Country Houses As Substitutes for Autonomous National Institutions on the Lands of Partitioned Poland
Originalveröffentlichung in: Centropa 13 (2013), Nr. 2, S. 120-135 Country Houses as Substitutes for Autonomous National Institutions on the Lands of Partitioned Poland URZULA BECZKOWSKA Institute of Art History, Jagellonian University, Cracow the polish-lithuanian commonwealth, torn by inter was a private nobleman’s residence, if possible located in nal conflicts, was unable to withstand the military power of the provinces, remote from major cities or towns adminis its neighbors (Russia, Prussia and Austria) who, in the years tered by foreign authorities and army. The ultimate codifi 1772-1795, gradually partitioned its territory (733.5 thou cation of the myth of a nobleman’s residence understood as sand square km). The abdication of King Stanislaus Augus ascrap of the fatherland saved from historical turbulence tus Poniatowski, an act imposed by Catherine II of Russia, was achieved in Romantic literature. The prototype of such and finally, the looting of Polish regalia1 brought a symbolic a “home-ark,” conjured up by Adam Mickiewicz in his Pan end to the political existence of the Polish state. Tadeusz (1834; Sir Thaddeus, or the Last Lithuanian Foray: Refusing to accept the tragedy of the Partitions, the A Nobleman’s Tale from the Years of 1811 and 1812 in Twelve Poles repeatedly attempted to regain independence, in Books of Verse), was Soplicowo: an old-Polish manor house conspiracy preparing the subsequent armed insurrections in which ancient customs were cultivated and relics of the (in 1794—the Kosciuszko Rising, in 1831—the November past preserved, thus encoding a message intelligible only for Rising, and in 1863—the January Rising), and engaged in the initiated in national traditions.5 The role of the noble pan-European conflicts whose outcomes were expected to man’s nest in the new realities after the Partitions found its bring changes inthe balance of power on the Continent fullest expression precisely in Mickiewicz’s epic poem, in (e.g.
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