Censorship in Poland: Enlightenment to the Twentieth Century
"Taken from the forthcoming Censorship: A World Encyclopedia, edited by Derek Jones, to be published by Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, London, in May 2000"
The exercise of preventive censorship remained with the Church; the secular authorities, in principle, operated only repressive censorship up to the 1790s and after the 17th century Polish kings issued fewer decrees on book matters. Under the last king, Stanislaw August Poniatowski (1764-96), the situation improved dramatically: printing, the book trade and the circulation of foreign works within Poland increased considerably during his reign; the massive growth in secular presses and publishing houses made the implementation of ecclesiastical censorship increasingly difficult. Poniatowski's reform-minded regime largely restored the responsibility for censorship to municipal authorities alone. Wherever the king was in residence, the Grand Marshall of the Crown carried out chiefly repressive censorship with a view to preserving public order and peace.
The Church nonetheless attempted to remove certain books. In 1776, the Bishop of Plock published Pius VI's list of 34 works that Catholics should not read and several years later ordered the confiscation of 20 copies of Locke's Logic (published in 1784 in Cracow's Press of the Principal Royal College) from schools in Pultusk. The bulk of secular repressions concerned libel. In 1770, the publication of a satire in the leading journal Monitor on one of the leading opposition figures associated with the conservative nobility's revolt - the Confederation of Bar (1768-72) - led the Grand Marshall to make an example of the publisher Mitzler de Kolof with a fine and prison sentence. A later lampoon in a similar vein, Polish Letters written in 1785, written under the pseudonym of Jan Wit, was arrested by the Grand Marshall's court and sentenced to be burnt in Warsaw on 15 March 1785. Where the authors or printers could not be punished, as in the case of the charges of corruption made by the Gazette d'Utrecht in June 1768 against the Royal Treasury Commission, the journal itself was destroyed.
The publication of the Cardinal Laws on 7 January 1791, which formed the basis of the liberal May Constitution of that year, established freedom of speech in the modern sense in Polish law. Paragraph XI extended freedom of expression to every citizen in printed and manuscript works. It marked the abolition of preventive censorship and the institution of a system of repressive censorship based on post-publication prosecution in the law courts concerning offence to persons or religion.
The promulgation of the Constitution led to a conservative, Russian-backed revolt, launched at the Ukrainian town of Targowica, whose ultimate success saw the legal position revert to the pre-1791 position. The new conservative regime restored preventive censorship on 17 September 1792, requiring all manuscripts to be submitted for approval prior to printing. The publication of a brochure, Exposition, by the French ambassador to Poland dealing with recent events in revolutionary France provided the immediate cause for instituting such controls and in November 1792 a ban on the import of the Paris Monitor followed in fear at the destabilizing effect that French events might have. Freedom of speech continued to be observed during parliamentary sessions - a considerable achievement considering the scale of Russian interference in political life - but this did not apply to print or writing. In pursuit of seditious works, a printer's fonts would be confiscated if an author's identity could not be discovered. Other than the press, theatrical works provided most concern to the authorities: January 1793 saw the banning of Schiller's Die Rauber. Polish plays were also stringently treated where they attempted to address the national crisis: Boguslawski's Presumed Miracle or Cracovians and Highlanders (1794) was taken off after a few performances in March that year at the National Theatre in Warsaw owing to patriotic demonstrations by the audience.
The Third and Final Partition of 1795 brought the Polish lands under the almost uninterrupted rule of Austria, Prussia and Russia for the next 123 years. Russian censorship, which established forms of pressure and regulation that the Communist authorities would employ after World War II, had the deepest and most long-lasting effects. As Nycz (1998, p. 8) notes, these entailed preventive censorship as a basic principle, but incorporated elements of repressive and (in practice) prescriptive censorship. A crucial distinction between Russian censorship and that practised in Prussia and Austria resided in its primarily extra-legal, arbitrary character and the general absence of any right to contest censorship decisions. The Tsarist authorities established multifarious bodies to control all aspects of literary, scientific and artistic activity, from the moment of entrusting censorship to universities in the Empire in July 1804. Up to the 1830 Insurrection, Poles performed a decisive and usually conservative role in controlling publications in Russian-occupied territory. Certain kinds of activity were excluded from the outset: in May 1817, Czartoryski, the university curator, declined to censor Yiddish newspapers for want of suitable experts, which amounted to banning them altogether.
