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| This is the electronic edition of Magdalena J. Zaborowska, "The Height of (Architectural) Seduction: Reading the "Changes" through Stalin's Palace in Warsaw, Poland", Centre for Cultural Research, University of Aarhus.
(Article currently under consideration at Journal of Architectural Education, USA) The pagination of the printed edition is indicated by red numbers marking the beginning of the page. Electronically published August 26, 1999 |
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Magdalena J. ZaborowskaThe Height of (Architectural) Seduction: Reading the "Changes" through Stalin's Palace in Warsaw, PolandWhenever I try to think of an architectural form that would best represent the fascinating cultural paradoxes of before-and-after the memorable political changes of 1989-91 in Eastern Europe, I inevitably picture the monumental bulk of the Palace of Culture and Science (Palac Kultury i Nauki, PkiN) in Warsaw, Poland. This gigantic Socialist Realist structure was officially presented by the Soviet peoples to People's Poland in 1952 and named after Joseph Stalin upon its completion in 1955.With its central location and a spire worthy of a gothic cathedral, this ironically temple-like monument to communism and the cult of personality - that "god that failed" - brings together the Western skyscraper, Soviet monumental "classicism" and the so-called Polish "national" styles. Its grotesque, wedding-cake shape signals the proximity of Warsaw to travelers and has been a fixed, central landmark for its inhabitants. Most important, the Palace is an architectural, synecdochal representation of the whole city and country, their turbulent history since World War II, and their sudden transformation in the wake of the recent collapse of the totalitarian rule in East and Central Europe. Fig. 1 Bird-eye view of the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw, Poland. In these pages, I focus on Stalin's Palace as a representative structure, whose diverse and divergent readings and interpretations I shall discuss in the larger historic and cultural contexts of pre- and post-1989 developments. My aim is to demonstrate the benefits of approaching Cold War architecture in Poland as a repository of discourses that engender -2- political narratives of identity both east and west of the (former) Iron Curtain. I would also like to divert the focus of the western architectural gaze from its insistent fixation on Russia, or the Evil Empire of the late Cold War. Like vast countries, monumental buildings and contentious ideologies are undoubtedly attractive - one would often be tempted to see one's own significance reflected in one's choice of a subject or adversary. But such approaches often result in discussions that only perpetuate, rather than exploding, the clichéd rhetoric of us-vs.-them, and thus prevent more innovative, post-binary readings that the present, post-totalitarian moment compels us to undertake. Contrary to some opinions, the so-called "satellites" that have comprised the Soviet bloc have their own, diverse cultural narratives to tell. They have their own architecture to offer to the Western gaze, not to mention their still relatively unknown individual versions of the Cold War. Study of Polish, Hungarian, Romanian, Czech, Bulgarian, or East German architectural narratives in their own right, as well as in the larger context of inter-cultural traffic in architectural signification and representation is an urgent task for scholarship both in the East and West.
In what follows, I examine the past and present discourses about the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw and demonstrate the ways in which they help us understand its seductive power as a multivalent architectural form. The Palace's unique ability to encode and compel the changing constructions of individual and collective narratives of Polish identity provides a valuable lesson on the complex relationship between architecture, literature, history, and politics in the larger context of cultural exchanges between Eastern Europe and the West. For structures like the Palace carry both ideological and political messages inscribed onto them by their designers and builders, while also serving as repositories of their individual spectators-readersí changing desires and fantasies. The fact that no other postwar building in Poland has been featured in so many diverse texts - from communist tracts, through poetry and fiction, to sociological studies, cultural critiques, -3- specimen of visual art, and a unique lore of legends, letters, and anecdotes - proves that the Palace in Warsaw is not just a building, but also a text-book of national and cultural identities. In a postmodern fashion, it can be also seen as an architectural representation of the globalized, collective, post-binary East-West transition into the post-totalitarian, millennial moment. The Iron Curtain: "Inadequately Remembered and Incompletely Forgotten" Anders åman claims that "the Iron Curtain, throughout its massive extent from the Baltic to the Black Sea, was one of the greatest construction projects of postwar Europe" (32). On the threshold of the new millennium, this construction still seems to abide in the spatial and geographic imagination and the discourses on