Polish Literature from 1795: An Introduction

'In Polish literature - as there is no need to demonstrate - historical issues have been dominant. But at the same time we can see trends that either attempt to distance themselves from those central interests or else reject an over-spontaneous attitude to reality which is devoid of a metaphysical perspective. Polish literature is torn between its social duties and its literary obligations.'

Now my soul is incarnate in my land;/My body has absorbed her soul./I and my country - am one whole !/My name is "Million" - since, for millions, oh, alack !/I love, and suffer the rack ... [scene ii].

In the absence of a divine protector, Konrad - and, by analogy, the sensitive individual who is the writer - is compelled to take on that role. Although his stance is tinged with satanic defiance - and in this is archetypically Romantic - he is saved for the future righteous struggle by the intervention of a priest, Father Piotr, who imbues in him a sense of humility and thus sets his lofty mission to save Poland on the right path, which is somehow, mystically, to be achieved by first passing through the purgatory of Russian exile.

What is never in doubt, however, is the validity of Konrad's original response to identify with and to represent his people's suffering. It is his duty, and by this declaration he makes a decisive break with the selfishness of the typical Romantic hero he had been to this point. His passionate avowal marks the moment when Polish Romanticism moves away from the general European model and assumes peculiarly Polish characteristics. Contrary to the gulf between the gifted individual and his benighted society that Western European Romanticism took for granted, Polish Romanticism in the innovatory form introduced by Mickiewicz asserted the communality of aims between that individual and his society against the occupying powers of Austria, Prussia, and, primarily, Russia. This provided an enduring role for the poet, and indeed any writer, as spiritual leader of the nation, as the representative of his society in its struggles against foreign domination and has lain behind the Polish suspicion of authority ever since.

The idea of such national service did not originate with the Romantics, and was not automatically hostile towards the state administration. Social responsibility had been a key theme of Polish Classicism, whether of the Augustan period of the reign of the last king of Poland-Lithuania, Stanislaw August Poniatowski (1764-1795), or of the constitutional period of the Congress Kingdom (1816-1831), albeit in radically different social and political contexts. During the last years of the Old Commonwealth, Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz's enormously successful contemporary comedy, The Return of the Deputy (1792), had insisted upon the concept of service to the nation as the primary duty of each citizen within it. Here, the urgency of the current political danger of Russian intervention informed the arguments in favour of civic responsibility. Alojzy Felinski's neoclassicist tragedy, Barbara Radziwillowna (1816), in presenting the drama of the last of the Jagiellonian kings, Zygmunt August, who had taken Barbara as his wife without consulting the parliament as he ought to have done, and thus threatened the political order, eventually places civic duty over passion by bending to its will. The fact that the parliament subsequently sanctions the marriage served as an implicit message to the present king, the Russian Tsar Alexander I, that Polish political institutions were capable of wise and moderate decisions - a particularly pertinent message in view of the limited constitutional experiment tolerated by the Tsar. By the 1820s, this stance was being overtaken by more restive elements, the stirrings of Romanticism in the Polish lands, whose representatives, including the young Mickiewicz, regarded the kind of civic responsibility being promoted by the Classicists as indistinguishable from political quietism. Moreover, the Classicists' bland assumption of the governance of human behaviour through the agency of reason singularly failed to match the political realities of the time. The literary polemical duels between representatives of Classicism, a more moderate Sentimentalism and the Romantics were, as was often to be the case in the Polish context, political arguments about the future condition of Poland. The 1830 Uprising brought to an end the particular compromise that had been the Congress Kingdom, marking the ultimate triumph of the Romantics refusal to acquiesce to the increasing strictures imposed by Russian autocracy.

The 'Great Emigration' of 1832, which followed the Russian victory over the forces of the Congress Kingdom, brought also a re-evaluation of their situation on the part of the Polish Romantics. Settled in Paris, and without any immediate hopes of restoring even the pre-1830 constitutional kingdom, they began to reformulate their ideas about the restoration of a Polish state in more mystical terms. These deliberations culminated in the idea of Messianism, a consolatory philosophy which sought to explain the reasons for the Polish defeat and European indifference and apathy towards the Polish plight by reference to the crucifixion of Christ.

It was again Mickiewicz who was to prove its most important exponent in his mystical prose works The Books of the Polish Nation and the Polish Pilgrimage (1834). There, Mickiewicz drew parallels between Christ's three days in the tomb and the 'burial' or partitioning of Poland, suggesting that the resurrection of Poland was an inevitable event, but only once European civilisation had itself undergone a necessary moral regeneration. Mickiewicz traced the toleration of injustice towards Poles to the corruption inherent in 'great politics'. Poland's sacrifice on the altar of the Great Powers' self-interest was the essential initial sacrifice required of the Polish nation, which could then lead the international regeneration of European politics by instituting a reign of morality in international affairs. The success of that project would finally be crowned by the restoration of an independent Poland.

