“Soliloquy of the Solipsist”: Tyranny Talking to Itself

Given her interest in world events, Plath’s “Soliloquy of the Solipsist” appears to be her jab at Communism. This time, the military action was in Poland. In June of 1956, the Poznań Revolt had taken place in Plath’s father’s hometown.
Scholar Nancy D. Hargrove dates “Soliloquy of the Solipsist” as having been written on November 18, 1956. It was on that day that the Soviet’s Nikita Khrushchev told Poland’s leader, “We will bury you.”  Khrushchev was an extreme example of solipsism; to him, his party’s existence was the only thing that mattered. That year there were several massive uprisings of the Polish people against the People’s Republic of Poland, with its puppet leadership installed by the Soviets. The Russian buildings’ Byzantine onion domes belong to the moon in Plath’s first stanza (CP, 37); the moon was the astronomical satellite that the United States raced the Soviets to reach. In 1956, it was the Soviets who were winning the space race.
The “puppet-people” of Plath’s second stanza references the leaders placed in Poland by the Soviets. The Soviet winter and Khrushchev’s “absolute power” are evident in the third stanza. The last stanza of “Soliloquy of the Solipsist” casts Khrushchev as the dictatorial god Zeus, denying the fact that his daughter Athena sprang from his head. Similarly, the Polish government, technically a Communist state sprung from its Russian overlords, did not adopt the broken, apathetic spirit of their Russian neighbors.
Extensive news coverage had gone on for months about the riots at Poznań and in Warsaw against Soviet exploitation. Living and working conditions divided the people into pro-Soviet and anti-Soviet Communists. The government denied the Polish people the emotional support and regard for their humanity that is reflected in Plath’s words: “Love fiery enough to prove flesh real.” A few months after Plath wrote her poem, in the January 1957 Atlantic, an issue in which Plath herself had a poem published, The Atlantic described the situation this way: “The Kremlin was also forced to take into account the paralysis of will and initiative, of mind and spirit, induced by the dead hand of Stalinism.”[1]
[1] From The Atlantic Monthly, January 1957. “Eyewitness in Warsaw” by Edward Crankshaw. Page 36.
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