culture and nationhood, although the Curtain has already been off its rusty hinges for over a decade.The memorable events of 1989-1991 dramatically changed the economic and political systems of the nations and neighbors of the former Soviet bloc. They also spelled profound shifts in the ways these nations, the West, and the whole modern world define themselves and one another within and beyond traditional dichotomies of cultural otherness. At the dawn of the "New World Order" East and West find themselves as strange bedfellows, suddenly joined as a postmodern cultural hybrid, at once self and other, at once European and "postcolonial." Still divided by and invested in the anachronistic rhetoric of binary opposition, they are thrust together and challenged by the global multicultural predicament that necessitates the deconstruction and revision of that rhetoric. But to do that we need a new vocabulary, imagery, even sensibility to understand what Homi Bhabha defines as the "cultural construction of nationness as a form of social and textual affiliation."Bhabha speaks about "writing the nation" from within postcolonial -4- studies, but yet, despite obvious affinities with the Third World, the Second World or the "Other Europe" does not often enter the discussions of postcolonial theorists, "the Soviet family of nations ... is colonialism's terra incognita" as Greg Castillo poignantly remarks. This is surprising given the history of Soviet imperialism and the continued inter-penetration of cultural and political codes between the East and West. In architectural terms, this inter-penetration has often brought about paradoxical symmetries where stark oppositions were expected; it has resulted in intriguing mutual "colonizations" of certain forms, styles, and ideological vocabularies. For example, Johann B. Schmidt writes that the "International Style" which appeared in America following the famous New York exhibit on modern architecture in 1932, was to "defy the rhetorical figures of paradox, oxymoron, ambiguity, double-coding, amplification, contradiction, and irony...one style was declared obligatory in opposition to the choice of many styles in the past."Both the rhetoric and architectural goals expressed here seem to echo in the proclamations of Socialist Realists, who promoted "multinationalism [as] the primordial ingredient of the culture of Soviet society and of Soviet architecture." It may thus appear that the USA and USSR as builders of social space at that time were engaged in an interesting dialogue on the relationship between form and ideological coding as expressions of "national" style. Its outcomes on both sides were large-scale buildings poised between "traditionalism" and "modernism" no matter that the two nations themselves, as well as individual forms up close, could not have been more different. Bhabha states that: "In the production of nation as narration there is a split between the continuist, accumulative temporality of the pedagogical, and the repetitious, recursive strategy of the performative. It is through this process of splitting that that the conceptual ambivalence of modern society becomes the site of writing the nation" (297). In such writing, Bhabha emphasizes the "chronotope of the local, particular, graphic" in which the "national -5- time becomes concrete and visible" (295). For my purposes in these pages, I will look at the "pedagogic" (and demagogic) and "performative" uses of ideology as writing and disrupting national identity through Stalinist architecture. By progressively zooming my contextual lenses on the Second World, Poland, Warsaw, and the Palace of Culture, I hope to demonstrate the ways in which an architectural form becomes a narrative embodiment of Polish "national time-space" in a trans-cultural, "postcolonial" and post-totalitarian moment. Formerly colonized by Big Brother from the East, like other countries of the former Soviet bloc, Poland now faces a subtle (and not-so-subtle) attempt at colonization from the West. It remains a European subaltern and other, despite, and perhaps even due to, the rapid "changes" in its political system and economics. The semantics of the popular term used here, the "changes" lends the recent decade of Polish and "Other European" history a hormonal flush, suggesting "feminine" ailments and menopausal vulnerability. This renewed otherness - and, in terms of gender politics, a curious re-"feminization" - of East and Central Europe in popular discourse and as a source of cheap "postcolonial" labor and playground for western investors, complicates our reading of and theorizing about gendered representations of nationhood, ideology, and power. It also opens up exciting new possibilities for scholarly pursuits of these issues for Cultural Studies and architectural theory. As Leslie Kanes Weisman reminds us, "space, like language is socially constructed; and like the syntax of language, the spatial arrangements of our buildings and communities reflect and reinforce the nature of gender, race, and class relations in society." The suddenly collective East-West gaze that now falls on images, monuments, and architecture of the past may compel us to remember, if not reenact, the Cold War hatreds, fears, and paranoias in the present, but should perhaps inspire us to analyze the gazers themselves instead.
