Around the World in 32 Countries: Polish Literature for Beginners

1989: Poland forms its Third Republic and ends its decades 'behind the Iron Curtain'

Capital City: Warsaw

Surface area: 312,696 km2 (larger than Italy, smaller than Norway)

Currency: Polish złoty

Driving side: right

Historical figures:

Casimir III, who ascended the throne in his early twenties and was king from 1333 to 1370, is apparently Polish history's answer to French history's Henry IV. He weakened the predominant power of the aristocracy in the nation's law, creating a balance with the bourgeoisie, and "was known for siding with the weak when the law did not protect them from nobles and clergymen." Besides he encouraged Jewish people to settle in Poland, and forbade Christians to kidnap Jewish children for religious conversion. When the Black Death broke out in 1347, the King closed the borders and Poland was mostly safe. Also, for example, he established the University of Kraków. His rule ended when he died during a hunting excursion.

Sources:

Poland [Wikipedia]

Casimir III the Great [Wikipedia]

List of countries and dependencies by area [Wikipedia] 

***

For Polish literature, I will content myself, I think, with not reading a whole book; instead I will mention a few works.

THE EARLY PARTS of Ève Curie's biography of her mother, Madame Curie, give (I think) a fine snapshot of Poland in the late 1800s.

The daughter writes of the familiar places where Marie Curie grew up, not just in Warsaw where Marie's family lived but also in the countryside where she might go for holidays as a child. Here she quotes one of Marie Curie's letters:

We go out in a band to walk in the woods, we roll hoops, we play battledore and shuttlecock (at which I am very bad!), cross-tag, the game of Goose, and many equally childish things. There have been so many wild strawberries here the once could buy a really sufficient amount for a few groszy [...] Every Sunday the horses are harnessed for a trip in to Mass [...]

Ève Curie describes public, educational and vocational life beneath Russian domination (every Russian whom she names is apparently a villain), the Polish hierarchy that divided the aristocracy and a professor's family. Also, it is clear how few resources there were for women who wanted to study there — which made emigration to France attractive.

"Specjalny obszar ochrony siedlisk Dolina Środkowego Świdra." c. 2015
by M. Nowaczyk?
via Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA-3.0-PL Licence)

ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER's The Magician of Lublin has wonderful passages on Polish scenery, animals and trees and snow; the food; and Jewish faith. He wrote after the Holocaust and in his books rebuilt a lost world; it is estimated that some 3 million Polish Jews died under Nazi rule. I did not finish the book. (After Singer began writing about the third extramarital affair of the main character, and it really began to be questionable if the mistresses were free agents or if they were being manipulated by the main character or by their circumstances, I decided that enough was enough.) The delineations between the religious and ethnic communities — e.g. the difficulty of intermarriage — were also kind of depressing; but I imagine that it was the same in most or all countries. But aside from that, from a literary perspective and for its social insights, it was exactly the book I want.

Überall war Gottes Hand sichtbar. Jede Obstblüte, jeder Kieselstein, jedes Sandkörnchen verkündete Sein Dasein. Die taunassen Blätter der Apfelbäume funkelten im Morgenlicht wie kleine Kerzen. Jaschas Haus lag am Stadtrand, sodass er auf die großen Weizenfelder hinausblicken konnte.

(Roughly translated: God's hand was visible everywhere. Every fruit tree blossom, every gravel stone, every grain of sand announced His presence. The dew-dampened leaves of the apple trees glittered in the morning light like little candles. Yasha's house lay at the edge of the city, so that he could look out onto the great wheat fields. German translation from the English/Yiddish by Susanna Rademacher, Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2017.)

