Narcyza Żmichowska's Novel from Life Czy to Powieść? (Is This a Novel

Narcyza Żmichowska’s Novel from Life Czy to powieść? (Is This a Novel?) (1876) Author(s): Ursula Phillips Source: The Polish Review, Vol. 59, No. 1 (2014), pp. 17-34 Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of the Polish Institute of Arts & Sciences of America Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/polishreview.59.1.0017 Accessed: 18-05-2015 21:32 UTC

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Ursula Phillips

Narcyza Żmichowska’s Novel from Life Czy to powieść? (Is This a Novel?) (1876)

The article discusses Narcyza Żmichowska’s final novel. Like most of her other fiction, it is incomplete, although the extant part consists of over 250 published pages. Żmichowska left a general outline of how she envisaged the text would develop, as well as another document and letters that all shed light on her original conception of the project as a collaborative effort with her former pupil Wanda Grabowska. The novel was conceived as the “writing of a woman’s life” and raises crucial issues surrounding distinctions between the genres of autobiography, biography, and fiction. It also highlights Żmichowska’s concerns about authorship and authenticity, as well as more specifically about the problems affecting female authorship in the nineteenth century. The part of the text she managed to complete portrays the protagonist’s childhood in the 1820s and also the stories of several female members of her maternal family stretching back to the beginning of the eighteenth century, which provide an interesting critique of the social, psychological, and emotional lives of Polish women in the pre-partition and early nineteenth- century noble manor.

Czy to powieść? (Is this a novel?) was the final text published, the last of four main novels or novel sequences, by Narcyza Żmichowska (1819–76), the most significant Polish female writer of the first half of the nineteenth century, of the generation preceding that of Eliza Orzeszkowa (1841–1910).1 Like most of her other fiction, it remained uncompleted. The very title itself—posed as a question—immediately raises issues surrounding the “novel’s” genre status and the author’s purposes, suggesting that she herself is unsure how to present the text to her readership, or that

1. This article is a reworked and expanded version of a paper presented at the AAASS Annual Convention in Boston, November 12–15, 2009.

This content downloaded from 141.211.155.157 on Mon, 18 May 2015 21:32:41 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 18 The Polish Review it is a deliberate mystification. The narrator’s stated intention is to write a woman’s life, more precisely that of “a type”: “a female type between the second and seventh decade of our century,” a life span that coincides precisely with Żmichowska’s own.2 However, I should emphasize that whatever else it may be, the “novel” is not an autobiography of Narcyza Żmichowska, it is a fictional work: the “facts” of the life of the novel’s protagonist have marked differences from those of Żmichowska’s own,3 yet in its broader sweeps and concerns, it could be said to be her internal autobiography, a record of some part of her mental and emotional life. What is important, however, is that the subject, described as “that unhappy yet honest crea- tu re ,” 4 is somehow representative of a generation of women from Żmichowska’s own social class (the relics of the impoverished landowning szlachta or minor gentry, rapidly transforming by mid-century into an urban middle-class and professional intelligentsia); and that the writing of the life is intended not so much to be a great work of art as to be useful to the envisaged readership, namely, other women.5 The woman’s life is not conceived as an exemplary one, as a model to be imitated or emulated, where a specific ideological model of ideal womanhood is extolled, but a life story in which the envisaged readership would recognize something of themselves and with which they could identify: namely, their common psychological and emotional experience. It is no militant call to arms, but rather a more subdued, muffled appeal for greater personal autonomy, by provoking empathy; it is an expression of sisterly solidarity, even a call for female friendship and bonding, above all a record of those features that defined the average female position in mid-nineteenth-century Polish impoverished gentry or bourgeois society: exclusion from the dominant discourse, emotional suppression, silencing, nonspecific feelings

2. “typ kobiecy między drugim a siódmym dziesiątkiem naszego stolecia.” Narcyza Żmi- chowska, Wybór pism [Selected works], vol. 2, ed. Maria Olszaniecka (Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1953), 210. References in this article will mostly be to the 1953 edition, in which Czy to powieść? appears in the second volume of two, 193–470. Żmichowska’s incomplete novel was originally published in the journal Wiek [Century] on December 2, 1976, three weeks before her death on Christmas Day. It was included in the five-volume collected works Pisma Narcyzy Żmichowskiej (Gabryelli) [Works of Narcyza Żmichowska (Gabryella)], ed. Piotr Chmielowski (Warsaw: Ateneum, 1885–86). It was republished as an individual work in 1929, with an introduction by Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński; see Narcyza Żmichowska, Czy to powieść? (Warsaw: Dom Książki Polskiej, 1929). There are no other editions. Boy includes a crucial document, omitted from the 1953 edition; hence, when referring to this document, I shall use the 1929 edition. All translations from Polish are my own. 3. One example is that Żmichowska lost her mother shortly after birth and never knew her, an early loss with emotional and cognitive consequences, whereas her protagonist Leona has a loving mother—almost too angelic to be true, who dies, however, at a young age. Leona’s father commits suicide whereas Żmichowska’s did not, and so on. Certain characters, however, reflect elements of Żmichowska’s background, notably the military careers of Leona’s maternal uncles. 4. “to nieszczęśliwe a poczciwe jednak stworzenie”; Żmichowska, Wybór pism, 2:210. 5. Ibid., 2:209; Żmichowska, Czy to powieść?, xxix–xxxii.

This content downloaded from 141.211.155.157 on Mon, 18 May 2015 21:32:41 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Żmichowska’s last novel 19 of guilt, resentment, purposelessness, boredom, lack of fulfillment—elements that are perceived to be the direct consequence of the subject’s gender and that become painfully apparent when, for example, she is denied access to a serious education (when she is obviously cleverer than her elder brother Józio), not allowed to enter the stables, or accused of doing things she has not done:

When Józio made the solemn promise that he would exert all his powers to enjoy study even more than horse-riding, when both women, my mother and my grandmother, were occupied exclusively with him, admonishing him and giving him advice, I stood in the meantime to one side, left to my own devices, so I began to look around and scrutinize various things. . . . Józio learned that he had rights and privileges because he had been born a man; Napolcia learned that for her there were certain limits and prohibitions because she had been born a woman. . . . At first many lonely moments oppressed me with their terrible boredom. When Mother was writing letters and Marcyna [the maid] was occupied with the laundry, I did not know what to do with myself.6

A profound feeling of injustice cut me to the quick. Perhaps a better little girl than I would have tried to protest her innocence and explain herself, but it didn’t even occur to me. My grandmother’s suspiciousness of me aroused a sense of my own dignity, or maybe it was pride—it’s hard to judge—slumbering in the depths of my heart. Yet what was to remain with me for the rest of my life was the fact that I could fight such false accusations only through silence; I would often indict myself, confess my guilt, sometimes with great humility, but I could never defend or justify myself.7

