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'''FIGURE 52. Mountaineers near Zakopane preparing Christmas puppet shows (U/OU)''' (picture)

sponsored an amateur artistic movement of a mass character. In 1970, there were 93 professional theaters throughout Poland, 20 of them in Warsaw. In addition, there were 39 concert halls and other facilities for musical performances, where the country's 19 symphony orchestras, nine opera and nine operetta companies perform, usually to full houses. The regime's effort in bringing culture to the people has been particularly marked in the postwar proliferation of so-called houses of culture, which range from well-developed urban institutions combining such facilities as a theater, meeting hall, library, motion picture theater, and lecture hall, to modest rural clubs generally engaging in similar activities tailored to local interest. Moreover, the number of museums and exhibit halls (355 in 1970) continues to increase; over 18 million persons annually visit such institutions. In addition to the 32,195 school libraries in existence in 1970, there were 8,621 public libraries—including branches and mobile book centers—and 326 major state libraries and archives, including such prestigious institutions as the Jagiellonian Library in Krakow housing some of the original manuscripts of Copernicus.

Rejecting the idea of two separate cultures—one for the general public and one for the elite—the regime has sought to provide a uniform product of "high ideological and artistic value" that at the same time would be comprehensible to consumers of widely differing experience. In theory, a uniform culture is needed to achieve the Communist goal of eliminating social differences and class divisions.

Traditional popular tastes and values appear to have undergone little or no change under communism; if they sometimes clash with the regime's esthetic views, they also clash with some contemporary styles of expression. Interest in the avant-garde in painting and music is largely confined to creative circles. The average citizen neither understands nor cares to understand abstract act, preferring, like the regime, "good old realism." In music, most people are unaware of 12-tone technique, but among the youth there is great enthusiasm for jazz and rock-and-roll, which the regime tolerates lest it intensify interest. The theater has traditionally been popular among the Poles and now commands an annual audience of about 18 million, including a relatively large number of skilled workers. Inasmuch as theater attendance, unlike cinema attendance, has not declined with the advent of television, audiences are presumably satisfied with contemporary theatrical fare. While the regime desires a reader interest in serious native literature concerned with contemporary problems, popular tastes run to the 19th-century novel, particularly the work of Sienkiewicz and Kraszewski; contemporary "escape" literature, such as adventure stories, crime thrillers, and stories about the German occupation; and the novels of leading contemporary Western authors.

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