Lecture 12: Cultural Life in Poland from the January Uprising to the Outbreak of the First World War Outline 1
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- 1 - Lecture 12: Cultural Life in Poland from the January Uprising to the Outbreak of the First World War Outline 1. Introduction. a. New conditions which prevailed after the 1863 uprising. b. Caesura in cultural life around 1890 2. The Positivists and Realists. a. Bolesław Prus b. Eliza Orzeszkowa c. Henryk Sienkiewicz 3. Modernism and Young Poland a. Stanisław Przybyszewski b. Leopold Staff c. Bolesław Leśmian d. Stanisław Wyspiański e. Władysław Reymont f. Stefan Żeromski 4. Conclusion. 1. Introduction Just as the politics of the fifty years between the 1863 Uprising falls into two parts, the first dominated by the Positivism and the rejection of the insurrectionary tradition and the second from the early 1880s, which saw the emergence of the new political movements which were - 2 - to struggle for dominance in the first half of the twentieth century, so cultural life also sees a cesura in the early 1890s. The first period was dominated by Positivism and the literature of realism, the second by the impact of European modernism on Polish cultural life. The principal embodiment of modernism in the Polish environment was the movement called ‘Young Poland’. Not all writing in the later period can be described as part of the modern movement. Some of it, in particular the fiction of Reymont and Żeromski is rather a response to the new political climate and does not break significant new ground in aesthetic terms. II. The Period of Positivism and Realism We have already discussed the political ideas that were embodied in Polish Positivism. The Positivist movement did not have a very clearly developed aesthetic, but it was very much influenced by the impact of Naturalism, particularly as it developed in France. As applied to literature, this movement was a corollary of the emphasis on biological sciences. The naturalistic technique was built on detailed external observation of human beings, since it was assumed that man’s behaviour is determined by elementary instincts and, as such, is no different from that of other animals. In the eighties, Polish writers began to elaborate a theory of the novel, and they turned their attention toward the French novelist Emile Zola, who, in his Le roman experimental (1880), explained the principles of the ‘scientific novel,’ which he proposed as an objective ‘mirror of life.’ Zola was combatted in Poland by the conservative (‘old’) press and gained some support from the Positivists (the ‘young’ press), although they never whole-heartedly supported his aesthetic. Bolesław Prus, the most eminent novelist of the period, considered Zola’s novels symptomatic of the times: Poetry and aesthetics up to today have served only the tastes of a social layer living in prosperity; now, entering upon the scene is a laver of people who live in poverty and whose fate leaves much to be desired, at least in regard to aesthetic exigencies. - 3 - Although naturalistic leanings were visible in some writers at the very end of the nineteenth century in Poland, the novel as a detached and dispassionate investigation failed to win a place of prominence. It was felt that naturalism was all right for ‘prosperous and happy France,’ but not for a nation whose very existence was in danger. Moreover, three other factors weakened the impact of the naturalistic approach: the first was the growth of ‘decadentism’ and a new subjective art; the second was the strivings of the revolutionary socialist movement and the third was the revival of faith in the idea of national independence, and the renewed interest this created in romantic literature. Thus, in its Zola-like variety, naturalism had but few Polish representatives. Bolesław Prus (1845-1912) 1. His biography 2. His Works Prus passed to fiction gradually. This came about as a result of his disillusionment with the effectiveness of journalism. While learning the craft, he was indebted, above all, to Józef Ignacy Kraszewski, among Polish authors, and to Charles Dickens and Mark Twain, among foreign authors. He began with short stories, usually situating them in a Warsaw apartment building among its poorer tenants (whose apartments always faced onto a gloomy central courtyard). His characters usually live on the brink of starvation: the seamstress in ‘Ball Gown’ (‘Sukienka balowa’); the unemployed mason in ‘A Tenant in a Garret’ (‘Lokator poddasza’ ); the little blind girl in ‘Organ-Grinder’ (‘Katarynka’), whose poverty prevents her from undergoing surgery; the poor copyist in ‘Waistcoat’ (‘Kamizelka’). This last story is a good example of Prus’s tenderness toward his characters. It tells the tale of a waistcoat sold to a secondhand dealer after the death of the owner. While the - 4 - latter was