Sound familiar? A declared aim is to describe “the things that have been forgotten” (rzeczy zapomniane), “sins and mistakes” (grzechy i pomyłki), and “unfair accusations” (niesłuszne zarzuty),8 in other words, sources of frustration and unhappiness experienced by the female protagonist as a consequence of her gender—namely,

6. “Kiedy Józio w dobrej wierze uroczyste składał przyrzeczenie, że wszystkich sił dołoży, aby naukę lepiej nawet od konnej jazdy polubić, kiedy obie panie, matka i babcia, nim jedynie zajęte, napominały go i radziły mu kolejno, ja tymczasem na boku, sama sobie zostawiona, zaczęłam się dokoła rozglądać i różnym rzeczom przypatrywać. . . . Józio dowiedział się, że ma prawa i przywileje, dlatego że się mężczyzną urodził; Napolcia dowiedziała się, że są dla niej ograniczenia i zakazy, dlatego że urodziła się kobietą. . . . Z początku niejedna chwila osamotnienia straszliwą nudą mi zaciężyła. Kiedy mama listy pisała, a Marcyna praniem była zajęta, nie wiedziałam co z sobą zrobić.” Żmichowska, Wybór pism, 2:284–89. 7. “Głębokie poczucie wyrządzonej niesprawiedliwości na wskroś mnie przeniknęło. Inna, lepsza ode mnie dziewczynka próbowałaby może uniewinnić się i wytłumaczyć, lecz mnie to na myśl nie przyszło nawet. Podejrzliwość babuni rozbudziła drzemiącą na dnie mego serca godność własną czy pychę, niełatwo osądzić. Na całe dalsze życie już mie to zostało, że przeciw fałszywym zarzutom milczeniem tylko walczyłam; sama siebie oskarżałam często, przyznawałam się do winy z wielką pokorą nieraz, ale nigdy nie umiałam się bronić i uspra- wiedliwiać.” Ibid. 2:300–01. 8. Ibid. 2:210.

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“the anger” and “the suffering” that Carolyn Heilbrun shows were excluded from many early female autobiographies because of the pressure on female autobiogra- phers to conform to ideologically expected models of womanhood. I would even suggest that Żmichowska’s project is an unusual example of precisely an attempt at the female bonding and exposure of “women’s truth” advocated by Heilbrun, as well as other feminist critics of the 1970s and 1980s such as Adrienne Rich and Te- resa de Lauretis.9 Yet the structure of the work, as well as the history of its original conception and genesis, suggest that the anxiety of its author was not only provoked by specific gender-marked suffering and anger, but by the problem of authorship itself: that is, by the problems surrounding authorship and authenticity, which are not only connected with gender—though clearly amplified by the position of the woman author in contemporary society—and which are marked in this text by the desire to conceal herself (i.e., her real-life personal identity), while revealing at the same time her feelings, attitudes, moods, not as exclusive, individual ones but ones that she perceived as representative of a generation of contemporary women. The novel, as a declared autobiographical project was originally conceived by Żmichowska as a collaborative one (during 1866 and the beginning of 1867), to be produced with her former pupil, friend and protégée Wanda Grabowska (1841?–1904), future mother of Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński (1874–1941), therefore of the next generation, whereby Żmichowska would supply most of the material (i.e., ostensibly autobiographical material, some of it accurate, some imagined—yet still meant to convey authentic experience) but where the actual writing would be done by Grabowska, who would also—or so Żmichowska intended—add something of her own life experience.10 Two main documents remain in which she developed her original conception of the novel: (1) the so-called Kontur ogólny (General outline), which gives a draft breakdown of volumes and chapters, a version of which was published by Chmielowski along with the extant text of Żmichowska’s 1876 novel in the 1885–86 Pisma (Works) and gives a general idea of how the plot and characters of the work may have developed had she finished it,11 and (2) another document, which is un- titled, dated January 1867, found by Boy among his mother’s papers, which gives the

9. Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life (London: Women’s Press, 1989), 33–75. 10. On the friendship between Żmichowska and Wanda Grabowska-Żeleńska, see Bar- bara Winklowa, Narcyza Żmichowska i Wanda Żeleńska [Narcyza Żmichowska and Wanda Żeleńska] (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2004). 11. The version of theKontur ogólny that he published in 1885–86 was found by Chmielow ski among Żmichowska’s papers after her death. However, another version discovered by Boy and published in his 1929 edition is fuller, and this is the one also reproduced in the 1953 edition. It maps how the novel might have developed had it got beyond the protagonist’s early childhood; see Żmichowska, Wybór pism, 2:433–40. The envisaged, later, unwritten parts suggest that the central issue is the relationship with the brother, even after the brother marries (unhappily) and dies, cared for by his sister. In reality neither Janusz nor Erazm Żmichowski married. The completed section of the intended plan is nevertheless substantial; it is of novel length, not a mere fragment. The outline also raises intriguing questions about possible

This content downloaded from 141.211.155.157 on Mon, 18 May 2015 21:32:41 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Żmichowska’s last novel 21 original working title of the planned joint project: “Autobiografia zastanawiającej się nad sobą kobiety” (Autobiography of a woman thinking about herself).12 Żmichowska also urged the project upon Grabowska in numerous letters. The first mention comes on January 15, 1867, where she complains of her own “writer’s block” and her need for Wanda’s input:

