خاکستان

by Marek Hłasko, ثنا نصاری (Translator)

رمان خاکستان به نویسندگی مارک هولاسکو که در زیر شاخه‌ی داستان‌های تاریخی قرار می‌گیرد، روایت‌گر زندگی فردی‌ست به نام فرانچیشک کوالسکی.کوالسکی در عصر یک روز بهاری، در حالتی نیمه‌هوشیار بود که پلیس او را دستگیر کرد. اتهام او توهین به دولت کمونیستی حاکم بود. او تمام شب خود را سرزنش می‌کرد و نمی‌دانست که چه چیزهایی‌ گفته است. حتی نمی‌دانست به چه چیزهایی شک کرده؛ استالین، لنین و یا حتی خود مارکسیسم. کوالسکی فردای آن روز آزاد می‌شود و در پی یافتن ایمان از دست رفته‌اش، به سراغ رفقایش می‌رود اما جوابی نمی‌گیرد. سقوط او به قعر ناامیدی و درماندگی از همین‌جا آغاز می‌شود. سقوطی به عمق یک گودال، شبیه به یک قبر بی‌انتها. او رفته رفته همه‌ چیزش را می‌بازد؛ در قبال اظهاراتی که خودش هم نمی‌داند بیان کرده یا خیر.منتقد نشریه‌ی نیویورک‌تایمز در مورد هلاسکو و خاکستان نوشته:«هلاسکو سخنگویی‌ست برای آنان که خشمگین و خسته، سرکش، آتشین‌مزاج و عذاب کشیده بودند. در خاکستان، هلاسکو چاقویش را در قلب حکومت کمونیستی فرو می‌نشاند و خون‌چکان بیرون می‌آورد.»

Genres: Fiction, Polish Literature, Poland, Classics, 20th Century, Literature, Novels

151 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1959

About the author

One of the most popular Polish writers of the 20th century. Author of numerous short stories and novels. Some of his works were adapted into films. His works were ruled by the idea of an evil dominating over good, inevitable loss of ideas in clash with the reality, as well as with the masculinist point of view. He wrote about protest of a moral nature. In his works he depicted the lives of the lower classes as dominated by hopelessness and cynicism. His characters dream about changes which come out to be vain.
After initial approval of his talent, his nonconformism and critique of communism forced him to leave Poland, and he spent the rest of his life abroad (mainly in Israel, Germany and U.S.A.) He died in Wiesbaden (Germany) in 1969. The circumstances of his death remain unknown. One hypothesis is that he mixed alcohol with sedative drugs.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title Graveyard implies political regime in the state… And Marek Hłasko’s story is laden with heavy sarcasm…
The hero of the novel – a card-carrying member of the party and a former partisan – unexpectedly meets his comrade in arms and after celebrating the occasion he gets arrested by the police…

Until the moment when he heard the door bang shut, Franciszek had not clearly realized his position: everything had happened too quickly, in an atmosphere of hysteria that didn’t seem quite real. Not until he had been in the stuffy cell for a while, and his eyes had become sufficiently accustomed to the half darkness to distinguish the people lying on the floor, did he realize that he would irrevocably remain a prisoner for several hours. At first this realization threw him into a rage, and he pounded and kicked the door; but, as no one responded, he soon grew tired; a little later he was even amused. “The whole thing is ridiculous,” he thought. “Nothing but a stupid mistake; somebody will have to pay for it later.”

He knows that he has done nothing criminal… He feels innocent… He believes the whole truth is on his side…

The stranger stretched luxuriously. “Each one of us imagines he didn’t do anything,” he said. “Each one of us somehow thinks he is innocent. But then a moment comes when others begin to have power over him, and then our thoughts don’t matter, and only what they think about us matters.” He sighed and turned over.

For the state there is no such thing as innocence… Any citizen at any moment can be found guilty… So the events continue to progress as in The Trial by Franz Kafka… And even the victim of the state tyranny in the end begins to doubt his blamelessness…

“And yet I must have done something. Somewhere inside me there must be some doubt I wasn’t aware of; it rose to the surface at the first opportunity, in a moment of exhaustion. What was it I doubted? The party? The people? The leadership? Or could it be the cause? How strong a man must be to go through life with a clear head, ignoring doubts, fears, sordid thoughts!”

