THE SARMATIAN REVIEW

Vol. XXVIII, No. 1 January 2008 De respublica emendanda

Andrzej Frycz-Modrzewski (1503–1572), political theorist and Secretary to Sigismund Augustus, King of Poland. 1348 THE SARMATIAN REVIEW January 2008 The Sarmatian Review (ISSN 1059-5872) is are always potentially available to a triannual publication of the Polish Institute of The Collected Poems of Zbigniew students and scholars. Houston. The journal deals with Polish, Central, and Herbert, 1956–1998, by James E. Reid Eastern European affairs, and it explores their It used to be that the older the implications for the United States. We specialize in (review) ...... 1357 the translation of documents.Sarmatian Review is Polish Literature from 1864 to 1918: book, the more it was treasured as indexed in the American Bibliography of Slavic and Realism and Young Poland, by George part of the collection. Now the op- East European Studies, EBSCO, and P.A.I.S. Gasyna (review) ...... 1359 posite seems to be true: the most re- International Database. From January 1998 on, files in PDF format are available at the Central and Eastern From Sovietology to Postcoloniality: cent interpretations of human affairs European Online Library (www.ceeol.com). Poland and Ukraine from Postcolonial are valued, while the older ones are In 2007 subscription price is still $15.00 per year for Perspective, by Sally Boss (review) .1361 discarded. Instant and untested individuals, $21.00 for institutions and libraries The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, ($21.00 for individuals, $28.00 for libraries overseas, knowledge trumps the wisdom of air mail). The views expressed by authors of articles Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999, the ages. by Abby Drwecki (review) ...... 1366 do not necessarily represent those of the Editors or of Western civilization (or any other the Polish Institute of Houston. Articles are subject to Obce miasto: Wrocław 1945 i potem, editing. Unsolicited manuscripts and other materials by Agnieszka Marczyk (review) . . . .1367 civilization worth its name) depends are not returned unless accompanied by a self- on written texts for its preservation, addressed and stamped envelope. Please submit your A Search for Radiance: On the Poetry of contribution electronically and, if requested, send a Adam Zagajewski, by Jolanta W. Best perpetuation, and development. printout by air mail. Letters to the Editor can be e- (review) ...... 1369 Dead civilizations are studied mailed to , with an Lighting and Ashes by Anna Gàsienica- through archeology, live ones are accompanying mailing return address. Articles, letters, and subscription checks should be mailed to Byrcyn (review) ...... 1372 reanimated by reading books. The Sarmatian Review, P. O. Box 79119, About the Authors ...... 1373 Poland’s identity would be unthink- Houston, Texas 77279–9119. Announcements ...... 1373 able without the foundation of its The Sarmatian Review retains the copyright for all Thank You Note ...... 1373 Renaissance and Baroque writers materials included in print and online issues. Copies for personal or educational use are permitted by section such as Stanisław from Skarbimierz, 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law. Permission Our Take Jan Kochanowski, or Andrzej Frycz- to redistribute, republish, or use SR materials in Modrzewski. Jacques Derrida, advertising or promotion must be submitted in writing Old Books whose dislike of Western civilization to the Editor. t the beginning of the twenty- Editor: Ewa Thompson (Rice University). was shared by many twentieth-cen- Associate Editors: Tamara Trojanowska (University first century a number of A tury literary theorists, bemoaned the of Toronto), American universities invented a Bogdan Czaykowski, University of British Columbia influence of the printed word on the new way of making room for new Western world. Editorial Advisory Committee: George Gasyna books: removing old books from The removal of a sizeable percent- (University of Illinois-Urbana), Janusz A. Ihnatowicz library shelves and storing them in (University of Saint Thomas-Houston), Joseph age of books published before the a remote location. Check with your A.Kotarba (University of Houston), Alex Kurczaba 1960s truncates the memory of the (University of Illinois-Chicago), Marcus D. Leuchter university librarian to see whether present generation. If a significant (Holocaust Museum Houston),Witold J. Lukaszewski this applies to your school. (Sam Houston State University), Theresa Kurk chunk of interpretations of culture McGinley (North Harris College-Houston), Michael At the time when fortunes are committed to paper is removed from J. MikoÊ (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), Jan spent on increasing the number of Rybicki (Kraków Pedagogical University), Dariusz easy circulation, the culture built on university administrators and non- Skórczewski (Catholic University of Lublin), Piotr these interpretations will eventually Wilczek (University of Silesia). teaching staff, the excuse that “it is wither. This was predicted by Marx- Copy Editor: Cyndy Brown too expensive to keep all the books Web Pages: Lisa Spiro (Rice University). ists like Antonio Gramsci who wrote in the library” sounds thin. Another Web Address: . in the 1930s that it is not necessary Sarmatian Council: James Burns (Houston), Iga J. excuse we have heard is that certain to engineer bloody revolutions to Henderson (Houston), Marek Kimmel (Rice books have not been checked out for University), Leonard M. Krazynski (First Honorary change political systems and affect Polish Consul in Houston), James R. Thompson (Rice decades, and therefore can safely be a transfer of power: it is enough to University). stored far away from the students’ change culture to affect such a eyes. In this issue: change. The massive removal of old This last excuse does not even de- books from university libraries is a serve a rejoinder. In the great librar- Our Take...... 1348 small step in this direction. While ies of the world most books have SR Data ...... 1349 many steps have to be taken to bring Witte, Stolypin, and Goremykin [1921], by never been checked out: simple Gramsci’s vision to fruition, one Ferdinand Ossendowski ...... 1351 arithmetic will tell you that. These should not ignore the small steps. Δ Books and Periodicals Received. . . . .1356 libraries are great because all books January 2008 SARMATIAN REVIEW 1349 Sarmatian Review Data Recent international awards for Polish engineers and artists Blizzard Challenge 2007 Award for Ivona, one of the two best voice synthesizers, awarded to Andrzej Sowula. This worldwide competition included inventors from 16 research centers specializng in synthesizing human speech. Sixty-fourth Venice Film Festival Award for the best European film, awarded to Andrzej Jakimowski for Sztuczki. Source: Rzeczpospolita, 7 September 2007. Atractiveness of Poland as investment destination Ranking of Poland according to its investment attractiveness for foreign investors: second out of 30, after India, and the only new EU member to make the list. Ranking specifics: at stake was the number of workplaces created by foreign investors emended after consider- ing the size of a particular economy as well as the amount of the invested capital. Source: The National Bank of Ireland, as reported by , 16 October 2007. Unemployment in Poland Cities where unemployment rate reached the “normal” level (under 4 percent) in August 2007: Sopot, Gdynia, Warsaw, and Poznaƒ. Cities where unemployment fell to under 5 percent: Katowice, Kraków, and Gdaƒsk. Cities where unemployment is the highest: Kielce and Łódê (10 percent). Unemployment in Poland in August 2007: 12 percent. Source: Anna CieÊlak-Wróblewska in Rzeczpospolita, 1 October 2007. Happiness in Poland Percentage of Poles who are satisfied with their family’s and the country’s economic situation, are not afraid of losing their jobs, and have an optimistic outlook for the future: 76 percent, the highest ever. Source: “Social Diagnosis 2007,” a survey involving 18,000 respondents conducted for the fourth time in 2007, as reported by history Amount of money cut from the 2008 budget of the Institute of National Memory by the incoming Civic Platform government in Poland: 41.5 million zloties (18 million dollars), or the largest cut of all in the national budget. Source: Lena Białkowska in Donosy, no. 4562 (10 December 2007). 1350 SARMATIAN REVIEW January 2008 In the seventeenth century Germany suffered as Poland did in the twentieth Percentage of male population of Germany killed in the Thirty Years War: nearly 50 percent. Amount of material damage wrought by the Swedish armies in Germany: one third of all towns (1,500), 18,000 villages, and 2,000 castles. Source: “Mass grave offers a glimpse of wartime life in 17th century,” The Independent (London), 3 August 2007. German “solidarity tax” for the rebuilding of East Germany Amount of money Germans pay each year to support East Germany ravaged by communist rule: 11 billion euros, or about 15 billion dollars. Number of years they have supported their East German brethren in this fashion: 16. Percentage of surcharge on German taxes necessitated by this “solidarity tax:” 5.5 percent. Source: Allan Hall (Berlin), “Calls grow to lift burden of Germany’s solidarity tax,” The Independent, 1 August 2007. Aggression does not pay in the long run Estimated number of German soldiers who died on Polish territory in the Second World War: half a million. Source: Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgraeberfursorge, as reported by Agnieszka Rybak, “Słoƒce Êwieci nad dobrymi i złymi,” Rzeczpospolita (Plus Minus), 3 November 2007. Twentieth-century repopulation of German monasteries by Polish monks Number of German Franciscan monasteries that are currently inhabited and administered by Polish monks: four. The most recent “takeover”: Franciscan monastery in Amberg, Bavaria, in August 2007. Reasons for this decision: retirement or consolidation of German Franciscan communities owing to a scarcity of religious vocations in Germany. Other Polish religious orders that have taken over monasteries in Germany: Paulists, Benedictines, and Carmelites. Source: Rzeczpospolita, 1 September 2007. Jews today Number of Jews worldwide in 2007: 13 million (5,235,000 in Israel; 5,652,000 in North America; 1,161,000 in Europe, among others). Percentage of mixed marriages among Jews: 54 percent in the United States, 60 percent in Germany, 80 percent in Russia and Ukraine. Greatest danger of de-Judaization among Jews: mixed marriages. Percentage of immigrants from Russia to Israel who are not Jews according to Jewish law: 35 percent. Number of young Jews in North America who are university students: 90 percent. Percentage of Arabs in Israel: 20 percent. Source: Szewach Weiss, former head of the Knesset, in an article “Jews Today” in Rzeczpospolita, 1 September 2007. Racist attacks in Russia Number of people killed in racist attacks in Russia between January-August 2007: 38, including 24 in Moscow. Number of people injured (mainly by stabbings) in such attacks: over 300. Background of the most common victims: persons from the Caucasus and Central Asia. Cities in which most attacks occur: Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Nizhny Novgorod. Source: Russian human rights group Sova, as reported by Steven Eke in BBC News, 3 September 2007. Russian Orthodox Church and Russia’s atomic weapons Place in which the Russian Orthodox bishop Ambrose blessed the officers and soldiers of the 12th Division of the Russian armed forces (responsible for maintaining and launching the atomic weapons): Cathedral of Christ the King in Saratov. Bishop Ambrose’s comment to the soldiers: “I pray that the atomic weapons that you created and that you have under your care always remain under God’s guidance as well.” Source: Russian army newspaper Krasnaia Zvezda, as reported by Andrzej M∏Ïynski in Dziennik, 6 September 2007. Rise of neo-Nazism in Germany Percentage of vote won by the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party in regional parliament elections in Saxony in 2007: 9 percent. Percentage of support for NDP in 2007, according to Forsa Institute poll: 9 percent. Recent incidents caused by neo-Nazis: attack on 8 Indian men by 50 German youths in the town of Mügeln in August 2007. Source: Tristana Moore, “Rise of Far Right Alarms Germans,” BBC News, 13 September 2007. January 2008 SARMATIAN REVIEW 1351 your father saying, ‘Witte will not sign the Peace Rare and forgotten Books—SR partial reprint series Treaty.’ Of course you will send it in your code.” Witte, Stolypin, and Goremykin [1921] Assured, and in the best of spirits, Suvorin sent the translated by F. B. Czarnomski cable off and went to New York. He told the sequel afterwards. “Just imagine, I arrived in New York, and already on Ferdinand Ossendowski the station I heard the newspaper boys shouting: ‘Peace between Russia and Japan. The triumph of Witte! The t may be interesting if I put down here a few of my Japs have yielded!’ What could I do? I got hold of a own recollections of three of the most distinguished batch of papers and returned to Portsmouth by the first IPrime Ministers of Russia: Count Sergius Witte, train. I set upon Witte at once. the creator of the 1905 Constitution and of the first “Excellency! What have you done? You have put revolution; Peter Stolypin, the author of the Bill Novoie Vremia in a terrible position. It’s a scandal! We intended to transform the [Russian] peasant into a small shall be the laughing stock of the whole press. I am done bourgeois, and the propagator of the civilized as a correspondent! What a debacle! What a debacle!” suppression of the revolutionary spirit in Russia; and Witte smiled, as if nothing had happened, asked me Ivan Goremykin, the last Imperial Premier. The three to sit down, and said in his rather hoarse and halting personalities were powerful enough to mark a distinct voice: “It is true that Novoie Vremia is compromised. epoch in the history of Russia. It is true that for a month you will be a laughing stock of the world. And it is also true that your reputation as Witte‘s main characteristic. . . and one which gave a special correspondent has gone to the dogs. But it is him a peculiar power, was his absolute immorality. not true what you say of the debacle. For you must To him there was only the aim, and all means to know how it all really happened. You see, I knew the reach an end were equally good. Japs would intercept your code. As soon as you sent to your editor in Petersburg the cable saying that I would Witte, a former bookkeeper of the Southwestern not sign the Peace Treaty, the Japs read the cable and Railway, who became a Minister of State, received were scared. If the correspondent of the most influential the title of Count, and became almost an autocrat in paper cables it so positively to his editor, who is his government, was and exceedingly forecful, energetic, father as well; if that correspondent goes off to New and wise man. The main characteristic of this York to play tennis, they thought then no change of statesman, and one which gave him a peculiar power, our position could be expected. The Japs were right in was his absolute immorality. To him there was only their deductions and they yielded.” the aim, and all means to reach an end were equally Thus Witte, in order to achieve a higher aim, sacrificed good, if they were practical. An episode during the the career of a good and devoted friend. Such methods Russo-Japanese peace negotiations in Portsmouth [after were quite common with him, and the Ministers and the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–5] is very illuminating undersecretaries in his Cabinet often suffered through it. in this regard. The negotiations were dragging on, as When Witte came to the conclusion that the mood of the Japanese put forward very stiff claims, and the the great masses of town population after the Russo- Russian delegation was totally confused and at a loss what Japanese war threatened revolution, which was likely to do. Witte himself was calm and even in high spirits. to infect the army, he convinced the Emperor of the One day there called on Witte the leading necessity of convoking Parliament and of proclaiming representative