I have not been able to unravel the reasons for this yet: whether it’s physical mor- bidity, or the moral consequence of certain events, circumstances—I don’t know; I will send you a more detailed study of this when you start work on our novel [sic], for I already consider the whole thing finished and today [emphasis in the original] at least I am sure that we will bring it to realization, of which you will find more elsewhere, in the papers that I am preparing for you.13 hidden aspects of Żmichowska’s life, namely, her close relationships with both Janusz and Erazm, suggestive of an intensity verging on the transgressive, a topic that is beyond the scope of the current article but that I discuss elsewhere. Having rejected marriage, the protagonist of the “outline” seeks to live with and for her married brother; she does not branch out into an independent, life-fulfilling venture of her own. The close relationship between brother and sister could be compared to that between George Eliot and her brother Isaac, as well as to Eliot’s fictional portrayal of Tom and Maggie Tulliver. See Ursula Phillips, “Women’s Lives and Everyday Experience in Narcyza Żmichowska (1819–1876) and George Eliot (1819–1880)” in Codzienność w literaturze XIX i XX wieku: od Adalberta Stifter do współczesności [Everyday life in literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: from Adalbert Stiftera to today], ed. Aneta Mazur and Grażyna Borkowska (Opole: Uniwersytet Opolski, 2007), 305–33; and Ursula Phillips, Narcyza Żmichowska. Feminizm i religia [Narcyza Żmichowska: feminism and religion] (Warsaw: Instytut Badań Literackich PAN, 2008), 539–48; and also Grażyna Borkowska, Alienated Women: A Study on Polish Women’s Fiction 1845–1918, trans. Ursula Phillips (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2001), 156–59. It is interesting that in this late text—in the “outline” at least—it is the transgressive love between brother and sister that is alluded to, and not (as in some earlier texts by Żmichowska) possible same-sex attraction, as discussed by, among others, Boy in his 1929 introduction and in his introduction to his 1930 edition of Żmichowska’s Poganka [The Heathen]. 12. This document, which itself has no title—and which is nota bene distinct from the Kontur ogólny, was found by Boy along with Żmichowska’s letters to his mother after the latter’s death in 1904. He included it in his 1929 edition of the novel (pp. xxix–xxxix), but it was not reproduced in the 1953 edition. It is crucial for understanding Żmichowska’s original conception of the collaborative project. As Boy says, this text “contains valuable material for understanding Narcyza’s creative mechanism, as well as for knowing her herself”; see Żmichowska, Czy to powieść? xxix. 13. “Przyczyny tego jeszcze dotychczas rozwikłać nie umiałam: czy jest to fizyczną chorobli- wością, czy następstwem moralnych zdarzeń, okoliczności—nie wiem; prześlę ci o tym więcej szczegółowe studium, gdy się do naszej powieści zabierasz, bo już rzecz całą skończoną uważam i dzisiaj [emphasis in the original] przynajmniej pewną jestem, że ją w wykonanie wprowadzimy, o czym na innym miejscu znajdziesz, w papierach, które ci przygotuję.” Narcyza Żmichowska, Listy. Tom V: Narcyssa i Wanda [Letters. Vol. 5: Narcyssa and Wanda], ed. Barbara Winklowa and Helena Żytkowicz (Warsaw: Instytut Badań Literackich PAN, 2007), 261.

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She writes again, two days later:

I don’t know from whence I’ve suddenly acquired such ardor in preparing this work for you. Since time immemorial I have not written so much or so quickly. . . . When I look at the pages lying in front of me, I am beside myself with sur- prise that I have filled them with my own hand and with my own absurdities and not-so-absurdities—I, now! [emphasis in the original]. And do you know what, Wanda, that only because of you am I able to be so prolific. . . . I myself will not write anything more! And I’ll give you one more riddle to solve: only for you and about you to your people, am I able to write freely. . . . So some of my writing powers have returned, but they are chiefly directed toward those regions into which you have drawn me.14

These passages strongly suggest that the joint authorship of Grabowska, or even her sole authorship working on the basis of the notes sent by Żmichowska, was a crucial element in the original conception. Feeling her own power and desire to write waning, she urges Wanda to realize the project for her. Ten days later (January 27), having received an initial draft from Wanda, she writes with a certain heated concern that Wanda hardly seems to know her, and makes various errors of fact in describing her life and family members, indicating that, at this stage at least, Żmichowska regarded the project as being based heavily on the facts of her own life, which she then proceeds to correct. The tone is demanding, impatient with Wanda’s noncompliance with her instructions and somewhat dismis- sive of Wanda’s efforts—despite the apparent dependence on Wanda’s participation:

I am replying the day after receiving your letter—at five in the morning, by candle- light. Though don’t imagine that yesterday’s irritation woke me so early, it’s my customary winter habit. I am making use of it only to shake off as quickly as possible the mass of imputations, with which you have inundated me worse than last week’s snowfall. If I remember correctly, from that Monday when you were handed my roll of papers, until yesterday or even longer, until next Tuesday, you were to meditate upon them, as though on the history of my life, so . . . !15

14. “Nie wiem, skąd mi się wzięła taka gorliwość w przygotowaniu ci tej roboty. Od nie- pamiętnych czasów ani tak dużo, ani tak prędko nie pisałam. . . . Kiedy spojrzę przed sobą arkusze, to się wydziwić nie mogę, że je moją własną ręką napełniłam własnymi dorzecz- nościami i niedorzecznościami—ja, teraz! [emphasis in the original]. A wiesz, Wando, że jedynie pod twoim tytułem mogę być taka obfita. . . . już ja sama niczego nie napiszę! A dam ci jeszcze tę zagadkę do rozplątania, że tylko dla ciebie i koło ciebie do twoich mogę pisać swobodnie. . . . Wróciły mie zatem niektóre władze piśmienne, lecz przeważnie w te strony, w które ty je ciągnęłaś.” Ibid., 269–70. 15. “Odpisuję ci nazajutrz o piątej godzinie z rana, przy świecy. Tylkoż sobie nie wyobrażaj znowu, że mię wczorajsze zadrażnienie tak wcześnie obudziło, jest to mój zimowy zwyczaj. Korzystam z niego jedynie, żeby się otrząsnąć co prędziej z tej masy posądzeń, którymiś mię zasypała gorzej niż śniegami przeszłotygodniowymi. Jak sobie wspomnę, że od owego po- niedziałku, w którym ci mój rulonik papierów oddano, aż po jutro lub dłużej może, po drugi wtorek będziesz medytowała nad nimi, jakoby nad historią mego życia, to . . .!” Ibid., 271.

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The next mention in this correspondence (February 11, 1867) already hints at Wanda’s cooling off, but also at Żmichowska’s intention to conceal the identity of the subject of the “autobiography” through the introduction of assumed names—names that also hint at the ones that Żmichowska would eventually choose for her own, single-authored version of the novel. Here, she calls it an “autobiography” (not a “novel” as previously):

Don’t give up on our autobiography; send me even what you consider to be the worst written, it’s always useful for me. . . . Only I must know the names you have chosen. In the meantime I have called the brother Józef, in honor of Prince Józef [Poniatowski], and the cousin Leontyna—I had before my eyes a certain Leontyna, whom I knew as a child. . . . The sister is as yet nameless. You must send me what you wanted to discard.16