The former communist countries have had "too much past" as some critics claim. Both individuals and whole nations are overburdened with narratives, symbols, and images of -6- that they are busy erasing, renaming, and rewriting, if not "westernizing."Yet an uncritical and total forgetting of the unglamorous past is impossible due to the proliferation of concrete and persistent reminders that could not be as easily toppled or changed as statues of Lenin or street names. As István Rév wrties, because "memory constitutes identity" the "writing of history . . . establishes and reestablishes identity" through new narratives. Leaving aside the dispute over whether or not historical narratives can ever avoid rubbing shoulders with fiction, we may ask if history written into whole city-scapes could ever be revised. Can buildings, bridges, street curves, and public spaces, as well as their imprints in national and individual memory, be altered overnight to make people forget the marches, strikes, parades, passages of tanks, and clashes with the riot police? And what about the persistent architecture of gray everydayness and routine of fear and enforced obedience? For the former satellites of Big Brother, monuments and structures that have withstood the post-communist clean-up function as mnemonic representations of past subordination and powerlessness. For the West, the New Good Brother, they are exotic, often handy markers of the old order that need to be revised and "re-colonized."They can be bought, made "new" displayed for profit and rewritten, as it were, so that new ideologies and power structures can unequivocally mark their triumph and "possession" through them. In the larger, post-binary theater of post-totalitarian cultural production, representation, and performance, these monuments and images remind us that the "past is more infinite than the future" as Toni Morrison stresses, and that it has to be resolved and dealt with before we can truly face ourselves in the present. Dolores Hayden explains that "place memory ... is the key to the power of historic places to help citizens define their public pasts: places trigger memories for insiders, who have shared a common past, and ... can represent shared pasts to outsiders who might be interested in knowing about them in the present."While trying to forget and selectively remembering, both cultural conglomerates East and West face the "bimodern-7- condition" what Arthur and Marilouise Kroker term, "the contemporary historical situation. . . [a] violent metastasis in which all the referential finalities of the political code of the twentieth century - capitalism and communism most of all - begin to slide into one another, actually mutating into their opposites as they undergo a fatal reversal of meaning." In Poland, such reversals make it possible to read the unchanging facade of the Palace of Culture as a unique, hybridic text that breaks down old binaries, while at the same time playfully offering the propaganda and show of Socialist Realism to Western investors of today. Moreover, it embodies a fascinating architectural representation of the gendered power dynamic between as well as within East and West during and after the Cold War. One of several Soviet erections that were placed in the capitals of the "satellite" countries, it was designed to contest Western technology in the "macho" struggle of the superpowers. Hence it reflects the constructed polarization of the masculine and the feminine inherent in larger, global processes of cultural representation in the world split into the First and the Third, with the Second trying to wedge in since 1989. Studying examples of such gendered political processes fought through the images and monuments of the past, we can better understand the representations that are replacing them in the present. Structures like the Warsaw Palace often encode both the persistence of traditional ideological binaries and the seed of their unmaking. They enable us to forge the blueprints of the "post-totalitarian mind" that we need badly to face the new millennium. "Architectural Machismo" or Engendering the Master Builder's Fairy Tale A fairy-tale Palace is rising in Warsaw Forever it shall last - like love -8- for a child Forever it shall last - like friendship of the Soviet kind. This shamelessly Socialist Realist poem describes the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw as a monument of Polish-Soviet friendship and thus binds the muses of poetry and architecture inextricably together. As Wojciech Tomasik argues, "Stalinist architecture [in Poland] 'speaks' by means of literature; the conceptions of 'architecture parlante' are realized in a mutual effort of the designers of socialist cities and the adepts of the writer's pen. Both are equally needed: the architectural form owes its ideological content to verbalized communication; socialist realism correlates the activities of an architect and engineer with those of a writer." Ever since the Soviet takeover in East and Central Europe, the theme of "eternal friendship" of nations reflected Soviet desire to integrate its own multicultural peoples into a centralized state by means of socialist culture. It was a required topic for both writers and architects in Poland, too, and especially so given rather strained Polish-Soviet political relations before and right after World War II, which Stalin entered as a secret ally of Hitler. Polish-Soviet "friendship" cemented by the military agreement, the Warsaw Pact, did not last forever, but the Palace survived Stalin, the Cold War, and the fall of communism in 1989 with flying colors. Now it thrives under new masters, amid dynamic changes that have been brought about by Polandís rapid plunge into free market economy. The "colors" have changed, too, as the Soviet and Polish flags and slogans have been replaced with advertisements of Western goods that compete to match the scale of the