The emergence of this notion of Poland as the 'Christ of Nations' was a powerful source of consolation for the exiled Poles, giving their struggle an ultimate teleological sanction. Polish sufferings in the present were thus justified by reference to an eventual day of resurrection; individual self-sacrifice was validated as the most appropriate response for Poles, thus justifying the continuation of insurrectionary activity even without hope of success, and this attitude held the dominant position in Polish intellectual life for approximately the next thirty years.

The first major challenge to the dominance of the revolutionary ideals of Polish Romanticism came in the aftermath of the national uprising of 1863. The new generation of intellectuals, who had passed through the briefly reopened University of Warsaw, seized upon liberal ideas penetrating from Western Europe to launch a gradualist programme of economic self-enrichment and social education termed Warsaw Positivism. With its slogans of 'organic work' and 'work at the foundations' (inculcating a sense of identity and solidarity with the rest of the nation at the lower end of the social scale, among the peasantry in particular, through education), Positivism seemed to contradict the very ethos of Romanticism: no longer was Messianism and irrational self-sacrifice to be the predominant Polish response to foreign occupation. In the thirty years between the two insurrections, that attitude had achieved little to speak of and had, effectively, worsened the position of Poles under foreign occupation. In the short and medium term, the key issue now was a process of national wealth creation, which was apparently intended to 'trickle down' to the rest of society. Contemporary writers, while supporting the general tenets of the Positivist programme, nonetheless continued to observe the fundamental attitude of literary national service that had lain at the basis of Romanticism. Literature - including journalism, which was the primary channel for attacks upon Romantic ideas - remained a major tool for propagating and reinforcing a sense of national identity and solidarity. The form of that social responsibility may have changed, but its reality had not.

The real backlash against such notions came only with the advent of Decadentism in Poland, as one of the streams of the 'Young Poland' artistic movement. Whilst the great national dramas of the Symbolist poet and playwright Stanislaw Wyspianski (1860-1907), such as The Wedding (1901) and A November Night (1904), continued to address Polish national issues, attempting to frame the Polish question in eternal and universal terms, equally influential were the ideas of Stanislaw Przybyszewski (1868-1927), who sought to deliver Polish literature from national service. For Przybyszewski, any attempt to harness art for social purposes led necessarily to its debasement as art, and this applied with special force to the Romantics' and Realists' notion of the writer as a socially responsible figure. In his poetic manifesto Confiteor (1899), Przybyszewski roundly condemned such ideas:

Art has no aim, it is aim in itself; it is the absolute because it is a reflection of the Absolute - the Soul. And since it is the absolute, it cannot be enclosed within any frame, it cannot serve any idea, it is dominant, it is a source from which all life comes.

Art stands above life; penetrates the essence of the universe [...]

Tendentious art, art-pleasure, art-patriotism, art possessing a moral or a social aim ceases to be art and becomes a biblia pauperum for those who do not know how to think or who are not educated enough to read proper textbooks. For such people, wandering teachers are necessary - not art.

To act upon society in an instructive or moral sense, to foster patriotism or social instincts through art means to humiliate art, to throw it down from the summits of the Absolute into the miserable accidentality of life, and the artist who proceeds that way does not deserve the name of artist. A democratic art, an art for the people, is even lower. An art for the people is a hideous and platitudinous banalizing of the means used by the artist; it is a plebeian act of making accessible what, by the nature of things, is not easily accessible.

Here were certain themes which had inspired the Romantics' early writings, particularly the emphasis on the validity of irrational experience, and an interest and even obsession with the supernatural. Przybyszewski also foregrounded such aspects as the demonic, sex and psychology in art as much by his Bohemian example as by his writings. Art, as Symbolists stressed elsewhere in Europe, was valuable precisely because its effect and purpose were undefinable, unquantifiable, indicative of a reality beyond the ken of most human beings. In this sense, Symbolists were keen to restore the division between the gifted, sensitive artist and the rest of society, which had been lost from the Polish context with the Mickiewicz's realignment of the poet with society against the foreign authorities. Political realities were, strictly speaking, now a matter of indifference.

Przybyszewski's dismissal of the social duties which had been literature's lot since before the Partitions, proved extremely liberating for some of his contemporaries. Moreover, his example would be periodically revived either in order to justify art's autonomy and apoliticism, or else to condemn it. The very lack of definition intrinsic to the Symbolist poetics ensured its survival and continuing appeal, and his deprecation of the writer's social responsibility was indeed an accurate foreshadowing of the situation that arose when liberation finally came. When the Allies restored Poland to the map of Europe at the end of the first world war, the new conditions promptly invalidated the whole principle of literary national service. Polish writers were deprived at a stroke of the automatic self-justification which had informed their writing during the previous one hundred and twenty-three years. As Jan Lechon put it: And in the spring let me see spring, not Poland.