When Grabowska failed to produce, Żmichowska decided to write the woman’s life herself. But the eventual format of Żmichowska’s 1876 novel re-creates in fiction the former real-life situation: the role of Wanda is replaced by a fictional protagonist, introduced as a former school-friend Leona Hołosko (dates 1816–1871; hence, from the “second to the seventh decade” of the nineteenth century) whom the top-level first-person narrator, identified by the initials N.Ż. (as distinct from the “author” of the text: Narcyza Żmichowska), urges to write the woman’s life; she even transfers almost word for word into the fictional correspondence instructions she had earlier addressed to Wanda. The novel opens with their correspondence titled “Kilka listów zamiast Wstępu” (Several letters instead of an introduction), and is followed by Leona’s memoir of her early childhood, which then occupies the bulk of the novel’s text, with Leona as the first-person narrator and subject of her own autobiographical account. I should emphasize that in all the documents sent by Żmichowska to Wanda, as well as in the fictional, introductory correspondence between N.Ż. and Leona Hołosko in Czy to powieść?, the writing of the “autobiographical” memoir is almost exclusively referred to as a novel (“powieść”), even though the original working title proposed to Wanda in 1866–67 was “Autobiografia zastanawiającej się nad sobą kobiety” (Autobiography of a woman thinking about herself). Yet the text written by the fictional Leona, presented by herself to the top-level narrator N.Ż. ostensibly as an autobiographical account, is itself of unstable genre status. According to Philippe Lejeune, an “autobiography” may be distinguished from an “autobiographical novel” by its complete identification between the author of the text, the narrator (usually first-person, but not always) and the subject (or “personage”); meanwhile a “pact” is made between the author-narrator-subject and

16. “Nie wyrzekaj się też naszej autobiografii; przyslij mi choć to, co najgorszym osądzisz, mnie się zawsze się przyda. . . . Muszę tylko znać obrane przez ciebie imiona. Ja tymczasem brata nazwałam Józefem, cześć dla Księcia Józefa, kuzynkę Leontyną—miałam na oczach pewną Leontynę w dzieciństwie jeszcze znaną . . .. Siostra jeszcze bez imienna. Musisz mi przysłać, co już chciałaś wyrzucić.” Ibid., 288.

This content downloaded from 141.211.155.157 on Mon, 18 May 2015 21:32:41 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 24 The Polish Review the reader that attempts to guarantee the authenticity of what is contained in the text.17 Leona herself alternately calls her writing “autobiography”18 or “biography.”19 The initial reader of Leona’s text, namely, N.Ż., however, does not entirely believe in its authenticity:

Immediately after receiving it, I read the manuscript; I did not find in it any word that would explain categorically whether the dead woman had written her memoir, or a novel; some of the details from our boarding-school life were of direct memoir-like content, but I do not remember that she ever told us about the family relationships she includes in the manuscript. . . . If we also add the change to the names, insignificant maybe and yet deliberately introduced, I have to admit in all sincerity that I do not know what to cling to, I do not know whether this is a novel. [emphasis in the original]20

There is no pact here, either between the fictional Leona and N.Ż. within the novel, or between the real-life Narcyza Żmichowska and her readers. It is a deliberate mystification and obscuring of the authorial voice, where the real subject of the work is hidden. The project thereby reflects Żmichowska’s concerns surrounding the very function of authorship, including the additional ones affecting specifically female authorship that she had already voiced in earlier fictional projects—concerns that fall primarily into two, interrelated areas: (1) the whole question of authenticity occasioned by the unavoidable, falsifying potential of the artifices of art (i.e., artistic fiction, or the novel), an issue that is itself underwritten by the belief that reflecting “life” and being “useful” are more important than “art,” and (2) the question of self- exposure, more acute for women than for men because of the contemporary social realities affecting women’s lives, where the very claim to authorship was an affront to received notions of femininity. As Nancy Miller puts it in her discussion of the autobiographies of Daniel Stern and George Sand, “The decision to go public is particularly charged for the woman writer. . . . The subject of women’s autobiography here is a self both occulted and overexposed by the fact of her femininity as a social re a l it y.” 21 In addition, there is the general problem that in order to be truthful, that

17. See Philippe Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique [The autobiographical pact] (Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1975), 13–46. 18. Żmichowska, Wybór pism, 2:212–13. 19. Ibid., 2:214, 223. 20. “Zaraz po odebraniu przeczytałam podarowany mi rękopis; nie znalazłam w nim żadnego słowa, które by mnie stanowczo objaśniło, czy nieboszczka swój pamiętnik, czy powieść napisała; niektóre szczegóły z pensjonarskiego życia były wprost pamiętkowej treści, ale nie przypominam sobie, by nam kiedykolwiek o swoich rodzinnych stosunkach mówiła to, co w rękopiśmie zamieściła. . . . Dodawszy jeszcze tę zmianę umyślnie, a jednak bardzo nieznacznie w nazwiskach zaprowadzoną, muszę wyznać szczerze, iż nie wiem, czego się trzymać, nie wiem Czy to jest powieść [emphasis in the original].” Ibid., 2:211. 21. Nancy Miller, Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 50–52.

This content downloaded from 141.211.155.157 on Mon, 18 May 2015 21:32:41 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Żmichowska’s last novel 25 is, maximally authentic, self-exposure also has to include the public exposure of the private selves of other people,22 an issue that for Żmichowska presented an ethical conundrum of some gravity.23 These ethical as well as practical concerns about authenticity and exposure, she had already voiced in the early short story “Capriccio” (1845), which portrays a poet who shamelessly collects people’s private lives in order to write about them. In the final chapters of the novel Książka pamiątek (A book of memories), which she added to her original work (1847–48) for the 1861 edition of collected works, she includes a digression on the difference between fiction andbiography , where the closed “artism” (artyzm) of the novel is evaluated negatively in relation to the open-ended, ultimately elusive and therefore more truthful, writing of a life: she actually cites this lack of suitable genre as the reason why she cannot finish this earlier novel about women’s lives.24 In her original notes to Wanda, meanwhile, she sees Wanda’s lack of “artistry” (artystyczność) as a distinct advantage in producing a more appropriate narrative style for writing a life—what Nancy Miller might call “a poetics calling for another, freer text”25—which relies on everyday language and strenuously avoids poetic artistry, or “the sin of metaphors” (grzech metaforyczny).26 It is worth noting here that in Żmichowska’s eventual own version of the novel, Leona expresses exactly these concerns about finding an appropriate language to express her small girl’s frustrations, which even at the time she could not name: “Why am I writing about trifles which have no biographical or aesthetic form?”27 We might also speculate as to why, given the tensions that Żmichowska clearly felt between the falsifying “artism” of artistic form (here: the novel) and the exposure-pitfalls of the (nevertheless) more authentic genre of life-writing, she insisted upon writing a novel. The point is, I think, that artistic form (fiction) allows for ambiguities that less contrived genres lack: for the simultaneous presentation of conflicting viewpoints, for speculation, for fluidity and process, and ultimately for mystification and obscuring of the authorial voice.28