of the Russian press, Boris A. Suvorin, a new Constitution. Soon he witnessed the increase of the son of the well-known editor of the most popular reaction, and resented the underhand struggle in which and influential of Petersburg dailies, the Novoie Vremia. the Court camarilla and the landed gentry engaged He came to inquire whether Witte foresaw any against him. developments at the Conference, as he wanted to go to The position of the omnipotent Minister was shaken. New York to see a lawn tennis match. It was necessary to prop it up in order to save the “Yes, of course you should go,” said Witte with ill- situation. Witte resolved to organize a national humor. “We are moving in a vicious circle. We can’t procession to the Imperial Palace. Who was to lead it? go either forwards or backwards with those Japs. Go The revolutionary leaders could be of no use, it was and enjoy hourself, but before you go send a cable to necessary to have a reliable man. He was found in the 1352 SARMATIAN REVIEW January 2008 pope Gapon who was very popular among the laboring a sweep, who happened to clean the chimney early in classes. He held the multitudes of workmen, students, and the morning, discovered the bomb, and the Count intelligentsia in front of the Winter Palace. At the head of escaped again. the procession went women and old men carrying portraits He summoned immediately his devoted agent of the of the Tsar and the Tsaritsa, crosses, and holy icons. political police and instructed him to make inquiries. We know how the Imperial Guards, let loose by the He learned that the executors were two agents of the reactionaries, massacred and dispersed the crowd. In Okhrana, and that the plan had been made by the Chief the evening of the same day the streets of the city were of Gendarmerie, General Kurlov, and approved by the bristling with barricades, and the flame of revolution new Prime Minister, Peter Stolypin. blazed forth from the western front to the shores of the Witte understood that he would be utterly lost if he Pacific and to the Indian border. A revolution of the aspired to the high office and taking part in the active workmen and the intelligentsia, which was drowned policy of the Government. Through secret channels he in blood by the Generals Trepov, Dumbadse, Dubasov, informed the Tsar that he had given up his political Meller-Zakomelski, Rennenkampf, Rinn, and others. career, and intended to devote himself entirely to the Witte’s hand was active in the march of the revolution. work of the Council of State, which was the Upper That hand was the pope Gapon, who was unmasked as Chamber of the Russian Parliament. an agent of the political police. He was then left in peace and his life was spared. Witte attempted at first to work upon the sentiments Still, Witte was able from time to time to vex his of the Tsar through a peaceful procession, through the enemy and successor in the ministerial chair. Once I religious fervor of the people, but failed. The guards witnessed a very fascinating conversation between the fired at the defenceless crowds, at the holy icons, even late and the actual Prime Minister. The meeting took at the Emperor’s portraits. place in the lobby of the Council of State. Then Witte played his last card. He threatened the “Your Excellency!” Witte opened the conversation. throne with revolution, hoping through fear to compel “Can you tell me when the police inquiries into the the Tsar and his advisers to admit the realization of the double attempt with the infernal machine against my new Constitution, which had already been proclaimed person will be concluded?” in the name of the Emperor. But the reactionaries, Stolypin looked at Witte suspiciously and answered: mostly German generals at the head of faithful “You know, Count, that the inquiries are being carried regiments, strangled the hydra. on. On their conclusion the results will be Witte fell, and retired from active politics for good. communicated to the Prosecutor, who will notify you But the shadow that still held the power of his ruin in immediately.” its hands remained. It was Gapon, the history of whose “I think,” continued Witte, “that the case is rather a assassination in Finand remains a mystery. The mystery, and should be interesting enough for the executioners were one of the Social Revolutionary Government to hurry up with its clarification.” leaders the engineer Ruthenberg, and an agent of the Stolypin, touched to the quick, exclaimed excitedly: secret police Okhrana who, during that stormy period, “Do you think, Count, I am an imbecile or a was close to Witte’s person. According to this agent, criminal?” Witte knew of the planned assassination of Gapon, but “Allow me, Your Excellency, not to answer this did nothing to prevent it, although at that time he still had question of yours,” replied Witte emphatically with a great influence and could have easily done so. mocking smile. Witte’s enemies were aware of his part in Gapon‘s And turning his back on the Prime Minister, he left murder and exploited it to arouse the vengeance of the him pale with rage. agents of the Okhrana against the dismissed Minister, Witte hated Tsar Nicholas II. I was with Witte at and endeavored to take revenge for the Constitution of the moment when the Tsar called him on the phone, October 17 and the revolution of 1905. intending to send him to Rome at the beginning of the An “infernal machine” was thrown into his motorcar [First] World War, in order to bring in Italy on the while he, as Member of the Council of State, drove to side of the Allies. This meant a diplomatic battle royal the Mariiskii Palace, but Witte escaped unhurt. The with the “old fox” Prince Bülow, the Kaiser’s envoy. attempt was repeated by sinking a similar contrivance “I thank your Imperial Majesty for the honor. I shall into the chimney over the Premier’s cabinet. It was to be glad to undertake the mission if, at my age, I have explode when the stove was lighted. But accidentally enough strength to carry it through,” said Witte with joy. January 2008 SARMATIAN REVIEW 1353 He listened while the Tsar spoke again. Then he war and Europe will be lost in revolution. Under its replied once more. debris the dynasty will perish! I am sorry for Nicholas “I beg to thank Your Majesty humbly, but I am II, for he is the son of the greatest of Emperors. I shall obliged to make one condition. In my actions I want to not live to see this disgrace and disaster. . . which will be guided by your Majesty’s instructions alone, and I shake the foundation of other States.” want to be entirely independent of the Minister of Witte was right. Early in February 1915 he died Foreign Affairs and the Prime Minister.” suddenly. Rumor has it he was poisoned. This is not In the interval Witte listened attentively, while his true. He caught a severe cold during his long speech hand, holding the receiver, was visibly trembling. on the financial and industrial policy of Russia at the “Yes, such is my unbending determination, Sire! The congress of Russian industrialists. The speech led to Emperor, on whose behalf I spoke at Portsmouth and the resignation of the Minister of Trade and Industry, where I obtained good results, could persuade himself Itmashev, and of a number of responsible officials in that the happiness of the Fatherland is my first care. that Ministry. On the eve of Witte’s death I brought Since my dismissal, your Majesty, my views in this him a memorandum on the intended monopolization matter have not changed.” of manganese ores; Witte studied the document carefully, A long silence followed, during which I could hear made some remarks and requested me to have it printed. the whistling rattle of the membrane in the microphone Next morning, on opening my paper, I read the notice which repeated the Tsar’s words. of his death. “I am very sorry, but I cannot withdraw this condition. He was a real, ruthlessly immoral, forceful, and wise I am your Majesty’s humble servant!” man. He seemed to be living exclusively for politics, The conversation was finished. Witte put the receiver indifferent to the common aspects of everyday life. But down and paced his study nervously. At last he halted in truth, this giant of Russian policy had one soft spot. in front of the bronze statue of Alexander III, whom he He was madly in love with his wife, whom he married adored, embraced the Tsar’s knees, and exclaimed with after having helped her to get a divorce from her first a voice hoarse and strangled with emotion: husband. “Thou, o wise Emperor, seest my pain and his crime. Their married life passed in deep love. When the Thou instructest!” Countess travelled and stayed in her villa at Biarritz, Witte did not go to Rome, and the Russian envoy leaving Witte behind at home in the Kamenno Giers settled the matter single-handed; true, he had an Ostrovskii Prospekt until the end of the Parliamentary easy task, as the excellent and energetic action of British session, he invariably fell ill. He suffered much from and French diplomacy frustrated all the plans and heart attacks, strong nervous excitement, and arthritis. efforts Prince Bülow undertook in Rome. Then he would send for his old friend, the Polish On hearing of the declaration of war against physician Wolaƒski, and spend with him the long Germany, Count Witte became pale like death, crossed evenings in endless talk that was the best medicine himself with his usual wide gesture, reflected for a long for his illness. For what he really suffered from was time, gazing at the statue of Alexander III and the his heart’s longing, bordering on melancholy. He died portrait of William II bearing the Kasiser’s own in the arms of the wife he worshipped. Before death dedication. After a long silence Witte said: he handed to her his famous Memoirs that were several “Those two always dreamed of war. The Tsar wanted times the object of thievish attempts, since they it to come in fifty years‘ time, the Kaiser wanted it at contained severe and sweeping statements on the once. The Tsar knew that the people are bereft of reputations of statesmen who bulked large upon the patriotism, intelligence, nerves; that the Treasury is political stage of Imperial Russia. empty; that there are no resources in the stores! The * * * Tsar knew that the revolutionary spirit penetrated Peter Stolypin was a provincial Governor on the deeply the popular masses. Therefore he became the Volga before he became Prime Minister and Minister ‘apostle of peace’ in Europe and tried to prevent war. of the Interior. He rose to the very top of bureaucratic William knew it too and was confident of victory. The career thanks to his energy, prudence, and profound Tsar and myself, we both thwarted his plans. Now all knowledge of the manifold tendencies pervading the is lost. The Japanese war taught Russia nothing, it has Russian society and nation. He was one of the first made her even more reckless and hysterical. Russians who had the courage to foretell openly that Remember, this war will ruin Russia; we shall lose the Russia was sinking fast into the abyss of anarchy and 1354 SARMATIAN REVIEW January 2008 revolution, and forecast with great precision—as the intensified their attacks in the press, at the same time history of the Empire proved—the immediate fate of operating with the usual Russian methods of his country. provocation, denunciation, and conspiracy. The willing Stolypin maintained that the revolution would be executors of the plotters’ designs were found in two launched by the working masses, the bourgeoisie, and men standing nearest to Stolypin as Minister of the the intelligentsia, and that it would quickly spread to Interior; they were the Chief of the Gendarmes, General the peasants and the army. In the whirl of struggles Kurlov, and the Director of the Department of Police, would perish the dynasty, the aristocracy, the landed Beletskii. These two dignitaries set to work through gentry, and the educated classes. the agents of the secret police who, at the same time, Stolypin did not undertake to arrest the flight of were members of the revolutionary party. The fighting revolutionary thought that continued with growing terrorist-revolutionary organizations received through speed, hastening through the “slow and treacherous mysterious channels considerable sums from the landed time toward the reign of Count Witte,” the author of gentry for the purpose of making an attempt on the 1905 revolution. According to Stolypin that Stolypin, and were furnished with a complete plan for revolution was the ballon d’essaie, and the school of a his assassination. Even the most cautious and speedy and more powerful upheaval. suspicious revolutionary leaders who, however, ignored But Stolypin intended to weaken its progress through the fact that the terrorist “comrades” who put the an iron regime in internal politics, hoping to create scheme forward were agents of the police, approved within a few years an immense anti-revolutionary army, of the scheme as possible of execution. composed of peasants, who were to be transformed into The attempt was put into execution in Stolypin’s villa a new middle class. In conjunction with the Minister situated in the most fashionable quarter of Petersburg. of Agriculture, A.W. Krivoshein, Stolypin convoked a A young and enthusiastic revolutionary, slightly meeting of the landed gentry and announced that the cracked, and entirely under the influence of one of his Government was obliged to purchase from them a comrades, exploded a powerful bomb in front of considerable portion of their etstates, in order to resell Stolypin’s study. The villa was considerably damaged, it on easy terms to the peasants for the purpose of the Premier’s son was wounded, and a large number raising them to the status of small landowners. The of officials, gendarmes, and private persons killed. The Government was to assist the latter to employ modern assassin himself perished in the explosion, but Stolypin methods of agriculture. The small landowner-peasant escaped unhurt, having lef the villa a few moments was to be in turn the mainstay of the Government and before the explosion. But the police failed to discover the foe of anarchistic revolution. either the initiators or the accomplices of the attempt. The Emperor Nicholas II approved of this new Then the Tsar, fearing a second attempt, counselled scheme, but the great landowners were terrified at the Stolypin to leave the capital for a time. The latter, who prospect of being forced to sell their land. Stolypin was had already received private warning, agreed, and under assailed from two sides. The gentry launched in their the pretext of studying the conditions of colonization press organs a violent attack upon the Prime Minister, of Asiatic Russia, went to Siberia in company with the calling him the “slayer of the gentry” and inciting Minister Krivoshein. During the journey two attempts against him the court camarilla. On the other hand the to derail the train were made by revolutionary revolutionaries, both at home and abroad, conducted railwaymen. an agitation against Stolypin, rightly apprehensive that On his return from Siberia he had another the abolition of the communal peasant proprietorship conversation with the Emperor to whom he put the and the creation of a peasant-bourgeois would postpone direct question whether he intended to fight the revolution in Russia for many years to come. approaching revolution by the only practical means of Stolypin did his best to impress the landed gentry issuing a new law of peasant ownership. Failing such with the imperative necessity of granting concessions. a measure Stolyping threatened to resign. The Tsar To his represenations of the horrors of the future promised to support the project, and to exact from the revolution, the landowners had but one reply: “Do not landed gentry submission to the new law. try to frighten us! You have the Cossacks, the When the landowners learned of the impending gendarmes, and the army to suppress any revolution!” measure, they pressed General Kurlov to remove The gentry tried to dissuade the Tsar from the bold Stolypin forever. A new plot was being hatched in the schemes of the Premier and, having failed, they bureau of the secret police when unexpectedly Stolypin January 2008 SARMATIAN REVIEW 1355 lefty for Kiev to take part in some