Once in the graveyard play dead then they won’t bother you.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Franciszek Kowalski runs into an old buddy from the war, gets drunk with him, and -- when he leaves -- is picked up by the police. And that is the beginning of his undoing. The police accuse him of criticizing the Communist Polish regime circa 1958. Franciszek loses his membership in the party, his friends, his family, his job, and his apartment. He goes looking up his fellow WW2 partisans, all of whom are gelid with fear. He doubts his own every thought:

What was it I doubted? The party? The people? The leadership? Or could it be the cause? How strong a man must be to go through life with a clear head, ignoring doubts, fears, sordid thoughts! What would I have been if I had no faith in the cause, if it had not been my goal, if it were not my goal even now, my brightest star?

The book is Marek Hlasko's The Graveyard, which was never allowed to be published in his native Poland.

Life under a rigid Communist rule with its secret police could be utterly frightening. When Franciszek goes looking up his old friends, all of them suspect that he himself is a secret policeman.

[Payam Ebrahimi · Rating 4 out of 5]

تقریباً و تا قبل از فصل آخر یک رمان معمولی، کمی تکراری و حتی خسته‌کننده‌بود. اما نویسنده در پایان داستان تقریباً همه چیز رو عوض کرد. داستان ناگهان دگرگون شد و نگاه من به کل کار عوض شد. تا ساعت‌ها فکرم درگیر کتاب بود و دوباره قصه رو با خودم مرور می‌کردم و دیدم که نویسنده چقدر حساب‌شده و درست همه چیز رو پیش برده و چه نگاه عمیقی داشته

ترجمه هم خوب بود

[Lila · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kafkaesque w najlepszym możliwym wydaniu

[Justin Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is unlikely to be the first novel of its kind that you would read, but it's a solid and enjoyable farce. It's also a shame this book wasn't in print when I was in college, because holy moly is this a good way to explain Foucault. Kill the policeman in your head! and all that stuff.

[Nathaniel Popkin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This review originally appeared in Cleaver Magazine.

The moment of truth in this book of deceit is treated in a most unusual way: it isn’t treated at all. Or more precisely: it isn’t even needed. The consequences for Franciszek Kowalski, the protagonist of Marek Hłasko’s unforgettable 1956 novel The Graveyard, indeed for all of humanity, are damning enough.

Slender Citizen Kowalski had fought bravely in the underground in 1945; after receiving a nearly fatal chest wound, his faith in international socialism had willed him to live. Now, at 48, the sober Kowalski is a proud Communist Party member and a factory manager in a Polish city. One night, he runs into a comrade he hasn’t seen in years. The old fighters set off to a bar to reminisce, and despite himself Kowalski gets drunk. On his way home early the next morning, Kowlalski inadvertently insults two young police officers, and without explanation they have him locked up for the night.

The earnest Kowalski can’t understand what’s happening. “Under arrest?” he asks. “What for?”

“Don’t you know?”

“No,” Franciszek said resolutely. He came close to the railing and put his hands on it. “I do not know. I remember that I somehow flew off the handle, but it seems to me that’s no good reason for keeping me locked up all night.”

“No good reason?” the sergeant drawled. “And what about the things you shouted? Don’t you remember what you shouted?”

The three of them stared at him, and Franciszek suddenly shriveled…“No,” Franciszek said after a while. He passed his hand over his forehead. “I don’t remember.”

Franciszek shrivels and you, reader, shiver. “It’s those words we’re interested in,” says the sergeant. Kowalski has entered level one of totalitarian hell. Outrage is followed by remorse, self-approbation, despair, and bewilderment. “Each one of us imagines he didn’t do anything,” a stranger tells Kowalski, in the drunk tank. “Each one of us somehow thinks he is innocent.”