22. Ibid., 49–50. 23. See also Borkowska, Alienated Women, 129–46. 24. See Narcyza Żmichowska, Wybór pism, 1:444–51. This novel was originally serialized in the Warsaw journal Przegląd Naukowy [Scientific review] during 1847–48; an expanded, but still unfinished, version appeared in volume 2 of the four-volume Pisma Gabryelli [The works of Gabryella] (Warsaw: J. Jaworski, 1861). Gabryella was Żmichowska’s pseudonym (a female one) at the time, possibly inspired by George Sand’s Gabriel (1839); but she had abandoned it by the time she wrote Czy to powieść? 25. Miller, Subject to Change, 52. 26. Żmichowska, Czy to powieść? xxxv. 27. “Czemuż ja piszę o takich drobnostkach, które żadnej biograficznej ani estetycznej formy nie mają?” Żmichowska, Wybór pism, 2:223. 28. Explaining why Żmichowska chose the “novel” as opposed to “publicistic” articles in order to present her views on the position of contemporary women, Borkowska makes a similar point about the ambiguity of artistic form: “She wrote novels because she knew that

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Earlier on, however, in the hybrid cycle of fictional and pseudo-autobiographical works titled Niektóre pisma bezimiennej autorki (Several writings by an anonymous female author, 1858–61), Żmichowska had introduced a substitute identity, the anonymous female author, who is actually fictional, but is presented variously within the multilayered structure of the overall work as a first-person narratoror as a character portrayed by a third-person perspective. I have explored the use of the “anonymous” identity elsewhere, in an essay devoted to Niektóre pisma bezimiennej autorki and the best-known “fiction” within in it, namely, the novel Biała Róża (White rose) (1858).29 Suffice it to summarize here, that the female author, well aware of the social opprobrium weighed against her, adopts a strategy of masquerade, posing as a self-effacing, conventionally feminine young woman who does not spurn fashionable clothes and parties (she is therefore no aggressive blue-stocking), and is even coyly flirtatious in her dealings with editors and publishers, in order, however, behind this mask, to push forward a more radical agenda (namely, to prove that as a woman she is as good a writer as any man), which she clearly sees would be rejected immediately were she to state her more feminist goal up front. The anonymous author’s self-protective strategy therefore has a deeper purpose: she does not wish to expose her real private self, or the selves of those whom she encounters, to public scrutiny and possible scandal, yet she does wish to expose aspects of her experience, her social relationships, and her inner (emotional and mental) life, which she sees as indicative of the generality of women of her time and social class, in a bid to bring them all greater autonomy. I would say something similar is going on with the later novel Czy to powieść?. The female experience contained in the material of the “autobiography of a woman thinking about herself” is to be exposed and portrayed as authentically as possible, but its direct association with any particular, living woman is to be concealed. A possible way of diverting, if not overcoming this inevitable conflict between authenticity in representation and self-exposure, is to get someone else to write the text, so it becomes in fact biography represented as autobiography. The idea of cooperation or collaboration also distracts from the recording of an exceptional individual personality and his (usually: his) achievement (the impulse generally acknowledged behind most conventional autobiography), and emphasizes common experience: it is therefore not only a concealing but a universalizing strategy. matters associated with the new image of women did not lend themselves to easy solutions, that they required the inclusion of different viewpoints, different justifications and arguments.” See Grażyna Borkowska, “Metafora drożdży. Co to jest literatura/ poezja kobieca,” in Ciało i tekst. Feminizm i literaturoznawstwie—Antologia szkiców, ed. Anna Nasiłowska (Warsaw: Instytut Badań Literackich PAN, 2001), 65–76, here, 67. 29. Ursula Phillips, “Authorship and Masquerade in Narcyza Żmichowska’s White Rose Texts.” In Masquerade and Femininity: Essays on Russian and Polish Women Writers, ed. Urszula Chowaniec, Ursula Phillips, and Marja Rytkönen (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), 72–92.

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In her instructions to Wanda, she says of their joint “novel”: “It will be however an Autobiography; not yours, Wanda, not mine: but ours, and that of many others,” and is to be grounded above all in real lived experience: “in reality, in memory, in uncontested proofs.”30 The same universalizing idea recurs in the later (fictional) reworking of these instructions of N.Ż to Leona within Żmichowska’s novel:

Don’t compose a novel, but rather piece it together from incidents, people, and events that you looked upon with your own eyes. Take a figure, who would have accompanied you inseparably from birth until the present moment, who was you, but not you, who lived among your relatives, acquaintances, and friends, and yet not through the same events or through the exact same circumstances. Take such a figure, and you will give us an image of a woman who will be perhaps the most faithful reflection of our moods during the course of the current century. You will remember things that have been forgotten, you will confess your sins and mistakes, you will clear yourself of the unfair accusations made against you,31 and you will spin at least one tiny spider’s thread between former, that is our, years and today, which is no longer our day but belongs to younger generations rushing into the world with greater momentum than ours.32

In these fictional letters, the universal resonance is underlined by the shortened form of Leona (itself a reduction of Napoleona, see below) to Ona, used by N.Ż. in her replies: “moja Ono,” “droga Ono,”33 thus correlating with the personal pronoun “ona” (she), and suggesting Leona’s potential identification as “every woman”. Ewa

30. “Jednak będzie to Autobiografia [emphasis in the original]; nie twoja, Wando, nie moja; ale nasza, i kilku innych”; “w rzeczywistości, w pamięci, w dowodach niezaprzeczonych.” Żmichowska, Czy to powieść?, xxix–xxx. 31. Mentioned here are some of the main tropes of autobiography as theorized by critics: the confession (the models of St. Augustine of Hippo or Jean Jacques Rousseau) and the self-justification, a crucial motive noted by Georges Gusdorf and discussed by Lejeune; see Philippe Lejeune, Autobiographie en France [Autobiography in France] (Paris: Librarie Armand Colin, 1971), 227–28. For a good overview of the history of the theory and criticism of autobiography in general and women’s autobiography in particular, see the Introduction to Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Walker (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 3–52. 32. “Nie komponuj powieści, ale ułóż ją raczej z wypadków, osób i zdarzeń, na które wła- snymi patrzyłaś oczyma. Weź postać, co by od urodzenia do chwili obecnej towarzyszyła Ci nieodstępnie, była Tobą, a nie Tobą, żyła wśród Twoich krewnych, znajomych i przyjaciół, a jednak nie wśród tych samych wypadków ani wśród tych samych okoliczności; weź taką po- stać, a dasz nam obraz kobiety będącej może najwierniejszym odbiciem usposobień naszych w ciągu bieżącego wieku. Przypomnisz rzeczy zapomniane, wyspowiadasz się z grzechów i pomyłek, usprawiedliwisz z niesłusznych zarzutów i choć jedną niteczką pajęczą usnujesz między dawnymi, to jest naszymi laty, a między dniem dzisiejszym, który dniem naszym nie jest, który należy do młodych, z silniejszym od nas rozpędem w świat śpieszących pokoleń.” Żmichowska, Wybór pism, 2:210. 33. Ibid., 2:197–98, 208.

