ukrainian trenches of the Zeks, but the monotonous explosions of grenades in the village in front, not the “whistle” but the cackling of the inhabitants in the south and east of Ukraine , and not the “star boot” but the cynical smiles of Putin, Sholz and Macron.
However, when Dłuski mentions where Sebyła’s remains were buried – and it was the Piatichatki military cemetery in Kharkov – it is worth adding a follow-up. Sebyła, who was killed during the Katyn genocide, again became a target of the Soviets. In March last year, the poet’s grave was reached by splinters from Russian cluster missiles that fell on the cemetery. One of these rockets entered at a 45-degree angle at the base of the upright Catholic cross. No one was injured, as the aggressor shelled the place of the dead with bullets for the living, but Russian troops were already approaching Pyatichatki, also known for destroying graves and memorials after their crimes.
War. Report from Ukraine (excerpt)
You may not believe that the Kremlin will raise its hand this far to the West, after all we are a member of NATO! But we know that Moscow has been waging wars internationally for a quarter of a century that go one step further – blowing up its apartment buildings in provocation of the FSB, killing civilians in its Chechnya empire, then sending its tanks to the Georgian capital, then hybrid reaching out to the Crimea and Donbass, and now – another step further, one step higher – the largest country in Europe attacked. Accompanied by military outbursts, the Russian parliament is considering “abolishing the independence” of the Baltic States, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov threatens nuclear war, and Putin himself, in the same speech announcing the destruction of Ukraine, also mentioned Poland, which the Soviet Union grateful for the regained territories.
There are more warning signs for Poland. One of the main sponsors of Russian armaments turned out to be reconciled with the possible defeat of Ukraine and Russian crimes against the civilian population. Germany – contrary to Polish warnings and US sanctions – completed its project and in January, in cooperation with Kremlin companies, completed the construction of the second branch of the northern gas pipeline. A month later, Putin could start a war. Berlin – with the crimes of National Socialism in its not-so-distant map, has lingered until now, sabotaging aid for the victims of the next, this time Russian, version of Nazism. If the murders in Irpien or the bombing of the hospital and kindergartens did not prompt Chancellor Scholz to transfer heavy equipment to Ukraine, what will appeal to our European “allies” when the tanks of Putin and Lukashenko through Suwałki to the oblast draw Kaliningrad? Do you think there will be no suitable excuse for delaying the reaction of Germany or France?
(…)
Three days before Putin’s army invaded the territory of a sovereign country, he questioned the right of the Ukrainian government and president to exercise power – this memento should also apply to the political discourse in Poland. The great diatribe of the Russian Führer lasted more than two hours, and it is strange that the Ukrainian people did not open their eyes after that. But did we open our eyes after the Smolensk tragedy, when Putin led several bets against the head of state?
Wheel of history stopped for a moment?
Sebyła’s intuition did not run out with the hecatomb of the Second World War, and even his personal story did not end after the commemoration of his final resting place. The Russians are still furiously fighting against what is good, noble and beautiful – no wonder Polish culture has been so strongly opposed to the Eastern Empire for centuries.
Dłuski doesn’t directly ask the main question, but he doesn’t have to, since he mentions Sebyła’s poem several times, which asks the main question:
My homeland, and you remain immersed in the iron dialect, the global dark face that turns the enemy’s four sides.
And you dream of bread and honey, and glass houses in family orchards, and happiness full of hardship, a feast under the branches of linden trees.
And the sky around turns red, a corpse in a robe wakes up, the sages stand terrified, desolate when they see the grave.
And again? or again? The wheel of history brings us in a burning circle, the wheelwrights’ dreams are over, the steel roars in a menacing forest.
And again? or again?
In the text I used excerpts from Bimonthly Arcana, a poem by Władysław Sebyła and the book “War. Report from Ukraine
Source: wPolityce