Living with Zygmunt Bauman,before and after

I first met Zygmunt Bauman in 1954 in Warsaw, Poland. We both were graduate students at the University of Warsaw, preparing our Master’s theses in philosophy under the guidance of Professor Adam Schaff. We met in the corridor in front of the professor’s office, when Zygmunt was leaving and I was waiting for my turn to talk to the professor. Someone introduced us, and there was a genuine sparkle of interest in his bright black eyes when he said: ‘Pleasure to meet you.’ However, I was somewhat discouraged by his clothing: a military uniform, though without any distinctions. Due to my own childhood traumas I had an instinctual fear of people in uniform. Later he explained that after being discharged from the army in 1953, he became a student and, having to feed his wife and daughter, could not afford to buy himself a suit.

I was 22 years old at the time, and he was 29. I was born into a Polish communist family of peasant origins, from the eastern part of Poland. Zygmunt Bauman was born into a poor Jewish family in the western part of Poland. Because our families were escaping to the east from the Nazi invasion, each of us spent the years of the Second World War in Russia. From the age of 7 to 12 I was at the International Children’s Home in Ivanovo, attending primary school. He finished secondary school in Russia with a gold medal and was drafted into the army as soon as he turned 18. He was fighting against Hitler’s Germany in the Polish Army that was formed in the USSR. Wounded in the battle for Kohlberg, he left the hospital to take part in the battle for Berlin. Despite the differences in our fates, the war left us with similar memories of hunger, severe cold, Russian songs, and the hard work of cutting wood. We were sharing these memories to the final days of his life.

Our friendship began to develop in 1956 when we started to work together at the Department of Philosophy and Sociology at the University of Warsaw, in the division of Political Sociology directed by Professor Julian Hochfeld, who earlier had been one of the political leaders of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS). Along with other friends from this department we were joined by mutual interests and convictions, but also by ties of friendship and camaraderie. We belonged to the Polish United Workers Party, but we believed in transforming the socio-economic system in a democratic direction, in the self-government of the working class, and in freedom of speech and thought. We were brought together by a shared desire to reconcile our academic pursuits with our political engagements, and a commitment to humanity. We aimed to develop Hochfeld’s idea of an ‘open and humanistic Marxism’. Our views at the time were considered ‘revisionist’, understood to be an interpretation of Marxist ideas that was critical of the direction taken by the ruling party.

Within this group, Bauman distinguished himself through his talent and his exceptionally hardworking habits (he used to joke that he had what was the most essential to academic work, ‘Sitzfleisch’, an ability to concentrate on the studies he undertook, and the quickness and tenacity to complete them). Two years after acquiring his Masters, in 1956, he defended his doctorate, published under the title British Socialism: Sources, Philosophy, Political Doctrine. In 1960 he received habilitation for the book Class, Movement, Elites: A Sociological Study of the British Worker’s Movement.

In 1962 he became the Chair of General Sociology. Under his direction I defended my doctoral thesis on ‘Karl Marx and problems of alienation in contemporary American sociology’ in 1967 (11 years after he had defended his PhD). In the same year he submitted his 15th book, Sketches in the Theory of Culture, for publication. This book was published for the first time 50 years later, in 2017, after the discovery of the only remaining copy of the proofs of the manuscript, the rest having been confiscated and destroyed by censors. In March 1968, Zygmunt Bauman, along with five other professors, was accused of instigating the students’ revolt against the system, and fired from the University of Warsaw. During an anti-Semitic campaign that accompanied these events, he was accused of being a Zionist and pressured to emigrate from Poland, together with his wife Janina and their daughters. I stayed in Poland with my family, and did not see the Baumans for the next 20 years, though I tried to keep up with his publications. In his review of sociological research undertaken during the years of the systemic transformation in Eastern Europe, Zygmunt included a comment on my book Personality, Ethical Orientations and Political Attitudes: the ‘accumulated data offer a unique historical record of the dynamics of public sentiment in a communist country, and they have recently been collected and summarized in a remarkably lucid and perceptive fashion by Aleksandra Jasińska-Kania, whose book amounts to a comprehensive, carefully documented “spiritual history” of a nation under communist rule’ (TLS, 24–30 November 1989, p. 1295).