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Owczarz observes a similar universalizing strategy in the earlier Niektóre pisma bezimiennej autorki:

. . . the theme of the whole of Niektóre pisma could be described, to borrow a phrase from Żmichowska herself, as the “biography of a woman thinking about herself,” any woman, who wants to think and is able to think. The anonymity of the work therefore not only plays down obvious autobiographical traits, it also somehow universalizes the content [emphasis in the original].34

Linda H. Peterson, in her study of the collaborative “auto/biographies” of the British Victorian writer Mary Howitt and her family, claims to have uncovered “an equally strong, if less well-known nineteenth-century tradition of autobiography that emerged from family practice, communal consciousness, and shared beliefs.”35 If such a tradition existed in nineteenth-century Poland, it has yet to be uncovered. It would seem, however, that it did not exist, because Żmichowska regarded the project with Wanda as something entirely new. She rejects the “tendentious” novels of the day, which she admits she herself had also formerly produced (completed and uncompleted), where the structure of a work was built around proving a principle or theory, and which she claims: “is currently the method used by all our women authors”; in such novels, she finds, “very little nourishment for myself; nothing that gives me pleasure, nothing that appeals to my taste.”36 She speaks of producing instead something fresh and different, which would pay greater attention to the inner life, be a more truthful reflection of “reality,” and also be “useful”:

Psychological studies! True, of course, they’re nothing new? For they have already been introduced into literary works . . . however, I have such presumption on my own and your account as to hope to say something new in addition, something more important because it’s something more real and authentic. Let us simply take down a genuine autobiography onto our sheets of paper; let us take it in the state in which we find it according to today’s date and in the mundane world around us, in a state of questioning and observing . . . we are free to write, only because we would write something that is useful to other people.37

34. Ewa Owczarz, Między retoryką a dowolnością. Wśród romantycznych struktur powieściowych w okresie międzypowstaniowym [Between rhetoric and randomness: romantic structures of the novel in the period between the uprisings] (Toruń: Universytet Mikołaja Kopernika, 1993), 122–23. 35. Linda H. Peterson, “Collaborative Life Writing as Ideology: The Auto/biographies of Mary Howitt and Her Family,” in Women’s Life Writing and Imagined Communities, ed. Cynthia Huff (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 176–95, here, 177. 36. “jest obecnie między wszystkimi naszymi autorkami upowszechnioną metodą”; “bardzo mało dla siebie pokarmu znajduję;—nic na przyjemność, nic na smak.” Żmichowska, Czy to powieść? xxx. In all quotations from this edition, I have modernized the orthography in keeping with the practice of the other, more recent editions that I use. 37. “Psychologiczne badania! wszak prawda że nie nowina? toć już są do utworów literackich wprowadzone; . . . a jednak mam tyle za siebie i za ciebie zarozumiałości, że jeszcze mam

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Here, she seems to recognize the important contexts of time and place in de- termining the self-awareness of the subject of the so-called “autobiography,” as well as the sense that identity is something indeterminate, fluid, not fixed, and yet contingent on historical and spatial circumstances, something she also emphasizes many times in the Kontur ogólny. I shall turn now to the specifically Polish (national) elements of the work, which complement the more transnational dimensions (such as the gendered aspects of autobiographical writing in general, mentioned above) but which do not in any way diminish them—Żmichowska’s approach transcends nation in that its focus is the woman’s experience (lived through as a direct effect of her gender) rather than the collective national experience, yet the specific location and cultural context also, inevitably, have an additional bearing on the development of her life. Compared with the large volume of theoretical and critical material that now exists in North American and west European scholarship on autobiographical writing and women’s autobiography in particular,38 Polish autobiography awaits similar detailed attention, especially in the longer-term historical perspective. However, several observations can be made. For a start, it is doubtful that there is any tradition as such of Polish women’s autobiography, if indeed there is such a tradition in any national language or culture. Linda Peterson’s casting of doubt on whether a tradition exists at all, for example, in English-language women’s autobiographical writing distinct from that of men and her assertion (invoking Paul de Man) that the distinctive problems surrounding life-writing are determined rather by the technical demands of the genre (“the resources of the medium”), could equally be applied to the Polish case.39 Polish women’s autobiographies, such as the “spiritual” autobiographies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries or the verse autobiography of Anna Stanisławska (ca. 1652–1700/1701?), the autobiography of Regina Salomea Pilsztynowa (1718–60?) or the Siberian memoirs of Ewa Felińska (1793–1859), do not form part of a distinct tradition.40 Meanwhile the fact that many female novelists (Maria Wirtemberska, nadzieję coś nowego, coś prawdiwszego dopowiedzieć. Weźmy tylko szczerą autobiografię na nasze arkusze; weźmy ją w tym stanie, w jakim jest na świecie bożym pod dzisiejszą datą, w stanie zapytania i spostrzeżenia. . . . pisać nam wolno, tylko dla tego, żebyśmy przecież coś użytecznego ludziom napisały.” Ibid., xxxi–xxxii. 38. Smith and Walker, Women, Autobiography, Theory, 3–52. See also Sidonie Smith, “Re- sisting the Gaze of Embodiment: Women’s Autobiography in the Nineteenth Century,” in American Women’s Autobiography: Feast(s) of Memory, ed. Margo Culley (Madison: Uni- versity of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 75–100; and Valerie Sanders, The Private Lives of Victorian Women: Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century England (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989). 39. Linda H. Peterson, Traditions of Victorian Women’s Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 1–5, 41–42. Peterson refers to Paul de Man’s essay “Autobiography as De-facement,” Modern Lan- guage Notes 94 (1979): 919–30. 40. General historical surveys of writing by women in Poland fail to identify any

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Eliza Orzeszkowa, Żmichowska herself in all her previous novels, Zofia Nałkowska, Maria Kuncewiczowa, etc.) put aspects of their own experience into their fictional characters is as self-evident as it is in other national literatures. What distinguishes Czy to powieść? from fictions with a protagonist or heroine into which the author directly transfers large chunks of herself, is that Żmichowska within the imaginary, constructed space of the novel creates an (imaginary) autobiography, not a fictional plot as such that develops and then resolves itself; the fictional Leona presents her text as an “autobiography” (or “biography”), so that within the confines of the fiction, it is ostensibly authentic—even though the narrator (N.Ż.) casts doubt on it; maybe Żmichowska was anticipating the conclusion that all autobiography is fiction anyway. In the case of Czy to powieść? we are therefore dealing with something different from the kind of autobiographically inspired work discussed by Małgorzata Czermińska, where the protagonist is deliberately created as a doppelgänger or alter ego of the author herself as, for example, in Maria Kuncewiczowa’s Fantomy (Phantoms) (1972).41 The Polish milieu, initially the city of Warsaw and its military personnel, and then the countryside—the small village and manor of Mielinek—somewhere to the east within Russian-occupied Poland defines the cultural, political, social, economic, and class contexts of the woman’s life. Here the consequences of the relatively recent experience (that of Leona’s—and Żmichowska’s—parents’ generation) of the partition of the Polish state, the campaigns of Napoleon Bonaparte and her family’s loyalty to this particular political option are symbolized by the subject’s own name: Leona, Leoncia, or Napolcia, all reduced forms of her full forename Napoleona. Meanwhile, the loss of men in military campaigns, fruitless rebellions, or political exile meant that in this generation women came to dominate family and social life (though not political life).42 However, when dominant women, such as Leona’s

