The Painted Bird, by Jerzy Kosinski, is the story of a boy separated from his parents in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. In a distant land of poor villages he is distrusted as a potential gypsy or Jew by the locals, who live without roads, plumbing, or electricity. The novel follows his adventures in this violent environment as he ages from a helpless child to a manipulative teenager. During this time he escapes from village to village, living with over a dozen keepers. The earliest ones have names like Marta, Olga, Jealous, and Lekh, and the latest include Garbos, Makar, and Labina. In the middle he lives with characters of no name, who he describes only with the titles carpenter, blacksmith, master, farmer, and priest.
None of these people are family to the boy, and he is a son to none of them. He is mostly a possession, valued only for the slavish duties he can fulfill. He lives on floors in dirt huts, attics, and barns, often with less stature than the household animals. The boy is bought, beat, set adrift, spit on, used as bait for lightning, delivered to Nazis, and dangled over a rabid dog for hours. The other children are not friendly; a group of boys attempt to rape him, and then push him under the ice of a river.
That the protagonist survives his many emergencies is a credit to his tenacity and independence. Surely he should have been died from one of his many beatings, or by dog attacks, or by drowning or freezing to death. He loses his voice. Yet the violence of the world he inhabits is so extreme that his story is not exceptional. He is much luckier than many others in the book. The book describes people who have been stabbed in the back, consumed by a swarm of rats, blinded with a spoon, and killed in more horrible ways than I care to repeat. Along with torture and murder, sexual abuse of many forms is displayed in detail throughout the book.
In this story there is no glorified character of moral stature. There are some characters who are less violent to the boy, but many of them have violence for others or are sexually disturbed. The boy himself is not innocent, he is more calculating than caring. It is not just that the environment hardens him, but that he loses memory of safer times, and never builds a significant capacity for sympathy. He is a victim, through circumstances and not through weakness imposed by ethics. At first he is utterly unable to control the world around him. As he ages he becomes more physically capable and more cunning. His last keepers include Soviet officers, who he respects, an orphanage, and eventually, his own parents. He is unhappy to be reunited with his family; the possible satisfaction of this ending is taken away by the crudeness of the boy and his detachment from people.
The Painted Bird is an exercise in violence and the depravity of people, who victimize each other without hesitation. It flows swiftly between stories of suffering. The novel is not about people, who are individually devoid of character, but of what people can do to each other. The violence in the book culminates in the literal pillage, rape, and murder of an entire village. In his italicized introductory paragraphs Jerzy Kosinski reveals the ethos of this world with more clarity, and less disturbing detail, than in the rest of the book. "The only law was the traditional right of the stronger and wealthier over the weaker and poorer," he explains, and then describes the peasants as "ignorant and brutal, though not by choice." This is the most direct explanation, and closest thing to a justification, given in the story. To the boy, there is no questioning of alternatives, there is only the fight for survival.
To me, the novel and its signficance cannot be explained without discussing the work of Maxim Gorky. It is just far too influenced by Gorky to be thought of on its own. Through the entire book I was continually reminded of Gorky's novels and short stories. There's a casual violence in Gorky's stories, where characters are killed offhand with little dramatic attention. Gorky shows the world through the horrible actions of its people. Several times he did this effectively through the visage of children. The boy in The Painted Bird is given only one book, near the end of the story, and that novel is Gorky's Childhood. In this way Kosinski does not shy away from comparison, but tips his cap to his literary forefather.
The most pressing similarity between the two authors is the nonchalant and pervasive violence, which Kosinski has taken to further extremes. At first glance Kosinski can be taken for a skilled imitator. Yet there is a difference between the two authors, a difference that nagged at me for days after reading the book. Gorky's world was morally void and depressing, but underneath a layer of acceptance, there was a total rejection of this state of being. Gorky channelled his disciplined depravity to an emotionally powerful release of outrage. In some books Gorky challenged us to question him, to find this outrage in ourselves, while in others his characters released it with sudden and powerful outbursts.
Gorky was looking for the Russian soul. He saw a country whose inhabitants treated each other with such careless disdain that it shook him. There was some kind of missing social contract or personal ethics that he lamented. To Gorky, something was wrong with the people in the world, who acted as their own repressors. In his intense bitterness, his namesake, there was an optimism that it need not be this way. There was a hope in the capacity of mankind.
In Kosinski, I cannot find this hope. I need to read more of his work, but in this novel I feel a deep-rooted pessimism. Kosinski's people are vicious, but that is not something that can be fixed, that is just their condition. The Nazis were evil, but they did not create these depraved villagers, nor would the end of the Nazis lead to the end of personal violence. Kosinski sees the missing soul, but questions whether it is just a myth, in the way that his boy searches for, and eventually gives up on, God. The war ends, but that does not mean that the people will become compassionate. Instead the war has killed the weak and merciful, and left people who are bitter and broken, like the boy. The boy approaches adulthood in the story, and does so as a manipulative survivalist. As the reader, I search for that hope, and can find it nowhere. Kosinski has left none, and created none of the conditions for it. I see that as his fundamental message in this story, and his departure from Gorky, that this could be a world where we do not have reason to hope.
