Reviews

Kott, Polish-born essayist, theater critic and Shakespearean scholar who emigrated to the U.S. in 1966, begins this autobiographical odyssey in Paris in 1939 where he played boccie with Leon Trotsky's future murderer. It ends with an account of the author's fifth heart attack in 1990 and a meditation on reconciling oneself to death. Accident, fate and the molding forces of history are leitmotifs in Kott's existential adventure. In France he befriended the Surrealists Andre Breton and Tristan Tzara, as well as their circle, yet also spent months as a seminarian in a Dominican monastery. Born in Warsaw in 1914, Kott returned to Poland in 1939, fought in the resistance against the Nazis and joined an underground Communist cell; he relates a series of hair-raising, narrow escapes from the Germans. His protracted enchantment with Stalinism, a blind faith that nearly wrecked his marriage, takes up the final phase of this sharply etched memoir. Readers' Subscription Book Club selection. (Apr.)

Kott, a Polish intellectual, essayist, critic, and the author of Shakespeare, Our Contemporary (1974), here presents his own unforgettable story in a series of essays. Originally published in Polish in 1990, this book now appears in an expanded edition. The entire writing resonates with life and its mysteries, some resolved, some not. Kott doesn't spare himself. It's all here: from his early prewar days in Paris to his partisan efforts as a Nazi fighter in the Polish underground, from the oath--read from a cigarette paper and then burned--that inducted him into the People's Army to his estrangement and resignation from communism. As a professor of literature at the University of Warsaw, he protested government censorship, eventually ending up in the United States teaching at various universities. The rigors and victories of Kott's life somehow offer sustenance to all who question existence.-- Robert L. Kelly, Fort Wayne Community Schs., Ind.