In the Kingdom of Poland, established under Alexander I by the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the Tsar's adviser, Nikolai Novosiltsov prevented draft bills defining and regulating censorship on the basis of the Constitution from ever reaching the statute books. Control of publication fell under the remit of three separate bodies: the Government Commission for Religion and Education, the Commission for Internal Affairs and Police, and provincial (voivodeship) commissions. It was the Polish Viceroy, Zajaczek, however, who first tightened the screw in May 1819, in an attempt to snuff out newspaper protests at Russian abuses.
From the start of the 1820s, Alexander I moved to instigate more restrictive controls, establishing a central Censorship Committee to implement preventive press supervision, which gradually came to supervise all areas of publishing. Polish deputies in the diet strongly resisted the new legislation, but were outflanked by an official clampdown initiated in December 1821, which enforced pre-censorship and the confiscation of imported journals. Provisions for theatre censorship were issued in April 1821, bolstered in the 1830s by instructions as to precisely which Polish plays could be performed. From the latter half of the 1820s, reports on parliamentary proceedings were prohibited. These developments culminated in Nicholas I's meticulously detailed, though never implemented, 230-article bill of 1826. However, despite the formal separation of control in the Empire from that in the Kingdom, the Ministry of Education in St Petersburg provided lists of "prohibita" to guide the Kingdom's censors. Historical works bore the brunt of these restrictions, which censured references to Poland's past, including the May 1791 Constitution and the 1794 Kosciuszko Insurrection, as well as the writings of French Enlightenment writers. The Polish insurrectionaries abolished the Censorship Committee as contrary to the constitution in December 1830.
When Paskiewicz restored Russian dominion in September 1831, preventive censorship returned in full force. The Censorship Committee established in February 1832 operated according to ad hoc instructions and directives issued by the supreme authorities. The post office and customs were enlisted to prevent the importation of forbidden works. The ensuing ban of 7 December 1832 on the direct import of all foreign newspapers and periodicals, regardless of whether they were currently banned in the Kingdom, initiated a series of increasingly restrictive measures designed to isolate the Poles from subversive foreign influences. Every work imported from abroad, or else intended for publication, performance or presentation in the Kingdom had henceforth to receive the censor's imprimatur prior to its appearance. After Nicholas's death, censorship eased, so that Mickiewicz's works, for instance, could appear for the first time since the 1830s, but the January 1863 Uprising provoked more draconian measures. In its aftermath, the Russians reduced the Kingdom to a province, removed Poles from the administration, and banned Polish as a language of instruction in schools.
These provisions were intended to destroy the Poles' sense of national identity, and the memory of ever having had an independent state. Censors rigorously eliminated the terms "Polish" and "Poland" from journalistic and literary works, replacing them by "domestic" ("krajowy") or "our"; during periods of intensive repression, the term "fatherland" proved impermissible. Terms designating national dress and traditions disappeared from print; Russian censors habitually degraded Polish kings to the status of "prince".
Polish writers responded by obliterating the Russian presence in their depiction of contemporary life, a practice which the National Democrat Roman Dmowski, who sought an accommodation with the Russians, criticized in Reymont's Promised Land (1899). Writers transmitted patriotic content to their readers by means of Aesopian language, indirect expression in the form of allegory, symbols or ambiguous plots. It was, in effect, what Eliza Orzeszkowa termed a "prison language" in a letter to Malwina Blumberg, her translator, in 1887: "no date, no thing concerning the national struggle and suffering is given by name ... And yet we understand each other - my reader and I - perfectly." This strategy produced some ingenious solutions: Walery Przyborowski cast his treatment of the 1863 Uprising as a historical novel Phantoms(Cracow, 1902) set in medieval Spain, disguising Warsaw as Bilbao, changing Cracow Suburbs (a main street in Warsaw) to Madrid Suburbs, and presenting the Uprising's leader, Stanislaw Traugutt, as Bona Fide. Over time, the circumlocutions dictated by the censors grew into badges of pride: Polish writers deliberately employed the term "our" in order to exclude others - understood as Russians, Prussians or Austrians - from Polish discourse, thus subverting the censors' restrictions on political messages. References to "storms" or "ashes" signified the insurrection; since exile to Siberia as the common punishment for participation could not be mentioned, the use of Russian constructions in letters or descriptions trailing away into dots, for instance, inferred the character's fate - encouraging the reader to provide the missing information about historical or political events.