celebration. General Black Sea. Everywhere one could already perceive the Kurlov seized the occasion to issue the order for the approach of Bolshevism and the moroseness of the execution of the Prime Minister. It was carried out by masses. The passenger boats along the Caucasian shore an agent of the secret police, who was also a member ceased to ply, and I was obliged to hire a motorboat in of the Social Revolutionary party. Stolypin was hit by order to get from Tuapse to Sochi. I was just engaged in several revolver bullets on entering the Kiev theater placing my luggage in the boat when a distinguished old and expired soon after. The assassin was hanged amidst lady approached me and requested permission to go by rather mysterious circumstances, and all subsequent our boat to Sochi, accompanied by her husband and maid. descriptions of the case are either inventions or vague Mutual introductions followed, and I learned it was rumors on a forbidden subject. Madame Goremykin. A few minutes afterwards the How was it possible for the murderer to enter the maid brought the ex-Premier. The old man was almost theater for which all tickets were distributed completely paralyzed, but still retained a remarkable individually to officials and to the best known people clearness of mind. of Kiev, and of which all entrances were guarded by We chatted on recent events when I mentioned the gendarmes, the metropolital and secret police, and the Germans who had demoralized the Russian army, military? reducing it to a maddened mob of robbers. Goremykin Behind the murder were the hands of Kurlov and defended the Germans and accused the Duma and the Beletskii; behind them were arrayed the aristocratic Entente diplomacy of authoring the revolution. latifundists and the old landed gentry. On our arrival at Sochi, the Goremykins stayed in a * * * “pension” while I went to the hotel Riviera. A few The last prerevolutionary Prime Minister of Russia days afterwards a gang of armed and masked men burst was old Ivan L. Goremykin, a rich, lazy, and cynical into the “pension” and stole all of Madame snob. Goremykin’s jewelry, money, and documents. The official career of this dignitary ran its normal On reflection, after this event, I was astonished that course. He was several times Minister of the Interior, such notorious and hated epople as the Goremykins but was unfortunate enough to be disturbed by the first should have chosen Sochi as their residence, where ripples of the revolutionary waves. The governors of conditions were particularly favorable for an attack. various provinces inundated the Minister with their Soon after my departure from Sochi, about the middle wires but the man, lazy by nature, never read those of October, Goremykin moved with his wife into a villa “stupid” telegrams, as he called them, stowing them belonging to his married daughter. Here he was away in the drawers of his desk. Someone informed assaulted at night by a gang of Bolshevik sailors who Emperor Alexander III of it, and he sent his aide-de- murdered with appalling cruelty the ex-Premier, camp to inquire. The latter found whole heaps of Madame Goremykin, and their son-in-law, while unopened telegrams, many of which were rather wounding seriously their daughter who was saved disquieting and even alarming. afterwards. Goremykin was obliged to resign. Such was the end of the First Imperial Premier and When, shortly before the revolution of 1917, leader of reaction. Δ Goremykin was, through the influence of Rasputin and ______the Empress, appointed Prime Minister, the Dowager Fedinand Ossendowski, aka Antoni Ferdynand Ossendowski Empress exclaimed: (1876–1945), Polish and English author, soldier, traveler, and diplomat, the author of Beasts, Men, and Gods [1921], a bestseller “This old idiot again!” that is now part of the Gutenberg Project. Sergei Witte (1849– But he was no idiot. He knew every inch of Russia, 1915), chairman of the Russian Council of Ministers under Tsar and the only escape from revolution he saw in the Nicholas II. Petr Stolypin (1862–1911), chairman of the Council conclusion of a peace with Germany. He threw all his of Ministers under Tsar Nicholas II. Both were influential on and influence in the direction of such a policy. beneficial for Russia, but repressive and destructive for the non- Russian population of the empire. Ossendowski’s rendition of During the rule of Kerenskii Goremykin was arrested, Stolypin’s murder differs from the accepted version. Ivan but released soon afterwards and allowed to leave Goremykin (1839–1917), an ineffectve politician known for his Petersburg. I met the ex-Premier a few weeks before chauvinistic views. This chapter (XXII) is excerpted from his death. Ossendowski’s The Shadow of the Gloomy East [1921], translated by F. B. Czarnomski (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1925). We updated In the middle of September 1917 I went for my the orthography but not the translation. All editorial additions are holidays to the “Caucasian Riviera”—Sochi on the in square brackets. 1356 SARMATIAN REVIEW January 2008 BOOKS Books and Periodicals fear that the only readers will be the authors themselves, and they will only read their own productions (the Received ouroboros syndrome). Chechyna: The Case for Independence, by Tony Szkoła moskiewska w literaturze rosyjskiej, edited Wood. London-New York: Verso, 2007. 199 pages. by Piotr Fast and Katarzyna Jastrz∏bska. ISBN 13: 978-1-84467-114-4. Glossary, index. Paper. Cz∏stochowa: Wydawnictwo Wyžszej Szkoły $22.95 on Amazon.com. Lingwistycznej (www.wsl.edu.pl), 2007. 179 pages. rom the horrific photograph on the cover to the ISBN 83-921963-6-8. Paper. In Polish. Flast page of text, this book is a heartbreaker. Not A collection of fourteen papers and one interview, only because it describes injustices that surpass primarily about Vladimir Makanin, a truly mediocre anything most potential readers have ever heard about, Soviet Russian writer who survived into the post-Soviet but also because, like Darfur, Chechnya is place where period. The book illustrates a wider problem that Polish it is in nobody’s interest to stop the injustices. It goes rusycystyka faces: a lack of audience. In Russia, hardly without saying that the imperial interests of Russia anyone pays attention to Polish scholarship about compel it to continue occupation, destruction, murder, Russian writers. In the United States and other first- and torture of Chechens. In the long run, of course, world countries, scholars have enough trouble with this is not in Russia’s interest, but once launched, learning Russian to read anything but Russian- and imperialism is blind until it burns itself out. Russian English-language scholarship. In Poland itself the imperialism has not yet burned itself out. audience for scholarly works about authors tainted by The author is Assistant Editor of the New Left Review, the Soviet system is minimal. One suspects that it is the publisher is a far-left publisher. It is an indictment limited to the authors of articles and their circle of of the conservative wing of American intellectual friends. establishment that no attention is paid to Chechnya. Polish rusycystyka has to develop a profile of its own Woods traveled to Chechnya and described the last if it wants to avoid nullity and irrelevance. The twenty years in that country, from high hopes of selection of topics might be related to a time period independence under President Dzhokar Dudaev to (the nineteenth century, for instance), or to a present day desperation. Exemplified by the declaration methodology (it is too late for formalism, but perhaps by rebel Chechen president, Doku Umarov, that from postcolonialism?), or nonliterary studies such as now on, the enemy is not only Russia but also the West, sociology. When reaching for a book or an article by a because it failed to react to Russia’s actions in Polish Russicist, the potential reader must know that Chechnya. Umarov’s declaration was not mentioned analysis of a certain kind will be offered. Otherwise, in the book that had been written before this statement the works of Polish Russicists will remain, with few was made. Representatives of the rebel Chechen exceptions, an exercise in futility. The public money government abroad, such as Ahmad Zakaev, vigorously used for educating such scholars and providing oppose this declaration. In November 2007 Zakaev subsidies for their publications is certainly wasted. resigned his post in the government in protest. But, as Madness and the Mad in Russian Culture, edited a proverb says, a drowning man grabs a razor. Tony by Angela Brintlinger and Ilya Vinitsky. Toronto, Wood makes a convincing case for Chechnya’s Ontario: University of Toronto Press, 2007. xi + 330 independence based on economic, cultural, historical, pages. Hardcover. ISBN 0802091407. $70.00. and political foundations. Will Russia listen? A collection of essays by some fifteen Russicists on Imhibition [sic], edited by Roman Działkiewicz one of the subjects that make Russian culture different and Ewa Tatar. Kraków: Muzeum Narodowe w from the rest of the Slavic world (and from Europe as Krakowie and Korporacja Halart, 2007. Photographs. well). While the subject of madness gained ground in 182 pages. ISBN 83-89424-75-4. Paper. Bilingual in European literature starting with Romanticism, it never Polish and English. Paper. achieved the status it has consistently maintained in A collection of postessays (or is it pot-essays?) written the East ever since Muscovy came into being. The very by a postrational and postconceptual crowd of Polish choice of topic makes this volume notable, although academics. Easily the weirdest volume we have in many essays the characteristics of Russian culture recently received. If one seeks a dead end for are played down or treated as an occasion to introduce humanities and letters, this is it. We have a question, psychiatry into literary citicism. however: to whom is this postbook addressed? We January 2008 SARMATIAN REVIEW 1357 Other Books Received: yet another cigarette, the blackness surrounding the Awaiting the Green Morning, by Maria Rosa Lojo. hard light on his face suggests his unflinching gaze Translated by Brett Alan Sanders. Austin, TX: Host into darkness. Informative notes to the poems and a Publications (www.hostpublications.com), 2008. ISBN chronology of Herbert’s life support and extend the 978-0-924047-47-3. 119 pages. Paper. promise on the cover. Readers who are discovering A bilingual book of poetry by an Argentinian writer, Herbert or reading him again may wonder how it is on topics both feminist and feminine. that a man who could write such original and profound Wizerunek Niemca i Rosjanina we współczesnej poetry did not receive the Nobel for literature. literaturze polskiej: Rekonesans, edited by Tadeusz Reviews of Alissa Valles’s translation have been Błažejewski and Heinz Kenip. Łódê: Łódê University mixed. In the New York Review of Books (April 26, Press (www.wydawnictwo.uni.lodz.pl), 2006. 245 pages. 2007), Charles Simic credits them as “admirable” in ISBN 83-7171-928-0. In Polish and German. Paper. spite of “an occasional awkward phrase.” Then, he A collection of academic papers on the image of Germans seems to damn them with faint praise by quoting lines and Russians in contemporary Polish literature. from the Czesław Miłosz and Peter Dale Scott Looking for the Horse Latitudes, by Miguel translations in this collection more than six times as Gonzalez-Gerth. Austin, TX: Host Publications, 2007. often as the Valles. In a review that is not as engaged 159 pages. ISBN 978-0-924047-49-7. Paper. as usual (New York Times Book Review, July 29, 2007), Host Publications specializes in poetry. This is a bilingual David Orr cautiously avers that “Herbert is now a (Spanish-English) book by a Mexican-American poet. complete poet in English, and he’s not as strong as he Romantyczka, by Joanna Rostropowicz Clark. should be.” In Poetry (May 2007) Michael Hofmann Kalisz: Kropka ([email protected]), 2004. 162 criticizes the Valles translation in ways that are both pages. ISBN 83-919802-0-0. Paper. In Polish. astute and concerned. He loves Herbert’s work, and A novel by a noted American Polish Slavist. from his position outside the modulated reviewing in “Czemu, Cieniu, odjeÏdÏasz”: Trzy opowiadania, by North America, he damns her translation as “a disaster.” Joanna Clark. Lublin: Norbertinum A few comparative translations may clarify different ([email protected]), 2007. 168 pages. approaches to translating Herbert. “The Trial,” from ISBN 978-83-7222-294-7. Paper. In Polish. Report From The Besieged City, translated by John and Otwarta rana Ameryki, by Aleksandra Ziółkowska- Bogdana Carpenter, opens with these lines: “During Boehm. Bielsko-Biała, Poland: Debit Publishers his great speech the prosecutor/kept piercing me with (www.wydawnictwo-debit.pl), 2007. 271 pages. his yellow index finger.” The scene is set in clear and Illustrations, index. ISBN 978-83-7167-556-0. immediate language. The defendant, whether Herbert Hardcover. In Polish. or you or I, is under repeated and merciless attack by a An impressive book on American Indians by one of representative of the state. For Valles the attack is Poland’s most prolific practitioners of the gaw∏da genre. presented as one occurrence: “When he gave his great (continued on page 1374) speech the prosecutor/punctured me with his yellow indicator finger.” A balloon or a ponderous dirigible is punctured and deflates with finality, whereas Herbert’s The Collected Poems 1956–1998 defendant resists during the trial and hopefully throughout his life, in spite of the continuing temptation By Zbigniew Herbert. Translated by Alissa Valles. of the “third dark solution” in the second to last stanza. Additional translations by Czesław Miłosz and Peter The impact of the dark and continually proffered Dale Scott. Introduction by Adam Zagajewski. New choices of betrayal, collaboration, or worse is weakened York: Ecco Press, 2007. xviii + 600 pages. ISBN 978- by the closure in Valles’s opening lines. As for Valles’s 0-06-078390-7. Hardcover. $44.95. awkward “yellow indicator finger,” the best response is to return to the Carpenter translation for a sense of James E. Reid the continuing trial and quiet struggle in the face of overwhelming odds. bigniew Herbert’s poetry and prose have been out Additional comparisons with less commentary may Zof print far too long. How welcome it is to have an help. Poetry is best when read aloud, and it is here that edition of his Collected Poems. Although he is looking more of the problems in the Valles version become down in the photograph on the front cover as he lights evident. “Report from the Besieged City” is a 1358 SARMATIAN REVIEW January 2008 meditative cri de coeur that calls to be read aloud. Here same time with the shadow of the text where it falls is the Carpenter transition from the third to fourth across another language” (New York Review of Books, stanza: June 14, 2007). This is an apt analogy. With the political everyone here suffers from a loss of the sense of time struggles now afoot in Poland, the chiaroscuro of all we have left is the place the attachment to the place. Herbert’s poetry falls heavily across the recovering body politic of that country. The Valles translation casts Here is Valles: long and unfortunately sometimes indistinct shadows in English, shadows that hopefully lead in the direction we here are all suffering from the loss of a sense of time of the next complete translation. In the translations of we were left only the place and an attachment to the place. Herbert by Czesław Miłosz and Peter Dale Scott, John and Bogdana Carpenter, or even Joseph Brodsky’s Her cumbersome version pales in comparison to the “Achilles. Penthesilea,” the reader responds to the celerity and grace of the Carpenter. “We here are all . . bright light and dark shadows in the poet’s voice. .” even verges on a tongue twister. The change in tense Zbigniew Herbert’s voice occasionally surfaces in the from one line to the next is also problematic. Her use Valles. Of course, the nature of the author’s voice in of the definite and indefinite article is inconsistent— translation is one of the most shadowy questions of even in her title, “Report from a Besieged City.” This all. Where others have succeeded, she