"Henryk Sienkiewicz i jego wizje" (1905)
by Czesław Tański (1862–1942)
via Wikimedia Commons

MANY YEARS ago, I read Henryk Sienkiewicz's Quo Vadis, written in an earlier generation of Polish writers and representing Poland's Catholic side. Taking place in ancient Rome, it is (as far as I remember) a saccharine but readable story of young Christians making their way against their decadent Roman overlords; St. Paul appears in vignettes. Looking at it again now, every feminist fibre of me is horrified by the beginning of the book. But if one decides to ignore the objectification of women (also of Black women who appear incidentally as the scene is set), it seems entertaining.

The best of all times for visiting is after noon, but not earlier than when the sun sinks towards the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, and begins to throw oblique shadows on the Forum. It is usually still very warm in the autumn, and people are fond of sleeping after eating. At this time it is pleasant to listen to the murmuring of the fountain in the great hall, and when one has taken the thousand obligatory steps, to muse in the purplish light sifted through the purple of the half-drawn awning.

(Quoted from Quo Vadis, Henryk Sienkiewicz.

Translation by S.A. Binon and S. Malevsky, Philadelphia: Henry Altemus, 1897. p. 15. via Hathi Trust)

*

Artur Rubinstein's My Young Years: It's well over 15 years that I read it. In my recollection the famous 20th-century pianist mixes extraordinary talent — of which he is extremely aware — with likewise extraordinary cattiness, also with despair and gloom. Whether it offers insight into Polish history and society I don't recollect, but doubt.

*

A colleague recommended (but with a warning) Jerzy Kosiński's The Painted Bird, which is apparently a dark book about a childhood during the Holocaust. I kind of doubt I will read it because it sounds too grisly. He also recommended Joseph Conrad 'if Conrad counts' — I decided that his books do have more of a British perspective — and Stanislav Lem's science fiction classic Solaris.

*

RYSZARD Kapuściński's speeches, The Other, are in the family bookshelf. It is no longer entirely up-to-date, I'd say. The translator — his speeches were held in Polish — uses the phrase 'Third World.' Also, I'd argue we rarely still need to read European anthropologists to learn about the world — we have books, videos, and social media written by people who live elsewhere. It's still fascinating to think of what Kapuściński saw during his journalistic career. While his focus is beyond the borders, he also illustrates, perhaps, the change in Poland's 20th century fortunes. First he was a representative of an Eastern Communist state as a foreign correspondent; but his speeches have allusions to Christian belief and the theology of Pope John Paul II now. His literary, anthropological, religious, etc. references are often Polish, despite his international career; perhaps this is also because the audiences for these specific speeches were Polish. But aside from that, rather than Russian, he cites British influences.

*

LASTLY, as an outsider's look at Polish history for those who love early 19th-century English kitsch, I'd recommend Jane Porter's Thaddeus of Warsaw. In a more contemporary vein, a book subscription service I use has books by Olga Tokarczuk; so I've started reading Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of The Dead.

***

Madame Curie, by Ève Curie [Goodreads]

The Magician of Lublin (novel), by Isaac Bashevis Singer [Wikipedia]

Quo Vadis, by Henryk Sienkiewicz [Goodreads]

Quo Vadis (film) dubbed into Russian [YouTube]

My Young Years, by Artur Rubinstein [Goodreads]

Jerzy Kosiński [Wikipedia]

The Painted Bird, by Jerzy Kosiński [Wikipedia]

Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad [Wikipedia]

Ryszard Kapuściński [Goodreads]

The Other, by Ryszard Kapuściński [Goodreads]

Thaddeus of Warsaw, by Jane Porter (Later 1831? edition) [Hathi Trust]

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, by Olga Tokarczuk [Goodreads]

***

Lady with an Ermine (ca. 1483-1490)
by Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
Although an Italian painting, it was brought to Poland in 1798 by Prince Adam George Czartoryski.
It now belongs to the Polish government. (Source: Lady with an Ermine, Wikipedia)
via Wikimedia Commons

Marie Curie Through Her Daughter's Eyes

Madame Curie
by Ève Curie, transl. Vincent Sheean

Radium Girls
by Kate Moore
Simon & Schuster UK
2016
(E-Book: 480 pp.)