In exile, Bauman finally settled in the United Kingdom, where he became the Chair of Sociology at the University of Leeds from 1971 until his formal retirement in 1990. He lived in Leeds until the end of his life.

I met him again in 1988 when I received a grant from the British Council to come to Oxford for a month as a visiting fellow. Zygmunt came to see me there, and later I went to visit him and Janina in Leeds. Since 1989 they both could travel to Poland, and they were coming often for lectures, conferences, or just to visit friends. They came to Warsaw for the last time together to celebrate the 60th anniversary of their marriage, though Janina was seriously ill. She died in 2009. My husband, Albin Kania, had died 15 years earlier.

In 2010 Zygmunt Bauman came to Warsaw for his 85th birthday when he was awarded the gold medal ‘Gloria Artis’ by the Polish Minister of Culture, Bogdan Zdrojewski. Zygmunt was still in deep mourning for Janina. We had a long talk about our emotions of grief after witnessing the death of our beloved. I told him about my feeling of sorrow and experience of widowhood. These talks strengthened our mutual understanding, and the intimacy and friendship between us. The following year Bauman was invited to teach a seminar on his social theory at the Collegium Civitas in Warsaw. He agreed under the condition that I would be the director of the seminar. The Rector of the Collegium repeated to me Zygmunt’s words: ‘She understands me better than I understand myself.’ For a year we were cooperating on this project: every month, Zygmunt travelled from Leeds to give a lecture in Warsaw, and I organized other lectures and discussions with the students every week. After one of his lectures he proposed, asking me to marry him. It was hard to believe that the miracle of falling in love could happen to people who were 80 years old, but we both felt like we were 16 again.

We became engaged on New Year’s Eve 2012 in Bellagio. Later, we were officially married in Leeds Town Hall. I moved to Leeds with him and we lived together for the next five years. Zygmunt convinced me to retire from teaching sociology in Warsaw, arguing that, as his own example showed, retirement could be a blessing for the development of one’s own creativity in writing. His creativity was in full bloom again, indeed. He usually woke up around four in the morning and, after quickly browsing through the daily press, wrote until eight, when he woke me up for breakfast. He hardly could wait until I finished eating, saying: ‘I have a lot of work to complete today.’ Then he ran to continue his writing in his office in an upstairs room of the house. I stayed downstairs in another office inherited from Janina. Among my correspondence I usually found emails from Zygmunt, including attachments containing his writing from that morning for me to read. I could barely finish reading and answering letters before noon, when he was calling me to have drinks before a lunch that he had prepared and set to cook in the oven (he loved cooking). This was his favorite time of the day: when we were drinking and discussing our morning work – mainly his writing, because mine had not started yet. I could only begin to work seriously after lunch and a short siesta, but when I was finally finding some inspiration to write, Zygmunt would ask whether we could take a break and listen to music or watch a movie he had prepared for our evening entertainment. We had different cycles of our daytime activities. I called him a lark and myself an owl. He preferred a different metaphor: according to the ancient Greeks, Venus was two different stars: Phosphorus, visible in the sky in the morning, and Hesperus in the evening. He was the morning star, and I was the evening one. I had a hard time keeping pace with him. He could write four or five books during one year, while I was glad to write four or five articles in the same time.

However, we were actually spending no more than half of our time working and writing at home, though it was the most precious time for us. Aside from that, we were travelling almost every week to give lectures or to present papers at conferences in various countries – mainly in Europe, but also in the US and Brazil. We had platinum status as KLM frequent fliers, which required 60 flights per year. Being a heavy smoker, Zygmunt didn’t like long transcontinental flights. He preferred to travel in Europe. Yet for him, Europe was not only a place or experience, but An Unfinished Adventure, a search for a model of the ‘art of living with a difference’, and ‘cosmopolitically integrated humanity’.

