Poland: In a Crooked Circle

One of Poland's most influential Communist authors has been sentenced to a year in prison. The charge: writing poison-pen letters to the regime's highest officials.

The scandal broke last fall when Pre mier Josef Cyrankiewicz, Politburo Member Edward Ochab and other top functionaries suddenly got a rash of Rabelaisian letters that mingled demands for greater intellectual freedom with obscene personal denunciations. Most of the letters, many of which were mimeographed, were mailed from the same Warsaw letter box, and police soon identified the sender: Novelist Jerzy Kornacki, 53, a protégé of the late Polish President, Boleslaw Bierut, and author of several proletarian novels (the best known: Hauling the Brick Carts). He is also an active member of Warsaw's Crooked Circle Club, a group of several hundred artists, teachers and historians whose debates on current affairs constitute the only organized forum of free opinion permitted by the regime. Searching Kornacki's apartment, police found a meticulous diary of scores of conversations with prominent Communists, reporting tales of personal and political duplicity that were news even to the cops.

Following his arrest, Kornacki was hustled off for psychiatric examination. Diagnosis: emotionally disturbed but fit to stand trial. Though the sentence was relatively mild, there are signs that the regime is clamping down on other intellectuals who have been demanding greater freedom of debate and inquiry. Recently, the government stopped the press run, after 7,000 copies had been printed, of a scathing novel, The Divine Caesar, by Jacek Bochenski, which bitterly attacked the Communist order under the guise of exposing ancient Roman tyranny. Muses the novelist's dictator: "Let's face it. Gaul has not been subjugated. The people want political reform. All the people want freedom and hate slavery." In case anybody missed the point, Author Bochenski described Caesar as a "bald playboy"—a clear allusion to the pate and personality of Premier Cyrankiewicz.