building. Unchanged on the surface, the form stands 230.68 meters high in the center of Polandís capital, boasts 44 floors, 3288 rooms, and 33 elevators, and continues to be subject of newspaper articles and -9- scholarly studies. Like under communism, it remains an object of tourists' pilgrimages, which ride to its top in high-speed elevators to see the panorama of Warsaw that has become an enormous construction-site. The official narrative of the form's identity remains unchanged, with the exception of details that were hidden from the public by communist censorship in the past, and that now provide the proverbial icing on the cake supplied by eager reporters. The "fairy-tale Palace" whose very name seems to evoke forbidden bourgeois associations, was designed by Lev Vladimirovitch Rudnev, an architect who was already famous for his Moscow high rises and the university, and who collaborated with a five-man collective of Soviet colleagues. Their project fused the form of the Western high rise with Russian decorative lavishness, while also using elements of Polish historic architecture, among others the so-called "Polish parapet" or "decorative crenellation" (åman 130), which were inspired by the buildings in the famous Renaissance square (Rynek) in Cracow. The schizophrenic mixture of curves, attics, and columns adorning the finished building once inspired a witty journalist to call it "Russian Greece" (Szczygiel). åman emphasizes the uniqueness of the form as a stylistic hybrid: "The Palace ... is no more typical of Poland than it is of the rest of the Soviet Union. It is unique of its kind outside the Soviet Union, and it is an offshoot of the seven high-rise buildings constructed in Moscow."He sees Rudniev's project as strongly impressed by "Russian ... academic architecture on Byzantine foundations" in which the "volumes of the building rise by stages from a broad base, until the building points straight up into the sky - a kind of architectural three-stage rocket" (130, 131). Rudniev's visit to Poland was his first trip to the "west" of the Soviet Union; besides Cracow, his research for the design took him to such other Polish "occidental" cities as Sandomierz, Torun, Chelmno, Kielce and Kazimierz nad Wisla. His Palace rose -10- with one Stakhanovite record being broken after another and claimed the lives of fifteen Soviet workers. The press was so busy printing party-prescribed paeans to the structure which, in the words of another author, was to "shed its rays all over Warsaw" that it never mentioned the casualties or the gossip about their ghosts haunting the structure. As Marian Szczygiel remarks, the bodies of two or three drunk workers who fell into the freshly poured concrete of the square around the building were left there, as it would have been too expensive to recover them. Quite literally, the blood, sweat, and actual flesh-and-bone of the proletariat served as the foundations. The Palace, the square, and the large green park around the complex were designed for the pleasures of the working classes, whom the new urban planning wanted to bring back downtown. In a famous poem by Adam Wazyk, "The Proletariat Will Enter the City Center" workers move "from the peripheries to city squares,/from the factories to palaces" and claim Arcadia-like Warsaw. Central in this socialist utopia, the Palace occupied such a large area with its volume of 800 000 cubic meters that about 3500 people had to be evicted and a prominent post-war neighborhood in Warsaw razed to the ground. The construction of Stalinís Palace was an expensive "gift" - it took three years and claimed human lives, destroyed what the press dismissed in passing a the "bourgeois district" and was a serious economic burden on war-ravaged Poland. One of the cult-of-personality songs popular at that time that my mother still recalls sounds like an ironic plea to a blood-thirsty, vampiric demi-god: "Long live Uncle Joseph Stalin whose lips are sweeter than raspberries." The Palace was among many similar buildings-monuments that Big Brother erected in the capitals of his satellite countries to commemorate their political and economic subordination after the Yalta agreement. To the Poles, that agreement was a blatant betrayal on the part of the Western powers. By leaving them at Soviet mercy, which was expressed by the euphemism of "Soviet sphere of influence" Yalta practically erased Eastern and Central -11- Europe from the cultural and political map of independent states. The erection of Stalin's Palace thus meant coming together of architecture, technology, military might, and communist ideology to put a seal "in stone" on that erasure. The building was a "gift" that war-ravaged Poland could not refuse, and became a persistent reminder of the times of Soviet hegemony and Stalinist terror in the region. At the same time, its official political design was to evoke quite another narrative, not of the past, but of the future; not of subordination and repression, but of freedom and joy. åman quotes from a letter of thanks that the Polish leader, Boleslaw Bierut, wrote to Stalin:
