Philosopher influenced Solidarity movement
The voice of Leszek Kolakowski was ‘fundamental for the fate of Poland’
By Nicholas Kulish / New York Times News Service
Published: July 23. 2009 4:00AM PSTPolish philosopher Leszek
Kolakowski speaks at the
Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 5, 2003.
The Associated Press file photo
WARSAW, Poland — Leszek Kolakowski, a Polish philosopher who rejected Marxism and helped inspire the Solidarity movement in his native land while living in exile, died Friday in Oxford, England. He was 81.
His family announced his death in the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, saying he had died in an Oxford hospital “after a sudden, short illness.” No other details were provided.
In Warsaw, parliament paused for a moment of silence in his honor, for his service to Poland’s freedom.
Wide-ranging career
In his long career, Kolakowski most famously dissected the intellectual underpinnings of the Communist system he had supported as a young man, at the height of the Cold War. He was an academic whose influence reached far beyond the academy’s gates and a scholar whose writings could be playful and satirical, but most of all, accessible.
Adam Michnik, one of the leaders of the Polish opposition, writing from a Gdansk prison cell in 1985, referred to him as “one of the most prominent creators of contemporary Polish culture.”
His most influential work, the three-volume “Main Currents of Marxism: Its Rise, Growth and Dissolution,” published in the 1970s, was a history and critique that called the philosophy “the greatest fantasy of our century.” He argued that Stalinism was not a perversion of Marxist thought, but rather its natural conclusion.
Work brings honors
In addition to more serious texts, he was known for writing plays and fables, and even a book, “Conversations With the Devil,” in which Satan debates a series of prominent mythical and historical figures.
Kolakowski published more than 30 books in a career spanning more than five decades. He was awarded the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest honor, and the MacArthur Foundation fellowship known widely as the genius grant.
In 2003, he became the first recipient of the U.S. Library of Congress’ $1 million John W. Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Humanities and Social Sciences, given in fields where there are no Nobel Prizes.
In announcing the prize, James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress, noted not only Kolakowski’s scholarship but also his “demonstrable importance to major political events,” adding that “his voice was fundamental for the fate of Poland, and influential in Europe as a whole.”
Rejecting Communism
Kolakowski was born Oct. 23, 1927, in the city of Radom, south of Warsaw. Like most Poles of his generation, Kolakowski knew hardship early. Under the German occupation of Poland during World War II, Kolakowski and his family were forcibly relocated to different towns and villages.
After the war, he studied philosophy, first at the University of Lodz and later earned a doctorate at the University of Warsaw. He took a teaching position there, rising to chairman of the history of philosophy section.
Early in his life he embraced Communism as a reaction to the destruction inflicted upon his country by Nazism. But a trip to Moscow intended as a reward for promising young Marxist intellectuals proved instead to be a turning point, exposing for him what he described as “the enormity of material and spiritual desolation caused by the Stalinist system.”
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