Against Our Civilization

Aleksander Wat and his book “My Age” is the absolute of historical testimony of an individual. In 1964, during his stay in Berkeley, struggling with a serious illness, Wat began to record his memories for therapeutic purposes, talking to Czesław Miłosz. Together, they take the reader into the world of the previous century, to pre-war Lviv, and into the prison reality in Lviv, Kiev, Moscow and Saratov. Wat is first a young idealist looking for an alternative to the existing reality, questioning European civilization, finally a communist and editor of “Miesięcznik Literacki” and “Czerwony Sztandar”, then a prisoner, and finally a staunch anti-communist, considering this ideology as opposed to European civilization. The reader has access to the author’s inner world, to the confrontation of noble ideas with experience, to reports of conversations with fellow prisoners, to worldview reflections, and to social observations. The author’s deep self-reflection leads him to perceive communism as pure evil.

The memories seem to be a universal and timeless testimony of humanity constantly put to the test to realize ideals at all costs.