The building's full name, The Joseph Stalin Palace of Culture and Science, denoted a truly socialist space that was to bring together the "Muses" of the workersí state arts and the state-supported scholars in the socialist sciences and Marxism-Leninism. Their joyful joint labor teeming inside that "stone flower that [had] sprung up on the flower bed of the city" as yet another servile poem gloated, was to transform the lives of the people in truly miraculous ways (Szczygiel). The form was thus to symbolize a better and brighter future, while also embodying the collective Soviet bloc victory over the "dark forces of war" and Western imperialism. Endowed with powers of artistic inspiration and collective spirituality, the -12- Palace became a sacred form, a paradoxical "temple" where the civic religion of Socialist progress towards that ever-receding horizon of communism found a prominent outlet and space for celebration and worship. Filled with theaters, luxurious ballrooms, offices, conference and exhibit halls, cinemas, and a museum and a swimming pool, the gigantic building served the Party and the people in a truly socialist fashion. It was both a specimen of civil architecture designed for everyday pleasure and a sacred monument to the dominant ideology. As Mark Lewis notes, "[a] public monument . . . like architecture is to some extent the image of the Socialist order, [and] guarantees, even imposes that very order." Mark Wigley emphasizes that "buildings, like texts, are inserted into the world of dissimulation to speak of an unattainable order beyond it ... the building masquerades as order." Long before it dominated the capital's skyline, already in the design stages, the Palace had become a powerful symbol of the communist order and Soviet takeover in Poles' collective and individual memory. And yet, despite numerous propagandistic poems, press releases, and newsreels daily documenting the construction and brainwashing the public with the "official" political narrative, the form also entered Polish symbolic landscape as a highly ambivalent sign. As a symbol of the patriarchal Evil Empire, the Palace's erection, and its subsequent phallic presence that broadcast "the largest, the tallest, and the most powerful" came to embody the presence and persona of the Great Leader/Architect of Communism and his cult. But its scale also symbolized the size, as it were, of the Polesí hatred and rejection of Stalin and Soviet hegemony. It placed Stalin forever and ambivalently so, in the heart of Poland; it was Stalin, as it were, because the physical structure was actually as much feared and despised as its flesh-and-blood patron. According to Lewis, the despot's image "is not so much a representation, but constitutes his very public embodiment. The image is his power" (4). In its function as a public monument, the Palace stood for the physical aspect of Stalin's -13- ideology, power, and actual violence; its spire personified and gendered them in the solid permanence of its gigantic structure and its unfailing, or unfalling, phallic presence towering over and surveying the city around it. The enormous statue of Stalin, which was to stand in front of the building and dwarf those of Polish national heroes who already stood there - astronomer Copernicus and poet Mickiewicz - never saw the light of day due to the eclipse of personality cult. In the wake of the 1956 political "thaw" his name was also scratched off from the "book of communist wisdom" which is held by one of the workers' statutes that adorn the Palaceís exterior.That bible of communism featured the proverbial sequence of names, "Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin" with the last line now poignantly blank. Some visitors claim they can still read Stalinís name carved over the entrance to the building, although it has been covered with a generic neon spelling the building's shortened name for over forty years. The dramatic stories behind the Socialist Realist erections and the oppressive regime that they represent have always made them fascinating to the West. There is a growing fashion for Cold War memorabilia and it spills and spreads indiscriminately over the scar left by the Berlin Wall. Trendy collectors these days boast Trabant cars turned into sofas and sport Red Army insignia both in Prague and New York. Even in Poland, the bar/museum of communist artifacts in Hajnowka, "At Volodiaís" has become a "campy" destination for tourists, while the press publishes numerous pieces on the Cold War culture ranging from communist flower symbolism to Leninís Brain Institute. In Archiectural Design, Ronan Thomas comments on the Kudrinskaya apartment high rise in Moscow, which was conceived as "a particularly complex and uneconomical construction with much unused space." Like the Palace in Warsaw, like todayís popular "post-communist chic" that building was an extravagant, impractical, and even a vaguely "romantic" proof that the East could afford to be unpredictable, "uneconomical" and that it indeed had "too much past" to represent and -14- perhaps repress. This surplus of past and architecture now spills over into popular culture east and west. Cold War buildings and collectible artifacts thus playfully resurrect the past, while at the same time trying to erase and re-interpret it in the new economies of cultural exchange and narratives of national identity. (Ex)Changing Narratives and Subtexts In a truly postmodern fashion, Stalin's Palace now symbolizes new masters, their phallic powers, and ideologies; it has become a repository of meanings, a semiotic space where sings join in a chaotic chorus of bi-modern, post-totalitarian (in)signification. Its incredible transformation into a slick "convention center" and Western free market stronghold proves the feasibility of what seemed unthinkable a decade ago - Joseph Stalin's Socialist Realist high rise now houses the World Business Center, Coca-Cola Poland, and a Casino, "Queens."