“tradition.” See, for example, Krystyna Stasiewicz, ed., Pisarki polskie epoch dawnych [Pol- ish women writers of earlier times] (Olsztyn: Wyższa Szkoła Pedagogiczna, 1998); Grażyna Borkowska, Małgorzata Czermińska, and Ursula Phillips, Pisarki polskie od średniowiecza do współczesności [Polish women writers from the Middle Ages to the present day] (Gdańsk: słowo/obraz terytoria, 2000); Celia Hawkesworth, ed., A History of Central European Women’s Writing (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). See also my bibliographical survey, “Pol- ish Women Writers; Research and Publications,” in Chowaniec, Phillips, and Rytkönen, Masquerade and Femininity, 16–27. 41. Małgorzata Czermińska, Autobiografia i powieść, czyli pisarz i jego postacie (Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Morskie, 1987), 68–96. 42. See Sławomira Walczewska, Damy, rycerze, feministki. Kobiecy dykurs emancypacyjny w Polsce [Ladies, knights, feminists: women’s discourse of emancipation in Poland] (Kraków: Wydawnictwo eFKa, 1999), 41–65; Halina Filipowicz, “Othering the Kościuszko Uprising: Women as Problem in Polish Insurgent Discourse,” in Studies in Language, Literature and Cultural Mythology: Investigating “The Other,” ed. Elwira Grossman (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002), 55–83; and Halina Filipowicz, “The Wound of History: Gender Stud- ies and Polish Particularism,” in Poles Apart: Women in Modern Polish Culture, ed. Helena

This content downloaded from 141.211.155.157 on Mon, 18 May 2015 21:32:41 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Żmichowska’s last novel 31 maternal grandmother, persist in applying a strictly patriarchal ideology, other women suffer the effects of their misogyny: silenced, repressed, and emotionally crushed—as in the case of several of her own daughters, and then Leona herself. Żmichowska in the Kontur ogólny makes an interesting remark about the influence of historical circumstances on Polish national identity as they differently affect the separate genders, here specifically the fictional brother’s personality in comparison to the inadequate or weak (as she saw it) characters of most contemporary Polish “brothers,” a point that, sadly, she does not develop further: the strong implication, however, is that Polish men (at least in the Russian partition) were emasculated by the loss of political control over their own lives and society, robbed perhaps of career opportunities and self-respecting outlets for their energies—although, at the same time, the suggestion is that this was also somehow in the “inherited national character,” while Polish women (who were excluded anyway from political roles by virtue of their gender, irrespective of the rulers) coped better with adversity, and were in some way morally superior:

(I was sorely tempted to give the brother the role of true guardian and defender, because my brother [she does not say which one] was always my support, but I learned from experience that in our society he is one of the exceptions. The major- ity, if not all, of the brothers whom I have known—I am talking about even those who love their families—were almost always saved more often by their sisters when they ought to have been the sisters’ saviors. Political circumstances contributed to this as well as the inherited national character in which the female element is better per- fected in its type than the male element.) [parentheses in original; emphasis added]43

Meanwhile, in the realized fragment of the novel, the patriarchal and spiteful predisposition of Leona’s grandmother—which expresses itself most painfully in the favoritism demonstrated toward Leona’s brother—is shown to be the psychological

Goscilo and Beth Holmgren, special issue of Indiana Slavic Studies 15 (2005): 147–67. These scholars demonstrate that despite the lack of men, women rarely stepped outside their gender- prescribed roles, although there were occasional exceptions. Elsewhere, I have discussed these limited gendered roles in relation to Orzeszkowa’s participation in the 1863 uprising; see Ursula Phillips, “Glory to the Vanquished or Tribute to Lived Experience: Eliza Orzesz- kowa’s Recreation of 1863 in Her Cycle Gloria victis (1910),” in Mapping Experience in Polish and Russian Women’s Writing, ed. Marja Rytkönen et al. (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), 64–87, here, 72–73. 43. “(Miałam wielką pokusę dać bratu rolę prawdziwego opiekuna i obrońcy, dlatego że mój brat był zawsze wsparciem moim, ale z doświadczenia przekonałam się, iż to u nas do wyjątków należy. Większość, jeśli nie wyszystkość braci, których znałam—mówię nawet o kochających swoją rodzinę—zawsze częściej bywała praktycznie ratowaną przez siostry, niż co by sióstr ratunkiem być była powinna. Skadały się na to okoliczności polityczne i dziedziczny charakter narodu, w którym żeński pierwiastek jest więcej udoskonalony w rodzaju swoim od pierwiaska męskiego w swoim znów rozdzaju.) [parentheses in the original; emphasis added].” Żmichowska, Wybór pism, 2:430.

This content downloaded from 141.211.155.157 on Mon, 18 May 2015 21:32:41 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 32 The Polish Review result of her own upbringing, as the rejected daughter of her father’s first marriage and a capricious stepmother, initially disinherited but eager to exercise power once her wrongs have been righted through an unexpected marriage. In fact, one of the most interesting aspects of the 1876 novel is the large amount of space devoted to several generations of female relatives on Leona’s mother’s side, stretching back to the beginning of the eighteenth century. In accordance with Żmichowska’s instructions to Wanda in the Kontur ogólny, where she refers to “English women novelists” who record several generations of human (men’s and women’s) experience in the family histories and hence character formation of their heroines,44 Leona—who repeats, in her justification for this strategy, parts of the earlierKontur ogólny almost word for word,45 but whose emphasis is overwhelmingly on the experience of women—rec- ords portraits of women in her own family via the oral record of another female relative, an elderly spinster (Róża), the only person in Leona’s family “who made no distinction between myself and Józio.”46 Róża has worked her whole life as a servant on the grandmother’s estate in return for her daily bread, thereby highlighting the marginal position of noblewomen who did not marry, often because they had no dowry, which left them exposed to exploitation: “it was hard unpaid labor rather than ‘residency.’”47 Meanwhile, in the sympathetic portrait of another aunt, Mal- wina, she shows how conventional barriers and pressures on a woman desirous of education and independent thought conspire to make her a grotesque caricature of those initial positive instincts.48 Żmichowska presents a strikingly negative image of the noble manor when compared to its idyllization in many contemporary and subsequent works of Polish literature. In contrast to the idealized image of this class contained, for example, in Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz (1834), which reflects the country manor as the source of true Polishness, the matrix of all healthy and patriotic values, it is one of oppression, especially for women, and of violence: and when I say violence, I mean just that: abduction, incarceration, forced marriage and—if we read between the lines—possibly also the unmentionable: rape (the story of Leona’s maternal great-grandmother, Dosia).49 There is no sentiment in Żmichowska’s novel, rather an attempt to understand the mechanisms of cultural and psychological formation. Even Orzeszkowa, whose novels abundantly record the economic decline of the landed class in the second half of the nineteenth century, still portrays it with marked nostalgia for some lost golden age. Following the novel’s publication in Wiek, Żmichowska’s death a few weeks later, and Chmielowski’s edition of her works ten years after that, the novel fell