Hłasko, who was forced to publish The Graveyard and other works while in exile (his books were banned by the Polish government), was masterful in revealing the levers of psychological manipulation at work in a totalitarian society. By the next day, Kowalski is convinced of his guilt. No longer worthy of his membership in the Party, he decides he must prostrate himself before his factory’s Party tribunal. This will be his moment of truth, a chance to cleanse himself and rebuild his standing. But what is this tribunal? An inane and arbitrary body, a farce.

Now stripped of his Party membership, Kowalski finds himself on the relentlessly gray, rain beaten streets of the city. “He raised his head and breathed in the air with all his strength,” says Hłasko;

there was a lump of steel in his lungs. He walked on, occasionally stumbling; he stared at the sky—it was better, easier this way. An insipid moon was drifting over the roofs; the darkness grew thicker and thicker, a clammy, impenetrable darkness which choked the sickly stars and he crowded city. A military patrol tramped by, the heels clattering. The moon suddenly dropped out of sight behind a dirty cloud; the soldiers walked ahead, staring apprehensively into the damp darkness.

Kowalski walks on—into the graveyard that was his faith in communism, his faith in humanity. He seeks out his comrades from the underground. They’ll vouch for him, he thinks, but one after the other has been destroyed by the “fear you’ve got to live with, constantly, without interruption, from morning until night.” Each one is more paranoid, more wary of the police, more afraid. Each one after the other has grown more distant from the idealistic days of the war.

Poor Franciszek buckles under the acute disillusionment; Hłasko makes his despair a metaphor for the emptiness of the regimes of the Soviet bloc. But his power as a writer lies in the precision and the particularity of a single man’s story as it unfolds in a single devastating moment. As a reader, this is the great reward, as it is with so much of the literature from Eastern Europe now being published—often for the first time in English—by Melville House, Archipelago, and New York Review Books: a beguiling glimpse at human beings drawn to the edge of existential possibility and then, so it seems, pushed some more.

[Pascale · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the same family as "Darkness at Noon", this book deserves to be much better known. Franciszek Kowalski is a conscientious factory worker and party member with a clean war record as a Communist partisan to boot. Yet, the minute he is thrown in jail for misbehaving in the street after sharing a bottle of vodka with a friend, his life starts to unravel. Because he's never fallen foul of the authorities before, Kowalski doesn't understand that the policemen only want to intimidate him and teach him a lesson. Instead of forgetting the whole episode, he makes the fatal mistake of trying to justify himself in front of all his comrades. His sincere attempt to vindicate himself backfires and he is expelled from the party. In short order his son disowns him, his future son-in-law leaves his daughter, who then commits suicide, and he finds himself without a friend in the world. All his war buddies have buckled under the regime's iron fist and the most charismatic of them has even gone mad after being submitted to torture. What makes the story so powerful, however, is the way the author describes Kowalski's inner turmoil. The reason why he believes the accusations made by the police against him is that, deep down, although he has never admitted it to himself, he has long despaired of the regime. Even if the officers have lied to him about what he shouted when drunk, at a deeper level they are right about how Kowalski feels about the regime. This is as clever a tale about how totalitarian regimes work as anything I've read, and for all I know there are dozens of Kowalskis in North Korea today.

[Katherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

“In abnormal circumstances you get abnormal reactions; nothing that can be foreseen, and nothing to be surprised at.”

A clever novel of political blindness and realization. Hłasko was denied publication at the time. He was told “This Poland doesn’t exist.” Read it for the dream-like eighth chapter.

[Stirnaite · Rating 2 out of 5]

*He was one of the lucky few who upon waking in the morning never have to be ashamed of the night before.

