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THE PERSONAL EQUATION 77
new Chaplin for three weeks/' they would exclaim, " 1,000,000 Polish marks." " Look at the cost of other foreign specialities, — some of them 4,000,000 marks each, at least. How are we to get that back from audiences who have not sufficient money to buy two ounces of bread a week? " Not being a born mathematician, I gave it up. But I noticed the cinemas were booming all the same.
It is worthy of note that censorship was very strict, particularly regarding Soviet Russian subjects. But there was no organised fight against it as there is to-day in Western Europe, where intellectuals and aesthetes, both Right and Left ones, are going about their countries demanding that Russian pictures shall be recognised and exhibited to the toiling Mass. The fact is the Polish people had had as much of Russia as they wanted for a century or two. Poland had been liberated from the Russian toils, the facts of a new world were asking to be added to the general knowledge of the people. Such knowledge must be guarded and transmitted and made clear and intelligible to the common folk. When that was done it would be time to pay attention to the cultural advertisements of a country that too long had been a bitter thorn in Poland's side.
The Polish people could afford to be indifferent to censorship, even to assist it, for the task of their cultural establishments was to define and interpret nationalism and patriotism, to follow the lead set by the Polski theatre and the Opera House. The latter was busy indeed in providing first instalments of the common heritage — in folk-songs, dances, legends — all, the stuff of which the Folk themselves were made, derived from desire, occupation and natural environment, the true sociological stuff of communities. There was a wonderful opera-full of real Poland. It was called " Pan Twardowski " and was the inspired work of Ludomir Rozycki. I begged some of our magnates to import it and give the English people an opportunity of seeing how a liberated country puts itself on the stage. But