has often failed is one of Herbert’s best known poems, and one of the to capture the resonances of his voice at its best—as reasons is that it is so clearly a report from “the” city he plays with its guarded, wry, gentle, self-deprecating, where the poem’s writer, narrator, and possibly its ironic, and wisely layered foundations. These reader is besieged. It is not a report from “a” city foundations lie at the core of his voice, although he somewhere. Occasionally there is also a rushed quality can be bitter, angry, and unreasonable—be thankful you to some of the translations. are not the target in Rovigo. Admittedly, Alissa Valles is challenged by the There are a number of minor cavils and hard reception of the well known translations that precede questions about the provenance of this argument- hers. The Miłosz and Scott, and Carpenter translations provoking book. Why does the publisher’s page state have the advantage of fruitful collaboration between “Translation Copyright © Alissa Valles,” and not list a two translators, one of whom in each case spoke translation copyright for the seventy-nine poems English and Polish fluently. A similar advantage is also translated by Czesław Miłosz and Peter Dale Scott visible in the recent Pevear and Volokhonsky reprinted here? I have been informed that neither the translations of the Russians. Working alone, Valles Miłosz estate nor Scott was contacted for copyright occasionally rises to the challenge. Her version of “The permission to use their translations in this controversial Envoy of Mr. Cogito” from Mr. Cogito carries Herbert’s collection. Would it have been too much effort to voice so well that it reads as if it were composed in provide appropriate credit to Miłosz, the Nobel laureate English. Does the second to last stanza recall Osip whose poetry was memorized and recited to provide Mandelstam’s death in internal exile? He was last seen hope in Soviet-occupied Poland? searching for food in a garbage dump near Vtoraya Why are the Miłosz and Scott translations not Rechka near Vladivostok: credited on the pages where they occur? Readers should not have to search the index for the little (M/S) credit for this they will reward you with what they have at hand each time they discover a translation that seems to be with the whip of laughter with murder on a garbage dump exceptional. When Adam Zagajewski’s five-page introduction is featured on the dust jacket, why was Whether Herbert was referencing Mandelstam’s fate the inclusion of more than eighty pages of Miłosz and is unclear. It is clear that the conclusions of this Scott translations not credited here where one would melancholy envoy are anodyne for a poet who wrote expect to find it? There are thornier questions about under the dangers of a totalitarian state and survived. the agent, publisher, and translator of this book that Mandelstam and many others failed. In “The Envoy” will not be raised here. Michael Hofmann has posed Valles does capture the taut contradictions of living these questions in a somewhat roundabout way in his under oppression, while refusing the easy decision to review in Poetry. betray others. Answers to some of these questions might help us to Anne Carson has said, “Translating . . . must line appreciate what this edition of The Collected Poems itself with the solid body of the original text and at the January 2008 SARMATIAN REVIEW 1359 has to offer, at least until it is superseded by another themselves as an excellent example of a drive toward translation. We must be careful how and where we place comprehensiveness without either excessive our feet when we step onto the shoulders of those who generalization or atomization, and the newest book have come before us. Zbigniew Herbert knew, as deeply continues this trend. MikoÊ, who is Professor of Polish as any twentieth-century writer, that we have to live literature at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, with what we have done. This is not one of those ironic is noted for his skill as a translator of prose and poetry. statements that sometimes pass for informed discourse, In fact all the translations in this volume are his own, so unlike the terrible ironies of oppression that Herbert with many of the texts appearing in English for the knew in his bones. Yet there may be an irony in this first time; true to form, the translations range from the book that perhaps only Herbert could fully appreciate very serviceable to the indisputably poetic. Each and roundly condemn in a moment of calm, were he anthology (five have now been published; the sixth, still with us—did his collected poems survive state which discusses the twentieth century beginning with oppression only to appear in English in a version that the post-Versailles era, is now in preparation) traces a prompts a multitude of nagging questions? major epoch in Polish cultural history and synthesizes Michael Kaufman, the former Warsaw bureau chief its social dominants, thus distilling crucial periods of for The New York Times, succinctly summarized what the country’s literary and social history into essential is at the core of the answers to some of the above compilations of a format this is manageable for questions. In 1986 he reviewed Herbert’s polemic, undergraduates in Slavic studies and the general reader “Spitting Everything Out,” published in Independent alike. Culture. It contained accusations Herbert returned to With a few exceptions, the texts selected for Polish in an interview in The Sarmatian Review a decade later Literature from 1864 to 1918 impart the sense of an (Vol. 15, No. 2). Kaufman’s opening sentence remains extremely rich literary half-century while emphatic and prescient for anyone who approaches the highlighting—rightly, I think, given the collection’s clarity in the shadows of one of the greatest poets of pedagogical purpose—the work of the major authors. the twentieth century: “THE subject, as always, is Any anthology, of course, must also be a work of collaboration.” Δ exclusion, but given Polish Literature’s overall purview, one wishes that the most interesting literary Polish Literature from 1864 to 1918 presences (such as Tadeusz Miciƒski, Kazimierz Przerwa-Tetmajer, Wacław Berent, or Stanisław Realism and Young Poland Brzozowski) had been covered in greater depth, even An Anthology at the expense of other, prominently featured authors. This can be said in particular of Henryk Sienkiewicz, whose works are already well-established in translation, By Michael J. MikoÊ. Bloomington, Indiana: Slavica and who is given ninety pages in the “Realism” section. Publishers, 2006. xii + 388 pages. Illustrations, select However, given the general lack of this sort of bibliography. No index. ISBN: 089-3573256. Cloth: $34.95. anthology in the English-language market, MikoÊ’s decision to weigh his collection substantively in favor George Gasyna of the big names and to aim it at the “general reader” (Foreword, vii)—thus in a sense producing a reading et me begin with two general observations. A list that might be presented to a high school senior for Lcurrent truism in Slavic studies discourse holds his or her Matura in Polish philology, or to a university that any new anthology of Polish literature in English freshman in the United States—is ultimately hard to and aimed at a general North American readership must fault, even if it did require erring on the safe side. be either long overdue or urgently needed. From that At nearly four hundred pages, the book’s scope is perspective, Michael MikoÊ’s anthologies can be seen ambitious and its breadth inclusive. The two major as most welcome interventions. However, MikoÊ’s cultural ascendants of the last decades before Poland’s collections represent something more important—and independence was regained—Positivism and the Young more timely—than simply compilations of selections Poland movement—are adroitly juxtaposed in a from the canonical greats of Polish literature. Their chronological narrative that elucidates the strong appearance constitutes an event, welcomed equally by reliance on certain literary styles and justifies the instructors and students of Polonistyka in the United contemporary public’s ready consumption of them. For States. MikoÊ’s anthologies have established 1360 SARMATIAN REVIEW January 2008 example, in an introductory section titled “Historical (pp. 5–9) leaves little doubt as to the fact that, as a Background,” MikoÊ writes of Polish Positivism: “The modality of anticolonial resistance and social praxis, program. . . put stress on ‘organic work’, asserting that Positivism combined a grand rhetoric of inclusivity the strength and unity of a society required that all of with the ironies of patronizing the lower classes (there its members excel in their efforts. . . .The long-range were some noteworthy exceptions, of course, such as plan urged individuals and all classes to work ‘at the Eliza Orzeszkowa, whose work is given some twenty foundation’, with the goal of establishing a just society. pages). The question of what and who a Pole is and is . . .As its ultimate goal, positivism envisioned novel not found distinct, if always locally inflected, ways of thinking, a new social consciousness, in a resonance with the gentry classes and with the emerging word—a renewed nation” (1). Of the textual selections bourgeoisies of the newly industrialized cities (pp. 1, that reflect this paradigm (including several by 237, 247). The nation was thus narrated along already Sienkiewicz), Maria Konopnicka’s folksy poems (37– rigid and gradually ossifying class, regional, and 47), excerpts from Prus’s The Doll, and the journalistic religious lines—all of which did not augur well for the fieldwork of his “Chronicles” are particularly poignant everyday life of the Second Republic, which was born illustrations of the extent to which the drive to in 1919 (this is a point nicely picked up in a number of reimagine and resurrect the nation—incorporating the recent studies, most notably historian Adam twin imperatives of returning to the roots and forging Zamoyski’s The Polish Way [1994], which tackles a new social contract—became engrained in Polish head-on the hidden and not-so-hidden discords of the letters over the two decades following the failed rising Dwudziestolecie). I used this text in a senior seminar of 1863. on Polish exilic literature; some of my students felt Though the Positivist agenda was implicitly and that the emancipated peasantry and, later in the explicitly (see p. 3) opposed to the insurrectionary drive nineteenth century, the urbanized proletariat, and the theme of a martyrological sacrifice to the nation grudgingly included in the project of Polish nation- that dominated and perhaps overdetermined the first building, were elements that constituted an awkward half of the nineteenth century, that antecedent, i.e., fit with the dominant imagined community of the Poles Polish Romanticism, is given only a basic contextual that, to a notable degree, was dictated by its gentry treatment. This may or may not be a problem: some class—and simply could not be wished or theorized readers of this anthology will undoubtedly have read away. In addition to Orzeszkowa and, in the Młoda MikoÊ’s volume devoted to Polish Romanticism Polska section, selections from Władysław Reymont’s (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2002) or similar reference The Peasants, further readings that highlighted this works. Others may reach for those volumes as a result particular tension in the cultural imaginary of the Polish of their encounter with this one. In the end, however, nation or that sought to polemicize the hegemonic the spectral presence and overt influence of the great modes of social reification would have been useful. poets of the first half of the nineteenth century, in both The final 140 pages of the anthology are devoted to the work of the positivists and the artists of the Young the Young Poland or Młoda Polska movement. Poland movement, could have been acknowledged Standard historiography treats this protomodernist more overtly. symbolist and impressionist ascendant of art and On the other hand, with regard to the legacy of the literature produced during the two decades prior to the 1863 rising that launched Positivism as a movement, Great War as an involuted genre with highly fraught insofar as this episode constituted the last spasm of iconography, which opposed the commonsensical and Romanticism in Poland and the ideational lineage for occasionally reductivist programs of the Positivists. what happened next is well established, MikoÊ is on Young Poland‘s symbology and even its ideological firm ground. Positivism, which in its specific Polish filiations with Romanticism are obvious: symbolism variation meant a distinctly anti-Romantic imperative can be read as a reaction to the formulae and of organic, synthetic work for the material survival and conventions of organicist realism, with the trope of the cultural maintenance of an internally displaced people, poete maudit appearing as a continuation of the imagery managed by the end of the nineteenth century to of the Romantic sublime. While these similarities in produce a clear if contested systematization of what modes of self-inscription are noted, MikoÊ does not precisely modern Polish culture should mean, and what analyze them in length, as witnessed by his it ought to incorporate should the nation reappear as a “Background” section dealing with the movement nation state again. MikoÊ’s judicious commentary here (237–47) or in the short introductions that accompany January 2008 SARMATIAN REVIEW 1361 the works of individual writers and poets. As a related untrustworthy as well. At least a fraction of the matter, the second decade of the twentieth century also discriminatory attitudes Poles in America often signals the rise of avant-gardism throughout Europe. encounter can be traced back to these assumptions built, Given this fact, an inclusion of such founding figures again, on the incorrect naming of historical events and of the Polish avant-garde as Bruno Jasieƒski and the resulting “standard usage.” Aleksander Wat, together with a nod at the manifesto- The fifteen papers in this volume were given at an mania of the early S. I. Witkiewicz, would have closed academic conference in Stockholm. The editor’s off the decade nicely while providing a glimpse of what introductory essay sketches out the problems that was to come next in Polish letters. Central and Eastern European scholars have faced in The antinomian thematics and assumptions trying to overcome false generalizations about the governing Positivism and early modernism in Polish region supplied by their Western European and arts and letters are not merely a case of generational American colleagues. Professor Korek points out that opposition. MikoÊ’s new anthology demonstrates that Soviet colonialism in Central Europe has had broader as far as cultural production is concerned, their specific implications than commonly recognized. Being interrelationships and imbrications were in fact quite colonized had negative psychological effects on the entangled—something that will become clear to readers culture and economic potential of the region. Since the as soon as they begin to explore the textual materials colonizer was the quintessential Other, the cultures for themselves. Polish Literature from 1864 to 1918, assaulted by colonization were obliged to look inward like the author’s previous anthologies, fills a significant rather than outward for sustenance. But this turn inward need; it is a fine and highly accessible work of synthetic had many undesirable consequences. Furthermore, the scholarship. I recommend it highly, and not only to relationship between the colonizer and the colonized general readers. Δ in Europe has been made more complex by the fact that some of the colonized countries were colonizers as well. From Sovietology to Leonard Neuger’s paper discusses the unspoken premise of German writings on Germany’s eastern Postcoloniality neighbors. Neuger points out that the concept of Poland and Ukraine from a Postcolonial Mitteleuropa (introduced in Germany toward the end of the nineteenth century) was related to German Perspective colonial expansion. Mitteleuropa was a territory “receptive to civilizing experiments,” as opposed to Edited by Janusz Korek. Stockholm: Södertörn the territory farther east that was “savage and Academic Studies 32, 2007. 