Abstract
In the years before the birth of Solidarity bridges were being built by courageous people in Poland to remove the artificial divisions in their culture. Those divisions flowed from the split of Polish culture into the approved ‘official’, the censored ‘unofficial’ and the taboo foreign — i.e. works produced by Poles in exile.
In August 1980 everything changed. Here Chris Pszenicki, a leading Polish specialist in London, summarises the effects of the Gdansk agreements on the ‘three strands of Polish culture’ and explains the struggle over the recent new censorship Act.