***

In the poor household of a teacher, a mother who had died of tuberculosis as her children were still young, and five children, in Varsovian houses in a Poland considered as a property of the Tsar's Russia, Marie Curie grew up in conditions that were unlikely for a Nobel Laureate. Women could not study at the official universities in Poland in the 1880s, and the academic culture was stifled by Russian political control.

Warsaw: Orthodox Church (1890-1900)
"Postcard showing a 19th century view of the Orthodox Church of
the Holy Trinity in Warsaw. Today the church serves as
the Field Cathedral of the Polish Army."
Marie Curie lost her faith after her mother
and one of her sisters died, early in her life.
via Wikimedia Commons

Even as Marie grew older, poverty vexed her as well as the lack of academic opportunity. Her family had made ends meet by renting out rooms to boarders, and through the teaching salary of the father. But the four remaining children (the eldest child died from a childhood illness) soon had to earn wages to educate, feed and shelter themselves.

Marie became a governess. Her job in the Polish countryside ended badly as she and the older brother of her charges fell in love; they were forbidden to marry by the young man's parents, and although she kept earning money there until there was another job for her, she felt her own intellectual development and self-education becoming sluggish. She fell into what I suspect was a depression. Marie had decided with her elder sister Bronisława (Bronya for short) that Bronya would study in Paris, that Marie would send her money that she could spare from her own expenses and her father's, and that as soon as enough money had gathered, the younger sister would study at the Sorbonne. At present she was just at the stage of earning and sending money.

But at last it happened. Paris brought Marie Skłodowska the ability to study as much as she wanted. She earned the best grades of anyone in her classes at the Sorbonne, I think. She also met Pierre Curie, when she was looking for more resources for her research. It was, it seems, the happiest period of her life in unpromising circumstances. Her apartment was dreadful and so unheated that one winter she piled all her clothing and even a chair over herself so that she could sleep; she barely ate anything and became ill; and she wore the same clothing for ages. Apparently Pierre Curie was her soulmate in this aspect too — appalling self-neglect, but also their idealistic and disinterested love of science, seemed to draw them together — and it seems charming, even if this reader at least spent many pages of Madame Curie (the biography first published in 1938 by her daughter Ève) trying to mentally reach through time to tell them to 'Eat something nourishing, for the love of God!'

It's difficult not to become misty-eyed at the portrait of the Curies' romance. It was at first complicated to keep the relationship going as Marie Sklodovska, loyal to Poland and very worried about her father, doubted whether to really marry a French citizen and bind herself to building a life that would keep her away from Warsaw and her family. But Pierre Curie's determination pulled them through, and Marie Curie never seems to have regretted it, although later in life she was — her daughter tells us — a cynic about love.

Pierre Curie liked going on endless walks without any predetermined goal, and Marie Curie enjoyed rambling and loved gardening until she died. So they shared a fondness of nature, too. Their honeymoon sounds beautiful and characteristic: they went on a bicycle tour (I wonder if bicycles were still enormous pennyfarthings in the 1890s?) through the French countryside. It turned out that their families got along well, too. There had been a de facto reunion around the time of the wedding, and Marie had finally been able to see relatives whom she had left behind in Poland, and with whom she'd only been able to talk by letter.

When the married pair returned from their honeymoon, they hoped in vain for a large, weatherproof laboratory space, as well as equipment and any paid staff. Their lab environment was so dusty, etc. that it had been contaminating their materials. It was worse for the Curies because they hated self-advertising and they were bad at actively snaffling paid positions and honours that would finance a better laboratory. Also, intrigues and academic politics ran against them. Prejudices existed against women and foreigners like Marie Curie. The French Academy of Sciences voted against admitting the Curies, and the Sorbonne dragged its heels for years before it finally offered Pierre Curie a professorship and refused even a little longer to pay for a laboratory or laboratory assistants. So, although the École Normale Supérieure was friendlier, offering Pierre a cheap laboratory and offering Marie employment, often the Curies had to finance their own research as they could.