-15- But how is that possible? What else does the Palace teach us about representation, memory, and the power of images in the post-totalitarian millennial moment? It seems to have emerged from Julia Kristeva's dystopian metropolis, which she describes in New Maladies of the Soul, where "glass and steel buildings that reach to the sky, reflect it, reflect each other, and reflect you." How does the Palace reflect us, its readers? What other stories does it tell us as a symbol of the post-totalitarian city that, as Elizabeth Grosz states, "has become . . . the point of reference, the centerpiece of a notion of economic/Socialist/political/cultural exchange"? In the most basic sense of a "historic marker" the Palace still stands for the painful and somewhat blurry past that cannot be erased; it is a constant (eye)sore on national and individual memory. Thus it also has been and still is "Stalin" on some level, but, like him, it has also always been and represented many other, quite contrary, things to its readers - Western, Polish, feminine, subversive, capitalist - that have enabled its present transformation(s). After all, its actual appearance has been irrelevant, while it has constantly been constructed as either grotesque or enchanting by individual beholders, whose passage through its overdecorated interiors only confirmed their freedom to overinterpret and fantasize amid the severity and nakedness of other communist structures. As åman stresses, it is "meant to be seen at close quarters" (131), which I would like to interpret metaphorically, while looking at a few of its historic and visual representations. At the time of its conception, the Palace was written up as a typical product of socialist industry - an architectural novelty, a communist "marketing trick" and "pseudo-event" that private individuals went to visit, and at which whole nations were expected to marvel. Rudniev himself emphasized that the design creed of his team of Soviet architects was "to create an atmosphere of warmth, love, and respect for the human being, so that everybody, child and adult, would like to come here and relax." The Palace was thus a glamorous -16- "family" advertisement for the triumphant, world-wide superiority of Socialist Realist technology and art. It also performed concrete cultural and social functions for the citizens of Warsaw, many of whom welcomed theaters, cinemas, and a park in the city center. Presented in innumerable articles, poems, songs, and posters, even on postage stamps and packets of cigarettes, Stalin's Palace henceforth joined public and private political meanings and designs in interesting ways. Its aesthetic appeal to the individual beholder of images and participant in socialist culture aimed at making him or her "buy" and "bow" to the ideology and power of the masses. Through the experience of spatial organization one underwent when inside, it made familiar The Great Leader/Architect/God of Communism, whom the phallic Palace signified, but whom Polish children were taught to welcome into human-scale world by calling him "Uncle." As a weapon in the East-West struggle for hegemony during the Cold War, Stalin's Palace provided a concentrated antithesis to the skyscraper-filled New York and Chicago, which were locations of "occidental" desire in Polish popular and stubbornly cosmopolitan imagination. These "enemy" cities were familiar to the Poles, as many had family there among "Polonia" or Polish immigrant population. "Our only skyscraper" had to denounce and de-familiarize those imperialist locations, and this often happened through discourses that concentrated on architecture - a frequent metaphor for the construction of "homo sovieticus." Jan Dabrowski, author of a book about the Palace's genesis, The Sky-High Monument of Friendship (1953), describes the American skyscraper as "a stone slab, deprived of character and beauty . . . [that] is a symbol of the [capitalist] rat race for profit, a symbol of indifference about man, beauty, and national artistic tradition." That decadent Western form was to be forgotten, negated, and transcended in the wake of the new Socialist architecture, which was to truly "serve society" and challenge the class-segregated design of the capitalist metropolis. -17- Interestingly, by contesting the American skyscraper, the Soviet one had to inscribe it unwittingly into the new socialist city-scape. Dabrowski's book spends a good deal of time demonizing the American city, which, in juicy quotations from the Soviet writer, Maxim Gorky, is animated as an obese, man-eating monster with skyscraper-teeth. The Chairman of the State Architecture Committee claimed in Pravda that the skyscrapers in the Soviet capital: "will be an advanced and progressive architecture based on rich national traditions drastically different from the soulless and formalistic creations of modern bourgeois architects.'" Being thus "negatively" informed by Western ideologies and structures that they desired to subvert, buildings like the Palace aimed at making their beholders forget the "enemy" glamour by always remembering the power and might that compelled their official readings. But the results were never unequivocal. In the eyes of Stefan Kisielewski, a more recent writer, who thought the Palace to be the worst thing that had befallen the Polish capital, that building also expresses the uniqueness of Warsaw, which has always been a "meeting place for all the madnesses, and regular quirks of the East and West." As a synecdochal representation of its capital and Polandís post-war history, the Palace thus becomes a "symbol of weirdness so peculiarly hinged on various psychic and chronological worlds that there is no way to express it" (Szczygiel). Kisielewskiís insistence on the formís unspeakable ideological and cultural hybridity explains some of the extreme reactions that it has always evoked. Some hate it and would like to see it demolished; others, like the chronicler of the Palace since 1960, Hanna Szczubelek, love it and passionately collect stories and anecdotes about it. No matter how one feels, it is true that the Palace has become such an integral part of Warsaw that it is impossible to imagine the city without it. A look at any postcard stand should be proof enough. Perhaps it is simply too big and too weird to be ignored. Its presence haunts the landscapes of Tadeusz Konwickiís four novels, and its absurdity seems to go well with the legendary stage set -18- designs of Andrzej Szajna. The latterís famous "Studio" theater is still located inside the Palace, as is "Dramatyczny" theater, both of which, right inside Stalinís belly, as it were, staged many a subversive performance in the aesopic theater idiom that escaped the scissors of communist censorship.