To some extent, the Russian (and other) censors tolerated such strategies, particularly if the work was intended for a narrow elite or the device was fairly opaque, and occasionally if a bribe were involved. Publications for the masses were invariably subject to tighter controls. Aesopian strategy was in itself problematic, since editors and authors would attempt to pre-guess the censor's response, and thus function as their own censors. Pietrkiewicz (1957) points out another pernicious dimension of self-censorship in 19th-century Polish literature, in that it imposed on writers an overriding concern with the national cause - the failure to address which became synonymous with disloyalty.
In Prussia, Frederick William II's Edict of December 1788 had introduced preventive censorship, stipulating that all publications required prior approval from the pertinent administrative authorities. In the first decade after partition, Prussian attention focused on reportage of Napoleon's campaigns and specifically the creation of a Polish Legion in Italy under General Dabrowski in 1797. The only permissible information related to lists of Polish casualties on San Domingo - an attempt to cast Napoleonic in a bad light in Polish eyes. To counter this, Warsaw newspapers circulated handwritten reports of Napoleon's campaigns, which were complemented by secret patriotic meetings. At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Pomerania and the Poznan province returned to Prussia (Warsaw became capital of the Kingdom) and was subject to Frederick William III's law of 18 October 1819, which re-established preventive censorship. Polish publishing in the 1820s-30s was limited to official announcements and regulations and modest religious works. After the defeat of the 1830 Uprising, when most of the major Polish writers went into exile, an amendment of February 1834, devised to counteract conspiratorial activity, forbade the distribution of imported Polish works without the prior written agreement of the Oberzensurkollegium.
At the start of the 1840s, the more liberal regime of Frederick William IV affected publishing too. He set up an independent body to consider appeals against censorship decisions in the form of the Oberzensurengericht, which was subordinate to the Ministry of Justice (23 February 1843). The increasingly active Polish underground conspiracy led to more stringent censorship in 1845, when a complete ban on works likely to foment sedition, as well as those critical of Austrian and Russian Polish policy, was instituted. Throughout the Spring of Nations, however, Prussian censorship practically ceased to function, and Polish publishing accordingly flourished: the first new Polish newspapers since 1795 began to appear. The resultant new liberal Constitution of January 1850 abolished preventive censorship in principle, but the Prussian police harassed the Polish-language press whose espousal of patriotic sentiments it considered subversive. The Press Law of 5 June 1850 allowed the suppression of both German and Polish oppositionist papers as contributing to public disorder and hostile to the constitution and King. Eventually, via the rescinding of this law in October 1858 and the promulgation of the new imperial Press Code of 7 May 1874, repressive censorship came to be established as a principle, offering the possibility of challenging decisions in the courts.
Despite these increasingly liberal provisions, Polish publications continued to be regarded as subversive by the administrative authorities. Patriotic works, especially collections of hymns and songs (Felinski's Boze, cos Polske, Wybicki's Marsz Dabrowskiego, and the Varsovienne, which functioned as national anthems) found themselves on lists of prohibited works, and Polish works inevitably constituted a major part of those pursued by the police. References to the pre-1795 state and past Polish military glories - above all, the victory over the Teutonic Order at Grunwald in 1410 - caused the Prussians to treat historical works with extreme suspicion. Works advancing the Poles' rights to their own state automatically amounted to sedition as defined by paragraph 85 of the penal code. Printers, editors and journals were therefore under close police invigilation, yet devised ways of circumventing official restrictions. Typographers and publishers gave very low figures for print runs, meaning that by the time the court's verdict had been announced, a great part of the edition had already reached the public, as in the case of the book The Celebration of the 400th Anniversary of Copernicus's Birth in Torun (1873), which used Copernicus as a symbol of the indestructible vitality of the Polish spirit. Priests were specially targeted by Bismarck's Kulturkampf and many were removed from teaching posts in 1872; after 1876, Polish as a school subject was restricted to the last three years of tuition. With the participation of Polish deputies in the Reichstag after 1871, these issues could at least be raised and protested. Ultimately, however, the assault on Polish culture had directly the opposite effect to that intended, serving to reinforce the Poles' sense of national difference and defiance within the Prussian state.