272 pages. Bibliography. impossible to civilize” (25). It was a borderland, a mix ISBN: 978-91-89315-72-3. Paper. of German and Polish, a civilizationally undetermined area. As usual in colonial discourse, the subject of Sally Boss women was part of the concept of Mitteleuropa: the women in that area were said to have a strong sex drive he book’s title signals a proposal of the Central/ and a wild streak in their personalities. The presentation TEastern European scholars to call a spade a spade, of the colonized as children was also part of this i.e., to call the Russian/Soviet occupation of Central discourse (28). What did the colonizer gain by so and Eastern Europe a colonial venture rather than a presenting the weaker? “Like Hegel’s Master, a choice that these countries have made. In American powerful identity, precisely because of his position in scholarship and journalism, it has been routinely the discourse” (25). suggested that Central and Eastern Europe somehow Aleksander Fiut agrees that imperial presence “chose” to be allied with Soviet Russia. Expressions negatively influenced Central and Eastern Europe, but such as “the Soviet satellites” or “communist then speedily slips into political correctness and says countries,” used millions of times in scholarship and virtually nothing. In contrast, Bogusław Bakuła’s journalism, in schools and social conversations, contain “Colonial and Postcolonial Aspects of Polish Discourse a suggestion that these “communist countries” were in on the Eastern ‘Borderlands’” is rich in substance. fact hostile to the United States, and therefore the ethnic Bakuła discusses the concept of Kresy, or the eastern groups that trace their roots to them were, and are, borderlands of Poland. One should note that Kresy 1362 SARMATIAN REVIEW January 2008 played a similar role for Poles as Mitteleuropa for to the view that Poland’s relation to Ukraine contained Germans. However, in contrast to the Germans who an element of colonialism, especially in the Romantic have not abandoned their hopes for Mitteleuropa (as period; however, he points out that a much stronger exemplified by Preussische Treuhand), for the Poles colonial dependence existed between Ukraine and the Borderlands are mainly a site of nostalgia, perfect Russia. This relationship was present in the nineteenth in their mythological essence and also as a place of century in the newly emerging Ukrainian literature. The suffering. Bakuła is right in noting that this mythology Russian response to it was to delegitimize Ukrainian excludes the Other (except as a savage to be tolerated identity. Only in the twentieth century did the Imperial or civilized). Certainly the Borderlands discourse in Academy of Sciences concede that Ukrainian was not Poland is a colonial discourse, and it incorporates the a dialect of Russian but a separate language. With ego-building notion of superiority. It also includes the regard to the early nineteenth-century Ukrainian motif of an “inferior” Ruthenian woman (49). Bakuła literature, the colonial model of dependence/ rightly quotes those Ukrainian writers who wrote subordination/inferiority was related to the “provincial sarcastically about the Polish ways of asserting the model” present in all empires, privileging the discourse primacy of Polish discourse in ethnically Ukrainian of the metropolis (St. Petersburg-Moscow axis) at the lands. expense of the “‘crude’, earthy, nativist and subversive” All this is aptly said, but the number of specific cases (63) discourse of Ukraine. Critics like Vissarion considered is too small to allow for the large Belinskii (and, one might add, many Polish writers and generalizations that Bakuła offers. I would also intellectuals) failed to see that beneath this earthiness question his suggestion that “[t]he fundamental task “a powerful sense of identity was being forged” (65). of postcolonial theory in Poland would be to reveal However, owing to the restrictions the colonial power those forms of language, image and text used in public put on the development of Ukrainian identity, academic life . . . which . . . store and accept convictions that self-reflection was not present in Ukraine at that time. disable, differentiate, exclude Others” (50). In his zeal Grabowicz contends that the 1920s marked a to introduce postcolonial theory to Poland, Bakuła renaissance of Ukrainian culture. For the first time in forgets the other side of the coin, namely, the dialectic history, Ukrainization of historical scholarship took of colonizing and being colonized at the same time that place and academic institutions were created that is characteristic of Poland. While Polish discourse focused on Ukraine. Both scholarship and culture incorporated colonizing habits with regard to the profited. This aspect of Ukrainian development remains Borderlands, it has also internalized the habits of the unappreciated in Poland; Polish scholars tend to colonized. Poles have been an object of colonization downplay the achievements of this period and point for both Germans and Russians. The two aspects of out that the roots of Stalinism lay in Leninism. The Polish identity have to be studied together to produce 1930s marked a radical change: Stalinism physically a truthful image of Polish cultural discourse. While destroyed individuals responsible for the Ukrainian Bakuła is right to question the alleged harmonious renaissance, although Party dignitaries like Mykola multiculturalism of the Borderlands and the Skrypnyk tried to keep Ukrainization alive. The next demonizing of Others when they departed from that step was Russification: the imperative of total control alleged harmony (not to speak of the very notion of that Stalin favored required that large entities like the Borderlands that happen to be the Mainland to other Ukraine did not veer away from the cultural habits of nations), he is oblivious of the issue of the Polish the center. For instance, the granting of university reaction to German and Russian colonization. degrees became the privilege of Moscow, and Ukraine as the victim of double colonization is the Ukrainian-language periodicals were curtailed. topic of George Grabowicz’s essay. The author suggests Discourse and behavior of Ukrainians were affected. that Polish enthusiasm for the “Orange Revolution” In the USSR it was impossible to resist the ideology if might be both compensatory and proprietory (on the one wanted to survive as a ranking member of society. one hand, the Polish “colonial guilt” regarding the Ukrainian culture was once again downgraded to Ukrainians; on the other, the Polish sense of ethnicity and folklore, and the best of Ukraine was accomplishment—however misplaced— in assisting “harvested” for Moscow and made into Russian writers Ukraine along the path that Poland itself has taken: and scholars. On the other hand, academic saying yes to Western civilization and aligning itself professionalism suffered from a proliferation of with Europe rather than Russia. Grabowicz consents publitsistika, or unscholarly essays published in the January 2008 SARMATIAN REVIEW 1363 Ukrainian scholarly journals. One might add that interruptions in the process of building its national “informality of presentation, broad complacency about identity. For that reason, a large group of Ukrainian incompetence . . . derivative thinking and . . . writers aligned themselves with “populism and parochialism of intellectual horizons” (74) also plagued tradition” (87), and for them the rubbing-in of the Polish scholarship in Soviet-occupied Poland. memory of Ukraine‘s colonial past is not acceptable. Grabowicz is no postmodernist, and in his Here Shkandrij summarizes the work of the Zhytomyr conclusions he returns to the topic of continuity. school of writers, who denounce “excessive Preserving the legacy of the past is crucial for Ukrainian intellectualism” and the passion for freedom that, in literature because of its youth and relatively modest their view, stems from the French Revolution [how content. Grabowicz points out that institutional wrong they are! SB]. For such writers the very word continuity is important for Ukraine, from the Union of “postcolonialism” is an anathema. They yearn for Writers to the National Academy of Sciences. However, continuity with the past and for the Ukrainian village. within this continuity there arise pseudohistories and Shkandrij sees such attitudes as reactions to both mystifications where the elites overemphasize Russification and Westernization “that threaten to themselves at the expense of the Other. Another danger submerge the national culture” (90) in a stream of comes from “reflexive Russocentrism” especially in universal democracy. He points out that there is a southern and eastern Ukraine, that blends easily with difference between an imposed hybridity and a freely parochialism and isolationism. On the other end of the assumed one. He probably underestimates the danger spectrum, there is nativism and xenophobia. Grabowicz of such traditionalist attitudes. They can be a prelude warns against these products of Soviet restrictions. The to an eventual absorption by Russia and an unwitting legacy of Russian colonialism in Ukraine (Grabowicz call to war against all those in Ukraine who do not deals mostly with Russian rather than Polish accept the Ukrainian identity. colonialism) also consists of corruption and academic Per-Arne Bodin of Stockholm University writes about dishonesty at universities, and the general passivity Iurii Andrukhovych’s Moskoviada [1992]. This once encouraged by Moscow because it facilitated burlesque novel chronicles the narrator’s student years colonial governance. Although the situation in Poland in Moscow. The novel owes much of its charm to the is different, Grabowicz’s paper is not irrelevant to Poles, technique of magic realism: it starts in the realistic especially regarding what he calls the “hybridization mode and then slips into fantasy, somewhat like Viktor of the humanities establishment” (73). Pelevin’s novels or, earlier, Witold Gombrowicz’s. Like While Grabowicz is a “traditional” scholar, Myroslav Pelevin, Andrukhovych records the disintegration of Shkandrij is inclined to reach for the resources of the Soviet empire. Polish writers Gombrowicz and postcolonial theory. He begins with examples of a Tadeusz Konwicki are also invoked by Bodin as deeply seated prejudice against Ukrainians in the prototypes. An attempt to distance his hero from the English-speaking world. It is even deeper than empire by naming him Otto (a most unlikely name in prejudice against the Poles, although it is less visible the Ukrainian context) shows that the problem of the at first sight. He is profoundly right in pointing out substitute hegemon is very real in Ukraine. Bodin that one good weapon against prejudice is postcolonial rightly asserts that Moscow has seldom been presented terminology that deconstructs the stereotypes of in any of the languages of the empire except Russian; colonialist observers. Russia in particular, with its to see it disintegrate in Ukrainian marginalizes Russian “Ukrainian school” of writers, could become an object language and culture in a striking way. But Ukrainian of postcolonial deconstruction, suggests Professor also gets an ironic beating in the passage declaring that Shkandrij. He points out that there is much resistance the Ukrainian language has won second place for to this approach. For some Ukrainian scholars, the melodiousness in a Swiss competition; in the same invocation of colonialism suggests an admission that competition Russian shared thirty-fourth place with Ukraine has been “a culturally and politically inferior Mongolian and Swahili (96). Everybody drinks in place” (84). There is also the association of postcolonial Andrukhovych’s novel, including the principleless studies with the largely discredited Marxism, and fear hero, and it is suggested that the empire will drown in of assuming a “reactive posture” that empires tend to the vodka its citizens imbibe. The sexual prowess of encourage. Finally and most importantly, the the “colonial” subject is shown literally and figuratively postcolonial approach seems to dissolve all (the latter through his travel to Moscow, an unusual nationalisms, and a country like Ukraine cannot afford direction for the colonial subject to take—it is more 1364 SARMATIAN REVIEW January 2008 customary for the colonialist to travel to the periphery). view that discourse is an act of instituting power and The hero wanders through the horrors and degradation perpetuating dominance.What, then, is the role of a of Moscow as if through hell, and returns to Ukraine negative stereotype perpetuated by participants in such at the end. However, there is no prettification of Ukraine a discourse? Hnatiuk invokes the problem of language either: Andrukhovych is rightly called a postmodernist in Ukraine. While statisitics show that in Ukraine writer. He is also a writer leaning toward Europe, as Ukrainians are a majority and Russians a minority, a his 2004 speech to the European Parliament (quoted sizable percentage of Ukrainians speak Russian rather by Bodin) indicates. than Ukrainian. Hnatiuk contends that it would be Tamara Hundorova of Kyiv’s Academy of Science wrong to draw the conclusion that Ukrainians are a writes on postcolonial resentment. She invokes “minority faith” (142) in the country. She also declares Nietzsche and states that resentment is a predictable herself in favor of affirmative action with regard to product of the feeling of marginality that Ukrainians Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians. Most importantly, she experienced in the empire. She compares Andrzej points out that it is wrong of the Ukrainian intelligentsia Stasiuk and Yurii Andrukhovych, and argues that the to consent to the notion that they form an isolated group first is postcolonial (free of resentment), whereas the in a sea of Russian-speaking citizens. Divisions among second is anticolonial (resentment is part of the Ukrainians should be avoided; there should not be a anticolonial syndrome). But then she seems to division between the “patriotic ” and “unpatriotic,” i.e., contradict herself by calling Andrukhovych Russian-speaking, intelligentsia. Hnatiuk does not postcolonial as well. The Hapsburg-generated propose any remedies, however; her paper merely Ukrainian identity is also mentioned. Perhaps my points out that the tactic of division is counterproductive reading of her paper is faulty, but she seems to invoke to the Ukrainian national interests. too many topics without exploring them sufficiently. Mykola Riabchuk of Kyiv addresses a similar topic: Anna Kaluža writes of “the experience of Otherness in the prevalence of Russian culture in Ukraine, and its Polish poetry after 1990,” and argues that it is part of desctructive role with regard to Ukrainian identity. He the postcolonial consciousness and is generated by a states that the most urgent task is to prevent the Russian situation in which “the balance between difference and language and culture from becoming mediators identity has been disturbed” (126). between world culture and Ukraine. He minces no Stefan Szymutko of the University of Silesia writes words, stating that culturally speaking Ukraine was on “appearance and essence in history,” using Teodor considered by Russia as a cultural colony, inferior in Parnicki’s novel as an example. While Szymutko has every way: linguistic, cultural, and political. Russian read his Hegel and Foucault, the categorical tone in symbols and myths were imposed on Ukraine which he asserts that power is the creator of knowledge wholesale, and were largely internalized by the and discourse smells of provincialism, and so does his Ukrainian masses. Riabchuk agrees with Hnatiuk “summary” of certain philosophical problems from concerning affirmative action for those Ukrainians who Plato to Derrida. Surely discourse and its sources are visibly (and linguistically) identify with Ukraine. The still a matter of debate, and hopefully always will be— two also agree in disagreeing with Andrew Wilson’s the alternative is the kind of determinism that, one work on Ukrainian nationalism (like