[مهران · Rating 4 out of 5]

یک شب، دیروقت تا خانه قدم زدم
و یکباره این شد پایان آزادی من
لباس شخصی‌ها، مسلسل های دستی
اوراق هویت، پلیس‌های مخفی

[Dominika · Rating 4 out of 5]

troche kafka triche after hours

[Oliver · Rating 4 out of 5]

final thoughts:

i like how each chapter is a kind of logical iteration, building clearly off the previous action and moving clearly to the next. you’d think this is the case in every book lol but it felt more obvious in this one, and beneficially so.

i like how recurring artistic images (maybe you don’t like it, the graveyard, the neon side) take on different and more significant meanings as the plot advances - particularly when the neon lights illuminate the otherwise empty eyes of his dead daughter)

the ending probably does really hammer home the emptiness of meaning of the entire system - and also conveys how when left to their own devices, their own logic, without any additional input from the surrounding society other than the expectations/experiences it has given its inhabitants, they will end up being destroyed, whether totally (franciszek) or more slowly (the other partisan fighters that we meet throughout). still, it felt rather blunt.

overall, i really enjoyed this book: hlasko can write with raw emotional power, gently and accurately describe a scene, and create situations and stories which expose the inhumanity, cruelty, hypocrisy, and valuelessness of the totalitarian soviet regime. also though some conversations between characters feel excessively flowery/philosophical. perhaps i should review them sometime.

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tight little expose on the dangers of all powerful political parties, and their tendency to destroy lives if even a whiff of rebellion is detected. Though the supposed opposition is misinterpreted, the entire authoritarian system is activated and loyal party members are devastated. Rather thin on character, but Hlasko conveys his ideas well.

[justi · Rating 4 out of 5]

„Nie ma już domów, są tylko cmentarze.”

W typowym dla Hłaski stylu książka opowiadająca o życiu w państwie totalitarnym. Trochę oniryczna, trochę Kafkowska, ogromnie dojmująca i dająca do myślenia. Obraz systemu komunistycznego, o którym każdy wie, że był, ale nie każdy jest w stanie sobie wyobrazić.

[Maedeh Dabiri · Rating 2 out of 5]

کتاب خاکستان از میانه‌ی دوم به بعد جان می‌گیرد و خواننده را به خواندن وا می‌دارد.
پشت جلد کتاب کاملاً داستان لو رفته و جذابیت ماجرا را از ما می‌گیرد، اما همچنان محتوای کتاب تازه و قابل تأمل است.
هرچند که غیر از قابل تأمل بودن، چیز دیگری ندارد.
و فکر می‌کنم اولین تجربه‌ام از کتاب‌های عقیدتی بود.

[Giang · Rating 2 out of 5]

Started off okay but my ADHD can't handle it...

[Peter Briggs · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you enjoyed this one, I'd recommend Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon."

[Andrew De Sousa · Rating 4 out of 5]

7.75/10

[Jennifer O. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Challenging, but quite compelling.

[geniusz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Troche więcej się chyba spodziewałam

[Dominika Legawiec · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Sidspears · Rating 5 out of 5]

zakończenie z totalitarnym twistem.

[Mikołaj · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cmentarz jako metafora życia w ustroju totalitarnym, czyli Marek Hłasko contra pogrążone w apatii i zakłamaniu społeczeństwo. Pod pewnymi względami przypomina „Rok 1984”, albo Kafkę.

[Jacqueline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating read.

[Clare · Rating 4 out of 5]

i have no idea why i bought this book when i was 14 but im so glad i did.

[blawatekk · Rating 5 out of 5]

nie ma już domów, są tylko cmentarze

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars. There are some political ideologies that are so complex, twisted, and wrapped up in layers of illusion that the facts ceases to exist. Even when we peel back the layers of lies in search for that inner reality, we are only left with an emptiness surrounded by the cast-off rinds. The Oxford Dictionary has chosen "post-truth" as the Word of the Year, signaling a new shift toward that type of ideological self-blindness throughout the Western world. Perhaps we should call this shift "post-fact," since "truth" still exists, but only relative to how one accepts or willfully rejects fact.

We see it in stark relief in the United States with the election of Donald Trump, whose words are so empty that fact and fiction become inconsequential to his followers -- as long as the words are spoken by Trump, then those words are Truth, because Trump only speaks Truth. All else is a Lie. And so the tautology of the totalitarian ideologue begins its long, twisted warping of reality, wrapping so tightly around the facts as to make the concept of "fact" disappear altogether. There is still truth, but it is only the Truth of Trump. It is facts that have become meaningless. (Social workers in the last couple decades have termed this manipulative warping of perception "gaslighting.")