"Rue Lhomond, Paris, 1913"
The street on which the Curies' 'cheap laboratory' stood.
From the Bibliothèque nationale de France
via Wikimedia Commons

Marie Curie chose to write her doctoral thesis about uranium, specifically an effect that Henri Becquerel had observed, i.e. that it can create black prints on photographic paper even though it isn't phosphorescent.

Joseph Roth and Poland After World War I

"Boot und Transportfuhrwerk im winterlichen Galizien" (1914-1918)
By the K.u.k. Kriegspressequartier, Lichtbildstelle - Wien
In the Austrian National Library
via Wikimedia Commons

IN THE MID-1920s, in a Europe that was as battered as ever by the First World War, Joseph Roth (who later wrote The Radetzky March) was earning his bread as a foreign correspondent for German newspapers. One such periodical was the Frankfurter Zeitung, mouthpiece for leftist circles in the Weimar Republic that was later shut down by the Nazis, only to resurrect itself after the Second World War as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Roth himself was far to the left, inclined to socialism, and he took the pen name 'Red Joseph' for the purposes of his political journalism. Also, his views and position in Weimar Germany were determined by other elements: he was a Jewish native of Galicia, now Poland, who had served (after years of reluctance) in the imperial army on the German side, and who indulged in an odd allegiance to the abolished monarchy, which he celebrated in part of his work.

His newspaper assignment was to travel in Poland, in Ukraine, and in a Russia that had been living under a Leninist system since 1917. (Later he would travel to Albania, Yugoslavia, the Saar region of Germany that had rejoined the country by referendum, Poland, and Italy.) Vladimir Lenin himself had just died in 1924. And Joseph Roth's perspective was, of course, directed by his life experiences. He had no prejudices against the coexistence of the plethora of European minorities. These were intended, per the ideals of the League of Nations, to form their own states by virtue of the ideal of self-determination, but they lived too intertwined with each other for it to be simple to draw a border map humanely. In that respect there is no warning in his writings of the German nationalism that already existed at the time, and certainly not of the Nazism. His stance toward the Russian government was staunchly optimistic, at first, and he was looking forward to seeing Leninist solutions to widespread problems of undereducation, poverty, sickness, and lack of dignity for the poor in a classist society. He also tinges his reporting with his strong adherence to religion.

He took a long time to send dispatches back, because he kept gathering more and more material before he put his pen to paper. I believe that one can easily notice from the quality and nature of his writing when the well of inspiration was overflowing and when it ran almost dry.* He also had a magisterial way of writing — he never mentions specific interviewees or quotes anybody, it seems; everything is noted from an infinite upwelling of knowledge, except where it throws a tangent into his intermittent analysis. In the course of his travels, he was assailed not by his surprisingly complacent interlocutors (they did not seem to be holding onto the grievances of the war, although it was uncanny for him to revisit some places where he had once been the invader), but by pests like bedbugs. Aside from physical afflictions like these, there is a peculiar untouchability in his reporter's persona, as if he were a sleepwalker through Galicia and the Soviet Union.

But he ended his travels by thinking that his socialist ideas were not being realized in every respect, and his optimism crashes every now and then in the reports. He also found, everywhere, the detritus of the war.

***

Excerpts from his reporting in Poland:

"Lemberg, die Stadt."

Es ist eine große Vermessenheit, Städte beschreiben zu wollen. [. . .] Städte verbergen viel und offenbaren viel, jede ist eine Einheit, jede eine Vielheit, jede hat mehr Zeit, als ein Berichterstatter, als ein Mensch, als eine Gruppe, als eine Nation.

and

Nationale und sprachliche Einheitlichkeit kann eine Stärke sein, nationale und sprachliche Vielfältigkeit ist es immer.

(November 22, 1924)

***

"Die Krüppel."