Polish-Jewish-American writer, Jerzy Kosinski, describes the Palace of Culture in his novel, Cockpit (1975) as the "Vatican governing the church of state." To his protagonist, who fakes letters from party officials in order to be granted a permission to travel to the United States, writing, and national, and individual identities can be reworked and reinterpreted within changing political scripts. Like writers, like architects, "people...[are] imaginative...[they are] architects of their own realities." In Kosinski's texts international city-scapes crossbreed and fertilize each other; he wrote about Warsaw and the Palace while living in New York, where it appeared to him: "[I]n the center of a barren square nicknamed the "Tundra." Every morning, whipped by northern winds that penetrated their inadequate coats, thousands of people rushed across the Tundra to work. From my room on one of the Palace's highest floors, they resembled faceless extras in a silent-movie crowd scenes." His clever protagonist felt close to being on top of the world in his Palace office, but when the author visited Poland, he was struck by how small it looked after thirty years of having been just a grand memory on his nostalgiaís map (Szczygiel). Like some Polish poster art, the ugliness and grandiosity of the Palace are both repelling and fascinating to a visitor; they seduce and tease him or her with their decorative arrogance, shocking contrasts, and phallic excess. åman claims that no other building in post-war Poland "incurred so much criticism, inspired so much revulsion" (125). And if, as Wojciech Tomasik argues, Warsaw is the "central focus in Polish symbolic space" then the centrally located Palace, no matter how controversial in its origin, can serve as the main architectural symbol through which the Polish capital and the whole culture continually (re-)define and -19- (re-)imagine themselves. Approaching it as a repository of post-war and post-totalitarian Polishness makes sense, too, as the form has existed, as it were, both on the profound and profane levels ever since its erection. Although despised as the symbol of Soviet regime, it continues to be an omnipresent icon of Warsaw's quirky attractiveness and its representations have been marketed with great success before and after 1989. For example, the language, layout, and images in a slick advertising brochure describing the Palace of Culture today, Warsaw Congress Center, clearly imitate the semiotics of Western publications of this sort. The brochure thus enables the mythic Cold War past as its selling point when boasting of: the "original architecture, unusual size" "most perfect marbles" "best kinds of woodwork" in this "fairy tale Palace" this "Mecca of tourist expeditions, the object of admiration for connoisseurs of construction and artistic craft." An early 1990s postcard, "Warsaw - The City Centre" represents a curious standoff between two towering structures: the light-colored silhouette of the Palace of Culture and Science and the dark, slick corporate glass tower of the "Marriott" Hotel. The image brings back the clichéd East-West dichotomies from the past, but it also playfully juxtaposes what has already become "our tradition" - the familiar Palace - with the "new era" - the predatory capitalist skyscraper. A more recent postcard, from the well-known cycle "I Love ..." in which a picture of a red heart replaces the verb, depicts an image of the Palace framed on left and right with those of the Old Town Square and the Royal Castle with King Zygmunt's signature column. The contrast between these images - Socialist-Realist excess of height and decor versus traditional eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European city center architecture - couldn't be starker. Nevertheless, in the eye of an informed spectator, these images fit together well, and in fact playfully disrupt their own superficial opposition of "old"/traditional/good vs. "new(er)"/communist/bad architecture. Upon closer scrutiny, Stalin's skyscraper from 1955 -20- appears to be a hybrid of a western high rise and pseudo-gothic cathedral, while the charming images of the Old Town are faithful replicas of buildings that had been completely destroyed during World War II. All the structures in the postcard were erected under the sponsorship of Polish United Workers Party and bear the signatures and political designs of its leaders. "I Love Warsaw" thus playfully seduces the post-totalitarian viewer with architecture as artifice and representation as reproduction made in People's Poland, with past and present embodied by specifically Polish communist "camp" as it were, by multivalent forms that resist simple comparisons and debunk chronological and political dichotomies. The paradoxical historic and cultural narratives encoded in Stalin's Palace have inspired novelists and journalists, literary and cultural studies, not to mention kitsch artifacts, from gilded miniatures and earrings to snow domes. Its image also adorns the cover of Mariusz Zawodniak's recent study, Literature on Trial, which explores the role of literary production as an extension, "reflection ... and ... symptom" of political life in Poland during the height of Socialist Realism. As Tomasik notes, Polish architecture and literature were welded closely together at that time. The task of the former to organize space was seen as instrumental in constructing the "new man" and the "new society" while the latter was to express and propagate both products as the " the leader among the arts." Like in the past, today, too, the Palace is a book offering its readers numerous stories about the identities of its designers/writers and beholders, and about the ever-changing locations of its interpretersí desires. According to Lewis, "re-appraisal and displacement" of a communist monument are possible because they are "already contained within the framework from the start, because the work will never be the simple representation of its subject, no matter how important or trivial the latter might be." The Soviet Palace has always been a Western skyscraper; Stalin's phallic "cathedral" has always signified the triumph of politics and economy over individual -21- faith; the texts written about it have also rewritten it and mythologized it, while it has always been a text in itself that contained its own unmaking. As an ever-shifting sign located on the margins, in the "feminized" Other Europe that is now serving as a writer, translator, and explicator of the emerging post-totalitarian mindset, the Palace thus represents the complex structure of this mindset. It reflects the ways in which the dichotomies of the past that individuals and whole cultures long to forget in fact infiltrate the superficial homogeneity of the present. It reminds us that present images always deconstruct the past in an effort to erase the memory of it; it is a monument to individual lives of men and women whose stories are never included in political narratives. Post-Totalitarian Archi-Texts for the New Millennium, or a Great Variety of Offers Under the Same Roof What other stories does the Palace tell? If one subscribes to Susan Suleiman's claim that in writing about culture one always "risks who one is" reading Stalin's Palace as a metaphor for the post-totalitarian moment necessitates interweaving of private and public national, gendered, and (auto)biographical narratives. As a structure-text that illustrates the paradoxes and complexities of the post-totalitarian mind, the Palace functions as an "architextural" construct - a meeting space for gendered collective and individual narratives of (inter)national memory. As Mary Ann Caws defines it, the term "architexture" means to "call attention to the surface texture of the construction made by reading." She emphasizes that the interplay between the "concept of origin and that of the building process" which is characteristic to architecture, is crucial to the reader's passages through texts, which, like buildings, are always placed and constructed in the context of other structures-texts. In employing Caws's claim that reading functions as "performance and as passage . . . in relation -22- to texts of exchange and city-scapes of passage" I want to demonstrate that cultural meanings inscribed into structures/monuments like the Palace actually contain and "predict" historical processes that make and transform not only them, but also their readers. In reflecting the changing political and ideological narratives written by those "who had the power to build" as well as opening up spaces for those created by individual readers that challenge and subvert the Master Text, the Palace reflects the historicity and fluidity of its beholders' constructed identities. Like architectural monuments, the self is "an evolving process . . . something made and always subject to revision." As Suleiman stresses, if we are to make the world "safe for dialogue" the politics of postmodernism should place more emphasis on the "political status of the plural self rather than of the plural text - not postmodernist intertextuality, but postmodernist subjectivity."