Rebellious Polish writer Marek Hlasko would understand this phenomenon explicitly. His novel The Graveyard, written in 1959 and recently published after long being suppressed, is a sharp critique of the Communist ideology in Poland that rigidly defined the reality of its acolytes to the point where the illusions masking their reality ran so deep that it became the only truth they knew. The protagonist, a working man and loyal party member named Franciszek Kowalski, is dragged into custody one night for speaking a vulgarity to a policeman -- a minor offense that sets in motion the unravelling of everything he understands to be the Truth about the party.

Kowalski soon comes to understand that tyranny and oppression have replaced political ideals and unity, and that service and social cohesion have transformed into surveillance, informing, and conformity. When this happens, he realizes, all men are living in the graveyard of ideology, but they don't realize it. Kowalski only recognizes this after it's too late.

Not surprisingly, the novel was refused publication by the Communist regime in Poland. In the 21st century, Hlasko's novel stands as a warning for anyone who might cast aside critical thinking and willingly (if unwittingly) accept the status quo. We must resist the gaslighting of reality and the obfuscation of fact that dangerous political rhetoric generates. Through the character of Kowalski, Hlasko suggests that the ones most capable of resistance are the outcasts, the misfits, and the marginalized. And even then, their only choice is to break away and go into exile -- a traumatic experience that will not be easy or without pain (physical, mental, and emotional).

There is no happy ending in the graveyard (or in The Graveyard). There is only the epiphany of self-knowledge and an understanding of the Repressive and Ideological State Apparatuses, which we might resist, but can never escape.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Set in Poland during the communist 1950’s, The Graveyard begins with a simple man and a willful misunderstanding. After a rare night of drinking, Franciszek Kowalksi yells at workers on a street corner. Policemen standing nearby pretend to think he’s insulted them, and Kowalski is taken to the police station for questioning.

From here, Kowalski’s life unravels. He confesses his night at the jail to his supervisor, and is cast out from the party. He loses his job. Adrift in the city he visits his former comrades, who during World War II fought in the Polish underground on the side of the communists. The same communists who are now ruining Kowalski’s life.

By the end Kowalski’s faith in communism, human nature, and perhaps his own sanity are gone. The bitter, depressing climax condemns human nature as little more than a machine that creates corrupt political systems. Of the parade taking place in the final scene Kowalski says: "those in front are executed by firing squads, and those in back see nothing and sing." He was at the front, of course, and he knows his time is over.

It is strange to think Hlasko wrote this before he was exiled - that his cynical worldview only deepened after he was forbidden to return to the Poland he had both condemned and loved as his homeland.

[Lupe Dominguez · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ok, so I have a hard time with books that are written to make you think super deep, political thoughts, but I read them anyway, hoping to be enlightened. In this case, I think I have failed yet again, and have only seen the superficial of the story. It seems to me that while Franciszek Kowalski THOUGHT he blurted out something that made him against the Party, he comes to the conclusion that he really IS against the party? I think that was what the whole moral was. I figured out, in the end, that it was Kowalski's own undoing, as he went to find help among his old comrades, because he began to spew his own truth's, which he was saying that he only said when he was drunk one night. But now that he is saying all these things while he is sober and coherent, he begins to see that he was actually right, that the underground has been there all along, and he has been with them all this time. So, in actuality, he IS against the party. He just never knew it.

Again. I really stink at reading these books, but they are always so enchanting that I have to keep trying!!!!!

[SPE · Rating 5 out of 5]

Re read this book again in January of 2017 . it has even more power now that Trump is president and it looks as though we are heading into a world of plutocracy with a despot at the wheel who is in a fight with the media and the truth. Time will tell. Signs are not good for the people.

This book highlights the grimness of standing by the party when thinking for oneself might result in more sanguine outcomes. the negative power of group think and the positive power of supporting and trusting networks. The dangers inherent in a world where trust and compassion are absent. All a graveyard. Dark