most Western hopes, Szymutko does not espouse. But the cocktail scholars, Wilson is emphatically pro-Russian in his he blends over a few pages has too many ingredients. sympathies and perceptions, a classic illustration of His argument suffers from too many generalizations, Foucault’s opinion that [Russian] discourse, spread and it does not come to a perceivable conclusion, wide in the West, builds dominance and power). breaking in midair as it were. Riabchuk recounts the processes once recorded by The paper by Olia Hnatiuk of the Polish Academy of Franz Fanon and Michael Hechter, of the elites Science takes on the negative autostereotype of dissociating themselves from the “aboriginal” native ghettoization invoked by Ukrainians. She is interested culture and adopting the “superior” culture of the in “nationalism as a discourse” (140), and has in mind conqueror. He states that in eastern Ukraine, the the discourse of the “imagined community.” She posits “aborigines are ashamed of their autochthonous that this imagined community does not exist outside background. . . and are even less inclined than ethnic national culture, which in essence is a discourse in Russians to show any interest in Ukrainian culture, which “various identity projects are being which they consider inferior” (163). To dislodge the reformulated.” She then invokes Michel Foucault’s image of a superior empire from the consciousness of January 2008 SARMATIAN REVIEW 1365 these natives a different model is necessary, and here recounted by Korek), only the freely acting individuals the West has to play a role. The more Ukrainians could save European civilization. Kultura’s credo associate themselves with the West, the better for their rejected all absolutes of old European culture, however. national consciousness. That is why it is advantageous After these rejections, what was left? Giedroyç did not for them to ally themselves with the Poles (and vice speak about it. He skirted around the problem. For him, versa) because no country can leapfrog its neighbors politics was a part of culture (true enough), and culture and go in a certain direction without taking into account was the field in which Giedroyç and his team wished its immediate neighbors. Riabchuk understands this. to play. Thus Kultura was not an organ of political He also understands that with the appearance of wild propaganda but an attempt to save a civilization. If capitalism, Ukraine became a provincial market for Professor Korek is right, then Kultura may be perceived Russian entertainment goods, from films and songs to as a late progeny of the messianic mission that Adam pulp literature. Riabchuk concludes on an optimistic Mickiewicz assigned to Poland in his romantic and note, stating that the boundaries between various groups romanticizing works. However, Korek is remote from in Ukrainian society are fluid and therefore apt to such associations (as was Giedroyç). Korek points out change in the future—hopefully, to accommodate a that Giedroyç and Kultura supported the view that is clearer national consciousness. still valid today: that Central and Eastern Europe are Liudmyla Pavlyuk returns to the divide between the key to European peace. Unless these territories are eastern and western Ukraine, and what it means for at peace, there is no peace in Europe. True enough— the anticolonial processes currently taking place in but not always remembered by the European diplomats. Ukraine. Niklas Bernsand details the mock trial of To preserve that peace, Giedroyç worked incessantly surzhyk, or the Russian-Ukrainian linguistic concoction for the cause of reconciliation between the nations of often spoken in Ukraine. For some shurzhyk is a Central and Eastern Europe. He also held dear the idea linguistic mongrel; for others it is a legitimate construct. of an Eastern European federation—a project that Finally, Janusz Korek of Södertörn University College seems utopian now, as one observes nations emerging in Stockholm takes on the weighty subject of the from the Soviet ice and bent on building and formation of identity of the Polish intelligentsia after strengthening their national identities (as many of the the Second World War (229–67). Professor Korek chapters of this book testify). However, when one looks points out that the Yalta agreements allowed “the myths at federalism from the perspective of the European and stereotypes. . . about Eastern Europe to be written Union, a different picture emerges. The mix of Eastern into contemporary Western discourse” (233). The West and Western Europe has proven to be attractive to the has long regarded Eastern Europe as a separate post-Soviet states, and in this sense Kultura can be continent that was culturally different from “Europe.” considered one of the pioneers of a united Europe. The “renting out” of these lands to the Soviet hegemon However, as Korek rightly notes, Giedroyç and Kultura confirmed the prejudices and allowed the West to spoke rather of a federation of Europe’s eastern part; function “normally” within its own cultural, political, barring that, they hoped that the USSR would allow and military spheres, unburdened by a vague obligation the creation of a neutral zone between itself and Western toward the East or a sense of a cultural connection with Europe. Try as he may, Professor Korek cannot avoid it. Korek notes that some Polish intellectuals, such as showing Giedroyç’s erroneous vision. It should have Jerzy Stempowski, understood this and therefore opted become clear to Giedroyç that no one east of Poland out of Europe in the belief that the continent would wanted a federation; they wanted independence. His eventually decline owing to its rejection of the dream of a multicultural Poland might ring a pleasant European East (Stempowski settled in Latin America). note, but it was a pipe dream. Those who cling to it But Jerzy Giedroyç and his Kultura stayed. Giedroyç today are advocating a cultural disaster. The situation believed that the West was going through a profound in countries such as Lithuania and Ukraine is skewed crisis. It was losing its ontological bearings and its toward a single ethnicity to the point of denying any power to radiate culture. It “chose death,” in Seneca’s ties to Polish culture whatsoever. One has to wait for famous phrase. Giedroyç opposed the Spenglerian several generations to see whether multiethnicity and vision of Europe’s future (as well as Marxism and multilingualism have a chance in Eastern Europe. As dispensationalist eschatology). He stayed in Europe the Ukrainian intellectuals featured in this book say in order to fight. His struggle was based on a belief in almost unanimously, the struggle of the suppressed the individual and his freedom. In Giedroyç’s view (as nations takes precendence before any such dreams of 1366 SARMATIAN REVIEW January 2008 multiculturalism. Korek calls such multiculturalism were generally considered to be assimilated into the “the myth of the Dnister valley,” thus echoing Edward Polish language and high culture. The languages we Keenan’s “the myth of Dnieprovia.” would now consider “Lithuanian,” “Belarusan,” and Altogether, a challenging book. It raises more “Ukrainian” were basically languages of the peasants questions than it answers, but with regard to the post- and the lower classes that were disenfranchised and Soviet sphere answers are not easy to find. Certain denied what today is considered the basic rights of general patterns emerge. The Polish and Ukrainian citizenship. scholars deal with different problems of postcoloniality. Whereas in Poland the issue of the continuing Given the relatively cordial relations between submission to the hegemon is not a problem (unless these states, it appears that cooler heads have one thinks of the substitute hegemons such as the prevailed in the formation of the modern sovereign Western Europeans), in Ukraine the subservience to nation states of Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, and and closeness of Russia are still major problems. The Belarus through the privileging of present-day vulgarity of the Soviet empire and its destructive political interests over historical grudges. pointlessness hurt the Ukrainians more than the Poles. While Poles debate the relationship between Poland The historical narrative continues through both world and the remainder of the Western world (Poles have wars, outlining the various partitions and border no doubt that they belong to it), in Ukraine the movements that carved up the territories of the former relationship with Russia and how to get rid of it still Polish Kingdom and the Grand Duchy into the Soviet, prevail in discourse. But virtually all the papers imply Austro-Hungarian, and Prussian spheres of influence. that the interests of Poland and Ukraine run parallel, All the while, Snyder provides anecdotes and vignettes and that both countries would do well to forget past that show the personal “ethnic” and political trajectories quarrels and cooperate as much as possible. Δ of Polish-Lithuanian elites who were instrumental in ethnonationalist movements in these various territories. In order to show the constructed nature of today’s ethnic The Reconstruction of Nations categories in historical perspective, he often points out that individuals known as Lithuanian national heroes Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, spoke mainly Polish or that people who now live in Belarus, 1569–1999 the homogeneous territories of Poland spoke Ukrainian as a first language. Snyder uses these facts about By Timothy Snyder. New Haven, CT: Yale University language and class to show that instead of rising up Press, 2003. xv + 367 pages. Index, maps. ISBN 0-3- from the grass roots, modern day ideas of ethnic identity 00-10586-x. Paper. $20.00. have been formed and crafted by key members of a landed elite. Abby Drwecki The second half of the book describes the ways in which the present borders of the relatively ethnically his volume tracks the development of national homogeneous nation states in this region were formed. Tidentity in the four modern states now known as This was accomplished through a loss of territory to Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belarus. Snyder puts the Soviet Union in the interwar period, and through a to doubt the commonsense assumption that modern series of ethnic cleansings that occurred during and nation-states and clear-cut ethnic groups exist shortly after the Second World War. Poles in Soviet “naturally.” Most people would assume that Poles live Lithuanian Vilnius and environs were “voluntarily” in Poland, Lithuanians live in Lithuania, and so on. resettled (thus becoming an equivalent to the German Snyder shows that in the early modern era, when the Vertriebene), while more brutal expulsions occurred names and boundaries of these countries first came into in the regions of Galicia and Volhynia that became a public consciousness, these divisions were far from part of Soviet Ukraine. While the fate of the Jews of clear or natural. He goes back to the Lublin Union of Eastern Europe is well known, the destruction of this 1569 that incorporated parts of present-day Lithuania, group was only one episode in the story of northeastern Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus into the Kingdom of Europe and in the creation of the new ethnic states in Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and shows that region. The present borders of the region were how the elite gentry classes of Poland and Lithuania decided on at the takeover of Poland by the Red Army, January 2008 SARMATIAN REVIEW 1367 and the absorption of Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belarus and at times fragmentary. The processes described here into the Soviet Union. While Poland lost its eastern are extremely complex, and caused this reviewer to territories, it gained a certain amount of territory from consider the history of “Poland” in an entirely new Germany, from which the ethnic Germans were way. The writing style is very academic and presumes likewise expelled. All of these movements were based a good deal of previous knowledge about general in an ethnonationalist logic of the Soviet order-givers, Central and Eastern European history, especially the a logic that stated that the nationality of people should Second World War and the communist period. A reader match up with the territory of their state. It must be who is not familiar with the region’s history or current remembered that these cleansings occurred under the arguments about theories of nationalism might find the Soviet-imposed communist governments. In describing book difficult. Nonetheless, it would be ideal for an the horrific events of ethnic cleansing Snyder does not academic setting, such as a graduate or advanced focus on gory descriptions of the events themselves, undergraduate survey of Polish or Eastern European which would be an easy way to get the reader’s history. The broad time frame covered makes it attention. He instead keeps these atrocities in context appropriate for a variety of topical courses. In addition, with the larger processes involved, giving the book an Snyder’s clear, engaging, and often witty writing style air of detached scholarship, while expressing an would make this book a good piece of reading for a appropriate degree of empathy for the individuals hurt casual enthusiast of Polish, Soviet, or European history. by these ethnic reshufflings. The last part of the Another interesting point of this text is that Snyder narrative is a somewhat triumphalist tale of national refers to several cities by different appellations, reconciliation and respect according to “European depending on the nation to which it belonged at a certain standards,” with Polish statesmen and diplomats as the point or according to usage by a certain people at a central characters. This part of the narrative shows how certain moment. Keeping track of all these usages can cooler heads have prevailed in the formation of the be difficult, but a “gazetteer” at the beginning of the modern sovereign nation states of Poland, Ukraine, book clarifies things considerably and is useful for Lithuania, and Belarus through the privileging of reference throughout. A series of maps also provides a present-day political interests over historical grudges. useful visual reference to remind readers of the location of borders and territories at different historical According to Snyder, modern ideas of ethnic junctures. Δ identity have been formed and crafted by key members of a landed elite. Obce miasto In short, this book challenges popular assumptions Wrocław 1945 i potem about the ways that ethnic nations arise, why ethnic cleansing takes place, and how nations can reconcile. By Gregor Thum. Translated from German by In popular discourse, ethnic conflicts are often Małgorzata Słabicka. Wrocław: Via Nova, 2006. 