There are times when facts have the quality of a fable. The re-emergence of a lost concerto, buried by its composer in the soil of Warsaw as he fled the Nazis, is such a moment. Ludomir Różycki survived, but his work appeared to have been lost for ever. Now, more than seven decades on, it has sprung to life again, reconstructed by Poland’s leading classical violinist, Janusz Wawrowski. A recording of the rich, exuberant concerto, which the musician performs with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, will be released this year.
There are also times when fiction reads, if not quite as fact, then at least as a direct commentary upon the facts before us. Yōko Ogawa’s The Memory Police, published in English for the first time last year, offers a kind of mirror image of Różycki’s story. The narrator lives on an island where objects are gradually vanishing: birds and ribbons, stamps and ferries. The memory police exist to enforce the disappearances, not only removing any physical trace of what has gone, but ensuring that no memory of them lingers. Even the memory of forgetting something must itself be lost; the few who are still able to recall have a precious, dangerous gift.
The book is not one but many allegories. It is a tale of creativity: the narrator is a novelist who hides her editor to protect him, and her mother was a sculptor who found a way to preserve things as they vanished. But it can also be read as a story of dementia, or death, or our inability to grasp a crisis as it escalates.
At its simplest, it is about loss itself. But the most obvious and popular interpretation of the book is as an account of authoritarianism and its need to erase the truth: its publishers describe it as Orwellian. Though the novel was first published in 1994, the translation has emerged only now, as if it has found its time. Its readers can see around them the rewriting of historical narratives the blank denials of authorities who insist that what we have seen and experienced never happened at all. (It is intriguing that even Frozen II, the recent sequel to Disney’s animated blockbuster, is built in part around the lies and omissions of those who rule, and the way that courage can unearth buried truths.)
The emergence of the missing concerto is, of course, a literal disinterment. Builders found the composer’s papers while working in the garden of his destroyed house after the war, and handed them to authorities. Wawrowski, who found the orchestral score and basic piano arrangement in two separate archives, and spent a decade reconstructing the work, hopes that it will restore the composer to the place he once held at the heart of Poland’s classical canon. Różycki’s story, like Ogawa’s novel, reminds us that to erase culture is also to erase people, and that memory is social. It is a cause for celebration, and contemplation too. What are we remembering now? And what is being buried?