In Lemberg wurde der berühmte polnische Invalide begraben, über dessen demonstrativen, heroischen Selbstmord alle Zeitungen der Welt berichtet hatten. Dieser Invalide sprach in einer Versammlung seiner Kameraden über die gemeinsame Not, schloß mit einem Hochruf auf die polnische Republik und schoß sich eine Kugel durch den Kopf.

*

Wir haben Massengräber gesehen, verschimmelte Hände, ragend aus zugeschütteten Gruben, Oberschenkel an Drahtverhauen und abgetrennte Schädeldecken neben Latrinen. Wer aber weiß, wie Ruinen aussehen, die sich bewegen[. . .]? Wer hat schon gehende Krankenhäuser gesehen, eine Völkerwanderung der Stümpfe, eine Prozession der Überreste?

So war dieser Leichenzug.

"Karl I. in Galizien während der Gegenoffensive, die von Mitte Juli 1917 bis Anfang August andauerte. Hier trifft er am 22. Juli in Busk ein. Gemeinsam mit dem Generalobersten Böhm Ermolli schreitet Karl das Ehrenspalier ab"
(~ King Karl I in Galicia during the counteroffensive, which lasted from mid-July 1917 to the beginning of August. Here he arrives on July 22nd in Busk. With Colonel-General Böhm Ermolli, he paces down the honour guard.)
By the K.u.k. Kriegspressequartier, Lichtbildstelle - Wien
In the Austrian National Library
via Wikimedia Commons

*

[. . .] und über dem Leichenzug, knapp vor dem Knaben im weißen Hemd, der das mattschimmernde Metallkreuz trug, segelte eine dunkelblaue Wolke, zackig, wuchtig und schwer, und streckte vorne einen Zipfel aus, wie einen zerfetzten Zeigefinger, um den Krüppeln den Weg nach dem Friedhof zu weisen.

(November 23, 1924)

***

St. Zitakapelle in Dobrowlany, Galizien (1917)
By the K.u.k. Kriegspressequartier, Lichtbildstelle - Wien
In the Austrian National Library
via Wikimedia Commons

***

Translations (amateurish, with help from Google Translate):
Lemberg [Lviv], the City
It is a great presumptuousness to want to portray a city. [. . .] Cities reveal much and conceal much, each is a unity, each is a plurality, each has more time than a reporter, than a human being, than a group, than a nation.
National and linguistic unity may be a strength; national and linguistic diversity is always one.

The Cripples
In Lemberg was buried the famous Polish invalid of whose demonstrative and heroic suicide all the newspapers in the world had reported. This invalid spoke in an assembly of his comrades about their common need, ended with a paean to the Polish republic, and shot a bullet through his brain.
We have seen mass graves, moldy hands, stretching out of filled-in pits, thighs on wire barriers and severed skulls beside latrines. But who knows what ruins look like that move? Who has seen walking hospitals before, a mass migration of stumps, a parade of remains?
This funeral procession was that.
And above the funeral procession, barely in advance of the lad in a white shirt who bore the dimly shining metal cross, sailed a dark blue cloud, ragged, massive and heavy, and stretched in front of itself a tip like a torn forefinger, to point the cripples along the way to the cemetery.

***

Sources:
Reisen in die Ukraine und nach Russland, by Joseph Roth. Jan Bürger, ed. Munich: C.H. Beck, 2015
Joseph Roth (Wikipedia - English)
Frankfurter Zeitung (Wikipedia - English)
Joseph Roth (Wikipedia - German)

* After rereading Jan Bürger's afterword in the edition that I have, it strikes me that perhaps I am misinterpreting. Roth apparently rarely thought he was out of material or inspiration:

"1926 gestand er den Redakteuren der Frankfurter Zeitung fast zwei Monate nach Ankunft in der Sowjetunion, dass er bis dahin noch gar nichts habe schreiben können. Dies habe mit der Überfülle und Intensität der neuen Eindrücke zu tun."