A narrative inscribing such subjectivity appears in "Self-Portrait with the Palace" by Zofa Kulik, an intriguing Polish artist, whose several photographic collages have been inspired by the monumental presence of Stalin's Palace in Polish visual culture. Ewa Lajer-Burchardth explains about Kulik's work that "memory may take the form of a cultural montage shaped by the scissors of personal experience."Kulik's "Self-portrait with the Palace" features a nude female body framed with an oval, "full-body" halo akin to those surrounding the images of the Virgin Mary. The woman stands erect in the center and in both hands, which cover her abdomen, holds a spear-like tip, which is used on tops of flag- and standard-poles. A large red star rests on the tip of the spear and spreads across her chest - the only patch of color in the otherwise black-and-white image. A twelve-point white star shines from between her knees. Above her head, turned upside-down, as if to imitate the familiar images of the Holy Spirit as a white dove, Stalinís Palace hangs, pointing its spire at her head. Against the black background float four male bodies draped in white sheets. Two of them -23- reach towards the Palace in the upper part of the image; two others in the lower part seem to be "falling away" knees bent, from the woman's halo they seem to be trying to hold on to. The image is a carefully staged, rigidly ordered collage of chaotically co-existing symbols, concepts, and images of Polishness. Like the Palace, it is a hybrid of past and present; like architecture it stages the (dis)orders of multiple national histories and identities. Kulik multiplies impossible dichotomies - female sexuality and virgin motherhood, phallic masculine heroism of Cold War monuments and vulnerable bodies of the male figures that evoke "Jesus Resurrected" Catholic Church rituals and those of communism, Stalin's Palace as/and the Holy Ghost. By doing so, she offers an excess of symbols and narratives that lurk beyond the superficial order of the composition. The artist herself refuses to comment on her work much: "I am an artist who says little and not very well, especially in public - nearly a mute. I am profoundly concentrated on looking."Lajer-Burchardth emphasizes Kulik's innovative ways of presenting "a certain masquerade of gender secured by a specific logic of desire at the core of the Communist subjective ideal ...[her] metaphoric relation between the Communist subject and the State which she thereby reveals to be essentially masochistic."Like in the "Self-Portrait with the Palace,"Kulik's other works featuring this form, "The Guardians of the Spire" and "May-Day Mass" provocatively juxtapose and reinterpret the inter-penetration of gendered narratives, political symbols, religious histories, and representations. Her series, Idioms of Soc-Ages, features a performance exhibit in which the artist herself is imprisoned between images of the Palace of Culture. Kulik uses the constricting "soc-form" to practice artistic freedom and confront her fear of subordination. To this critic, too, the Palace stands on the borders of autobiography and scholarship. It resides inside childhood memories and family photographs, especially the one taken on the occasion of my grandfather and aunts' "pilgrimage" to the Palace's construction site around 1954, which was all the tourist rage at that time. Not surprisingly, I grew up both -24- hating and admiring Stalin's skyscraper, and have been unable to remove its silhouette from the landscapes of my private memory. Lest this be read as an instance of narcissistic exorcism of the past, I want to recall Steen Eiler Rasmussen's explanation concerning the validity of individual experiences of forms in space: "architecture creates the framework around our lives."In this context, an old joke about the Palace only proves its vitality for Polandís capital, the country's culture, high and low, as well as this reader: "Do you know from where there is the best view of Warsaw? From the top of the Palace of Culture and Science because then you cannot see the Palace."To get rid of it, we have to scale it. Hence, seen or not, the Palace is always there, both as a poignant absence or an overwhelming presence in the eye and memory of the beholder(s), whose gaze is always partially directed inwards, in an attempt at self-reading.
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Fig. 3. Facade
Fig. 4. Casino "Queens"
Fig. 5. Exterior detail with the "Book of Communism"
Fig. 6. Main entrance
Fig. 7. Exterior detail with male sculpture