507 described as stemming from “ancient” conflicts that pages. ISBN 83-60544-04-2. Hardcover. In Polish. cannot be solved by modern statecraft or diplomacy. German original: Die Fremde Stadt: Breslau 1945. Snyder definitively shows the contrary: he shows that Berlin: Siedler, 2003. ethnic conflicts in this part of Europe can be traced to the actions of elites between the early modern period Agnieszka Marczyk and the twentieth century, and that these conflicts have been resolved, likewise, by the intervention of elite oday’s Polish city of Wrocław has a rich history actors. Anthropologist Frederik Barth has postulated Tpunctuated by many names. It was the German that all ethnic groups are defined by the maintenance Breslau, the Habsburg Presslaw, the Bohemian of boundaries. Snyder, a historian, has given us a Vretslav, and the Polish Piast Wrotizla. [1] Each name concrete example of how these boundaries are change points to profound historical changes, perhaps historically formed and solidified. none more drastic than the transformation of Breslau This book is a tremendous piece of scholarship, into Wrocław that began in August 1945, when the drawing together sources from over thirty archives and Potsdam Conference finalized the westward shift of document collections in five different countries, often Poland’s borders. making sense of source material that is contradictory 1368 SARMATIAN REVIEW January 2008 With the important exception of the synagogues, difficult, and the difficulties were compounded by the Breslau remained almost undamaged by the war until many layers of mistrust that divided the city’s January 1945. By May, however, the Red Army’s population. Deportees from the east distrusted the offensive and the Wehrmacht’s desperate defense of voluntary migrants from central Poland, Poles often “Fortress Breslau” left most of the city in ruins. In the vilified Jews, and those who came from cities were five years that followed, the newly Polish Wrocław appalled by the provincialism of the vast majority who witnessed expulsions of Germans, and the arrival of arrived from villages and small towns. In the early Poles and a small number of Jews and Ukrainians. Most postwar months the homes and stores left behind by were war survivors from central Poland, but roughly the Germans were looted and the items sold on the black 20 percent were expellees from Poland’s former eastern market. Although the “post-German” objects were regions annexed to the Soviet Union in 1945 (136). highly valued, they were also constant reminders that Thum mentions the ethnic heterogeneity of the eastern those who now used them were living in a foreign place. regions of the Polish Second Republic, but does not Thum proposes that to counteract this sense of discuss the history of the competing claims to these impermanence, Poland’s communist government lands made by Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and sought to create a public image of a historically Polish Belarusans. The complex story of this forced population Wrocław that could become an object of patriotic pride. transfer and the subsequent government campaign to In fact, one of the most interesting aspects of his study give Wrocław a Polish identity is the subject of Gregor is the analysis of how government officials, city Thum’s insightful study. In both Poland and Germany administrators, historians, priests, architects, and Thum has received much praise for his impartiality, educators worked to implement this goal between 1945 his painstaking research, and his insights into the and 1989. The ideologically sanitized image of structure of Polish collective memory under Wrocław portrayed it as a medieval Polish city, communism. [2] controlled for centuries by Bohemian, Habsburg, and The book situates the population transfer in Wrocław Prussian rulers, and finally reunited with the Polish in the wider context of the mass expulsions that motherland in 1945. Popular histories, museum accompanied the postwar political reorganization of exhibits, public memorial ceremonies, educational Central and Eastern Europe. Thum examines both the materials, and sermons therefore emphasized international politics that necessitated mass migrations Wrocław’s connections with the medieval Polish Piast and the plight of the expellees for whom, whether dynasty, while the city’s German history was German, Polish, or Ukrainian, the end of the war systematically suppressed and removed from public brought no relief from violence, loss, and uncertainty. attention. City planners removed German monuments To contextualize the initially violent and sometimes and inscriptions from the streets, German cemeteries vengeful deportations of Germans from Breslau, he were first neglected and later destroyed, Gothic emphasizes the similar fates of the deported Breslauers buildings were restored because they came to and of the expellees from eastern Poland. He also symbolize the Piasts, while the remains of Prussian reminds his readers that all postwar expulsions buildings were demolished despite the protests of ultimately resulted from Hitler’s war, and from the historical restoration experts. Not surprisingly, Thum unspeakably brutal Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe. proposes that while the suppression of Wrocław’s Within Breslau itself, the forced population transfer German history addressed the psychological needs of started with the expulsion of the city’s Jewish the postwar moment, it eventually came to interfere community in the 1930s. with the creation of a meaningful local identity. The When he turns to the fate of those who arrived to carefully constructed public image of a Polish city kept settle in Wrocław, Thum emphasizes the pervasive clashing with private encounters with German objects sense of alienation that lingered in the city long after and with traces of German culture and architecture that the war was over. Because the post-1945 Polish- could not be eradicated from Wrocław’s landscape. It German border was not officially recognized by a treaty was only with the collapse of communism in 1989 that between the two countries until 1990, the political status historians could begin to freely investigate the city’s of Wrocław and other “Western Lands” remained multicultural heritage. uncertain throughout the communist decades. Wartime Thum argues that the investigation of Wrocław’s damages, lack of adequate law enforcement, German period needs to be complemented by analysis transportation, food, and housing made daily life of the ways in which Jews, Ukrainians, Roma and Sinti, January 2008 SARMATIAN REVIEW 1369 and Russians figured in the city’s history. He cautions, NOTES however, that the appreciation of historical diversity 1. Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse, Microcosm: must not obscure the traumas of the years between 1933 Portrait of a Central European City (London: Jonathan and 1949, or the four decades of efforts to purge Cape, 2002), 11–12. diversity from images of Wrocław’s past. For example, 2. Thomas Fichtner in Humanities. Social- und Kulturgeschichte, , 1 July 2005, or Beata Maciejewska in Gazeta recently published by Norman Davies and Roger Wyborcza (Wrocław edition), 18 May 2007. Thum’s work Moorhouse does not sufficiently emphasize the has also received prizes in both countries, including the problem of expulsions and alienation in the postwar Georg Dehio Buchpreis in 2004, and the book prize from period (439). While Davies and Moorhouse do not the Polish monthly journal Odra in 2006. focus on alienation or deconstruct the official image 3. In summer 2006, for example, the Berlin exhibit “Forced of a historically Polish Wrocław, their analysis is an Paths: Flight and Expulsion in Twentieth-Century Europe” indispensable complement to Thum’s. He shows that provoked bitter criticism from Polish officials and museum government propaganda produced rigid historical curators. They felt that the exhibit, organized by the schemas that could not support a meaningful bond Federation of German Expellees, purposefully minimized German responsibility for the war by failing to provide between Wrocław and its inhabitants. Davies and sufficient historical contextualization. See for example, http:/ Moorhouse show, however, that cultural life and /www.msz.gov.pl/ dynamism returned to the city after the war, even as it OÊwiadczenie,Ministerstwa,Spraw,Zagranicznych,w,zwiàzku,z,wystawà,Wy struggled with economic crises, halting reconstruction muszone,drogi.,Ucieczka,i,wyp∏dzenie,w,Europie,XX,wieku,7301.html. efforts, and consequences of the forced population transfer. Through music, experimental theater, political A Search for Radiance satire, and religious observance Wrocław’s inhabitants created a vital sense of community that sustained many On the Poetry of Adam Zagajewski of them through the Stalinist years, and through the decades of communism. By Anna Czabanowska-Wróbel. Kraków: Thum’s study is valuable not only because it provides Universitas, 2005. 247 pages. Bibliography, index, fresh insights into Wrocław’s history, but also because summary in English. ISBN 83-242-0490-3. Paper. it adds a measured and sensitive voice to the ongoing Polish-German cultural and political dialogue. Jolanta W. Best Although this dialogue has entered a decisively new My masters are not infallible. and constructive phase after the watershed of 1989 and My masters seek my advice 1990, the trauma of the Second World War still In fleecy overcoats hurriedly slipped on overshadows the relationship between the two over their own dreams, at dawn, when countries. The issue of expulsions continues to generate the cool wind interrogates the birds, misunderstandings and tensions. [3] Thum does not my masters talk in whispers. deny the chaos and violence that characterized the I can hear their broken speech. deportations of Germans from Poland in the early Adam Zagajewski postwar months, but he provides the historical framework necessary to understand the roots of this nna Czabanowska-Wróbel, a Jagiellonian chaos and violence. Moreover, his examination of the A University literature professor, defines ideologically motivated images of a purely Polish Zagajewski’s poetry as a “search for radiance.” She Wrocław makes it clear that national collective memory singles out several different schools of interpretation is not constructed from all available evidence. His of Zagajewski’s work among Polish and foreign critics, study is a powerful reminder that conveniently and posits that the first school can be described as the simplified images of national history—whether they “innovative voices” (Renata Gorczyƒska, Clare are Polish or German, communist or postcommunist— Cavanagh, and Gražyna Borkowska); the second as the need to be challenged by confrontation with the “reserved voices” (Marta Wyka and Marian Stala, who surviving historical record. Δ stress Zagajewski’s poetic of “bitter innocence”); and the third as the postmodern voices (Bogusława Bodzioch-Bryła who reads the poetry of Zagajewski as a “semantic labyrinth,” 225–29). For Czabanowska- Wróbel, Adam Zagajewski is a poet of both modernity 1370 SARMATIAN REVIEW January 2008 and postmodernism. Although he witnessed the rise and is strongly connected with the contemporary world fall of the leading theories and ideologies such as (200). This methodology of metaphors leads structuralism and Marxism, he no longer trusts any Czabanowska-Wróbel to her definition that ideology or theory. Instead, he chooses epistemological Zagajewski’s poetry can be defined as “thinking patience and perseverance in trying to describe the through images.” She tries to conduct her examination world. He creates an open realm of the “poetry of within the paradigm of Zagajewski’s poetry, and never questions, but not of answers” (237). against it (234). The attitude of methodological and paradoxical The book is divided into four parts: 1. A History of “conscious naiveté” (Êwiadoma naiwnoÊç) has been Solitude, 2. Moments of Radiance, 3. Dreams Have Not built systematically by the author of Another Beauty. Been Studied, and 4. A Pupil of Masters of Unknowing, Its purpose is to redefine human self-consciousness which provides a short conclusion. A History of Solitude (238). Zagajewski seems to perceive poetry as a contains four essays: Wanderer, Another Beauty, process-oriented activity that expresses self- Mysticism for Beginners, and Solitude, Solidarity. consciousness. His poetry thus rejects dogmatic Czabanowska-Wróbel consecutively analyzes the thinking and does not promote arbitrary descriptions aesthetic, metaphysical, and ethical dimensions of of reality (234), tending instead to be complex and Zagajewski’s poetry (249). The first essay ponders the tautological at the same time (253). This poetry idea of a spiritual and metaphysical quest for meaning expresses a negation of nihilism, pessimism, and understanding. It defines Zagajewski’s poetics as skepticism, and existential irony, but it does not impose a series of dialectic antinomies, stretched out between easy affirmations. Zagajewski’s poetry should not be intellect and imagination, philosophy and poetry, considered as a static presentation of a “monumental negation and affirmation, ecstasy and boredom, a building,” but rather should be viewed as an activity sudden epiphany and a lack of understanding. The of thinking. It might be compared to the process of antinomies help the reader discover a range of life that “setting a tent for—a wanderer” (234). is universal, rich, and complex, but never fully Working with such metaphors, Czabanowska-Wróbel comprehended (“The Ode to Plurality” [1982], 38). For accentuates the leading images of Zagajewski’s poetry. Zagajewski, a human being has to “wander” and look One of them is the metaphor of the “snowball.” The for a final metaphysical realm—where God and poetry “moving snowball” generates its own motion and reside—even if they cannot be fully defined (17, 66). experiences dynamic changes (228). Thus the early The concepts of deity, poetry, pain, death, and others writings of Zagajewski reveal an essential core visible are noumenal in nature and cannot be fully decribed. in his late poetry. However, Czabanowska-Wróbel If the essence of poetry is indescribable, one is left emphasizes that the mature Zagajewski differs from with an urgent necessity to wander in search of his earlier self. Over time the poet gradually developed understanding. Thus the function of poetry is a strong awareness of the cognitive processes and a recognized as a search for meaning and understanding self-consciousness (237). A “pendulum in motion” (56). describes well the nature of his later poetry. Zagajewski Zagajewski’s poetry also focuses on what can be creates a poetic movement where opposite directions/ described as the restitution of light. Using words, sides of meaning are paradoxically connected. At the poetry discovers and collects beautiful and “potent same time, the clear-cut meaning is replaced by a moments of light” (65). A good example can be found “search for the meaning” (253). Finally, the metaphor in Zagajewski’s volume Without End: New and Selected of a “tapestry” is useful in creating a framework of Poems [2002], especially in the poem “Smoke.” poetic images in Zagajewski’s work. It is relevant to Zagajewski’s “theology of beauty” leads to note that Hans-Georg Gadamer defines any written text consolation and is the main topic of Another Beauty as a tapestry/fabric. Czabanowska-Wróbel also (69). The idea of “beauty” as consolation is hidden in references the works of Czesław Miłosz and Renata a dialogue with “another”: music, poetry, art, and Gorczyƒska, which describe the poems of Adam philosophy (246). Zagajewski proposes a dialogic Zagajewski as a fine texture made by a skillful weaver. perception of artworks where one has to develop an The phrase “poems as rich tapestries” reminds one of open-minded relation with poems, paintings, and a precise Gobelin (rich, colorful texture) where the music. In rare moments, this artistic attitude can lead reader can explore a vibrant world transformed into to epiphany. It is similar to the case of paintings by art. This artistic reality is not an escape from life, but Jan Johannes Vermeer van Delft, who stimulated January 2008 SARMATIAN REVIEW 1371 Zagajewski’s “small epiphanies” (72). Czabanowska- beginners.” This poetry depicts life in a modern/ Wróbel correctly points out that music is the highest postmodern reality where one is always a beginner: art for Zagajewski (as for Arthur Schopenhauer), but never prepared enough, never patient enough, and never poetry comes immediately after music (74). The poet peaceful enough. Nevertheless, people are full of a has been inspired by the music of Bach, Mahler, desire/longing that is metaphysical in nature (94). Chopin, Shostakovich (in “Self-Portrait”), but he Zagajewski’s poetry can be described as aporetic, or mainly listens to Mahler. The dominant influence of one in which there are no ready-made answers. It opens Mahler’s music can be defined as poetic “Mahlerism” a desire for certainty rather than offering certainty (95- (75). For instance, Mahler’s Song of the Earth is being 96). recognized in Zagajewski’s “Three Angels” (in As long as certainty is difficult to obtain, the “masters Mysticism for Beginners), “Opus Posthumous” (in New of unknowing” appear to be a careful epistemological Poems), and “Three Voices” (in Tremor). choice (236). There are many philosophers and poets The dream of pure spirituality, perfect meaning, and who became Zagajewski’s intellectual and spiritual perfect inner life becomes increasingly prominent in masters, including Józef Czapski, Zbigniew Herbert, Zagajewski’s later poetry. In her essay on Mysticism