ill with tuberculosis, he had lived with only one thought: not to depress his wife. He assured her his waistcoat had been getting too tight, while she herself in her turn had been narrowing it in the seams in order to fool him. The rich, in Prus, are not treated with any ferocity. A houseowner to whom a poor seamstress owes money turns out unex- pectedly to be quite humane; or a tenement owner, a Jewish rabbi, goes in search of help for an unemployed mason; or an old bachelor, a connoisseur of music, is at first irritated by the organ-grinder in the courtyard, but when he notices the joy its sounds give to a blind girl, not only does he pay the janitor to bring in all the organ-grinders of the neighborhood, but he contributes money for the blind girl’s operation. In ‘Michalko,’ Prus depicts an illiterate young peasant newly arrived in Warsaw who is a little like a Steinbeck hero. Michael (Michalko) is extremely strong, hard-working, and so naive that by city standards he is an idiot. After saving a man from being crushed by a wall on a construction site, he disappears into the crowd, unaware of the very notion of heroism. The short stories date mostly from the earlier phase of Prus’s work. Around 1885, he turned to the novel. As a realist, he formulated his program in opposition to both ‘idealism’ (read ‘Romanticism’) and ‘naturalism’, although Flaubert and Zola, who both were then called naturalists, had some impact upon him. ‘The aim of literature,’ he wrote in 1885, ‘is to aid the spiritual development of the individual and of society. The sciences aid thought, social sciences aid thought and will, while literature aids thought, feelings, and will, that last indirectly. Quite interesting is the parallel he drew between literature and science: ‘Such characters as Hamlet, Macbeth, Falstaff, Don Quixote are discoveries as valid for psychology as the laws of planetary motion are for astronomy. Shakespeare is worth no less than Kepler.’ Of Prus’s three best novels, his first, ‘The Outpost’ (Placówka), appeared in 1886. It is a study of a Polish village. The hero, a peasant named Ślimak (which means ‘snail’), serves to illustrate the life of the entire village. Practically all of its inhabitants are illiterate. There is no school, and religion consists largely of magic: when one of them buys, by - 5 - chance, a painting representing ‘Leda with a Swan,’ they pray to it just as they do before two old portraits of noblemen, former benefactors of the local church. The far from picturesque, poor, and hard-working village has been touched, however, by certain transformations taking place in the country as a whole. A railway is being built in the neighborhood, and the owners of a manor have sold their property to German settlers, who divide up the land into small farms. Here, Prus inserts a message, as he was deeply distressed by Bismarck’s policy. German settlers were being given loans and encouraged by the German Government to move across the border into Russian-occupied Poland. The Germans were economically stronger and better organized than the Polish peasants, while the rich Polish landowners seemed to lose their patriotic spirit when money was involved. In the novel, landowners speak more French than Polish, and decide to move either to a city or abroad instead of staying in the boring countryside. The plot is built around a series of misfortunes which befall Slimak when he refuses to sell his plot of land to the German settlers, who want to construct a windmill on it. The extremely stubborn Ślimak does not act out of self-interest, since the money from the sale of his property would buy him a better farm elsewhere. He acts out of sheer inertia and an attachment to the principle inculcated by his father and grandfather: once a peasant loses his inherited plot of land, he is headed toward the greatest of misfortunes, namely, becoming a wage earner. Ślimak himself lacks the strength of will that his wife possesses (and here, Prus seems to be a good observer of the Polish village). He hesitates. But his wife, although she is on her deathbed, asks him to swear that he will never sell the land. Far from being a hymn to the supposed vigour of the peasant, the novel exposes his conservatism. It is the only defense he can make against the inroads of a world hostile both to him and to his country. This somber picture is enlivened by Prus’s flashes of humor and his warmth. The local priest, though preoccupied mostly with dinners, drinking, and hunting parties at neighboring manors, is, under Prus’s pen, not completely deprived of all semblances of a good Christian. Two of the lowliest creatures, by village standards, emerge as bearers of the - 6 - most lofty ethics of selflessness. Ślimak’s half-wit farm hand, upon finding an abandoned baby, carries it to his miserable quarters and takes it under his permanent care.