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Article
Living with Zygmunt
Bauman, before and after
Aleksandra Kania
Warsaw University, Poland
Abstract
This paper offers a memoir of living with Zygmunt Bauman. It begins with the early
encounter of Bauman and Aleksandra Kania in Warsaw in 1954, where both were
Masters students working with the humanist Marxist Adam Schaff. Kania and Bauman
followed their separate life paths for decades, though they were both postwar com-
munists and reconstructionists. Much later, the loss of their partners led to union, in
Leeds and across the globe in travel. This is a story of friendship and mutual enthusiasms,
then intimacy between two working sociologists. There are also some apparent differ-
ences, as between the Lark and the Owl, or between Phosphorous and Hesperus. Life
together leads especially to Italy, and to Pope Francis. This is a reflection on what
Bauman called the art of life.
Keywords
Zygmunt Bauman, friendship, Italy, Aleksandra Kania, Leeds, love, sociology, Warsaw
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.
Corresponding author:
Aleksandra Kania, Instytut Socjologii, Warsaw University, 00-927 Warsaw, Poland.
Email: aleksandra.kania@uw.edu.pl
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1–5
ªThe Author(s) 2018
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0725513618811710
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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 excep-
tionally 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 sub-
mitted 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 pro-
fessors, 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 pub-
lications. In his review of sociological research undertaken during the years of the
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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 Jasin´ska-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 under-
standing, 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 under-
stand 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
Kania 3
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 enter-
tainment. 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.
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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’.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Author biography
[AQ1]
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