The Australian author Michael Moran came from England to live permanently in Poland in 2004 although he had been visiting the country regularly since 1992. It was partly a metaphysical decision instigated by his grand uncle who was a concert pianist and loved the music of Chopin. He even asked Michael to scatter his ashes at the village of Żelazowa Wola, the birthplace of the composer. Michael himself is an intriguing and fascinating person if one takes into consideration his life achievements not to mention his personality and personal charm.
His book A Country in the Moon: Travels in Search of the Heart of Poland (Granta Books, 2008), highly acclaimed on a global scale, is his homage to Poland. It was translated into Polish in 2010 by Wydawnictwo Czarne as Kraj z Księżyca: Podróże do serca Polski. Interestingly, the title refers to a remark made by the great eighteenth century English statesman Edmund Burke sadly reflecting on the shameful First Partition of Poland in 1772. He considered it ‘the first very great breach in the modern political system of Europe.'
Today Michael lives in Warsaw where he has found his place in the world and where he leads a happy life with his Polish wife Barbara.
Extracts from the book:
I arrived in Poland one desolate January morning in the winter of 1992. The training centre was some eighteen kilometres from the city centre, deep in a picturesque birch and pine forest on the banks of the Vistula. Private allotments for raising vegetables, known as działki, sported tiny, fantastical cabins. The building must have been one of the last conference centres in Warsaw untouched since communist days. Two architecturally sterile blocks were linked by a covered walkway. Decrepit and overgrown tennis courts with rotting nets lay to one side of a neglected Italianate garden that had once graced a charming summer villa. A three-legged dog nosed some promising rubbish bins. The reception area was dim, with unsmiling women behind a glass panel furnished with a tiny speech aperture that forced one to bend double to communicate. Anyone hoping to use the telephone needed to grasp the single red handset pushed through the gap on a short cord. Disconnection seemed inevitable and usually irreversible.
*
It was the intimations of a glorious past that first attracted me to this city [Warsaw] and this country. Signs, indications, ruins and reconstructions exercise my imagination in a way unknown in the immaculately preserved museums and scientifically restored monuments in the West. The history of Poland is a manifestation of absence, mysteries to be read from fragments, the residue of human action. Almost the entire movable cultural heritage of Poland has been systematically stolen, burnt or despoiled since at least Napoleonic times, going back even to the Tatar Golden Horde. The Nazis implemented a complete state-sponsored apparatus to facilitate the theft of artworks followed by their sale or destruction. Many survived only through displays of tremendous courage and patriotism. A chipped jewel, a dented monstrance, a military button, a captured Oriental tent, a shattered Teutonic castle on a timeless riverbank speak to me eloquently of resistance and sacrifice.
*
We had to wait in another queue while foreign applications were processed. A Hungarian three-star General engaged me in laconic conversation in old-fashioned English.
‘I see you are a foreigner, old fruit. What are you registering in
this nightmare, my good friend?'
‘A car. An FSO 125p. It's rather difficult.' I had already begun to
sigh in Polish and look crestfallen at the floor.
‘Ha! You are more than lucky - just a car!'
‘Why?'
‘I am registering a tank!'
‘A tank! Do you have to register tanks?'
‘Sure. That will give the bastards some problems!'
He laughed uproariously and proceeded into the inner sanctum. An hour passed before he emerged triumphant.
‘They want me to put stop lights and direction indicators on the
bloody thing!' He laughed again and wandered off.
*
[At Żelazowa Wola - birthplace of Chopin]
In the soft light of early evening the distant figure of a woman appeared at the entrance to the park, dressed in a dark coat of military cut, blonde hair caught up in a ribbon. I idly watched her enter through the wrought iron entrance gates and come towards me up the path. She came into focus only slowly, preoccupied as I was with melancholic thoughts. I was astounded to see Zosia materialize.
‘What are you doing here?' I asked in amazement.
‘Kocham cię (I love you), that's all. I want to be here and listen to Chopin with you.'
‘How did you get away, for heaven's sake?'
‘I told them I needed to escape the city and go to a concert. Simple really.'
Hands linked, we pushed aside the heavy brocade and leather curtain at the front door. Only about twenty-five people could be accommodated in the tiny room. A brass candelabra with the crowned Polish eagle resting between the branches stood on the small grand piano. Warm yellow light flickered on the portrait of the composer and fitfully illuminated the painted beams of the dwór. The young pianist, a French girl, had ambitiously chosen to play both sets of Chopin études. Her little dog lay under the instrument fast asleep.
*
‘Na zdrowie, Mike! Good vodka!'
‘Na zdrowie!'
I downed another shot of my home-made Żubrówka vodka. I was sharing it amongst the other drivers of the Polish Automobile Club as we were interviewed under bright lights.
‘Who is the President of the club?' I asked naively. They looked at each other aghast.