Austrian attempts at germanizing their Polish subjects generally proved half-hearted and short-lived, and instead, at times, the Hapsburgs preferred to encourage ethnic discord between Poles and Ukrainians in Galicia as the chief component of a "divide and rule" policy. The Poles' first experience of Austrian censorship came under Maria Teresa, whose Court Chancellory in Vienna demanded the expedition of 35 copies of every work published in Galicia as of 1776. Preventive censorship began with the instructions issued by Joseph II's Studien Commission in January 1790, stipulating that manuscripts be submitted for its approval before publication. Galicia and Cracow, which became a free city in 1815, were the main crossing points for Poles smuggling seditious literature into the Kingdom. Invariably, individuals who gained official permission to publish Polish books engaged in some form of clandestine activity. In 1831, Konstanty Slotwinski became director of the renowned Ossolineum institute (founded 1827) in Lwow. A year later, he set up a printing press and lithograph, on which he pressed 27 illegal works including Mickiewicz's patriotic Books of the Polish Nation and Pilgrimage and revolutionary manuals. As was common practice, the provision of false places of publication or the absence of such information was designed to mislead the censors and police. Arrested in 1833, Slotwinski was released after completing an eight-year sentence in the Tyrolean fortress of Kufstein, only to perish in the Austrian-sponsored jacquerie of 1846.
The Spring of Nations saw the introduction of more liberal policies, but Galicia began to enjoy truly autonomous status in the wake of the Ausgleich. Article 19 of the Fundamental (Constitutional) Laws implemented in December 1867 guaranteed the nations of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy the right to free development. Subsequent Polish pressure on central government brought further concessions, specifically the raising of Polish to equality with German as a language of administration (1869), and the reinstatement of Polish as the principal language of instruction at the revitalized Jagiellonian University in Cracow (1870). In 1872, the Polish Academy of Learning (PAU), the forerunner of the Polish Academy of Sciences, was founded in Lwow. Poles received concessions in the form of permission to hold patriotic demonstrations, albeit, in the case of the most significant, such as the 1869 celebrations of the Union of Lublin in Lwow, under duress.
From 1867, the Austrian Partition proved most conducive to the development of Polish culture. Exceptionally in the occupied Polish lands, emigre Romantic classics gradually reached the stage here, with the Stary Theatre in Cracow hosting many of the premieres. In Lwow, the Viceroy allowed a performance of extracts (including the prison scenes, though without references to Tsarist cruelty towards the Poles) from Forefather's Eve III in 1889 and Slowacki's Kordian (1834), which depicted a conspiracy to assassinate Nicholas I in Warsaw, only in 1897. The Austrian regime was predicated upon the principle of loyalism and Lwow censors, who were often Polish, duly excised passages or banned plays containing anything that might inflame relations with Vienna or neighbouring (allied) powers. In November 1870, the director of police prohibited the first version of Anczyc's Kosciuszko at Raclawice - the most popular patriotic play of the time - due to its condemnation of the Partitions and its expression of Polish revanchism. It was only performed for the first time in a considerably altered version ten years later in Cracow, due to the Stary director Stanislaw Kozmian's personal intervention with the Viceroy's office, but at the cost of the complete removal of the derogatory term "Moskal" (Muscovite). The partition of Poland remained the political status quo, which had to be accepted by Poles, and any blame sought in defects of the Polish character. Attacks on the Triple Alliance (1872-87) were thus restricted to fairly gentle allusions, especially where they concerned Prussia: an anti-Prussian historical play like Rydel's Prisoners, which was banned in Cracow and Lwow in 1902, could be performed later (1908) following the replacement of "German" throughout by the archaic "Teuton" or less specific "enemy". In the main, Austria's competition with Russia in the Balkans allowed Polish authors slightly greater room for manoeuvre, and this carried over into translations of Russian classics that showed the full degradation of human beings under Tsarist autocracy, which were passed uncut.
The depiction of internal Galician affairs caused the censors' intervention when deemed likely to exacerbate Polish-Ukrainian relations. Wlodzimierz Lewicki's Wernyhora was passed for performance in Lwow in 1894 after the removal of many passages addressing injustices committed by the Polish nobility against the Ukrainians and calls for Ukrainian national liberation. Plays with anti-Semitic or Zionist messages, as well as works endorsing a proletarian revolution (particularly after 1905), were similarly prohibited because of fears for public order.
John M Bates 16 March 1999