Today in The New York Review of Books: Daphne Merkin reflects on the bliss and blues of life by the pool, and, from the archives, remembering the birth of Poland’s Solidarity movement, forty-five years ago today.

Daphne Merkin
Poolside

On a broiling summer afternoon I am lying on a chaise, daydreaming about past lovers and abandoned plans. But the water beckons, promising always that we can begin our lives anew.

Free from the Archives

Forty-five years ago today representatives from Poland’s Communist government and Lech Wałęsa, the leader of a group of striking shipyard workers in Gdańsk, signed the Gdańsk Agreement, authorizing the creation of Solidarity, the first independent trade union to be recognized by a Warsaw Pact government. Solidarity and Wałęsa soon proved instrumental in ending Communist rule in Poland.

For the Review’s October 9, 1980, issue, Abraham Brumberg interviewed Jan Litynski, a long-time opposition leader who had just been released from jail three days after the Agreement was signed, and Edward Lipinski, a ninety-two-year-old economist who had been an opposition leader since he was expelled from the Communist Party in the early 1950s.

Abraham Brumberg, Jan Litynski, and Edward Lipinski
After Gdansk: Two Interviews

Jan Litynski: Polish society—and particularly the strikers—did not come out against Communist power as such, but simply refused to obey it. They said, in effect, we’ve had enough of the way the government has run this country.

Alexander Stille
Killing the Moonlight

“From the beginning Futurism had a clear political dimension…. Many Futurist evenings were agitations in favor of Italy’s entering World War I. Proclaiming a brand of ‘revolutionary nationalism,’ in 1918 the movement even founded a Futurist Political Party that blended right and left, mixing bellicose support for Italy’s territorial expansion with promises to combat illiteracy, legalize divorce, abolish the secret police, and rid the country of the influence of the Catholic Church.”

Bathsheba Demuth
Where the Dogs Run

“I did not understand everything I heard in camp then, even in English, and as an outsider I never fully will. But it was clear even to me that no snowmachine or truck could substitute for dogs. Dog is salmon and salmon is story.”

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