and Czesław Miłosz. Józef Czapski is described as a for Beginners, Czabanowska-Wróbel accentuates the person with a passionate, “I don’t know” attitude. This main symbolic images and depicts them as a poetic attitude was an underlying source of his search, and “fire-like” desire for transcendence (83). The desire of his spiritual youth and enthusiasm. It was strongly for the sacred is present, especially when one lives in a connected with Czapski’s persistent “I know” attitude spiritual desert. Zagajewski’s desert takes the form of that generated his moral choices. Zbigniew Herbert a big city. It is the city that forgets, or does not possess, has a special place in Zagajewski’s poetry. Herbert an artistic and intellectual glory. This is a former “holy was the master, the first real poet whom he met at a city”; it suffers from amnesia and needs to be spiritually school in Gliwice, and artistic interlocutor. The two awakened. The implication is that there are many poets participated in a creative dialogue on art, poetry, spiritually dormant American and European cities. The and aesthetics through their poems (167). In Farewell concept of a big city presages an image of one’s inner to Zbigniew Herbert, Zagajewski pays homage and life perceived as a dialectic between the realms of the symbolically announces: “I marvel at your poems’ “individual” and “social.” That is a constant but never kingly pride” (179). Zagajewski admires Herbert’s overt narrative in Zagajewski’s works, and ability to maintain an artistic distance from the reader Czabanowska-Wróbel underlines it strongly in her and hide the artist‘s ego behind the poem (169). sketch Solitude and Solidarity (98-113). The cities Zagajewski stays close to the idea of the relation (Lviv, Kraków, Warsaw) mirror a social reality defined between “man and objects/things” initiated by Herbert as a “polis” or “wholeness.” This “collectiveness” is a (171). One could discover further similarities by metaphor of Polish culture. Sometimes cultural reading their poetry, as they both write on ordinary ambivalence is created when an individual solitary objects and on art, including Dutch painting, as well silence becomes public, or an individually cherished as music (172). They also established the “poetry of literary word begins to be relevant for many (112). the city” that includes Lviv (179). In addition to Like Simone Weil, Zagajewski postulates that solitude Czapski, Herbert, and Miłosz, Zagajewski was and meditative attention are necessary conditions of a influenced by Roman Ingarden, a philosophy professor good social life. In its final form, solitude goes against who lectured on phenomenology at Jagiellonian any social realm because it is a choice of being University in Kraków. “homeless” in life. That always symbolizes a universal The author of Without End subscribes to poetic human condition (111). Solitude may also generate an epistemology that has its roots in phenomenology and inner transformation (metanoia), leading to an epiphany mysticism. The idea of a phenomenological “epoch” (92). In Another Beauty Zagajewski states that one underlines Zagajewski’s later poetry and essays where has to be attentive and has to remove layers of an the reader can detect various forms of suspension of overwhelming irony and routine from life. Then it may judgment. It is interesting to note that this author of so be easier to discover the goodness that still exists— many sophisticated and intellectual poems pays little even in this cruel century—and contradicts evil or attention to the established definitions of the nature of ignorance (92). Czabanowska-Wróbel asserts that beauty, poetry, or music (236). Paradoxically, this Zagajewski’s poetry is indeed “mysticism for suspension of judgment initiates the beginning of a 1372 SARMATIAN REVIEW January 2008 poetic “search for radiance.” It also opens the innocent years, gruesome occupations, and the family’s possibility of learning through erring and mistakes hopes of new life in the United States. Tekla Guzlowski because those “masters are not infallible. They’re talks about her home west of Lviv, her family being neither Goethe . . . nor Horace . . . I can hear their shot by the “hungry men” who were like “terrible and broken speech” (“My Masters,” 237). big buffaloes,” and her subsequent journey of sixty A Search for Radiance is written with erudition and years. No one created a museum for this survivor. The a genuine passion for literature. It is a significant book war taught her that the world was a broken and cold that examines not only the aesthetic paradigm of Adam place filled with worthless men, where one had to work Zagajewski’s poetry, but also reconstructs the less hard to stay alive and where birds did not sing. obvious and hidden “ontological” questions of his Her husband, a simple man with no knowledge of poetic philosophy. This is accomplished through close the world, knew only physical labor, pain, and death. readings of Zagajewski’s texts. Sometimes the The years of suffering in the slave labor camps brought language of analysis appears to be too metaphorical them together. Jan Guzlowski dug beets, dragged fallen (180), but ultimately the reader is given a rich trees, and made bricks in order to survive in the German commentary on literature, philosophy, and art. It is camps. After the war and an interlude in the DP camps, indeed a teres atque rotundus, a well-rounded book. Δ Guzlowski’s parents and their two children, Jan and Donna, arrived in the United States. They were “stiff like frighten ostriches” and recalled the beautiful Polish Lightning and Ashes countryside while dreaming of their future in America. They were all deeply scarred physically and By John Guzlowski. Bowling Green, KY: Steel Toe emotionally by their experiences. Their mother could Books, 2007. 86 pages. ISBN 978-0-9743264-5-0. not erase from her memory the German soldiers who $12.00. Paper. shot her family and all the men, women, and children in her village. Jan Guzlowski could not forget his Anna Gàsienica-Byrcyn humiliation and the hunger that forced him to eat leaves off trees, bark, flies, leather buttons, cloth caps, roots, n this collection of poems John Guzlowski offers a newspaper, and any seeds found in the dry dung left Ivoice to his parents Jan and Tekla and their war by the cows. He remembered his friend, an artist from experiences. Deeply affected by his parents’ suffering Wilno who was castrated and killed by the Germans. and struggles during and after the Second World War, He had nightmares of Germans changing into wild the poet retells their life stories, speaking for them and dogs. He thought of himself as a corpse that made its in the name of all the forgotten and voiceless survivors journey and was waiting for “the slumber promised by and refugees. The poems tell the story of the Guzlowski God in the bible and other books that lie.” Guzlowski’s family’s remembrances of the crimes they witnessed, volume ends with a lyrical epilogue in which the poet as well as recounting their years before the war and walks with his little daughter in the autumn garden, commenting on the hardships they experienced as thinking about his dead parents and their world of Displaced Persons (DP). “lightning and ashes.” The volume consists of three parts plus a prologue John Guzlowski writes in a concise and naturalistic and an epilogue. In My Mother Reads My Poem “Cattle language. His poems convey his parents’ voices with Train to Magdeburg,” Guzlowski describes his mother great clarity. He often employs strong words to as an eyewitness to the war’s madness. Tekla emphasize the inhuman and primitive conditions of the Guzlowski comments and reflects on the transport of war and the German slave labor camps. He softens the war prisoners. Overwhelmed by emotions, she refuses horrible scenes with the warm depictions of his mother, to recollect all the painful events that she has seen and and he contrasts German terror with his father’s endured. The unsaid has to be filled out by the reader’s helplessness, and his dreams of pigeons, “the birds knowledge. We are left with the sense that the war without chains.” This volume of poetry is a testimony, traumas are beyond description. Part I: What It’s Like a document to the human drama that has not yet been Now, Part II: When My Mother and My Father, My absorbed by people outside Poland. Lightning and Sister Danusha and I Came to America, Part III: What Ashes is an important literary account of the Holocaust the War Was Like interweave vignettes of war crimes of Polish Catholics. Guzlowski restores the voices of and slave labor camps with the recollection of lost its forgotten survivors. He truly is a follower of La January 2008 SARMATIAN REVIEW 1373 Rochefoucauld’s maxim that “it is better to light a week periods. Time period: July 7 to August 11, 2008. candle than to curse the darkness.” Δ Cost: $2,688.00 for five weeks, all-inclusive; $1,540.00 for two weeks, all-inclusive. Inclusive means all but Announcements and Notes transportation. For further information contact Professor MikoÊ at 414-229-4313 or email him at Polish Culture Ministry wants to collect information [email protected]. about Polish library collections abroad The Ministry has issued an open letter to interested parties abroad with the intention of preparing lists of About the Authors Polish or Polish-oriented archives, books, and artworks. Jolanta W. Best teaches philosophy at the Houston Anyone interested in providing such information is Community College. asked to contact the Ministry at Sally Boss is one of the founders of Sarmatian Review. (Monika Abby Drwecki is a graduate student in history and Czartoryjska). Owing to the consecutive occupation anthropology at Indiana University. of Poland by Russia and Germany during the Second Anna Gàsienica-Byrcyn, Ph.D., is a lecturer in Polish World War and beyond and the ensuing massive Language and Literature at the University of Illinois at emigration, a great deal of materials vital to Polish Chicago. culture have been dispersed throughout the world, and George Gasyna is Assistant Professor of Polish and new materials have been created in conditions of Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois at emigration. Those wishing to fill out questionnaires Urbana-Champaign. are asked to open the Ministry site (www.mkidn.gov.pl) Ferdinand Ossendowski (1877–1945) was a Polish and further navigate to the appropriate forms. writer and traveler. Old Polish Literature Online Agnieszka Marczyk is a PhD candidate in the Staropolska Online is an Internet site featuring originals Department of History at the University of and translations of the works of medieval, Renaissance, Pennsylvania. and baroque Polish literature, with occasional James Edward Reid is an editor and writer who lives translations of later works, up to Romanticism. To read in Guelph, Canada. He has published book reviews in some of the forty-three translations of the first Polish The Dance Current, Off The Shelf, The Globe and Mail poem, “Bogurodzica” (thirteenth century), go to Books, and The Sarmatian Review; fiction in http://www.staropolska.gimnazjum.com.pl/ang/ Highgrader Magazine, and poetry in the Canadian middleages/rel_poetry/Wolkowski.php3 Forum, Off The Shelf, The Sarmatian Review, and The This link courtesy of Dr. Zbigniew Wołkowski of Guardian. Paris, France. YouTube Polish videos 1. The creation of the Polish air force in 1919 by American pilot (later movie director for John Wayne and creator of King Kong) M. C. Cooper and Thank You Note Mississippi lieutenant Cedric Fauntleroy: www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZDaPa72LHg (English Our hearty thanks go to the following persons for their captions) donations to the Sarmatian Review Publication Fund: 2. Warsaw military parade May 15, 2007: www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6izE2TMhFE Ms. Roza Ekimov; Mr. Stanley Garczynski; Mr. Stefan Summer Study Tour at the Catholic University of J. Ginilewicz; Professor Richard J. Hunter, Jr.; Col. Lublin (U.S. Army, Ret.) Francis C. Kajencki; Professor Professor Michael J. MikoÊ of the University of Witold J. Lukaszewski and Mrs. Alicja Lukaszewski; Wisconsin-Milwaukee is an experienced organizer of Ms. Joanne F. Winetzki. summer study tours at CUL. He has conducted such tours for a quarter century. This year, the tour includes We also thank all those who have renewed their five weeks in historic Lublin, a choice of courses in subscriptions in spite of a rise in price. In the last Polish (beginning, intermediate, advanced), with several years the cost of publishing this quarterly university credit for the courses. The tour and courses (including its web edition) have doubled. We greatly can be accommodated within two, three, four and five- appreciate our subscribers and donors. 1374 THE SARMATIAN REVIEW January 2008 Books Received (continued from page 1357) Ostatni Staƒczyk: Michał Bobrzyƒski. Portret konserwatysty, by Waldemar Łazuga. Toruƒ: Adam Marszałek Press (www.marszalek.com.pl), 2005. 264 pages. Give Bibliography, photographs, index of names. ISBN 83-7441- 119-8. Paper. In Polish. where it really counts A well executed critical biography of one of Poland’s great historians. Bobrzyƒski (1849–1935) is the author of the much-discussed interpretation of Polish history, Historia support Polski w zarysie. He bet on a wrong horse: he believed that (Catholic) Poland could be reborn only in alliance with (Catholic) Austria. He also condemned nineteenth-century The Sarmatian Review uprisings and put the blame on Poland’s loss of independence on the Poles themselves. A Handbook of the Communist Security Apparatus in East Central Europe, 1944–1989, edited by Krzysztof Persak and Łukasz Kamiƒski. Warsaw: Institute of National Remembrance (www.ipn.gov.pl/portal/pl/24/), 2005. 352 pages plus 8 pages of photographs. Index of names, list of abbreviations, diagrams, and tables. ISBN 83-89078-82-1. Hardcover. An English-language sourcebook on intelligence operations and internal security apparatus in the USSR (1917–1945), East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania. It outlines the structures of internal security in aforementioned countries and their contribution to Soviet intelligence. Examples: number of Czechoslovak agents abroad in 1955: 232 verified names. Budget for internal security in East Germany in 1979: 2,390 million marks. Number of internal spies in East Germany in 1982 (pop. 17 million): 85,512. Number of internal spies in Poland in 1981 (pop. 36 million): 25,634. A good source of data for papers and presentations. The Anya Tish Gallery The Autonomy of the University: Its Enemies and Friends, 4411 Montrose # C, Houston, Texas 77006-5854 edited by Jan Kieniewicz et al. Warsaw: Instytut Artes phone/fax: 713-524-2299 Liberales, 2007. 189 pages. ISBN 83-920349-6-1. Paper. In Artwork and paintings Polish, English, and Russian, with English summaries. A collection of worthwhile essays on an unadulterated from Central and Eastern Europe vision of what universities are all about. The tenor of this publication corresponds to that of the ISI and Modern Age. TAG TRAVEL The volume offers a Central European perspective on the Ticketing, Cruises, Accommodations, Car Rental Latin legacy of the West. Halina Kallaby, General Manager Narracje po koƒcu (wielkiej) narracji: Kolekcje, obiekty, 2550 Gray Falls, Suite 200 symulakra, edited by Hanna Gosk and Andrzej Zieniewicz. Houston, Texas 77077-6674 Warsaw: Elipsa (www.elipsa.pl), 2007. 471 pages. Index of Phone: 713-535-1438 names. ISBN 978-83-7151-776-1. Paper. In Polish. [email protected] A collection of theoretical papers and recent interpretations of mostly Polish literature of the last several decades. RADIO COURIER Archiepiscopus Damianus Zimoƒ, Doctor Honoris Causa Universitasa Silesiae Catoviciencis, edited by Zbigniew Polish American Radio Network Kadłubek and Piotr Wilczek. Katowice: Para Press P.O. Box 130146, Houston, Texas 77219 (www.para.sic.katowice.pl), 2007. 117 pages. ISBN 078- Polish Language Program 83-61061-08-3. Paper. In Polish. KCHN 1050 AM A collection of essays and statements (related to the event tel./fax: (281) 679-6623 described in the title) that are strikingly relevant and email: [email protected] occasionally truly profound. www.radiocourier.com