When Czesław Miłosz published The Captive Mind in 1953, it caused an immediate firestorm. An intimate and unsparing portrait of Miłosz’s fellow Polish writers and their relationship to the Stalinist state, the book quickly found an audience on both sides of the Iron Curtain—even in Poland, where it was officially banned. One concept in the book proved to be especially compelling for this first cohort of readers. This was the idea of ketman, or ideological disguise. Miłosz borrowed the term from the world of Islamic religious thought, where it denotes the duty of believers to conceal their beliefs when faced with persecution. For a time, ketman was everywhere. In Poland, it seemed to identify the condition of everyday life, where ideological pressures forced many aspiring artists and intellectuals into a continuous game of dissimulation and playacting. In the West, ketman had a dual career. For some thinkers, it identified the particular strangeness of so-called totalitarian regimes, while for others, it named something generalizable to “total” institutions, and perhaps, to society as a whole. After some two decades, however, the discourse around ketman began to shift, and the term came to be abandoned, as a paradigm of thought rooted in belief gave way to another centered on authenticity. This talk will tell the story of ketman’s rise and fall in order to identify an overlooked current in mid-century thought, and as a way to reflect on the current terms of our relationship to ideology and power.
Jacob Mikanowski is a writer, historian, and journalist whose work centers on the past and present of Eastern Europe. He received his PhD in European history from the University of California, Berkeley in 2024, with a dissertation on discourses of self-concealment in Stalinist Poland. As a journalist, he has covered current events in Poland, Hungary, and neighboring countries for outlets including The Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, and The New York Times. His first book, Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land, was published by Oneworld Publications in 2023. It has since appeared in German, Czech, and Korean, with eight more translations on the way.
IWM Senior Research Fellow Taras Fedirko will moderate the discussion.
