A few years before his death, Zbigniew Herbert, the prominent Polish poet, published a slim volume of nineteen poems titled Elegy for the Departure. Many of the poems had a clearly valedictory theme. The title poem, “Elegy for the Departure of Pen Ink and Lamp,” is particularly significant: it seems to announce the end of Herbert’s lifelong project as a poet. The poet bids farewell to three companions of his childhood that might have set him on his literary path: the pen, the “outlet of the critical mind, messenger of soothing knowledge;” the ink of “wise depths” smelling of “a gentle volcano / the call of the abyss;” and the oil lamp, “a bright allegory / a spirit stubbornly battling / the demons of gnosis,” yet also familiar with ”the surf of passions” and able to call up “landscapes of a savage city repeated in water.” Elegy for the Departure was not Herbert’s last book. The poet had still eight more years of life and three more poetic volumes ahead of him, but he was already very ill, tired, and aware that his best days were behind him. What he was bidding farewell — apologetically, as if the departure was his fault — in these three objects was both his turbulent life and his poetry based on the struggle of reason and light against the “demons of gnosis” and the “gentle volcano” of existential mystery. It was not a gentle farewell. The last line sounds like a door slammed shut in anger: “and / it will be / dark.” Reading this poem again thirty years later, I cannot resist the feeling it is also a farewell to a whole poetic epoch, or to a certain type of poetry that had prevailed in Eastern Central Europe in the postwar decades, especially after the relative relaxation of the political and aesthetic strictures of Communism around 1956. It was as if the poet felt that after his departure, and the departure of several members of his generation, no one is going to write like them. He expected a literary extinction. This is exactly what happened. The young Polish poets of the 1990s, those born in or around the 1960s, loudly foreswore the legacy of the giants of the previous generations. And a similar revolution was taking place in practically all the countries of the now post-Communist region. This was not surprising, considering the immensity of social and cultural change that occurred with the end of the Communist regime. But what was the era that had so spectacularly ended with the victory of the dreams of all the postwar generations? Did it have to end? And was it replaced with anything that promises equally lasting value? 
The first of these questions may be the most important and also the most difficult to answer. In the postwar decades the poetic scene was dominated by a handful of great names scattered throughout the region subjugated by the Soviet Union after the Second World War: Czesław Miłosz, Zbigniew Herbert, Tadeusz Różewicz, Wisława Szymborska, and Adam Zagajewski in Poland; Vladimír Holan and Miroslav Holub in Czechoslovakia; János Pilinszky in Hungary; Vasko Popa and Ivan Lalić in Yugoslavia. The list may be longer, but it is certainly not shorter. What, if anything, links all those poets? For a start, they shared a tragic time and tragic circumstances. Most of them were born in the 1920s. They were teenagers when the war broke out and young adults when it ended. There were the older ones, like Miłosz or Holan, who started writing and even gained prominence before the war, and younger ones, born after the war, such as Adam Zagajewski. But most of them grew up during the Nazi atrocities, sometimes as members of the resistance and sometimes as helpless witnesses. After the war, they faced the momentous political disruption in the form of the Soviet Communist takeover. Some of them, such as Herbert, met it with inner resistance, some with hope, or resignation, or even, like Szymborska, with enthusiasm. In every case, however, the political and social transformation must have been a moral and psychological jolt. Those who were favorably disposed towards the new order were usually quickly disappointed, leading some of them to open opposition, but more often to poetic resistance against the ideological and aesthetic vulgarity that surrounded them. During the years of the strict and forcefully imposed doctrine of socialist realism, they were often reprimanded and sometimes silenced by the monitors of official culture for their pessimism or alleged obscurity. With very few exceptions they staunchly refused to write “for the masses” in the prescribed propagandistic mode. In many cases, their true poetic debuts took place in or around 1956. Many of these poets knew and respected each other, met or corresponded, formed friendships or practical alliances, and generally felt a bond of fraternity, a certain “genetic attraction” to each other. They constituted what is called a “biographical” literary generation linked by a set of historical facts and private experiences that defined their lives. It would be hard, however, to call them a literary school, or group, or movement. In the strictly literary sense, there are few similarities and much diversity among their particular poetic idioms. At first glance, what can link Miłosz’s elegantly versed declarations, meditations, and “treatises” on poetry, philosophy, and theology with Popa’s rich, oneiric, near-surreal imagery, or with Różewicz’s stripped-down, unfigurative, deliberately un-poetic style, or Herbert’s ironic anecdotes, and perfectly balanced “classical” lines with the texture of ancient marble, or with Holub’s tongue-in-cheek philosophizing and free use of scientific language, or with Pilinszky’s prison-camp tableaus, where realistic description flows into a set of metonymies so accurate that one can easily take them for plain speech? (Upturned faces of hungry prisoners pulling a heavy cart seem “strained for a scent / of the far-off celestial trough.”) Is it possible to talk about all those very different poets as a common literary phenomenon? When, in the 1960s, the works of these poets were
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