44. Ibid., 2:433–35. 45. Compare the long citation above with ibid., 2:212–13. 46. “która żadnej nie czyniła między mną a Józiem różnicy”; ibid., 2:291. 47. “było to raczej ciężką pracą bezpłatną niż rezydencją”; ibid., 2:290. 48. Ibid., 2:385–412. 49. Ibid., 2:308–28.

This content downloaded from 141.211.155.157 on Mon, 18 May 2015 21:32:41 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Żmichowska’s last novel 33 into obscurity along with most of Żmichowska’s output.50 It enjoyed a brief revival in 1929–30 when Boy republished it along with two other novels, Poganka (The Heathen) and Biała Róża, all in separate editions with his introductions, as well as the first edition (1930) of Żmichowska’s letters to his mother.51 Two of the novels, Biała Róża and Czy to powieść? were enthusiastically reviewed at the time (1929) by Irena Krzywicka in Wiadomości literackie (Literary news) where she compares Żmichowska’s understanding of childhood psychology in Czy to powieść? to that of Tolstoy in his novel Childhood, Boyhood, Youth.52 Żmichowska’s final novel, however, has received very little critical attention subsequently.53 In conclusion, I would underline the fact that Czy to powieść? bears witness to Żmichowska’s assertions—in the planning documents sent to Wanda and elsewhere—that “life” and social “usefulness” were more important than art, that infor- mal communication (or conversation: “rozmowa,” as she called it)54 more authentic than artifact: the purpose of her writing the woman’s life being first and foremost, to borrow a phrase from Heilbrun, “to write that other women might live.”55 Krzy- wicka, however, who refers more to the life story of Leona as it may have developed

50. Significantly, Maria Ilnicka, editor of Bluszcz [Ivy]—the leading women’s cultural journal of the day—fails to mention Czy to powieść? in her long obituary and review of Żmichowska’s literary production. Ilnicka, concerned about the reputation of her magazine among the social elite and the Catholic hierarchy, was uncomfortable about the emancipa- tionist or feminist elements in Żmichowska’s works; it seems unlikely that she was unaware of the publication in Wiek; see Maria Ilnicka, “Narcyza Żmichowska,” Bluszcz (1877): 4–6, 11–12, 15–16. 51. The recent republication of the letters includes Boy’s original 1930 introduction: Żmichowska, Listy. Tom V: Narcyssa i Wanda, 5–31. 52. Krzywicka’s 1929 review “Rozmowa kobiet o Narcyzie Żmichowskiej” [A women’s conversation about Narcyza Żmichowska] is republished in Irena Krzywicka, Kontrola współczesności. Wybór międzywojennej publicystyki społezcnej i literackiej z lat 1924–1939 [Control of contemporaneity: a selection of interwar social and literary critical articles, 1924–1939], ed. Agata Zawiszewska (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Feminoteki), 174–79. Tolstoy is mentioned on p. 176. 53. As far as I am aware, the only works to discuss the novel in any detail, apart from Boy’s 1929 introduction (Żmichowska, Czy to powieść, v–xxii) are: Marian Stępień, Narcyza Żmichowska (Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1968), 463–88; Maria Woźniakie- wicz-Dziadosz, Między buntem i rezygnacją. O powieściach Narcyzy Żmichowskiej [Between rebellion and resignation: the novels of Narcyza Żmichowska] (Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1978), 307–35; and Borkowska, Alienated Women, 109–11, 154–55. 54. “Conversation” for Żmichowska was axiomatic. It was fundamental to her pedagogy; see Phillips, Narcyza Żmichowska. Feminizm i religia, 146. It was also an important structural element in her literary works, as Borkowska demonstrates in her analysis of Kasia i Marynka [Kasia and Marynka] (1869), another fragmentary, unfinished, and rarely discussed novel; see Grażyna Borkowska, “Conversation as Female Experience: The Case of Narcyza Żmichowska,” in Rytkönen et al., Mapping Experience, 32–49. 55. Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life, 39.

This content downloaded from 141.211.155.157 on Mon, 18 May 2015 21:32:41 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 34 The Polish Review according the 1867 Kontur ogólny than to the extant text of the written novel (which covers only Leona’s childhood years), namely, that of a young woman who freely rejects offers of marriage, sees her significance in terms of generation—in contrast to the grandmothers and aunts: “Napolcia [is] a woman who already has the courage to be herself . . . perhaps an exaggerated pioneer of women’s independence. . . . And the latest stage—that’s us.”56 Interestingly, Krzywicka also presents her review as a conversation: “Rozmowa kobiet o Narcyzie Żmichowskiej” (A women’s conversation about Narcyza Żmichowska), in which three women discuss the novels reissued by Boy, a strategy that also allows her to speculate about Żmichowska’s sexuality without it appearing to come directly from herself. A final irony is that the fictional life situation, the death of Leona and the narrator N.Ż.’s eventual receipt of her manuscript, was to be exactly paralleled in real life, as if Żmichowska had written her own epitaph: like Leona she completed only the childhood years of her novel, before she too passed away. In her recent book, Agnieszka Mrozik, comparing Borkowska’s assessment of Żmichowska’s strategy for novel-writing as polyphonic, hybrid, fluid, polemical, and ultimately open-ended with analogical critical assessments of the work of Izabela Filipiak, speculates as to whether we can speak of a tradition in Polish women’s or feminist writing initiated by Żmichowska.57 I am not sure about a “tradition,” since before Filipiak it is hard to find another similar multidimensional voice; perhaps it is rather the case that Żmichowska—not only in her writing strategies but also in many other ways—possessed a feminist consciousness far ahead of, even out of step with, her own times.

56. Krzywicka, “Rozmowa kobiet,” 178. 57. Agnieszka Mrozik, Akuszerki transformacji. Kobiety, literatura i władza w Polsce po 1989 roku [Midwives of transformation: Women, literature, and power in Poland after 1989] (Warsaw: Instytut Badań Literackich, 2012), 48–49; Borkowska, “Metafora drożdży,” 67–68.

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