Copyright by Agnieszka Barbara Nance 2004 The Dissertation Committee for Agnieszka Barbara Nance Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Nation without a State: Imagining Poland in the Nineteenth Century Committee: Katherine Arens, Supervisor Janet Swaffar Kirsten Belgum John Hoberman Craig Cravens Nation without a State: Imagining Poland in the Nineteenth Century by Agnieszka Barbara Nance, B.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2004 Nation without a State: Imagining Poland in the Nineteenth Century Publication No._____________ Agnieszka Barbara Nance, PhD. The University of Texas at Austin, 2004 Supervisor: Katherine Arens This dissertation tests Benedict Anderson’s thesis about the coherence of imagined communities by tracing how Galicia, as the heart of a Polish culture in the nineteenth century that would never be an independent nation state, emerged as an historical, cultural touchstone with present day significance for the people of Europe. After the three Partitions and Poland’s complete disappearance from political maps of Europe, substitute images of Poland were sought that could replace its lost kingdom with alternate forms of national identity grounded in culture and tradition rather than in politics. Not the hereditary dynasty, not Prussia or Russia, but Galicia emerged as the imagined and representative center of a Polish culture without a state. This dissertation juxtaposes political realities with canonical literary texts that provide images of a cultural community among ethnic Germans and Poles sharing the border of Europe. The Realpolitik of the situation was dictated by the same powers whose interests had divided iv and then erased the country. A Polish-Prussian alliance was argued for by Prince Antoni Radziwiłł (1775-1833), until Bismarck made Prussia into the core of the German Empire; a Polish-Russian axis was the focus for Aleksander Wielopolski (1803-77) who argued for Polish culture as Slavic; and a Habsburg-oriented solution, represented by Count Agenor Gołuchowski (1812-1875), defined Galicia as an autonomous cultural region within the political framework of a multiethnic state. These political debates, not surprisingly, are echoed in literary works of the time: Theodor Fontane shares his Prussia with one kind of Polish culture in competition with Galicia; Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach and Jan Lam share a common view of Galicia which is Habsburg, multiethnic, and Polish. Taken together, these images reflect a dialogue about Polish identity, and in consequence about a new European identity, in the context of Austro-Hungarian and German Empires. That is, the debates point to a cultural identity in Europe that does not correspond to ethnic nation-states but rather to a shared culture, history and community experience that Galicia came to represent up until World War I, when Galicai was divided between Poland and the Ukraine. v Table of Contents INTRODUCTION 1 PART I POSNANIA: THE PRUSSIAN PART OF POLAND 13 Chapter 1 The Prussian Part of Poland .................................................................14 Prussia and Poland before 1800 ...................................................................17 Poles, Prussians and Napoleon ....................................................................30 The Era of the Spring of the Nations: Bismarck's Rise to Power and Kulturkampf ........................................................................................38 The Revolution of 1848 in the Grand Duchy of Pozna .............................45 Chapter 2 Prussian Writers vis-à-vis the Poles: From Dedication and Admiration to Critique and Condemnation ..........................................................................60 Prussian Polish Literature ............................................................................60 The Making of Prussian Polish Lyric: Polengedichte and Theodor Fontane 65 Fontane vis-à-vis Gustav Freytag: The Image of Prussia and Bismarck in Their Literary Works.....................................................................................76 Fontane's First Political Novel: Vor dem Sturm............................................81 PART II GALICIA: THE POLISH "IMAGINED COMMUNITY" 99 Chapter 3 Galicia in the Nineteenth Century......................................................100 Historical Background ...............................................................................100 Galicia from Its Roots to the Peasants' Uprising of 1846...........................103 Galicia after 1848........................................................................................108 Chapter 4 Images of Galicia in Nineteenth Century Literature: Marie von Ebner- Eschenbach .................................................................................................115 Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach and the Polish Nation ................................115 Der Kreisphysikus.......................................................................................118 Peasants' Uprising Revisited: "Jakob Szela"...............................................132 vi Chapter 5 Jan Lam and Galician Society............................................................142 Lam in the Galician Public Eye .................................................................144 Panna Emilia Czyli Wielki wiat Capowic.................................................149 The Historical Setting .................................................................................158 Conclusion ..................................................................................................166 PART III POLAND AND RUSSIA: THE SITUATION IN KONGRESÓWKA 168 Chapter 6 Galicia and Kongresówka in the Time of the January Uprising of 1863: Wielopolski's Realpolitik ............................................................................169 Kongresówka: The Russian Partition. Historical Background ..................169 Before the Uprising: Kongresówka in 1861 ...............................................178 Galicia and the January Uprising................................................................189 Chapter 7 The January Uprising and Lam's Response: Pan Komisarz Wojenny and Koroniarz w Galicji ....................................................................................197 The Politics of Fiction ................................................................................201 The Question of Aristocrats........................................................................210 Conclusion ..................................................................................................221 CONCLUSION 223 Bibliography ........................................................................................................233 Vita .....................................................................................................................248 vii Introduction The year 1795, one of the most significant in Polish history, is the year of the so- called Third Partition, which was the last step in breaking up the Kingdom of Poland by giving the remaining portions of its territory to the three great powers – Russia, Prussia, and the Habsburg Empire.1 After the three divisions occurring in 1772, 1792 and 1795, Poland vanished from the map of Western Europe. The downfall of the Polish kingdom had begun in the second half of the eighteenth century when the state faced internal anarchy and political chaos caused by lack of democratic laws and complete disregard for the social and ethnic differences within Polish society. Despite some patriotic political attempts to strengthen the Kingdom by introducing the first European democratic Constitution (which, for instance, abolished serfdom and granted the inhabitants of cities the same rights as nobles), Poland ceased to exist as a nation for over 120 years. Throughout this time, the imperial entities that emerged as a result of the three Partitions: Posnania (or Prussian Poland), Congress Poland (or Kongresówka), and Galicia (the Austrian Polish province) sought to use the memory of Poland to regain a kind of cultural 1 Among many other sources covering this moment of Polish history is: Jerzy Lukowski, The Partitions of Poland: 1772, 1793, 1795 (London and New York, 1999). Broad coverage this period is included in all Polish histories: see, for instance, Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland (New York: Columbia UP, 1982), Gieysztor, Kieniewicz, Rostworowski, Tazbir, and Wereszycki, History of Poland (Warszawa: PWN, 1968), Zamoyski, The Polish Way: A Thousand-Year History of the Poles and Their Culture (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1994). 1 capital (Bourdieu) and to preserve a distinctive Polish identity for the elements of Polish culture remaining when the country’s political identity disappeared. In this dissertation, I will focus on the persistence of this distinct Polish identity in all three regions into which the Kingdom of Poland had been partitioned: Prussian Poland, Russian Poland, and Galicia. I will argue that from the three, only Galicia functioned as Polish “imagined community” (Benedict Anderson). This province alone maintained among its citizens a sense of Polish autonomy, a cultural Poland. Furthermore, because of Galicia’s multiethnic structure and its geographical position, this Austrian Polish province