‘Are you the President, Witek?' one driver with a ponytail asked.
‘No, I'm not.'
‘Are you, Staś?' This questioner looked like Orson Welles in a Bugatti T-shirt.
‘No. Not me.' Everyone looked nonplussed.
‘We don't know who the President is and we don't care! We are all leaders here! Do you want to be the President?'
I declined graciously.
*
The extremes within the Polish temperament are reflected in the richly varied landscape which ranges from pristine primeval forest to the most polluted soil in Europe, a country where chemically damaged children seek rehabilitation in the mountains. It was the Polish trees that captivated me from the very beginning of my excursions around the country. The leaves on linden, birch and aspen have the tremulous, nervous movement of impressionist paintings. The rapid vibration is like a marvellous electro-chemical agitation. The branches sway lethargically, flexibly in the summer breeze above impossibly slender trunks. In winter the bare birch and pine forests on the Mazovian plain creak in a mood of melancholy solitariness, a haunting accompaniment to any wanderer in the snow. In the ancient forest of Białowieża the last herds of European bison roam amidst the chaos of the primeval bog together with lynx, eagle, roe deer, wolf, wild boar, red fox and elk. The first encounter with Białowieża, one of the last lowland primeval forests in Europe, is an experience never t be forgotten.
*
The unique contribution Poland has made to the European psyche is resistance to oppression whatever the cost, a universal human emotion rarely expressed with such intensity as here. The political philosopher in Edmund Burke would have been astonished at the extraordinary transformations of this ‘brave and haughty nation, long nursed in independence'. Poland is no longer his ‘country in the moon'.
*
During the Pope's final hours I wandered the streets of Warsaw in the small hours pondering the spiritual and political revolution John Paul II had catalysed in Poland on his first pilgrimage to the country in the summer of 1979. It was then he uttered the eloquent biblical phrases ‘Be not afraid' and ‘Renew the face of the earth', which were taken deep into the hearts of the millions of Poles who joined him in prayer in the open fields outside town and city. He transformed this fragmented society. The regime feared him as a dangerous enemy although paradoxically they assisted their own suicide by helpfully planning his pilgrimage. During the celebrations a miner was asked the use of religion in a communist state and succinctly replied, ‘To praise the Mother of God and to spite those bastards!'
Review quotes A Country in the Moon:Travels in Search of the Heart of Poland (Granta Books May 2008)
The Guardian
‘...the best contemporary travel book on Poland, reminiscent in its finest moments of Patrick Leigh Fermor's masterful Time of Gifts...[An] erudite, humbling and rhapsodic travel book... No thinking traveller interested in Poland should overlook this essential book.'
The Observer
‘This memoir is in the tradition of Lawrence Durrell's Bitter Lemons and proves a well-crafted, spirited and original polonaise, triumphantly balancing humour with scholarship.'
Metro London
‘Recalling something of W. G. Sebald...Moran is a sensitive, intelligent companion, as able to capture the rapacious spirit and conditions of modern Poland as he is the mournful, savage ghosts of its past - the result is moving and absorbing.'
The Spectator
‘There is so much to admire in this well-researched and hugely entertaining book, and so much to learn...A Country in the Moon is a three-star feast.'
The Times Literary Supplement
'This lively and intelligent book is stuffed with original material that is both fascinating and quite new to most people in the West. Moran has a taste for the baroque oddity, the outrageous eccentricity and the all-but-incredible historical anecdote.'
The Independent
‘Moran's writing is richly atmospheric with real depth and sparkle. [His] deep knowledge of the country and genuine engagement [make this] an absorbing ... ultimately rewarding travelogue.'
Conde Nast Traveller, Giles Foden
`Wonderful'
Wanderlust Travel Magazine
(the finest travel magazine in the UK - 5 stars and chosen as ‘Book of the Month' May 2008)
'Literary travel writing at its best: elegiac, informative and profound... probably the best travel book I will read this year.'
The Good Book Guide
This superb introduction to Poland and the Poles is written with a keen eye for the ridiculous and powerfully communicates the surreal quality of the post-communist environment of the early 1990s......This is not just a travel book, but also a journey through Poland's history, informatively and entertainingly re-told by a man with a real gift for storytelling.
Bookdealer (an important book trade monthly in the UK)
‘Moran's description of his tribulations...could have flowed from the pen of a Dostoevsky...This book has lifted the veil on one of Europe's most talented and inspiring people.'
The Sunday Times
'a good primer on Poland's history of dash and gloom....an entertaining account...[which keeps] the reader engrossed to the end.'
The Daily Telegraph
'Moran writes well of the Polish concept of żal (regret after irrevocable loss) ; of Polish pride, honour and exuberance mingled with pessimism; and of the importance of the Catholic church and the family...This well-written book offers some much-needed history lessons.'