In Europe he enjoyed going to Italy most of all. He loved Italian people, food, landscapes, cities, monuments, and museums. We both especially admired the massive attendance at the Festivals of Philosophy, and the large audiences at lectures, which is a specific and enchanting characteristic of Italian culture. Coming to Italy for such events was a very festive occasion for us. Zygmunt always was happy to meet his friends in Italy, and it was here that he found his most valued co-writers or collaborators in publishing his works. He regarded cooperation with them as inspiring, and beneficial to both sides.

It was in Italy, during one of the last months of his life, that he met Pope Francis. Not only did Zygmunt greatly admire the Pope; he placed the greatest trust and hope for a way toward a better society in his messages. Looking for an answer to the ‘seminal live-or-die question for humanity’, Bauman ‘found in an address by Pope Francis – currently the one person among public figures with considerable planet-wide authority who is sufficiently bold and determined to raise and tackle this sort of questions…That answer is: the capacity for dialogue…The chances of fruitful dialogue, as Pope Francis reminds us, depend on our reciprocal respect and assumed, granted and mutually recognized equality of status’ (Retrotopia, pp.164–6). When we were invited to the Community of Saint’Egidio conference in Assisi in September 2016 and were informed that there would be an opportunity to have a personal meeting with the Pope, Zygmunt was already suffering from congestive heart failure. I told him that the trip could be too exhausting and dangerous for him, but he answered with exasperation: ‘I would crawl to meet him.’ During their conversation Bauman compared Pope Francis to a light in the tunnel on the search for the survival and integration of humanity, and the Pope laughed, jokingly saying that it was the first time in his life that he heard the metaphor of a tunnel being applied to him.

In the beginning of November 2016 we took our last trip to Italy, and stayed in Florence for two nights. Bauman was invited by Fabio Cavallucci to give a lecture at the Prato Centre of Contemporary Art, on the exhibition entitled ‘The End of the World’. It was his last public lecture, published recently in a small book edited by the Laterza Publishing House. He discussed the variety of meanings of such phrases as ‘end of the world’ or the ‘end of time’ and a variety of reasons why people in some situations become particularly prone to worry about such subjects.

That was the situation in our personal life at the time: an anticipation of the coming end of our life together. Zygmunt’s enormous physical energy was rapidly exhausting, though his intellectual activity remained remarkable. We started to cancel lectures of his that were planned for November and December in Portugal, Slovakia, Croatia, Venice, Palermo, and Amsterdam, one after another, but he was still writing and sending manuscripts to the organizers of conferences. We celebrated New Year’s Eve 2017 and the fifth anniversary of our living together at 1 Lawnswood Gardens in Leeds. Raising a glass of champagne, Zygmunt said sadly: ‘It will be a short year.’ On the ninth of January he passed away to the ‘liquid eternity’. A private family funeral, attended by me and my daughter, along with his three daughters and their families, took place at the Lawnswood Cemetery in Leeds. One week later I left Leeds and returned to my home in Warsaw, Poland.

Zygmunt Bauman remains present in my life in many different ways: in my thoughts, dreams, talks, reading, and writing. I was invited to talk about him and his work at several meetings and conferences in Warsaw, Poznan, and Cracow. I am afraid that he could not hear me, but he was always hard of hearing anyway. Many journalists and scholars asked me for interviews while preparing articles or books about him. He left us a huge intellectual legacy: to continue the search for answers to the questions he raised; to follow up his works and ideas; and to learn from him the art of life. In his book with this title he wrote: ‘Love, we need to conclude, abstains from promising an easy road to happiness and meaning.…It is something that always still needs to be made anew and remade daily, hourly; constantly resuscitated, reaffirmed, attended to and cared for.’ It remains true even more after ‘the death that us parted’.