Pozostał w kontrze. Leopold Tyrmand wobec ruchów kontestacyjnych w USA na kartach Dzienników Stefana Kisielewskiego
He Remained in Opposition. Leopold Tyrmand in the Face of Contestation Movements in the Pages of Diaries by Stefan Kisielewski

Summary/Abstract: The article presents – on the basis of Stefan Kisielewski’s Diaries from 1968–1970 – the profile of Leopold Tyrmand as an enemy of the contestation movements in the United States. At the turn of 1968 and 1969, Tyrmand was a lecturer at Columbia University. At that time, he opposed those views of American youth which he considered to be neo-Marxist and Maoist. An analysis of the historical context of Tyrmand’s American journalism from 1968–1970 shows his intransigent attitude to the New Left movement, as well as to Soviet and Chinese communism. The wave of protests in 1968 was criticised by the writer. In his Diaries, Stefan Kisielewski also refers to the conservatism of Tyrmand, which, however, raises doubts in terms of its interpretation. Tyrmand’s anti-communist stance cannot be viewed in isolation from the Cold War geopolitical rivalry between the United States, the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. The writer did not succumb to the ideology of communism, neither in Poland nor in America, during the period of the New Left’s accelerating expansion.

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